Experimental / All styles

Tip! Parallel Traces of the Jewel Voice by dj sniff is a project that takes inspiration from historical narratives and personal memories constructed around The Jewel Voice Broadcast (Gyokuon Hoso) that took place on August 15 of 1945. Contrary to common belief, Emperor Hirohito did not speak live on air to announce the surrender of Japan on this day. Instead, two lathe-cut discs with his recorded voice were skillfully mixed and played by NHK engineer Shizuto Haruna. Haruna’s proto-DJ/turntablist…

In an interview for The Wire magazine back in January 2012, Spencer Clark claimed that one the most important "lesson" learned while performing with The Skaters was "stay true to your imagination". Taking this life motto at heart, Clark's world today is still a place of wonder and myth, conveyed through a myriad of aliases and invocations like Vodka Soap, Fourth World Magazine or Typhonian Highlife. Always the wide-eyed mystic and searcher of the netherworld, Clark surfaces again on Discrepant s…

A globetrotter in the most pure and respectful sense, away from the trappings of neo-colonialist ventures and predatory tourism, Discrepant head honcho Gonçalo F. Cardoso returns to his Island impression series to offers us another glimpse of his deep, abstract impressions of (an)other island. After passionately collecting the sounds and lives inhabiting the main Island of Zanzibar, Unguja, released through Edições CN back in 2018, Cardoso now dwells into the Malaysian heartbeat of the Borneo fo…

Tip! Elders is the debut release from Ensemble Nist-Nah, a nine-piece percussion group led by Nantes-based Australian drummer and percussionist Will Guthrie. The diverse group of French musicians that make up Ensemble Nist-Nah – whose collective experience encompasses traditional Gamelan performance, contemporary composition, noise, jazz, and everything in between – perform on drum kits, traditional and junk percussion, and a complete set of Javanese Gamelan instruments. Though building on the f…

Dirk Serries (worldwide renowned for his ambient alter-ego Vidna Obmana from 1984 till 2007) returns to this expansive sound universe with a new collaborative album that redefines the genre. Together with alto saxophonist Trösta the duo delivers a breathtaking album just in time to comfort, soothe and challenge in these darker times. Island On The Moon is a symphony of harmony, depth and nuance. A solace drenched in melancholy and light, made without the aid of computers but by the hands of two …

Wire were born at the dawn of punk, but they became the quintessential art band. In the three closing years of the 1970s, the English quartet had one of the greatest opening runs of any band, shifting to post-punk before punk began to go stale and forging three masterpieces in a creative furnace so hot it burned out by the end of 1980. Those albums-- Pink Flag, Chairs Missing, and 154-- still sound remarkably fresh, and have been re-mastered and reissued with their original vinyl tracklistings, …

*200 copies edition* In its own way the music of British duo brothers Mark and Clive Ives—known creatively as Woo—seemed destined for a digital world that the internet offers. They began making music together decades ago, but it’s only been within the last decade that they’ve started to receive the critical acclaim they rightly deserve. Their music is largely instrumental (though not always the case) and is perhaps the best example of “mood music” I can think of. Occasionally it’s meditative and…

We're heading for the dark side of the krautrock kaleidoscope with this month's Electronic Sound cover stars, the inimitable Can. Prompted by the release of 'Live In Stuttgart 1975', the first in a series of archive Can gig recordings, we speak to Irmin Schmidt about the band he created with Michael Karoli, Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit towards the end of the 1960s. As we try to deconstruct their wholly unique brand of sonic voodoo, Schmidt reveals the inner workings of Can, together with his…

We're marking 40 years of the one and only Chris & Cosey in the new issue of Electronic Sound. Our cover story is an in-depth interview with Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti, who look back over the highs and lows of their incredible musical partnership, which they formed straight after Throbbing Gristle imploded. The fact that Chris and Cosey are a couple has always been central to everything the pair have done, including the 20-odd albums they have released under a range of different guises, …

Second Sleep presents Cap Varela by Disso.

