Electronic / All styles

In the early 1960's Tod Dockstader was a young maverick composer of electronic 'organised sound', and James Reichert a film composer and music supervisor. They met in New York in 1963, and launched one of the most extraordinary collaborations in modern music, a unique attempt to integrate electronic sounds and the classical orchestra. Unlike Varese's Deserts, and Stockhausen's Kontakte, it does not merely have the orchestra play along with a tape, or even process orchestral sounds live. What mak…

**250 copies** "Backwards is really pleased to present the new Fabio Orsi release. This time Fabio offered a monumental work: eight long tracks contained in a huge box set with four compact discs. Musically it stands on the new course of the artist: together with the classic ambient and drone atmospheres that we know well, the work has more dynamic parts with rhythms and pulsations, and more melodic parts. A perfect meeting between ambient music and berlin-style electronics, between intimate and…

** 500 copies. Limited 50th Anniversary Edition: embossed, reverse board, hand numbered, limited edition red vinyl ** There was a particular type of artist who could only have emerged in the legendary early 1970s. Few musicians fit the bill better than Conrad Schnitzler. Revolution, pop art and Fluxus created a climate which engendered unbridled artistic and social development. Radical utopias, excessive experimentation with drugs, and ruthless (in a positive way) transgression of aesthetic fron…

*150 copies limited edition* Brandon Tani is a multidisciplinary artist based in San Diego, CA. He is drawn to the varied intersections of minimalist, concrète, and found sounds. Mixing narrative and abstraction. Since 2022, Brandon has released music under the moniker "Daily Rituals" and has recorded 5 releases to date. This new album represents the first release under his own name.

*200 copies limited wedition. In process of stocking* "Backwards is really pleased to present the new Fabio Orsi release. This time Fabio offered a monumental work: eight long tracks contained in a huge box set with four compact discs. Musically it stands on the new course of the artist: together with the classic ambient and drone atmospheres that we know well, the work has more dynamic parts with rhythms and pulsations, and more melodic parts. A perfect meeting between ambient music and berlin-…

*200 copies limited edition* Since the start in 2008 Jon Wesseltoft and Lasse Marhaug, aka Tongues of Mount Meru, have released a set of intense and mind tripping longform pieces. Their music often almost seemingly static and gradually building it’s intensity over long streches of time. This is music that demands concentration, and hypnotically drill into the awareness of the listener. At times abrasive andintense, but also beautiful and calmly introspective. Last year they released the culminat…

**200 copies** "Spaces is a series of compositions based on recordings in museums. Each work builds on a binaural recording of the environmental sounds a museum and each has been processed based on different concepts. The approach for processing and adding of electronic sounds was inspired by an artwork that was hanging in the museum space. So space and artwork form a unity. As a composer and mastering engineer I am extremely sensitive to the sounds around me. But I’m also a keen visitor of muse…

* Edition of 200 * With his new album “Continue” Richard Chartier presents four minimalist compositions with a focus on deep drones and apparent silences. The music is subtle, delicate and at moments fragile. Full, with details, like delicate patterns that unfold like ripples on water. With a keen eye on details the compositions reflect Chartier’s earlier work, but also asks new questions. When is the creative process done? Is art ever finished or does it continue to develop? And how does the li…

* Stunning collaborative work of field recordings and electronics by Jos Smolders and Jim O'Rourke * What if sounds were to fold in on themselves? Quite quickly after being 'born', even. Only to be released back into the 'normal' world of linear projection and moving waveforms from a resonant source to the ear drum to hearing and listening, some album length later? Through a looking glass of sorts, as if emerging from an anechoic chamber through the backdoor. From absolute silence into all heari…

Laurie Spiegel’s second full-length album, Unseen Worlds, arrived just over ten years after her debut album. Having realized the pieces found on The Expanding Universe (1980) on an instrument no longer available to her, the GROOVE System at Bell Laboratories, Spiegel moved on to composing and developing for the Alles Machine, alphaSyntauri, McLeyvier and various other instruments before creating an instrument entirely her own. Spiegel created “Music Mouse - An Intelligent Instrument” on a Macint…

