New Arrivals / Last 4 weeks
Electronic Music
One of the most significant archival recoveries from the deep history of Japanese electronic music. Electronic Music Works gathers, for the first time anywhere, the entirety of Shuko Mizuno's tape and synthesizer output - a body of work that, until now, had remained almost entirely unknown, even to those familiar with the composer's name. Spread across three CDs, issued by the indispensable Three Shells imprint, it presents music drawn from tapes discovered at Mizuno's home and salvaged on the v…
Aman Aman (Greek-Anatolian Laments)
Intensely expressive free-verse vocal laments over sliding violins, hammered santouri, guitar, and oud - the hybrid sounds of the Mediterranean in the early 20th century. “Aman Aman” cry the singers on these recordings, their voices preserved on 78rpm discs cut between 1911-1935. The phrase roughly translates to “mercy,” a call of despair, but also one of joy and admiration. On many of these sides, that full range of emotion is transmitted at once. Some of these artists are legends, others lost …
Bulayo (Guitar Songs From Tanzania, Kenya, Zambia, And DR Congo)
African acoustic guitar masterpieces, expanding on Mississippi’s beloved “African Guitar Box.” In 1979 and 1980, a young British-Kenyan musician named John Low hit the road to learn finger-style guitar from his heroes. He traveled across Kenya, Tanzania, Congo, and Zambia, visiting, and sometimes staying in the homes of, stars like Jean-Bosco Mwenda, Losta Abelo, and Emmanuel Mulemena. He also documented brilliant but previously under-recorded artists like Tanzania’s Francis Kitime and Kenya’s M…
Inzovu Y'Imirindi
In the late 1980s, singer Bizimungu Dieudonne, his wife Agnes Uwimbabazi, and a backing band of family and friends self-released a visionary cassette, featuring stuttering electric guitars, loping bass lines, and call and response vocals. Their combo of 80s studio wizardry rooted in traditional Rwandan praise songs resulted in hypnotic, extended jams unlike anything else released in East Africa at the time. The lyrics praised the beauty of the countryside and the exploits of the ancient gods. On…
The MerKaBa Brotherhood
The MerKaBa Brotherhood are Roman Norfleet (The Cosmic Tones Research Trio, Be Present Art Group) and Andre Raiah (Brown Calvin of Brown Calculus, Be Present Art Group). The duo draw from esoteric texts, sacred imagery, and mystic thought, shaping sound into space, tone, and pulse. It's a spare and almost geometric record featuring Sax, keyboard and percussion.
The album turns sound into a working language - textures as diagrams and melodies as signals. There is much to be learned and even more …
Toothpaste For Your Elephant
*250 copies limited edition* Toothpaste For Your Elephant marks the first release for London based Ó Mhaidin. Unfolding over 16 tracks, 3 of which are newly mastered reissues seeing vinyl for the first time, the compilation is born from a love of 80’s underground cassette culture, an homage to late nights spent listening to junked-up Americana, disregarded DIY oddities and neo no-wave.
Featuring contributions from Old Saw, Tarawangsawelas, Kulku, Fiesta En El Vacío, Thorn Wych and more, Ó Mhaidi…
Sunday Mass: Text Scores 2019-2024 (Book)
This collection of text scores is a survey and a re-formatting of my work in prose and text scoring between 2019 and 2024. While not comprehensive, several of these pieces are from my Grid Series and a few have never been presented publicly or privately. In most cases, my commitment to harmony and a specific harmonic grammar meant that these scores were presented with attached pitch material. However, the text always came first and, in this volume, these works present themselves as poems, elegie…
Meadow Rituals
Lüüp, the acclaimed international project with collaborations / contributions from musicians from different countries known for blending folk textures with cinematic ambience, releases Meadow Rituals, an expansive 3CD collection that unfolds like a seasonal hymn to nature, memory, and communal ritual. Across three discs, Lüüp weaves delicate acoustic instrumentation, ritualistic percussion, choral textures, and intimate field recordings into a cohesive sonic journey that feels both timeless and …
Corn Alone
This is my ode to corn in 3 parts, all featuring corn as corn himself. There are 6 pieces composed for 7 handmade instruments, made entirely out of different parts of corn, with some thread and wood glue as well. There is a cornfield recording, taken on a day they were harvesting just under a mile or so away. And there is a musique concrete type of piece featuring field recordings and the instruments.
