New Arrivals / Last 2 weeks
Abacomancy
Abacomancy (defined as "a form of divination based on the interpretation of the patterns in dust, dirt, silt, or sand") is the first record by the duo of Derek Monypeny and Kevin Corcoran. Monypeny and Corcoran have a decades-long personal and musical relationship; they played in the free-improv trio DMPH with the late tenor saxophonist Chad Stockdale, who released a 7-inch on Stockdale's Weird Forest label in 2010.
Abacomancy is the result of a one-day recording session in Monypeny's adopted to…
Ritual of Light
"Ritual of Light" is the first full length from Descending Pharaohs. Recorded in mid-2022, it marks the band in its first year as a trio with a sound that is mainly implemented by the conventions of guitar, bass, and drums and enhanced by rich textures created by Turkish saz-baglama, greek tzoura, and oud as well as drone-driven electronics. Their influences run deep in the realms of 70s electric Arabic/Anatolian, spiritual jazz, and krautrock, but they project these influences towards a modern …
Oozetones / Fleshscapes
While this album was written and completed in early 2022 the work here reflects about a decade's worth of developing a unique approach to improvising, super-imposition, and sound engineering as a method of constantly shifting and expanding composition. In many ways this work is the logical conclusion of the desire for, and searching after, a certain sound and feeling, which I believe is present here.... ...The ooze is all encompassing. The ooze moves across and through all things. The ooze is ac…
TAQATO3
Violinist Mike Khoury came together with Sharif Sehnaoui (guitar, percussion, bouzouki) and Raed Yassin (bass) to create some very natural and organic improvised music during the Irtijal Festival in 2018. Khoury said, “the three of us had an instant connection with a common understood language that predated all of us.” The music was not a part of a festival performance but a sparate effort by the three musicians. Khoury is best known for his work as a soloist, in duet with percussionist Ben Hall…
Live at Space Mountain
Fellahin is a violin, wind and percussion format for violinist Mike Khoury. He has assembled this instrumental grouping several times under that moniker. For this album, Khoury travelled to Miami to work with Kenny Millions (Keshavan Maslak) on clarinet and guitar, and Steven Bristol on percussion. Khoury is best known for his work as a soloist, in duet with percussionist Ben Hall and dancer/choreographer Leyya Tawil and as a member of The Northwoods Improvisers, Porcelain Hammer, The Redford Ci…
Born For Years
Porcelain Hammer formed in 2018 for the purpose of expanding the direction of Ben Miller's multiphonic guitar work into a full ensemble. This new direction in Miller's music is the melding of art, psych, world and no-wave with lyrical hypnagogia.
Miller played guitar in Sproton Layer with brothers Roger and Laurence (1969-71), The Fourth World Quartet (1975), Destroy All Monsters with Ron Asheton and Michael Davis (1977-78), the avant-power trio Nonfiction (1982-85), Chicago's Dirty Old Man Riv…
Drueling
After a year of inter-continental correspondence, Turner Williams Jr. and Derek Monypeny crossed paths in the Spring of 2023. Derek was touring in Europe, playing solo sets with his electric shahi baaja, an instrumental obsession shared by Turner. Turner invited Derek down to Marseille for a session in his aerial basement studio overlooking the city. The result was the first shahi baaja duet for either musician. Spontaneous Mars music in the shadow of enormous transmission towers, pylône electri…
Forming - Concentric Rings in Magnetic Levitation
In late fall of 2018, Ryan traveled to Valencia, California to meet with Michael for a weekend of informal conversations at California Institute of the Arts. Before Ryan returned home to Colorado, Michael gifted him a recently released recording of Teodora Stepančić, Assaf Gidron, and Martin Lorenz’s realization of Michael’s Concentric Rings in Magnetic Levitation, a recording that profoundly impacted Ryan and served as the impetus for this recording.
