Experimental / All styles

"Disguised as the meandering outpourings of vacant thought and activity dialed simultaneously from zero and ten. Formed in the cauldron of a fevered mistake resolute. Surrounded by ignorance, dis-interest, and the attention of the carefully self-selected. Recorded and burned through a thousand galaxies of dust and doubt and endless infinite wonder, transforming both time and space. Forever exiled to the very bottom of the world to reflect on the struggling desperate pile above. Recognizing any c…

Nearly 15 years after the edition “Maison.House II-V” – in duet with his electroacoustic friend Eric La Casa – Vert Pituite La Belle is pleased to collaborate once again with Jean-Luc Guionnet, this time alone and at the organ.For Arantzazu Close & Far, the vinyl medium makes perfect sense: two sides, two versions of the same sound event, the recording of the same improvisation on the organ of the basilica of the monastery of Arantzazu in the Spanish Basque country, realized during a residency o…

Inspired by early Tuxedomoon’s bittersweet melodies, Negativland’s angular collage attacks, looseness of Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves and the mind-boggling short films by John Smith, here is… Pakasteet with Charles Hayward! Imagine A.I. amalgamating the last avant-hard sonicists of a future-past for the final anthem: that mad dance of a civilization lost in sunshine ruin. Pakasteet: the frozen section of the space formerly known as the supermarket. Blender. Tannoy. The void has…

Formed in the early 1970s, The Residents have been charting a unique path through the musical landscape for over 45 years. From far-out, experimental recordings to highly conceptual, innovative multi-platform projects, the band has refused to stand still, and continues to move in several different directions at once. But you probably already knew that. Produced with The Cryptic Corporation using archival tapes supplied by The Residents themselves, this package explores and expands the cla…

In May 1977 Derek Bailey gave me a press ticket for Company Week - a series of concerts of improvised music in London. I made some notes at the time, but there seemed to be nowhere suitable to publish the extended commentary I eventually produced. So I wrote it into a dummy book and it to Derek. Most of it is reproduced here." Peter RileyOriginal copies of this rare and invaluable document, published in 350 copies

A compact monograph containing gathering a visual documentation, two essays and a conversation with Tony Conrad, whose multi-faceted contributions since the 1960's have influenced and redefined music, filmmaking, minimalism, performance, video and conceptual art.Tony Conrad, who can be described as an artist, composer, musician, filmmaker, and performer, might be considered the first true “crossover artist.” For the exhibition at the Kunsthalle Wien, Conrad built a replica of a jail cell that wa…

Recorded in Paris in 2014. Ame Son was a progressive rock band from France. They are notable for being featured on the Nurse With Wound list. Members of Ame Son also were in the band Red Noise and Komintern. Formed by Marc Blanc and Patrick Fontaine. Both were members of the first line-up of Banana Moon (the band that later would become Gong). Their debut album Catalyse was released by BYG in 1970. Ame Son is Marc Blanc, François Garrel, Romeo Blanc, and Bernard Lavialle. Edition of 500.

Deluxe presentation of this legendary weirdo experimental side wrapped in a massive fold-out silkscreened poster sleeve with twin obi strips on heavy coloured vinyl in an edition of only 300 copies: originally self-released in 1989, IYS is this amazing group’s masterpiece. Coming out of Seattle in the mid-80s Yeast Culture were a hermetic autonomous arts collective along the lines of Mnemonists/Biota who used field recordings of uncanny resonances, occult soundings, extreme invasive microphone t…

"Phonography was Stevie's first LP release, and an out-of-the-blue masterpiece: terminally idiosyncratic but with all the compositional qualities of great pop. A gifted songwriter, R Stevie (son of Bob Moore, Elvis' bassist) grew up and was steeped in Nashville's countrypolitanism; but, as a recidivist rebel, he inevitably slipped into strange byways, following his own, unique path into celebrated obscurity - as this strange and compelling record attests. Hans Arp said, 'My paintings are like fi…