Second Sleep presents Mercury Hall's latest release Night Calls. Mercury Hall is the solo project by the label's founder Matteo Castro, one of the most relevant figure in Italian noise scene. With this solo project, Castro delivers long excursion of concrete music.

Seven sound-paintings inspired by the poems of Finnish writer Eeva-Liisa Manner and the paths of the Deep North which revolve around the boreal circle, those lakes, shores, cliffs, fjords and large forests inhabited by other lives, other presences than ours. Le rêve, l’ombre et la vision is constructed from field recordings of natural phenomena at various open sites: echo in a wooded valley, geyser, cliffs rocks, glacial lake sculpted by a forgotten glacier, fire, landscape after freezing rain, …

In 1976 the Entourage Music and Theater Ensemble reached a creative zenith. The nomadic troupe had just released The Neptune Collection, its iconic second album for Moses Asch’s Folkways Records, and decided to present the music to audiences across the rust belt in its most miasmic, elemental form. Extended stretches of full-group improvisation mingled with folk-tune like melodies during these performances, which featured multiple dancers spontaneously interpreting the music, at times in elabora…

Abschattungen is the band Giovanni Di Domenico formed to pay hommage to everything that goes under the name ‘funk’. Strong grooves are laid under a forest of psychedelic textures and intense melodies, filling the auditory space with dense metaphysic dance movements. Taking inspiration from albums as Sun Ra’s Lanquidity and Gruppo Di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza’s Feedback, black music inspired pulsations are fused with contemporary music’s sensibilities and the power of free jazz, resulting …

Henry Birdsey is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and audio engineer based in New Haven, CT, working primarily with the pedal steel, lap steel, microtonal organ, violin, and homemade instruments. Educated by microtonal theorist and composer Kyle Gann, among others, Birdsey has emerged as a prominent voice in the avant-garde music scene over the last several years. Touring extensively in the United States and abroad as a solo act and as half of Tongue Depressor with Zach Rowden, Birdsey has dev…

*300 copies box set* Som Desorganizado is an annual meeting promoted by Sonoscopia, gathering ideas and sounds from innovative sonic explorers. It is based around open presentations and discussions of artistic works, collaborative efforts and new directions in music. From a broader perspective, Som Desorganizado is also a reflection on the meaning of sound, and how it can be organized into musical artifacts.Box Set:- 2 CD's- 138 Illustrations by Ilan Manouach / Microworkers (12x12 cm)- 6 Photos …

"As far as my artistic memory goes, I have always been fascinated by the boundaries between continuity and discontinuity, between the sayable and the unsayable, between the countable and uncountable; between what can be described completely by an algorithm and what cannot; between precise writing and writing that only manages to approximate any given phenomenon; between directionality and a lack thereof, adirectionality — a conflict that, not without a certain degree of internal struggle, I woul…

Hamburg sound artist Gregory Büttner often surfaces on his own 1000Fussler label, but here he is on Gruenrekorder, the home of artistic field recording releases. Voll. Halb. Langsam. Halt. (Gruen 181) was recorded on an old steamboat that was built in the 1930s and happens to be made completely of metal. Using his contact mics, Büttner has created a “metal” record putting him directly in line with Test Dept, Neubaten, and other industrial acts who recycled metal to produce a robust clang. „Voll.…

2025 Edition. 100 copies only! In collaboration with Wax Mage, Aurora Central brings you the definitive edition of Merzbow's groundbreaking album Merzbeat. Every copy features an incredibly beautiful hand-poured colored vinyl - each one unique - housed in an archival style sleeve and gatefold jacket, plus two inserts reproducing paintings by Masami Akita created around the time of the album's recording. Remastered by Masami Akita at Munemihouse, Tokyo 2021. Originally released in 2002 on Importa…

Reading Group is thrilled to introduce the debut LP from a new improvising group of three singular artists: Fred Moten (voice), Brandon López (double bass), and Gerald Cleaver (drums). López and Cleaver have been improvising together as a duo for a number of years, over which they’ve developed a secret, unspoken language of organically growing repetitive figures in a wide range of sonic palettes. López and Cleaver have long been recognized as some of the most vital voices in contemporary experim…

