Experimental / All styles

Sofa Music is thrilled to invite a new artist on board the Sofa catalogue with the adventurous album Undulate from the danish, Oslo-based artist Niklas Adam. When the Sofa team first heard Adam's music, there was no discussion about including the album in our catalogue. His music deserves to be heard: it's an album that grows on you with its complexity of beautiful and genorous sounds. It's a concert. It's a lecture. It's a drum solo, a homage to Tudor, an opaque invitation, it's a conversation …

Sofa is very proud to release the outstanding debut record of composer / guitarist Fredrik Rasten. In Six Moving Guitars, the stable sounds of justly tuned consonances are being «activated» by the different qualities of the movements of the guitars. The piece came out of the collaborative work between three dancers and three musicians. The group’s goal was to work with choreography and sound as a unity, erasing the functional differences between dancer and musician and focusing solely on the son…

Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø and Daniel Lercher met in the Czech country side in 2010, as part of an improvising orchestra comprised of Austrian, Czech and Norwegian musicians, and started working as a duo shortly after. Finding common ground in fine grained and slow pulsed music, the duo went through a research period, striving to develop a common material void of all things unnecessary, where the impact of acoustic and electronic sound elements were truly balanced. While Nørstebø refined his arsena…

Mayhem are the most influential Black Metal band in the world, and obviously no strangers to controversy. Death Archives offer never before seen photographs and unique insight into one of music’s most extreme subcultures. During the band’s ongoing career, now spanning thirty years, bass player and only surviving band member from the original line-up, Jørn “Necrobutcher” Stubberud, has collected enormous amounts of photographs, video diaries and memorabilia. In this unique documentary book, Stubb…

Ripped  & Torn: The UK’s Loudest Punk Fanzine is an anthology of one of the first punk zines. Tony Drayton began producing Ripped & Torn in Glasgow in 1976 and carried it into the next wave of punk, continuing long after others like Sniffing Glue had stopped. All of his seventeen issues are reproduced in this bound volume. By punks and for punks, Ripped  & Torn: The UK’s Loudest Punk Fanzine is a fascinating document of the punk subculture and a sacred text of DIY culture. “The mystery was: who …

**60 copies** Muuton Koto is a collaboration work of Finnish musicians Veli-Matti Ikävalko (Kutomo, Tulasi) and Jani Hirvonen (Uton). The recordings of this album started already in 2010, but it took almost ten years before it was fully finished (but there was also many years when "nothing" really happened). It was recorded andmixed partially in Chantepie (France), Brisbane (Australia), Kotka, Helsinki and Turku (Finland). Muuton Koto's music is a colourful psychedelic folk; with a mix of sweet …

**75 copies** Rabid trio blasting out some smash and grab free muzak voodoo with deformed, blown-out grooves and brooding, midnight atmospheres that give you the same high-torque hairdryer treatment as you would get sat in the front row at a Cairo Free Jazz Ensemble gig or listening to a Vermonster LP full blast in a shipping container. Unsettling as it is invigorating, layers upon layers of elastic electronics and graceful keys lurking around - spectators to the reoccurring elephant seal deathm…

**250 copies** Improvised soundtrack to a non-existent Western, recorded in the late '90s by James Kirk, Nathan Thompson and Tim Cornelius. "Deep South kitchen-sink explorers have been circling the drain in counterclockwise fashion for at least half my life and yet I am still reduced to shameless gobsmackery in the presence of this sterling new collection of historic treasures. Committed live-to-tape in the comfy climes of a living room / recording studio / temple affectionately known as 'Canong…

**300 copies** Originally released on cassette by Corpus Hermeticum in 1994. All sounds by Alastair Galbraith and Bruce Russell. "New Zealand is on summer holidays all through the month of January. For some reason I had the house to myself, the wife and kids were elsewhere. Alastair Galbraith brought over some instruments and we plugged in a cassette recorder. We spent the sunny afternoon setting up combinations of instruments and seeing what happened. We had recorded the Concord LP the year bef…

300 copies in orange vinyl. The trio Susana Santos Silva / Torbjörn Zetterberg / Hampus Lindwall emerged in 2015 with their first album If Nothing Else (Clean Feed) which was received with critical acclaim. The unique conceptual approach to composition & improvisation rooted in both free jazz and contemporary classical music was described as “guaranteed a unique listening experience” (JazzIn), “It is art!” (Gapplegate Music Review) and “unique sound and style” (New York City Jazz Record). On the…