Following his critically acclaimed collections Electronic Music from the Seventies and Eighties and Electronic Music from the Eighties and Nineties, Carl Stone quickly follows-up Baroo with a double-LP album of recent works, including the final section of Fujiken, his epic journey through southeast Asian field recordings and street cassette culture.On all six tracks, composed between 2013 and 2019, Stone’s pan-global playground of looping synths and Asian pop culture remains as fertile as ever, …

*300 copies limited edition* "Rain and experimental music have had an interesting connection for decades. Under the umbrella of American film music promotion, Hanns Eisler was already looking for "Vierzehn Arten, den Regen zu beschreiben” (fourteen ways to describe the rain) in 1941. A good 20 years later, The Cascades interpreted the periodicity of rain as a rhythm of mourning. For the Beatles ("If the rain falls, they run and hide their heads"), the precipitation inspired the band to use backw…

Includes 16 page booklet and a download code redeemable from the label with bonus tracks. It's a bountiful collection of unheard prog and space rock rich with minimoog, created by Franco Falsini - whose 'Cold Nose' recently turned up on Spectrum Spools. His later synth bits like 'Darkside' are exceptional and practically worth the admission alone. Not so sure about the earnest prog noodling, though... Packaged in reverse card slipcase with colour inners and a 20-page booklet of in-depth h…

Since launching six years ago, the ReRVNG series - a curatorial effort by the New York based imprint RVNG, has carved a singular place in the cultural landscape. Dedicated to highlighting remarkable, but overlooked gestures in sonic expression, its effect has been so wide sweeping that the names found within its catalog - Harald Grosskopf, Craig Leon, K. Leimer, Ariel Kalma, Anna Homler, etc, have emerged from the shadows, becoming familiar to most. After a year hiatus, much of which has been sp…

Michele Mercure often dreams of music, and in her waking life, reclaims fragments of these fleeting, floating melodies in her compositions and sound art. Beside Herself, an anthology of Mercure’s self-produced and distributed cassettes released between 1983 and 1990, collects these dreamlike passages and lo-fi nocturnes, preserving the qualities of discovery and intimacy surrounding their genesis. Mercure’s sound is a porous electronic art that overlaps ambient, abstract, and industrial se…

What did ancient wine taste like? the grapes of pompeii were only red and red they stayed till it’s dying day… Full cassette album of phantasmal electronics domain loving, walking, crawling,  petrifying between the shadows of the vineyard that Vesuvius watched disapprovingly of eve after summer eve.

*100 copies limited edition* Blood wrecking ball arrives to push the fireball in your stomach even deeper into the bowels with one rhythmic punch after the next until your blood river is totally engulfed in flames and reduced to the strains of a prior civilization. Huge, heavy, landscape synths, chords and chorlas mixed with old school pulsing industrial drums and power electronic voices. Highly recommended new project from Netherlands!

2CD version, including two CD bonus tracks. Pseudocode was a Belgian electronic improvised music band, active from 1980 to 1982, featuring Xavier S (Thrills), Guy-Marc Hinant (Sub Rosa co-founder) and Alain Neffe (Insane Music, Bene Geserit). While Xavier S contributed most of the lyrics and vocals, it was Guy-Marc Hinant who often played the core melody on his Pianet electric piano. Neffe's contributions are particularly noteworthy throughout, as he weaves together the bulk of the sonic clo…

Belgian composer and pianist Jean-Luc Fafchamps initially devoted himself to writing for small groups in which the piano plays a central role (Dynamiques, for two pianos; Melancholia Si..., for two pianos and two percussionists; Neurosuite, for a keyboard trio), before his interest in non-tempered harmonies and polyphonies of timbres led him towards other sound combinations (a garden, for wind quintet; Bryce, for clarinet quintet, etc.). He is currently moving towards working for larger formatio…

"This work is not music in a conventional sense, it does inhabit that world, but in a new way. The cello is treated fundamentally, as a resonating body, transmitting sounds elementally. The bow on a string, the flux of weight, pressure, speed and angularity releases a myriad of complex sound phenomena. The juxtaposition of multiple sounds on adjacent strings creates fluctuating and rhythmical beatings. The detuning of the instrument increases its pitch potential and basso profundity. In combinat…

