Music from Germany

Awesome 5xCD box featuring collective releases from the 70s to the recent years by the Swedish legendary pioneer of free jazz and improvised music. Sven-Åke Johansson (Mariestad, Sweden, 1943) is a composer, a drummer, a poet, an author and also a visual artist. Longtime collaborator of the free improv scene back in the German sixties with Peter Kowald and Peter Brötzmann, furthermore with Manfred Schoof, Schlippenbach, Rüdiger Carl and Hans Reichel. He contributed to numerous exhibitions, p…

2016 Repress. A legendary recording that pairs Don Cherry’s heavenly trumpet stylings, Terry Riley’s psychedelic/minimalist organ work and the vibes of Bengt Berger in a great live concert recorded in Koln in 1975. Riley is in stunning form playing the kind of endlessly rippling dosed organ drones with a sense of stasis in expansion that is uniquely brain-razzing. Cherry’s playing is heart-stoppingly beautiful, curling slow, melancholy arcs and threading high angel tones through Riley’s e…

A collection of some of Karlheinz Stockhausen's earliest work, including his earliest piece of musique concrète "Beton-Studie" (aka "Étude") written by Stockhausen in 1952-53 at Pierre Schaeffer's studio at the RTF in Paris. Until 1992 this piece was believed to have been lost. The LP also includes the celebrated "Zeitmass" (1955), and "Klavierstück XI, parts I-IV" (1956), both of which helped to cement Stockhausen's role as one of the leading German composers of the 20th century

Bureau B reissues the eleventh solo album by German keyboardist Hans-Joachim Roedelius, originally released in 1986 on the small Norwegian label Cicada. If we can agree on 1969 as the year of Cluster's inception, then Roedelius needed a good 17 years to discover the aural qualities and musical beauty of the grand piano for his own compositions. More precisely, he must have become aware of the grand piano during the recording sessions for Jardin Au Fou (1979) andLustwandel (1981) in Peter Baumann…

A collection of Stockhausen’ s most important works from the 1950s, particularly “Gesang der Jünglinge” (“Song of the Youths”) 1955-56, probably the most iconic piece of electronic music ever written. Only because of Stockhausen’s complete understanding of electronic equipment, along with his creative genius, was he able to produce this masterwork, the first piece of music to unify vocals and electronics.

“Kontakte” (1959-60), Stockhausen’s first piece to use both electronics and traditional instruments together, marks a turning point in his career, when his music was beginning to show the influences of American avant-garde jazz and composers like John Cage. In “Kontakte” live musicians play alongside a tape recording of percussion sounds that have been altered by different electronic devices (i.e. a ring modulator or a reverberator). Stockhausen wanted the musicians to improvise over the prepare…

A unique 3CD-box from Umlaut Records putting in attention the musical collaborations between two of Sweden’s most headstrong musicians: the pioneers Bengt “Frippe” Nordström and Sven-Åke Johansson. The previously non-released music was recorded in Stockholm 1970, 1977 and 1982 and portrait the musicians both in format of a trio, including legendary pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach, and in a large orchestra led by Johansson including, at the time, young groundbreaking jazz musicians from Swede…

Nine-CD box version. Cluster's influence on the development of electronic music cannot be overstated. The original trio of Conrad Schnitzler, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, and Dieter Moebius released two seminal albums as Kluster before Roedelius and Moebius replaced the "K" with a "C" and continued as a duo. They produced eight albums in their most innovative period between 1971 and 1981, two of them together with Brian Eno. Cluster anticipated much of what would later emerge in such varied style…

'After sharing the bill with fellow musicians like Knut, Isis, Jesu, Lightning Bolt, Melt Banana, Zu, Asva, Todd, Shit & Shine, Marduk or Tony Conrad on the occasion of the 150+ concerts given over the last years, drummer Marc Fantini, bassist Derek Shirley, electronic musician & vocalist Gilles Aubry and electrified tenor sax maestro Antoine Chessex felt the need to come back to studio work. Results a powerful though dark and introspective piece of pure sonic radicalism. 'Cheval ouvert' immerse…

Peter Brotzmann, Tenor Saxophone, Alto Saxophone, Tarogato. Fred Hopkins, Double Bass. Rashied Ali, Drums. Recorded by Holger Scheuermann, Jost Gebers, October 30th and 31st, in Berlin, 1991. First released on FMP as FMP CD 53.'In perhaps the most understated performance of his entire career, German saxophone giant Peter Brötzmann played in a trio with American free jazz legends Fred Hopkins and Rashied Ali back in 1991 at the now mythical Total Music Meeting. () Brötzmann appears to have been i…