** Limited edition of 100 tapes, 50 on blue colored version (this one) and 50 on original colored version cover. ** Certainly Amlux is a very cohesive and well-constructed piece; starting more softly than usual, the record slowly builds into the chaotic harsh sound that Merzbow is well known for, but this time adding some actual recognizable music elements (like rhythms), and constructing various surprisingly well-texture soundscapes, that made of this album a more focused and immersive piece th…

** Limited edition of 100 tapes, 50 on original colored version (this one) and 50 on blue colored version cover. ** Certainly Amlux is a very cohesive and well-constructed piece; starting more softly than usual, the record slowly builds into the chaotic harsh sound that Merzbow is well known for, but this time adding some actual recognizable music elements (like rhythms), and constructing various surprisingly well-texture soundscapes, that made of this album a more focused and immersive piece th…

** Limited edition of 100 tapes, 50 Copies with yellow coloured cover artwork (this one) and 50 Copies with pink coloured cover artwork ** Introducing Masami Akita's homage to free-jazz. Door Open at 8am is one of the most adventurous outings made by Merzbow. Recorded during the same era as Aqua Necromancer, this new recording also incorporates the use of sampled sounds. However, this time Akita is paying homage to his love of free jazz, free-jazz drummers to be precise. It includes tracks such …

*2022 stock* Ikuisuus presents a split tape between Hurricanes Of Love and Black Krak Fairy

No time to waste: nine months after Tim Vanhamel released 'Dubs Pour Oh La La', his debut album under the moniker Comité Hypnotisé, the Millionaire frontman presents already the second album 'Hiking The Trails Of Mount Muzak'. Hardly leaving any traces of the dubbed out vibe which marked the first record, Tim expands his Comité Hypnotisé universe to a surprising next level on this second album: exploring a place where James Last, Wu-Tang Clan and Dj Shadow are cooking up a Thai meal in a Peruvia…

In the summer of 1981, The Fall embarked on their second American tour, criss-crossing the States over a two-month period. Featuring the dual guitar of Marc Riley and Craig Scanlon and rhythm section of Stephen Hanley and Karl Burns, A Part Of America Therein, 1981 would document this fabled journey with crucial performances that show the band evolve from noisemaking lout cultists into true post-punk legends."From the riot-torn streets of Manchester, England to the scenic sewers of Chicago ..." …

"August 2019; Piacenza. The warm padano, sticky, inexorable, which marks the hours from dawn to evening and the flu in the night. Almost by mistake, in the automatic gestures of false computerized researches, after having registered the mail, read messages and fulfilled the electronic deontology, I come across Barene. I knew nothing about them. I look at photos, videos and read articles. Suddenly present. They attract me. I imagine. And immediately I put in memories, paradoxically distant in tim…

*Edition of 218. Tip!* Reynols is a storied band with endless lore. Many history lessons have been written about them, still they remain one of the world's most mysterious and challenging groups. "Gona Rubian Ranesa" is Reynols' first studio album in 17 years and it updates their classic sound to new realms of hypnotic psych-rock immersion. This record was cut by the classic Argentinian quartet of Miguel Tomasin, Anla Courtis, Rob Conlazo and Pacu Conlazo and it stands as 100% proof that Reynols…

*300 copies limited edition* SOL OP is based on a collective composition for unconventional pipe organs made by the three Danish composers and musicians Jonas Olesen, Anders Lauge Meldgaard and Sandra Boss. On three mobile, midified and modified pipe organs,the trio has constructed a musical universe inhabited by animals, humans and machines. SOL OP is based upon an exploration of the organs' more alternative sonic features. Incorporating the full instrument in the compositions – including the a…

* Digipack CD edition * Ghédalia Tazartès left us in February 2021 when we had just finalized the editing and the cover art of his new album with him. Unfortunately he will never see the finished object. This record is therefore particularly important for us. He opened his archives to us so that we could select unpublished pieces with him and organize them in two long suites. This work took almost two years (finding the pieces among dozens of sometimes very old CD-Rs, checking that these pieces …