Performed by Keiko Shichijo. Tom Johnson's An Hour for Piano was written in 1971. The piece began as a series of short, improvisatory sketches in 1967 when Johnson was accompanying a modern dance class at New York University. Johnson gradually expanded these sketches and added transitions between them, writing a piece that is to be played in exactly one hour. Achieving this goal requires an absolutely steady tempo for the duration of the piece, which Johnson has set at quarter note = 59.225 beat…

The title mundana comes from Boethius' (427-524 AD) printed work on ancient Greek music: De institutione musica. John McCowen is a New York based composer and performer whose work focuses on extending the possibilities of the clarinet family. John embraces long-form drones, difference tones, and beating harmonics as a means to extrude the dimensionality within - treating the clarinet as an acoustic synthesizer. His works for ensemble utilize spectral techniques to superimpose the timbral/sonic c…

Beautiful rendering of French composer Eric Satie's 1918 masterwork "Socrate", originally for four sopranos and chamber orchestra, here stripped to its essence as a duo with Olalla Aleman on soprano and Guy Vandromme on piano, maintaining Satie's characterist reserve and refinement in the 3 parts: "portrait of socrates"; "banks of the ilissus"; and "death of socrates".

Return of Richard Youngs to Fourth Dimension, a label that has supported his work since the early 1990s via collaborations with Simon Wickham-Smith. The latter returns to this set, based around the notion of songs featuring special guests. Spread over the two discs, the eleven songs here assume all manner of sonic guises that are often difficult or sometimes blissed-out, but always rewarding. Most include guests, themselves from a wide variety of backgrounds (taking in all from groups such as Tr…

100 copies in Red Vinyl. After 44 years, the real masterpiece Tony Esposito's Rosso Napoletano sees the light again with this marvellous 13-minutes rework by Mushrooms Project. Archeo Recordings is a reissue record label that regenerates old, lost, obscure and forgotten rare gems of mostly Italian music but also all over the world of the 70s, 80s and 90s. All outputs are licensed by the artists and the vintage labels; audio tracks are remastered in their original form; the sleeves and center lab…

Strings is one of the best known and best loved Finnish jazz albums from the 70s, but annoyingly difficult to find on vinyl. The Svart reissue presents the album mastered for vinyl from the original tapes and comes with new liner notes. From 1970 until 1974 Otto Donner, one of the founders of Love Records, worked as the director of the entertainment section of the Finnish Broadcasting Company. The idea for Strings came up during that time when Juhani Aaltonen and Donner ran into each other at Yl…

Approaching the Exquisite Corpus was an alternative title we considered for this DVD release. It would have indicated how the films introduced here from my early Super 8 phase already evidence an artistically consistent path leading to my most recent production to date, The Exquisite Corpus, and highlighted my endeavor since the 1980s to make the specific qualities of the analog film medium sensuously tangible in the form of "exquisite ecstasies". No matter how various the imagery of Blood-Letti…

Mental Groove presents a vinyl reissue Do Den Haag Church from France, repress of the band's now well known live recording in Den Haag, 2008. The recording is raw and the mastering is fat. The first two pressings made in 2014 and 2015 were distributed confidentially and during the numerous live performances of the band. This pressing features brand new artwork. "France is a French trio that uses drums, bass and amplified hurdy-gurdy. They only perform live, in the middle of the audience - turned…

A new album of piano driven ambient music from British composer Robert Haigh. Following in the path of his albums for the Japanese Siren label, Creatures of the Deep is an underground vantage of a meeting between the musical worlds of Harold Budd and Erik Satie.  With a storied musical career that has ranged widely in style — from his industrial-avant-garde works on Nurse With Wound’s United Diaries label as SEMA to his legendary ambient drum and bass records as Omni Trio on Moving Shadow — Robe…

'Marginal Invitation', 'Corrosions on the Surface of Life', 'Cloud Passade No. 3'. Comprised of three balanced examples of his Continuous Music technique on solo piano, Three Solo Pieces serves as perhaps the best introduction the Ukrainian-Canadian composer Lubomyr Melnyk yet available. 'Marginal Invitation' is a subdued work with a deeply rooted melodic sensibility that is rich in overtones, while 'Corrosions on the Surface of Life' exhibits a dissonant fury of patterned note play. The final, …