Masahiko Satoh’s fourth album is a duet with German pianist and composer Wolfgang Dauner. Dauner is one of very early European avant-garde jazz pianists, and he recorded the first free jazz album in Germany back in 1964. Dauner played with Eberhard Weber and Jean-Luc Ponty, and in the late 60s, he experimented with choral music. Being a passionate innovator and experimenter, in 1970 he discovered electronic devices and started using them in his music. He experimented with ring-modulated Hohner c…

Lachenmann seems to continue nurturing the modernist aesthetic,perhaps that it had passed/eclipsed the German experience, something Habermas has said, and that we do live in an age of new opacity, or complaisance (Undurchsichtlichkeit). It is fascinating still to contemplate the state of music Now,(Nun) from this fragile state,a broken timbre "zerbrechlichen klang", one where the creator/composer needs to begin again and renew timbre for the future,find new contexts for works or simply th…

29 tracks of sheer joie de vivre form this manifesto of musical positivism. Reductionist on their acoustic surface, constructivist in their compositional core, the tracks themselves and in their sequence point to a sociological base: a sociology of sound or a sound sociology driven by the rough necessities of political acoustics. Advanced 4-track tape recording techniques struggle with primitive digital technology, thus forming a class of sound which contains itself as an element and attribute. …

The legendary Berlin-based art collective Column One come with a new double album, entitled "Cindy, Loraine & Hank". This was in the works for almost 10 years and it is their first album since anniversary box set "No One" from 2011 and "Antiphona" 10" vinyl EP from 2013. For this recordings, Column One were René Lamp, Robert Schalinski, Jürgen Eckloff, Andrew Loadman with Nada and Rasmus Schalinski plus a host of guests including Reinhold Friedl and Zeitkratzer Ensemble. This double album presen…

German reedman-composer Peter Brotzmann is, despite an immense catalog spanning over forty years of activity in free music, criminally underrepresented in the format of a "standard" piano-less quartet. From reed-heavy octets and orchestras to the winds-bass-drums power trio, not to mention a long-running trio with percussion and piano, most of the possible formations have been covered. His Die Like A Dog Quartet was the one entry in this instrumental canon in the late 1990s, and produced five re…

The first volume of the box "FMP - Free Music Production Box" brings the listener back to the 1977 into the FMP studio in Berlin where Alexander von Schlippenbach recorded the album "Piano Solo '77" (FMP 129): a fascinating album of music improvisation for piano solo. The second volume of the box "No Comment" (FMP 133) is dedicated to the trio of Stefan Keune (sopranino sax, high baritone), Hans Schneiber (bass) and Achim Krämer (percussion) appreciated for their always direct expressiveness wit…

Waxwork Records proudly presents the deluxe vinyl soundtrack reissue of Werner Herzog’s, NOSFERATU THE VAMPYRE. The album, composed by German prog legends POPOL VUH, comes from Waxwork as a deluxe, expanded double LP including four extra tracks from the film, and originally released on the Popol Vuh album, Bruder des Schattens – Sohne des Lichts. Waxwork has worked directly with the family of late Popol Vuh founder, Florian Fricke, to faithfully restore and remaster the soundtrack for vinyl. Inc…

2016 limited repress, edition of 200. A meeting with the giant. In this live session recorded in 2014, the konstruKt quartet's basic lineup reunites again with Peter Brotzmann, with whom they recorded the amazing studio album Dolunay (rec. 2008, rel. 2011) and Eklisia Sunday (rec. 2011, rel. 2013; also with Huseyin Ertunç and Dogan Dogusel). As the title says, all are invited to listen to the message hidden in these rhapsodic vibes, where the energy of an elephant stampede is channeled into a…

180-gram vinyl. The legendary, rare Brötzmann album finally reissued on vinyl for the first time, with the special fold-out leporello on the front. One-time pressing of 1000. Originally released on Calig in 1969. Side A: The Peter Brötzmann Sextet: Peter Brötzmann: tenor sax; Evan Parker: tenor sax; Derek Bailey: guitar; Fred van Hove: piano; Buschi Niebergall: bass; Han Bennink: drums. Recorded at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg, Germany, on April 18, 1969; recording engineer: Kurt Rapp. Side B: T…

"The latest release from Asmus Tietchens continues the ambiguity that has been prevalent through his recent works.  Far from the early experiments with sampling and erratic, mechanical rhythms that characterized much of his early work; Ornamente (zwischen Null und Eins) is an opaque disc of hushed electronics and tiny bits of glistening noise.  Moments of near silence are followed by digital glitches and massive, intense vibrations to result in another piece of conceptually challenging, y…