This album was made during my residency at Art Farm in Marquette, Nebraska, surrounded by infin…
Stillness in their isolation
low volume listening highly encouraged.
for a while now, i've been fascinated in the sensory threshold, the moment in between sensing or not, like when doing a hearing test; at one point you hear a sound and next you don't, but you're not quite sure. do you hear the beeps, something from outside or maybe something from inside yourself?
for this project, i wanted to try and recontextualize loud traffic and constant hum of air conditioning units into a quiet, nearly inaudible form as the hustle an…
Pas de la Demi-Lune
"Halfway between the Summer Solstice and Autumn Equinox falls the pagan Lughnasadh festival marking the beginning of the harvest season in Ireland. Pas de la Demi-Lune was originally composed and performed for this festival in a celebration event organized by Phelim Ó Laoghaire. For that occasion, Dylan performed the piece in the river crossing leading to the Brennanstown Dolmen in Co. Dublin, a megalith portal tomb estimated to have been erected sometime in 4000-2500 BC. They chose to record in…
Lights shimmered like whispers in the depths of the trees
Textures of belonging, relentlessly woven into the epigenetics, layer upon layer, building palimpsests of human existence that are both fragile and resilient, with nothing but a wobbly strand of DNA. The way our grandparents' experiences spill across our systems, the way their grandparents’ experiences formed them in the first place, like a busy cityscape humming in the background, keeping the flow, making things operate, and despite their physical peril, hearts still flicker and divulge poetry …
anabasis (1)
anabasis (1) is a composition in 72 parts for five musicians, based on four kinds of materials: Sand, Wind, Tone and Wave; these materials are arranged and intertwined with a fifth ‘Interludes’ strand that interacts with the four materials. All of these are then ‘unbound’ over the course of the piece by changing continuity in a variety of ways outlined in the score. This interpretation of the score is a live performance that features prepared reed organ, electromagnetic pick-ups, sand, pedals, D…
A Fine Chance for Permanence
*100 copies limited edition* A Fine Chance for Permanence captures a pivotal moment in contemporary improvisation, where a new generation of musicians reshapes the language of spontaneous music in response to an increasingly fragmented, hyper-connected world. Drawing from decades of experimental traditions—from 1960s free music to the reductionist movements of the early 2000s—the album proposes a fluid, “both/and” aesthetic that resists fixed ideologies in favor of multiplicity, dialogue, and sh…
Kite
*200 copies limited edition* Mysterious lycanthrope and sound-explorer from Gothenburg, Sweden and surrounding forests - behind the name Ratvader is the composer Oscar Sidoff Rydelius. Discreet Music crossed paths with Oscar for the first time during 2025, a chance meeting that resulted in the enchanting 14-track album Kite now released on Gustaf Dickssons in-house imprint Frihetens Förlag. Evocative and strangely moving soundtrack-style compositions that at times feels like the medieval bastard…
Live at Somewhere
"I call it ‘the Shadow Pattern Vignette’. A fragmentary and pleasingly non-discriminatory exercise in audio capture which, when sequenced, compiled or arranged alongside other such vignettes, leads to the finished work of Nate Ivanco’s Shadow Pattern. You can reach into the hermetic depths of his Hamilton Tapes micro label, recent transatlantic appearances via Infant Tree, Chocolate Monk or adhuman, or indeed, this new LP ‘Live at Somewhere’ and find the Shadow Pattern Vignette. Forever in evide…
Everybody Else's Life Too
Were you to tap the lifeblood of Chicago music, you would find Josh Berman flowing liberally through its veins. Active on the scene for more than a quarter century, the cornetist, bandleader, and composer has helped retain the unique flavor of the city's soundscape, with particular attention to the music of its jazz past – groups like the Austin High Gang and the Oliver-Armstrong lineage and Freddie Keppard, as well as more recent figures from Lester Bowie to Wadada Leo Smith.
But Berman is more…
The Dream Island of Birds
Mike Cooper returns to Discrepant with »The Dream Island of Birds«. Neither documentary nor abstraction, »The Dream Island of Birds« sits between field recording, memory, and invention — an island heard through time and circuitry.
In the early 1990s, Cooper met illustrator and writer Charles van Sandwyk while walking on a small island in Fiji. Van Sandwyk was living there quietly, working from a modest bamboo house near the beach. Years later, Cooper learned that following a serious car accident…
Movie
*150 copies limited edition* Filmmaking and music-making share a common element of worldbuilding. Whole cloth, environments are raised in which a perspective can be placed; the viewer, the listener, is taken on a ride into the unknown for a time. Movie, the newest album by DMV-based duo Lifted, is like a film shot with microphones rather than cameras, using the pacing, spatialization, and semiotics of cinematic sound design to lead us through a surreal soundworld that draws as much from Foley ar…
Fragments of Soaring Vessels
The tracks that make up Fragments of Soaring Vessels are conceived as “sensitive vehicles.” Although they seem quite different at first listen, closer listening reveals multiple points of intersection—often overlapping, sometimes paradoxical. The Inexpressible Feeling of Dereliction approaches an attempt at a sonic transposition of a feeling of emptiness and rupture that may arise in an extreme situation, in which a pious person is confronted with a moment of absolute disillusionment regarding t…