2018 small repress. LP version. "Following on from 2012's acclaimed Imikizushi (BT 007CD/LP), Now While It's Still Warm Let Us Pour in All the Mystery is the fourth release from the established power trio of Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke, and Oren Ambarchi, recorded in January 2012 at their yearly concert at SuperDeluxe, Tokyo. While the trio's two previous double LP releases featured sprawling, side-long performances, the music here is presented in six shorter pieces, each one displaying a differen…

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…

Finally available the soundtrack to one of the most extreme and shocking movies of all tim - within this framework, Shevchenko and Iskanov elaborate an unfathomably mystic sound akin to the movie score, where wicked industrial music meets flickering piano ballads and distressing soundscapesPressed on"Risin Sun Flag" (Solid White Colored Vinyl) – Limited to 400 copiesHoused in a gatefold jacketFirst time ever on vinyl with unreleased tracks, pressed on 2xLP plus a bonus CDIncludes in-depth liner …

**50 copies copies, wood engraved hand assembled tape box + wood engraved set of 12 cards** All music, recordings, mixing by Guilhem Lacroux. Concrète and Electroacoustic Experiments circa 1995. The diversity of media (digital, analog, high and low definition), techniques (morphing, cut-up, sequence-play) and writing engines (serendipity, madrigalism) make La Journée the exemplum of an era in full gestural, sensitive and temporal metamorphosis

Chandra Oppenheim was a child star like no other. As the daughter of famed conceptual artist Dennis Oppenheim. By age nine, Chandra was staying up late at her parents' art-world parties, collaborating in her father's projects, and performing her own plays at downtown hotspots such as The Kitchen and Franklin Furnace. This set the stage for Chandra's course-altering collaboration with members of The Dance, who were looking to form yet another project and found their muse/fuse in ten-year-old Chan…

A long overdue, larger, reprint of the 1975 classic pamphlet by Hugh Davies, Paul Burwell, Max Eastley, Evan Parker, Paul Lytton, and David Toop. A rare look into the maker culture inherent in the 1970s UK experimental music scene with descriptions and pictures of Hugh Davies's shozyg, the communally blown horn, and more. Preface by David Toop.

Finally, the online magazine Sound American is available in a lovable, givable, carryable, trainable form! We’ve culled our favorite articles from the first three issues and commissioned some special new works not found at soundamerican.org for this special book presentation! This first volume features writing by and about Rick Moody, Ben Hall, Nate Wooley, Shinkoyo Collective, League of Automatic Music Composers, Women in Electronic Music, TECHNE, John King, John Cage’s Number Pieces an…

**limited edition marbled vinyl + download voucher** In a handful of improvised albums circumnavigating the troubled waters of the contemporary Mediterranean -Greece, with the eponymous Oiseaux-Tempête (2013), Turkey and Sicily for Ütopiya? (2015), Lebanon with Al-'An! (2017) - the collective Oiseaux-Tempête has stretched its electric arc over musical genres and borders, imposing itself in a river of tours and releases like a wild UFO within the hexagonal indie scene. Navigating instinct, as att…

Released as a vinyl-only album on Sterile Records in 1986, Controlled Bleeding's Headcrack is a monumental album of industrial-noise meets ambient soundscapes. The original record is hopelessly out of print, and Toronto-based Artoffact Records reissues it with remastered audio and updated cover art for the first time. Essential listening!

Baba Commandant And The Mandingo Band return with their second LP, Sira Ba Kele. After the Afro-beat fury of their first album Juguya (2015), the band has now distilled a potent mix of traditional and modern Burkinabe funk with a reverent take on the iconic Mandingue guitar music of the 1970's. Mamadou Sanou (Baba Commandant) leads the band with a confidence earned from years of toiling in the DIY underground of the West African music scene. His riveting growl and main instrument, the doso n'gon…

The South of the East is the debut album from Tenggara Trio, comprising of improvisors from Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. Like previous Lao Ban Records releases it has Yong Yandsen gargling, screeching, skronking and more on the tenor saxophone, but unlike previous releases, "The South of the East" is the most rocking (read: loud, aggressive, driving) release from Lao Ban Records hitherto. The other two members, Ikbal S. Lubys and Dharma both play electric guitar (with efx and objects), but…

