New Arrivals / Last 2 weeks
Hyomon-Dako / Magnésie
"On this new diptych, Spelterini widens the realm of possibilities even further, blending rock experiences with learned music, and forging new paths at the crossroads of post-punk and minimalist music. These two pieces, just under twenty minutes each, explore delightful points of friction between contrasting formats and temporalities, which stand in contrast to the sonic urgency at work, finding fragile points of balance between repetition, rupture, and explosion.
Named after the Italian tight…
Grzyby
After a three-year hiatus from releasing new music, Błoto knew they had to make up for the long wait with a flood of fresh material. Their fruitful recording sessions at Studio Pasterka produced a wave of new tracks—like mushrooms springing up after the rain. These sessions have already brought us two 7" singles, the Grzybnia LP, and now, rounding off this chapter, comes the final piece: the album Grzyby (eng. Mushrooms). Anticipation for new Błoto releases reached a fever pitch. Vinyl collector…
Der Tanz Aller
When the performance group Ligna approached me in 2012 to compose music for a play based on Rudolf von Laban’s revolutionary kinetic theories and so-called ‘Bewegungschöre’ (movement choirs), I thought of a soundtrack that would be both rhythmically engaging, abstract and mechanical. I knew there would be pre-recorded voices talking about his philosophy and guiding the audience via headphones. So, I had to leave some “air” in the arrangements, allowing the visitors to concentrate on the spoken w…
Habibi Funk: A Selection From Libyan Tapes
Habibi Funk is more than happy to announce our 31st release which happens to be our 3rd various artists compilation. The album is dedicated to the cassette tape scene in Libya from the late 80s to early 2000s, from disco to reggae to pop. All songs previously unreleased outside of Libya and not available on any DSP platforms.
The Magic Of Ju-Ju
A furious 18-minute raid occupies the first side of this 1967 album, where Archie Shepp (tenor sax) is surrounded by Reginald Workman on double bass and five percussionists: Beaver Harris, Norman Connor, Eddie Blackwell, Frank Charles and Dennis Charles. Even if Shepp never loses the initial energy, the rest of the music on The Magic of Ju-Ju has slightly less frenetic atmospheres; it is a departure from the first track, gradually sitting in a more traditional realm, with the addition of Martin …
Pleasure
Girls At Our Best! were one of the greatest and most influential bands to emerge in the early 1980s as part of a new wave of independent acts. DJ John Peel championed them, playing their singles repeatedly and inviting them to record a session for his programme. Wry vocalist Judy Evans and brutal yet melodic guitarist James Alan who’d met at art college in Leeds fronted Girls At Our Best!, the proto-Indie band that formed from the ashes of Alan’s 1977 punk band SOS! Pleasure, the sole album, rea…
Ascension
*180 copies limited edition* Venice Affair seeks only to give humans a look into their own lives, history, suffering, and peace, all while providing a backbeat sprinkled with sexuality, romanticism, and especially entertainment. The concept of “Ascension” is much larger than a description of upward motion; it is the human description of our evolution from four to two, from caves to high rises, from child to elder, and from stardust to flesh. This collection of songs has been in the works since 2…
Porno Incubo
*170 copies limited edition* As is now a well-established tradition, when 7 appears in the catalogue number it is the turn of handyman Asymmetrical. The title takes its inspiration from a tag that appeared in the bathroom of the historical Knick Knack Yoda after one of the (in)usual nights, and is a leap in time, a project born from the layering of different sessions that took place between 2018 and 2020 and only sees the light of day today. 7 is also the number of inches of PVC on which this do…
Astrïd and Sylvain Chauveau Cover Songs Originally Sung by Women Singers
Astrïd and Sylvain Chauveau previously released the collaborative album Butterfly in the Snowfall in 2014, and have played shows together and with Rachel Grimes. Sylvain often covers songs, changing the original music using electronic or a minimalistic harmonium. For their new collaboration, Astrïd and Sylvain decided to work together for the first time on an album of cover songs, starting with Nina Simone’s version of Dambala, then Nancy Sinatra’s Bang Bang (a song Sylvain regularly performs li…
The Blind Sublime
Andrew Ostler’s fifth album for the Expert Sleepers label continues his trajectory away from a sound largely based on synthesizers towards orchestral textures and heavily processed saxophone. Building on the string arrangements of his previous LP “Dots on a Disk of Snow”, and taking a heavy dose of sax drone from the earlier “Four Drones for Saxophone and Modular Synthesizer”, this record also adds a full choir, taking the music to another level of spiritual intensity.
