New Arrivals / Last 4 weeks
This Great Midwestern Darkness
*100 copies limited edition* Collected and composed from 2+ years of improvisations and "digging in the dirt" of a lifetime living in the midwest of the U.S. TGMD offers a pause to witness, imagine, and drift in present time. From the ethereal piano and muted beats of the opening track "O Marfa, Oh" (inspired by a solo pilgrimage to Marfa and the work of Donald Judd), on through to "Mountain", recorded and captured in Colorado (between unfortunate falls from bicycle traveling fast downhill ha). …
Andando El Tiempo
*2024 stock* Andando el Tiempo features new music of wide emotional compass by Carla Bley, and underlines her originality and resourcefulness as a jazz composer. “Saints Alive!” sets up animated conversations between the three musical participants with striking statements from Steve Swallow’s bass guitar and Andy Sheppard’s soprano sax. The stately “Naked Bridges/Diving Brides” draws inspiration from Mendelssohn and the poetry of Paul Haines. And the powerful three part title composition – wh…
Midwest
*2024 stock* Mathias Eick reflects on distances travelled in this intensely melodic set of original compositions, which makes an imaginative journey from Hem, the tiny Norwegian village where the trumpeter grew up, to the vast plains of Dakota in the American Midwest. It was to the Midwest that hundreds of thousands of Norwegians travelled by sea in the 19th and early 20th centuries – and naturally they took their music with them. In similar spirit Eick, a Norwegian improviser-composer strongly…
Gnosis
*2024 stock* In this vivid and exciting project, the Santiago-raised and New York-based pianist-composer David Virelles looks towards one melting pot from the vantage point of another. A far-reaching work with deep cultural roots, Gnosis speaks of transculturation and traditions, and of the complex tapestry of Cuba’s music – the sacred, the secular, and the ritualistic – but the work’s shapes and forms could only have been created by a gifted contemporary player thoroughly versed in the art of t…
Up And Coming
*2024 stock* Guitarist John Abercrombie – who has recorded as a leader for ECM since 1974 – returns with a second album by his quartet featuring Marc Copland on piano, along with longtime rhythm partners Drew Gress and Joey Baron. Extolling 39 Steps, the group’s 2013 album, the Financial Times said: “The emphasis is on subtle intrigue, flowing lyricism and the interplay between the leader’s warm, cleanly articulated guitar and Copland’s piano… with bassist Gress and drummer Baron equally supple …
The Gleaners
*2024 stock* Larry Grenadier’s The Gleaners is a profound and highly creative album, harvesting influences from many sources, its title inspired by Agnès Varda’s film The Gleaners and I. In between his own pieces here, including a dedication to early hero Oscar Pettiford, Grenadier explores compositions by George Gershwin, John Coltrane, Paul Motian, Rebecca Martin and Wolfgang Muthspiel. “The process for making this record began with a look inward,” Larry writes in his liner note, “an excavatio…
Lucus
*2024 stock* Norwegian drummer/composer Thomas Strønen presents a revised edition of his acoustic collective Time Is A Blind Guide, now trimmed to quintet size, and with a new pianist in Wakayama-born Ayumi Tanaka. Tanaka has spoken of seeking associative connections between Japan and Norway in her improvising, a tendency Strønen seems to be encouraging with his space-conscious writing for the ensemble, letting in more light. As on the group’s eponymously-titled and critically-lauded debut album…
Romaria
*2024 stock* Andy Sheppard’s quartet extends the musical explorations begun on the 2015 release Surrounded By Sea, an album praised by Télérama for its “poignant serenity.” In this new programme of compositions by Sheppard (plus the title track by Brazilian singer-songwriter Renato Teixeira), the drones and washes of Eivind Aarset’s guitar and electronics – aided by the generous acoustics of Lugano’s Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI – help to establish a climate in which improvisation can take place. T…
The Dreamer Is The Dream
*2024 stock* or his third ECM release as a leader, Chris Potter presents a new acoustic quartet that naturally blends melodic rhapsody with rhythmic muscle. The group includes superlative musicians well known to followers of ECM’s many recordings from New York over the past decade: keyboardist David Virelles, bassist Joe Martin and drummer Marcus Gilmore, who each shine in addition to the leader on multiple horns. The Dreamer Is the Dream features Potter on tenor saxophone – the instrument that …
Streams
*2024 stock* On his second leader album for ECM – following on from the prizewinning Gefion – Danish guitarist Jakob Bro continues to refine his trio project, with its emphases on melody, sound, space, layered textures and interaction. The rapport between Bro and Thomas Morgan (Bro calls him “my musical soul mate”) has become something extraordinary, and often guitarist and bassist develop improvisational ideas in parallel. There’s an historical aptness, too, in the choice of Joey Baron as the b…