While touring Europe in autumn 2017, Minami Saeki (voice), Wakana Ikeda (flute), Yoko Ikeda (viola), and Taku Sugimoto (guitar) visited Switzerland and joined up with Swiss composer/musicians Stefan Thut and Manfred Werder. This CD is a recording of five pieces they performed at the concert venue Theater Delly in Solothurn, Switzerland, on October 9, 2017. Thut played cello, and Werder used glockenspiel and typewriter. Each of the five musicians other than Saeki provided a composition of his or …

This is the 2nd CD release commemorating the 6th anniversary of Ftarri, the CD shop in Suidobashi, Tokyo. In recent years composer Masamichi Kinoshita, cello player Tomoki Tai, and composer/computer musician Takumi Ikeda have departed from their usual musical activities to hold “Electric Powered Music” concerts–periodic improvised music performances featuring electrical machinery and devices. These three plus guest Takuya Harashima (biwa, flute, voice) performed together in an Electric Po…

This is the 3rd CD release commemorating the 6th anniversary of Ftarri, the CD shop in Suidobashi, Tokyo. It documents a concert held at Ftarri in June 2018, featuring Beijing-based musicians Zhu Wenbo and Zhao Cong. The first set was an improvised performance by Zhao Cong (electronics, objects), guitarist Takashi Masabuchi, and alto sax player Masahide Tokunaga (25 minutes). In the second set, a septet consisting of these three musicians plus Zhu Wenbo (buzzer, clarinet, whistle), Yuma T…

La Tène is back with a double invitation to its third full length LP.  The hurdy-gurdy/harmonium/percussions trio welcomes two bagpipes (cabrettes and 23” to be exact), and a combo of string instruments (12-string guitar and electric bass).  Beyond the instrumentation, we’re looking at a gang of high esteemed guests: Jacques Puech, Louis Jacques, Guilhem Lacroux and Jérémie Sauvage, whom works are given their due credit (with the La Novià collective and its multiple variations, the France group…

This LP is a documentation of the very first meeting of Stuttgart-based minimalist jazz duo Fifty-Fifty and Swabian sound exploration society Metabolismus. All players draw from decades of experience with different forms of improvisation, using instrumental and electronic sounds known and unknown to spontaneously create an aural environment of complex simplicity. A wide spectrum of group mind expressions can be heard, from the purely abstract to moments of calm reflection. The title is a meditat…

This record documents music made by two women — one American and one Korean — who have both made a profound impact within experimental music. Ellen Fullman’s Long String Instrument has been a long-term life-work of incredible ambition and dedication. It is immediate, exciting and inspirational. Okkyung Lee has completed rewritten the possibilities for the cello in solo and group improvisation whilst maintaining a steadfast defiance to the many attempts to contain her work within pre-defined genr…

200 copies. Black vinyl, white cardboard sleeve with postcard attached, stamped white labels, insert. Plays at 45rpm. One of my most cheered moments this year was sitting drunk on my living room floor when someone put on an unmixed version of 'Lindholmen - Stenpiren' out of nowhere. Right there and then the most jaw-dropping amalgamation of the first bunch of Rough Trade 7"s, Berlin Super 80 and Gothenburg 2018. Monokultur is a new duo that consists of Elin and Julius from Skiftande Enheter…

200 copies. Black vinyl, white cardboard sleeve with postcard attached, stamped white labels, insert. Plays at 45rpm. Two new tracks from Canada's Korea Undok Group.  Continent is a record about memory, time and identity, and marks the first non-reissue vinyl output from KUG. The title track, and a-side of the record, concerns memory and its disintegration over time. Throughout our lives, we encounter far too many people, places and things—so many that it will always be completely impossible…

Since the early 80s, Blackhumour has been stubbornly dedicated to an investigation of the cracks which exist in common speech practice and the vacancy of the signifier. Vocal event is mined for stochastic determinism and glottal smut. While affinities exist, it would be difficult to categorize this material as sound poetry, despite a focus on voice, breath and the subtle diversion of linguistic intent. What is it. Repetition and magnification direct the incremental units of a sound which m…