The first side of the LP p…
How Buildings Learn
"Last year, a consultant from the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors took stock of my home in Bristol. He told me the survey would be sent as a pdf via email; I asked him for the audio recording of his spoken notes. The visiting field recordist graciously gifted it to me.Around the same time, we had a security camera fitted. My daughters commented that the audio sounded like “Daddy’s music.” I can now travel anywhere in the world while producing field recordings of my home. ‘How Buildings Le…
Voiceless Mass
Big Tip! Listening is the foundation of Raven Chacon’s (b. 1977) wide-ranging artistic practice. “I am a listener,” he simply declares, but the attention he gives to sound is complex and vast, encompassing far more than what is immediately audible. From his earliest works, Chacon has been dedicated to amplifying the unheard, calling attention to what is absent or unknown. Although Chacon classifies the compositions on this recording as chamber music, all three of these works “zigzag” through his…
Music from the Tudorfest: San Francisco Tape Music Center, 1964
In the spring of 1964 Pauline Oliveros organized a festival celebrating the work of pianist David Tudor, which featured compositions by Oliveros, George Brecht, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Alvin Lucier, and John Cage. The Tudorfest was a watershed event in the brief history of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, which not only provided its members with an opportunity to collaborate with Tudor, but also to promote their own work. Co-sponsored by KPFA, the Tudorfest demonstrated the artistic diversi…
Music From The Once Festival 1961-1966
With Robert Ashley, George Cacioppo, Gordon Mumma, Roger Reynolds, Donald Scavarda, David Behrman, George Crevoshay, Philip Krumm, Pauline Oliveros, Robert Sheff, Bruce Wise. Ann Arbor, Michigan, seems an unlikely site for the establishment of a major avant-garde festival that would shake the new-music community. Tucked away in America's heartland, the city is equally removed from the Eastern metropolises whose artists pride themselves on sensing the pulse of the times, and from the nonconformis…
Future Travel
Long out of print in its original, 1981 LP version from Street Records, Future Travel, has now been released again, remastered for digital media, by New World Records (80668-2). All the music composed and performed by David Rosenboom from this historic album is included, along with a new version of And Out Come the Night Ears, which was first introduced on an LP from 1750 Arch Records in 1978. One of the first albums composed almost entirely with a digital synthesizer, Future Travel, features th…
The Boyé Multi-National Crusade for Harmony
In response to the arguably self-righteous pronouncements made in the 1990s as to what jazz is and isn’t, Julius Hemphill (1938–1995) spoke up as he had done throughout his career. “Well, you often hear people nowadays talking about the tradition, tradition, tradition. But they have tunnel vision in this tradition. Because tradition in African-American music is wide as all outdoors.” This collection of music, this celebration of artistic collaborations that engaged Julius Hemphill throughout his…
Music of David Tudor and Gordon Mumma
This historic recording features the first-ever release of the two earliest surviving recordings of David Tudor's seminal work, Rainforest. Sandwiched in between are six keyboard works by Gordon Mumma in recordings featuring the composer and his close collaborator, Tudor. Together, these works constitute a fascinating and historically important document of the 1960s avant-garde in America.
In early 1968, Merce Cunningham created a new dance whose apparent impetus was Colin Turnbull's The Forest …
Spectral Malsconcities
In modern experimental music, and especially among a number of musician-composers emerging in America during the Sixties, a fixation on process and awareness became a structural hallmark, exploring the gradual change of sonic materials, built environments, and the human body. Though much maligned as a term by its practitioners, figures like Steve Reich, La Monte Young, Philip Glass, and Terry Riley were among these 'minimal' composers; askew of them were electroacoustic explorers like Alvin Luci…
Harmonium
Just Asked whether he would describe his music as “Sound for the sake of sound,” James Tenney (1934–2006) replied, “It’s sound for the sake of perceptual insight—some kind of perceptual revelation.” This release aptly demonstrates Tenney’s deep exploratory fascination with the nature and potentialities of aural perception. His attraction to these topics was simultaneously intellectual and sensuous, and its musical products at once invite both sustained reflection and the most immediate of corpor…
The Zürich Concert
Just when you think you are grasping the breadth and quality of the music of Julius Eastman (1940 - 1990), a recording such as Julius Eastman: The Zürich Concert shows up, and you have to go back and reassess his work and wonder what will show up next. This recording is from a 1980 solo seventy-minute improvisatory concert in Zürich, a cherished cassette made by a friend of Eastman's, who recently realized its uniqueness and decided that he should share it. The Zürich Concert was performed on Oc…