»Hoya«, the first collaborative record from Fhunyue Gao and Sven Kacirek, is a site of encounters. There’s the encounter between two different media and artistic conceptions: Gao, on the one hand, a stage director | performer | musician based in Switzerland, a frequent collaborator of Annalena Fröhlich’s, Thom Luz’s and many others, who works for a most colourful variety of venues all over Europe and is a member of the music association Bongo Joe. Kacirek, on the other, an established musician l…

For almost ten years, Ruben Machtelinckx has followed an extraordinary path in Belgian and European improvised music. As a guitarist, but equally as a composer. It began in 2013, when the quartet Machtelinckx/Badenhorst/Jensson/Wouters released their debut, ‘Faerge’. The album was praised by international press and was listed ‘Best Belgian jazz release’ by Knack magazine. In 2020 he won the Klara Award for Best Belgian Jazz release for his latest record: Porous Structures (Aspen 009). In between…

Nicola Giunta and Gioele Valenti (the musicians creating the Lay Llamas dimension) seem to communicate from a different solar system their ecstatic gaze towards an imaginary future world. They rely mainly on a narrative tone of mysterious and spectral dark-psych shades, digging abyss of glacial depht of the self, where light filters through lysergic languors and radiant progressions of luminous dust. Oneiric voices refer to the hybrid chaos of a metropolitan jungle, as a hypnotic and psychic di…

It was early in 2019 — no, November 2018! — that Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin met at Studio Rymden, in a quiet suburban district of Stockholm, to make the music that became Ghosted.

*In process of stocking* With Sonescent, Matchess unifies her folk-psych pop and experimental styles in a transcendent full-album trip unlike anything she's done before. After hearing songs in her head during a 10-day silent meditation retreat, Whitney Johnson gathered a band of Chicago contemporaries (Haley Fohr, Rob Frye, Tim Kinsella, Kalina Malyszko, Brian Sulpizio) to realize her arranged recollections of the tunes, the sounds of which she then passed through an atmosphere resembling the on…

Chicago Research presents the latest release on tape by History of Leather.

CCTK Music combines Gabriella Isaac's exploitative use of laptop as feedback loop / sound source / physical device and James Fella's electro-acoustic / tape as instrument approach. The duo incorporates each other's material in real time (on Side A), cutting the content onto 6 singles-sided reference lacquers. The lacquers were used to assemble a collage in a performance setting in late 2019, and again in a studio setting for Side B. The result is a record that is both scathing but at times harmo…

Recognized as a skilled and sought after collaborator, Ted Byrnes solo albums cast a wide net that capture Byrnes' adventurous and omnivorous approach to solo percussion. An alumnus of Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA, Byrnes has made his home in the center of a Venn diagram that includes free improvisation, studied electro-acoustic work, fearless new music and harsh noise. Recognizing the porous borders between these modes, Byrnes' work on Moving My Body Through Space is a flailing medita…

*75 copies limited edition* "After several stand out collaborative releases, including a duo LP with Mark Shippy and another duo LP with Claire Rousay, violinist Alex Cunningham returns to solo form with As Slow as the Stream, an album made up of one 33-minute cat and mouse game titled "As Slow as the Stream Cuts the Dirt from Beneath." If you've ever watched a cat sneak up on a mouse, you've seen the cat making its way towards it's prey so slowly that you barely even notice the cat is moving at…

Tip! *In process of stocking* Like its predecessor, Philos, The Gleam is a completely solo work, all the music composed and played by Park Jiha on the piri, a type of oboe, the saenghwang, a mouth organ (shown on the album cover art), the hammered dulcimer known as the yanggeum, and glockenspiel. There’s a stark clarity to the sound, yet it’s never spare or empty. There’s a searching warmth to what she does. It’s minimal without being minimalist, occasionally presenting itself with the formality…