Does It Still Matter
"The new avant-garde isn't about creating something that doesn't yet exist, it's about abandoning and confusing rigid genres. I want to open up, in order to both abolish and reconstruct the musical past." — Noémi Büchi
Electrical Storm At The Micro Station
We are immensely pleased to welcome into the HDK catalog Mr. Graham Simpson, a champion of electronic music who was hidden in his little house up there in the north east of England. It is reductive to place Graham's music under a specific tag because he is able to release amazing albums in any genre or subgenre that can in some way be traced back to the definition of electronic music. Albums like this “Electrical Storm at the Micro Station”, which will surely make rejoice the lovers of old recor…
Faer The Wanderer
Here we go again: Gnoll is back! The brutal dungeon-synth ensemble was this time involved in a collaboration of epic proportions called… Faer the WandererFaer is a Conan-esque character specifically invented for HDK by the English writer John Reppion (co-author with his wife Leah Moore of masterpiece comics such as Albion and Wild Girl, fresh from collaboration with... Iron Maiden!): Faer the Wanderer is a tribute to the glorious heroic-fantasy paperbacks of the 70s, but with typical vibes of th…
The Book Of Illumination
*100 copies limited edition* Yotzeret Sheydim, the noise moniker of Desdemona Ill, has been releasing and performing a truly unique brand of noise music nonstop since 2021. The project focuses on themes of Judaism, demonology, magic and queerness. Ill uses synthesizers and microphones to perform her audible ritual magic, often creating a noise nigun in order to enter devekut. Sometimes summoning sheydim, sometimes just praying to HaShem. Yotzeret Sheydim translates to "she creates demons" and re…
Ferocity of the Unconscious
*50 copies limited edition* Based in the US since 2002, Andrea Pensado uses voice and electronics to create her highly idiosyncratic brand of experimental music. A harsh, cut-up sound profile, mixed with the strong emotional component of her music, generates a deeply personal sonic language which inevitably gives rise to intense responses in the most diverse audiences. Pensado exhibits staggering control in her work, utilizing Max MSP to map synthesis parameters into performance gestures. Her mu…
Playing The Flute Down Baltimore Pike
*50 copies limited edition* Dead Door Unit is the solo noise moniker of Ken Geiger, a prolific experimental and metal musician from NJ. Vocalist for the death metal band Blemish and one half of the junk noise duo Master Grave Services, Ken has been releasing high test tape noise as Dead Door Unit since 2022, and for years before that under his own initials. DDU is a sonic scrapheap of mangled degradation. Junkyard sampling, vertigo-inducing loops, and careening feedback tangle together in twiste…
Electric
*2024 stock* Arne Nordheim is among Norway’s most important post-war composers, particularly among those working within the field of avant-garde electronic music. Nordheim studied studied Musique concrète in Paris during the mid 1950’s, expanding his practice in Holland toward electronics and synthesis during the end of that decade. Upon returning home, he embarked on a stunning body of work, stretching over the coming decades. The composer’s works in these fields are a marvel - standing with th…
Nordheim Transformed
*Stock 2024* When Rune Grammofon got going as a record label, one of their first projects was reissuing pioneering work by Norwegian artist Arne Nordheim, who dealt in some experimental works in the late 60s before developing a career as a composer. As a response of sorts from the next generation, Biosphere and Deathprod endeavoured to remix some of Nordheim's prescient pieces through their respective modern lenses. Originally released in 1998 and sounding as vital and inventive 25 years later, …
Mythical River
*300 copies limited edition* Their previous album Arrival of The New Elders presented a more varied and reflective trio, still as groovy as ever, but more structured and less jam oriented, earning them a 9/10 review in Uncut and a spot in their albums of the year list, noting their telepathic communion and concluding with “this is an Elephant9 you´ll never forget”. Reviews in Jazzwise, Shindig, Prog, Electronic Sound, The Quietus and several others followed in the same fashion. We´re delighted t…
The Many Faces Of Karin Krog (Recordings 1967-2017)
Norway’s Grand Old Lady of jazz, Karin Krog turned 80 in May 2017, and the Odin label honoured her with a superb 6CD box set overviewing her outstanding career. Karin Krog is one of the great jazz singers. Few others worked within so many different areas of the music and fewer still could have done so with the same assurance, commitment and elegance. Like her peers such as Jan Garbarek, Arild Andersen, Jon Christensen and Terje Rypdal, she is a figurehead for that explosion of Norwegian jazz tal…