A thrumming monadic field; a constellation o…
Given
"The piece given may be characterized as a certain activity, a special kind of practice. We practice as a trio (two players and one producer), hoping that anything might emerge: we gather to share a beautiful time together, exchanging our hopes and longings, our suffering, and our pain. Why should there be music at all? Faced with this question and considering the state of our world, artists could often find themselves drawn toward a sense of meaninglessness. But this is not the end. In the face…
When you rub your eyes, you see things you can’t describe
"In the emergence of consonance out of vapor, in shapes slowly forming from static sounds, Szymon Wójcik’s music gestures toward the movement named in its title: the appearing of what cannot be described. We hear it in its porousness: despite the dense mist, the music retains a transparency, recalling Feldman’s image of a full glass that never spills, no matter how many pennies you add. We hear it in the free singing, which does not so much break away from harmonies in Just Intonation as reveal …
Any sense of where we were gone
Any sense of where we were gone is music obsessed with the infinite within the minute, with the mercurial, breakable, with shifting, sifting, cohering, and digressing. It is an improvisational framework in five parts for chamber ensembles, prepared piano, and electronics, written for and played here by my good friends. It steals inspiration from postmodern fiction, obscure geometry textbooks, and poems about time. This is a live recording of the first performance
“To do. To do something, to do g…
Perpetual Guest
For a few days at the end of July 2023, I curated a series of concerts and recordings in a few spaces in the historic, now-defunct Kreenholm Textile Factory in Narva, Estonia, a stone's throw from the Russian border. In Kreenholm's reverberant rooms, these sessions reflected on the layers of history, labor, conflict, and lives past and present that have shaped the factory and the constantly re-evolv- ing border city. A large and unexpected part of this project involved the restoration of an anti…
Beams Boy
*100 copies limited edition* A handbag purchased in Tokyo in the early 2000s reappears in the present, containing a series of personal items: a T-shirt, a CD, five cassettes, and three mini-DVs. Sifting through the material, Barbara Signer rediscovers all kinds of forgotten memories and hidden traces of the past. Whilethe video cassettes were recorded in the streets of Tokyo at the turn of the millennium, the audio tapes contain music from Nick Kamen to Vivaldi, as well as the artist’s own voice,…
A Few We Remember
A Few We Remember is the new album by Jonah Parzen-Johnson and Lau Nau. The recording debut for the new duo of Finnish composer Lau Nau, aka Laura Naukkarinen, and American baritone saxophonist Jonah Parzen-Johnson, it cycles between moments of knotty ambience, whispered melody, and innocent tinkering, as the duo improvises over 8 narrative scores composed by Parzen-Johnson. Jonah Parzen-Johnson says: “For me, telling a story is about more than sharing a set of facts. A well told story is the pr…
Miss America
Talk Show is a new duo collaboration featuring Steph Richards on trumpets and resonating surfaces and Qasim Naqvi on drums, almglocken bells and modular synthesizer. Having worked together on other projects for almost two decades, Miss America, to be released by We Jazz Records on 21st November, marks their first, pure duo collaboration – a space to engage with a sonic language they’ve been cultivating together for years. The album was recorded live, with Qasim crafting real-time electronics and…
Oblivion
*150 copies limited edition* A surprise album by bvdub and zakè. No album description. No songs available to listen to. Must buy blindly.
SSI Solo 2024
A leading saxophonist on the Japanese improvised music scene, Junji Hirose also gives performances using self-made analog noise instruments. It was in the 1980s that Hirose started presenting noise performances on his SSI (self-made sound instrument), made of various everyday objects. Over the years he continually modified the instrument, for each version attaching a different number to the name SSI. On the Hitorri label, Hirose has released the CDs "SSI-4" (hitorri-997 / 2013), "SSI-5" (hitorri…
Evoke
*200 copies limited edition* While her main instrument is baritone sax, Misaki Motofuji is a multi-instrumentalist with an excellent command of other saxophone types including tenor and alto, as well as clarinet and flute. In concerts she additionally makes wide-ranging use of electronics, vocals, field recordings and various effects and objects, spontaneously assembling splendid, amazingly well constructed performances. In May 2022 Motofuji performed a concert of this type at Ftarri, Tokyo, whi…
Biosphere
*200 copies limited edition* While her main instrument is baritone sax, Misaki Motofuji is a multi-instrumentalist with an excellent command of other saxophone types including tenor and alto, as well as clarinet and flute. In concerts she additionally makes wide-ranging use of electronics, vocals, field recordings and various effects and objects, spontaneously assembling splendid, amazingly well constructed performances. In May 2022 Motofuji performed a concert of this type at Ftarri, Tokyo, whi…
Uchidome
Seijiro Murayama is a Paris-based drummer, percussionist, improviser and composer. It was in 2009 that he first released CDs on the Ftarri labels Hitorri, Ftarri and Meena. He has since released over ten CDs of performances in solo, duo, trio and quartet formations.
"Uchidome," Murayama’s fifth solo album from the Hitorri label, consists of three tracks recorded in France in January 2025. All his drum solo albums are outstanding, and this CD, with its unique and inimitable performances, is no ex…
