Music from United States

Limited to only 45 hand-numbered copies on black vinyl with a photo and notes on the cover. Great obscure recordings from an equally obscure quintet led by Coltrane's drummer Rashied Ali. Available here for the first time.

Mindblowing!!!!!! Originally released in 1979, "Art of the Acoustic Steel String Guitar 6 & 12" was Robbie Basho's 15th record, and his magnum opus of solo guitar. It is the culmination of his life's effort to usher guitar music into a new artistic paradigm, and to "establish the steel string as a concert instrument indigenous to America."This album represents Basho’s most technically fine guitar work. In both composition and performance, the album is enormously complex and yet conveys an effort…

2016 repress. Gatefold exact repro reissue of Don Cherry's classic Eternal Rhythm Group, recorded at the Berlin Jazz Festival, 1968. An amazing line up of: Cherry (cornet, gender and saron [gamelan], flutes), Albert Mangelsdorff (trombone), Eje Thelin (trombone), Bernt Rosengren (tenor sax, oboe, clarinet, flute), Sonny Sharrock (guitar), Karl Berger (vibes, piano, gender), Joachim Kühn (piano, prepared piano), Arild Andersen (bass), & Jacques Thollot (drums, saron, gong, bells, voice). T…

In the spring of 1964 Pauline Oliveros organized a festival celebrating the work of pianist David Tudor, which featured compositions by Oliveros, George Brecht, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Alvin Lucier, and John Cage. The Tudorfest was a watershed event in the brief history of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, which not only provided its members with an opportunity to collaborate with Tudor, but also to promote their own work. Co-sponsored by KPFA, the Tudorfest demonstrated the artistic diversi…

A "classic" from the Sub Rosa catalog, never released on vinyl before. An astonishing piano-player drifts on beats and soundscapes. Recorded during a magical night in the courtyard of a Siena Renaissance Italian Palazzio where the lightness of Harold Budd meets Eraldo Bernocchi's deep electronics. Beats and bass, drones and soundscapes tie together harmonically to meet one of the most emotionally-involving piano players/composers.

“Les Barricades Mistérieuses,” the harpsichord gem by French Baroque composer François Couperin, has been a long-running source of exploration for Fluxus musician Philip Corner, who for years has used it as a jumping-off point for piano improvisations. Through Two More-Than-Mysterious Barricades comprises two very different takes on the same piece. The first dates from 1992, in collaboration with dancer Paulette Sears (who provides the ‘singings and screamings’ of the album’s subtitle); it moves…

"One of Cecil Taylor's earliest recordings, Looking Ahead! (1959) does just that while still keeping several toes in the tradition. It's an amazing document of a talent fairly straining at the reins, a meteor about to burst onto the jazz scene and render it forever changed. Looking Ahead! is a vital recording from the nascence of one of the towering geniuses of modern music and belongs in any jazz fan's collection." --AllMusic

Jazz Advance is the debut album by pianist Cecil Taylor recorded for the Transition label on September 14, 1956. The album features performances by Taylor with Buell Neidlinger, Dennis Charles and Steve Lacy. "Though many did not understand his approach at the time, the passing years temper scathing criticism, and you can easily appreciate what he is accomplishing... With Jazz Advance, the revolution commenced, Taylor was setting the pace, and the improvised music world has never been the sam…

Jazz Advance is the debut album by pianist Cecil Taylor recorded for the Transition label on September 14, 1956. The album features performances by Taylor with Buell Neidlinger, Dennis Charles and Steve Lacy. "Though many did not understand his approach at the time, the passing years temper scathing criticism, and you can easily appreciate what he is accomplishing... With Jazz Advance, the revolution commenced, Taylor was setting the pace, and the improvised music world has never been the sam…

on 180 gram vinyl with CD. Originally released in 1980, Jon Hassell and Brian Eno's collaborative album Fourth World Music Vol. I: Possible Musics is a sound document whose ongoing influence seems beyond dispute. Not only is the album a defining moment in the development of what Eno coined as "ambient music" but it also facilitated the introduction of Hassell's "future primitive" trumpet stylings and visionary "Fourth World" musical theories to the broader public. These vectors continue to …