Edition of 300. The Scottish folk tradition runs deep in the bones of Alasdair Roberts, a singer and songwriter whose voice seems to carry centuries of Highland mist and ancient balladry. With Green Ribbons, Roberts joins forces with an ensemble of kindred spirits - fiddle, accordion, double bass, and assorted strings - to create a work that sits comfortably alongside the great British folk recordings of the late 1960s and early 1970s, yet sounds utterly contemporary in its execution. This is mu…

**very last copies** Première release. Two astonishing archival works by Mary Jane Leach are now available on vinyl for the first time, bringing to life a wondrous iteration of the highly fertile 1970s New York minimalist scene. Mary Jane Leach is a definitive model of the American avant-garde and experimental composer - creatively brilliant, tragically underrecognized, yet always there, rigorously plumbing the depths, issuing challenges, venturing toward the unknown. Having moved to New York du…

Max Giteck Duykers (born 1972) stands out for his ongoing dedication to the sound worlds made possible by the Pierrot ensemble. Therefore it is fitting that the first recording devoted exclusively to Duykers's music should feature two of the four "Pierrot sextets" he has composed this far, that the remaining four works on the disc are playable by P6/P6+ subsets, and that everything here (except for the one vocal work which adds guest soprano Zen Wu) is performed by members of Ensemble Ipse, the …

Kate Soper's (b. 1981) Ipsa Dixit (2010 - 16) is an evening-length work of chamber music theatre for voice, flute, violin, and percussion that explores music, language, and meaning through blistering ensemble virtuosity and extended vocal technique. "'Ipsa dixit' is the feminized form of ipse dixit (literally "he, himself, said it"), a fallacy in which an assertion is made based not on proof, but on the supposed authority of the speaker alone. The title seemed apt for a work that explores …

Liz Harris of Grouper under the name Nivhek: Mellotron, guitar, tapes, field recordings and broken pedals, made during residencies in the Azores and Murmansk and at home in Astoria, Oregon.

Trust in Rock documents the last evening of an epic concert series held at Berkeley’s University Art Museum in November 1976, featuring an all-star ensemble of the Bay Area’s most unclassifiable musicians performing works by “Blue” Gene Tyranny and Peter Gordon. Tyranny’s cycle “No Job, No Warm, No Nothing” contains songs “concerned with influence, trust, self-reliance, and having to re-do what is true for you;” three songs by Gordon, with lyrics by Kathy Acker, are complimented by two earlier i…

**250 copies** "In my count, this is the 25th album by Amherst's Idea Fire Company. And it a marvel of creative whackery that unfolds its charms like a glamorous stripper doing a matinee show at a well-lit coal mine. Many key auxiliary members have passed through IFCO's ranks (Dr. Steve, Jessi Leigh Swenson, Meira O'Reilly, Franz de Waard, Graham Lambkin, Matt Krefting, etc.), but the core of the unit has always been Karla Borecky (catcher, piano) and Scott Foust (first base, trumpet/synth). On …

**400 copies** "Eugene Chadbourne is one of the great guitar players of the modern era. At the time he began recording in Canada in 1975, his music was a unique syncretic formulation. While its most obvious component was free improvisation in a style then most widely associated with English and European players, his music also contained elements of jazz, country, folk, blues, psychedelic and international sounds, referencing these threads in ways that were so diverse and intensely personalized i…

Debut LP by the New Zealand duo of Bruce Russell (Dead C, Handful of Dust, etc) and Luke Wood. Visceral Realists is a high-concept commentary on the state of vinyl, analogue recording, music culture, art, etc. A 45-rpm bullet of short bursts of free electric sound, the music here is tactile and rough but not “noise music.” Russell and Wood play over loops of scratchy records, with their guitars and electronics surging to get over the wall. Russell’s guitar sound from his vintage transistor amp a…

Debut collaboration between these like-minded English underground titans, perfectly mixing the long-form pop eccentricities of Grumbling Fur with the free electric sound of Astral Social Club to produce four epic and memorable tracks. The music is dense and layered, with hidden hooks, haunting vocals, unidentifiable electronic shuddering, delicate ambience, etc. Challenging but completely accessible and beautiful stuff. After a brief vocal declaration of purpose, Back To the Egg rides a motorik …