This is a collection of electronic works composed between 1959 and 1969 at the Institute for Sonology in Utrecht, Holland. Once again, Sub Rosa offers a chance to reflect upon a rare lineage of electronic music's origins, a revolution of the fifties and sixties when an art form was emerging without a base -- ex nihilo -- a new music produced by machines designed to construct the new. Utrecht University's large complex of studios that comprised the Philips laboratories housed an extensive collect…

Incredible and unreleased before music by Otto Sidharta, pionneer of Indonesian electronic music. Head-vibrating electronic drones conjuring a rare and arcane kind of acousmatic magick, with electronic compositions that integrated natural sounds and urban sounds to this extent were extremely rare at the time, which gives them a unique form of intensity. An hallucinatory ascent into narcotic-hazed Indonesian rainforest atmospheres which could almost be scoring some Werner Herzog absorbing documen…

Originally released in 1977. Rich textural pieces constructed from an unnotatable, intricate interplay of percussive squeals, scrapes and rattles, parched and pitchless woodwinds, and dislocated keyboards On the evidence here, Acezantez founded by the versatile Croatian composer and instrumentalist Dubravko Detoni merit wider recognition. Contemporary Croatian Masterpiece !Here are supposedly stylistic affinities between early Nurse With Wound and Detoni's music. This Detoni (born February 22, 1…

The sounds found in nature can have a very slow groove. A groove embedded by silence, so slow it can almost only be felt while spending a few hours at sea, on a forest trip, in open fields... It is this groove and the "silence" of nature that inspired the Fieldtone compositions. The music is performed by an ensemble of string instruments (kanklės, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, double bass) supplemented with drums. Book of Air's series of bundled compositions exploring the parameters of sound…

Elina Bolshenkova (aka Eli!) is an activist, artist and musician from Russia who currently resides in Georgia. Her previous long player ‘Flood Management’ was released by the indefatigable Infant Tree label. It is a dangerous time to be an outspoken artist in Russia, so Elina is happy to keep to the shadows for now. The title for the album is taken from a novel of the same name by Soviet-Russian science fiction writer/brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky who were renowned for their fictional fut…

Next One's Called could be seen as the missing link between Slaughter in a Tiny Place (SR 298CD/LP, 2010) and 1982's Europa (SR 372LP) -- the third and final LP report from Pseudocode. All songs here are previously unreleased; Recorded and mixed between 1980 and 1981. Pseudocode were a Belgian electronic improvised music band, active from 1980 to 1982. Featuring Xavier Ess (Thrills), Guy-Marc Hinant, and Alain Neffe (Insane Music, Bene Geserit), the material on Next One's Called sees Pseudocode …

*50 copies limited edition* Active since the late 1970s, Rosa Arruti was a member of bands like Mohochemie, Tendre Tembles and Psicópatas del Norte. Since 2000, Arruti has been working on her solo project, Nad Spiro, delving into experimental electronic soundscapes and crafting intricate guitar textures. Known for collaborations with international artists like My Cat is an Alien and Atsuko Kamura, her work has been released on labels such as Geometrik Records. Arruti's music is recognised for it…

Dis FAC is the first release of an eponymous project which sees Andrew Hulme (co-founder of O Yuki Conjugate) reunited with Tom Fazzini for the first time in 20 years since their previous group A Small Good Thing (active 1989 - 2002).

Michał Jan Kozłowski is a post-conceptual artist born in Warsaw, Poland in 1986. He began making music at the beginning of the millennium, founding rockabilly band Flymen, releasing tracks on punk labels and gigging throughout the early decade of the 2000s. Later in London he started an improvised noise duo, Unknown Unknowns, with fellow visual artist James Lander and with those who wish to remain anonymous. TV Sunset is his new retro-futurist project. According to Kozłowski, "Ghost in a Broken …

"Like the cosmic compositions it delicately references, Kosmischer Pitch is proof that the higher and lower pleasures can triumphantly combine.” - The Wire Magazine