"In 1972, Sun Ra inked a high-profile deal with ABC / Impulse, bringing his recorded work to the widest audience he’d had to date. A slew of Saturn back catalog titles and two newly-recorded albums (Astro Black, Pathways To Unknown Worlds) were issued before ABC cancelled the contract, dumped the records into the cut-out bins, and left the unreleased albums to languish. Now, over four decades later, Roaratorio is proud to offer one of the lost Impulse recordings for the first time. Sign…

Cross-pollinating the wants lists of art/jazz/print and architecture enthusiasts this seldom sighted 45 single is regarded as the rarest “lost” recording by American jazz trumpeter and global communal music missionary Don Cherry as he collaborates with French piano improv genius François Tusques. A missing link in the pre-formative years of improvised jazz this mythical private pressing unites two of the key exponents of both American and French free jazz – two entirely independent musical art f…

Definitive best of CD by acclaimed Los Angeles postpunk group Savage Republic. Formed by noted artist-designer Bruce Licher in 1981, and inspired equally by punk and Krautrock, the band went on to record four studio albums between 1982 and 1989, most issued through their own Independent Project Records label. The band were particularly popular in Europe, touring regularly, and even grazing mainstream consciousness with an appearance on the soundtrack of the movie Silence of the Lambs. The …

Harold Budd's music exists in that misty place between ambient, new age, and minimalist composition, where everything is gentle and nothing lasts for long. Over the past 40-plus years, he's released about 30 albums. Some are solo, some are collaborative; some are studio and some are live; some are improvised and some are structured. He famously worked with Brian Eno on the second of Eno's landmark "Ambient" series (Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror), and less famously made an album with the Scot…

2013 release. Anthology box set containing 7 hard-to-find and critically acclaimed albums, released on labels such as Cantil, Opal and All Saints. The box includes: ‘The Serpent (In Quicksilver)’ (1981), 'Abandoned Cities’ (1984), ‘The White Arcades’ (1987), ‘By The Dawn’s Early Light’ (1991), ‘Music For 3 Pianos’ (1992) ‘Through The Hill’ (1994, with Andy Partridge of XTC), ‘Luxa’ (1996). Also includes 76 page book compiling interviews and essays about Harold’s work from writers such as…

LP version. "Begun as a one-off collaboration in 2009, the trio of Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke and Oren Ambarchi has now become a solid working group, refining its craft through a series of annual concerts at Tokyo's legendary SuperDeluxe. Much of their recorded work has focused on their intense, ritualistic take on the rock power trio of electric guitar, bass and drums. Presenting the entire first set of the trio's March 2013 concert at SuperDeluxe (the second set will follow on Black Truffle lat…

It is an astonishing gift of fate when a creative artist, known to the world for a particular achievement, is suddenly shown in a quite different light thanks to the existence of a single document that has somehow escaped the ruthless culling mechanisms of time. Harry Partch's Bitter Music is such a document, a “diary of eight months spent in transient shelters and camps, hobo jungles, basement rooms, and on the open road”. This long-lost journal of Harry Partch's wanderings during the Great Dep…

American composer Philip Corner likes Satie too well not to object to how he is played. From the time of his participation in the first performance of Erik Satie's "Vexations" he realized that here was, lurking under the travesties of the 1st Gymnopédie, one of the greats of this or any other century... a "secret genius" who masked with humility and seeming conformity a profoundly innovative thorough-going critique of the limitations and pretensions of our High Culture as it has come down to us.…

Cleared is the duo of Steven Hess and Michael Vallera, both veterans of the Chicago experimental underground. With their new album Drown, Cleared integrate elements of minimalism and sound design with the textures and spirit of early dream pop. Recorded and produced in Chicago, Drown weaves seamlessly between works of classic ambience and narcotic experimental rock. The band find themselves at the crux of both the light and dark components of their past material. The result is a truly lus…

Doom behemoths Sunn O))) and Ulver meet for a deeply spiritual blood-letting on the eagerly anticipated 'Terrestrials'. What started out as an improvised all-night session between the bands following Sunn O)))'s 200th gig - playing to 2000 people at the Øya festival in Oslo, Norway, August 10th, 2008 - has grown into a tantric, cinematic dedication to the night some half decade in the making. The original tracks they created that night have been over-dubbed in the interim resulting in three exte…