Ilian Tape kicks on with another entry into its ITX Series, this time with a lovely hand-stamped long player from MPU101. It is a deep dive into escapist ambient worlds with plenty of grainy tape hiss and cosmic static, celestial melodies and provocative moments of introspection. Analogue machinery is really brought to the fore on fuzzy sounds like 'CreamyPORTAL-Xa' with patient and pastoral synth smears, while 'APEX CA 91352' has brighter and more mellifluous melodies rising up through the mix.…

Temporary Super Offer! Incredible, idiosyncratic and obscure early 80s French futurist DIY project led by Jean-Luc Aime (Univers Zero) this feature-length album of elusive recordings marks the bone fide axis point where Zeuhl-Skool meets synth pop, dark ambient and early electro culled from rare vinyl and disparate cassette co-op releases for this first ever LP release.A lost art-ifact from a micro genre where ZED, Eskaton and Heldon share outernational tape space with Vox Populi! The Normal, Co…

Some things take a long time. And some things are meant to last. But how you know that, or learn how to find out, that’s a more intangible thing. That’s A Shaw Deal – intangible. A communal meeting place for two old friends and their different musics. A Shaw Deal is the first album by Geologist and DS. They go back a long ways – back before Highlife, before Shaw joined White Magic – back to the early childhood of Animal Collective. Basically, Doug Shaw touched down in NYC around 2003, and he and…

Temporary Super Offer! From deep in the heart of Moominvalley, frozen in time for many midwinters passed, comes a genuine treasure chest of never heard Moomin melodies and instrumental comet songs composed for the continued animated adventures of our Fuzzy-Felt freak folk friends who disappeared from UK TV pastures in the mid-1980s. From the top of the Hobgoblin's hat and the bottom of Snufkin's satchel, original Moomin's composer Graeme Miller (The Carrier Frequency) kindly shares this patchwor…

Temporary Super Offer! The debut issue from Finders Keepers' hugely promising new Cacophonic sub-label is the first in a series of rare records by French experimentalist Michel Magne: six pieces of extended vocal technique, musique concrète, and jazzier modes very much in keeping with Finders Keepers' quirkier tastes. A faithful reissue including facsimile of the original artwork and 12-page booklet of liner notes. "One of the very earliest full-length French concept albums - part radical manife…

Echoes of disconnected sound reverberate meshing together into a cascading river of intersecting sound elements – occasionally confrontational, ultimately unforgettable.

Cacophonic present a reissue of Musique Expérimentale, originally released in 1962. Further concrète explorations from the second generation of forward-thinking sonic auteurs that would push the boundaries of experimental music known collectively as the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, founded by Pierre Schaeffer. Having found a job in 1936 at Radiodiffusion Française (later Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française, or RTF) as an engineer, Schaeffer developed a newly found interest in music and with t…

Temporary Super Offer! Reissue of 1960 BAM label release. Musique Concrète represents an important milestone in the development and progression of the genre of the same name. It marks a crossroad for the genre and its originator, Pierre Schaeffer and another of the genre's most important protagonists, Pierre Henry. In 1942, Schaeffer and Jacques Copeau founded the Studio d'Essai (renamed Club d'Essai in 1946) as part of Radiodiffusion Française studios in order to experiment with radiophonic tec…

An over-stimulating immersive auditive dive with exceptional depth. Uruk carries the listener away within a phenomenal landscape of dark ambient and subterranean drones with constant rich textures generating an atmosphere of extraordinary intensity.This remarkable new musical endeavor is a joint effort by Massimo Pupillo (Zu) and Thighpaulsandra (Coil). Echoes of Coil music and Zu music appear here and there but the duo maps an uncharted territory. This is organic electronic music. A journey int…

* Repress* This edition was produced and finalized in a particular context, Mika Vainio having left us on 12.04.2017. This material is the last concert he has given. It took place at Cave12 on 02.02.2017. We needed time to listen to this archive again, which we did in situ in June 2020 with Cindy Van Acker. After this listening, we felt invested in having to make this archive public. In order to edit and work on this material, we asked Carl Michael von Hausswolff to do the mixing. At our request…