New Arrivals / Today
mere meer
Tokyo-based producer aus debuts on Squama with his new album mere meer. Grounded in the question of how a specific environment can emerge through voice and memory, rather than through recording of an objective reality, the album stands in the tradition of modern Japanese Ambient and Kankyo Ongaku. aus is the solo project of Tokyo-born composer, producer, and curator Yasuhiko Fukuzono. His music is characterized by a precise combination of cinematic strings, acoustic instrumentation, and concrete…
Remanens
*200 copies limited edition* The music on ‘Remanens’ is the result of a commission by Art Cinema OFF off and B.A.A.D.M to score the short silent film ‘Positano’ made by french actor and filmmaker Pierre Clémenti in 1969. The film itself is an ever-shifting series of glimpses, without much context, of a family vacation to the island Positano. The short cuts are similar to a dream or obscured, residual memories where chronology has fallen apart.
The score was reworked into album format on ‘Remane…
Schizo
Schizo (Frog Funk/Collobrakis) was developed from the remnants of the band Empire. I started with Empire in early
1977. When summer came, we found ourselves in the drummer Peter Lundgren's house rehearsing new songs. A little symphonic, a little fusion and simply some odd music. We hadn't scraped together any major repertoire, so we rehearsed some cover material. We only played local gigs, at youth centers and schools. Once a year Kjell 'Hagge' Haglund, who ran the club Wroom on Östra Berget, w…
Kramp
*250 copies limited edition* Kramp was a band from Hallstahammar and Västerås (in the middle of Sweden) who started out in 1975 and played together until 1984. During those years the boys in the band jammed whenever they met but never released any records. Luckily some marvy unpolished and no-frills rehearsal space recordings from 1978, recorded on a small cassette player, survived and can be heard here in all their unpolished glory.
Various Artists - My Heart is Dust Before Him: 21st Century Gasba from Algeria
Across western Algeria, the gasba, a reed flute central to Bedouin folk traditions and ceremonial music, continues to appear in new forms. Once associated primarily with saint festivals and trance rituals, its distinctive hypnotic sound now sits alongside the drum machines, synths and electronic textures of contemporary raï. The recordings collected here come from Oran, the port city of Western Algeria widely regarded as the birthplace of raï. Before raï became an international pop phenomenon, i…
Collected Tape Works 08' - 17'
After many requests to reissue the seldom heard cassette EPs and VHS releases, Akuphone compiled this archival release which illuminates the group’s early development from 2008 as enigmatic practitioners of post-apocalyptic folk and ritual psychedelia.
These recordings capture Ak’chamel’s signature sound in its most primal form: thoroughly f*cked lo-fi production, warped tape hiss, detuned instruments, and melancholic hysteria captured on cassette.
Spiritually Unemployed
*Much needed repress!!* Ak’chamel, The Givers of Illness plunged into truly deranged extremes to summon the decayed, otherworldly essence captured on Spiritually Unemployed, embracing unhinged and esoteric methods during the tracking process. Recorded in a makeshift adobe studio amid liminal border-zone ruins. Nocturnal treks along forgotten stretches near the U.S.-Mexico line, through derelict border outposts and sun-bleached vehicle husks, yielded unique recording opportunities: Ak’chamel drag…
Chinese Folk Songs
As the first entry in its catalog, Akuphone presents a reissue of Lily Chao’s Chinese Folk Songs, originally released by Four Seas Records in 1968. This edition includes four previously unheard titles and exclusive liner notes containing Lily Chao’s biography and lyric translations. Chao Xiao-Jun aka Lily Chao was born in Taiwan in 1948, while mainland China was rapidly undergoing major changes immediately following the end of the Chinese Civil War. After experiencing hard times in her girlhood,…
Animative
On October 23, Animative, Johnson’s third album under his own name and his first for International Anthem/Nonesuch, arrives to turn up the wattage on his artistry. More than any release to date, Animative shows why musicians and a growing community of listeners know this Chicago native and longtime L.A. resident to be one of the most imaginative electroacoustic musicians today, not to mention one of the most stunningly versatile. On Animative, the harmonically rich, loops-inflected sound Johnson…
Reason
Corbett vs. Dempsey is thrilled to announce the release of ‘Reason’, the second album from international free music quartet The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.
Woven Static
Many of the field recordings on this album I recorded standing still with my phone or zoom capturing quiet moments. But like silence, true stillness doesn’t exist. Our perception of time creates the illusion of stillness. That perception is not rigid, it can fluctuate and bend. Everyone around us experiencing time differently. I built the foundation of the music around this idea. Nothing in sync, many different loops varying in length. Some fairly recent recordings, others from years ago. I've u…
Grisaille
Grisaille is shaped by reduction, intuition, and time. Woven from a deliberately restricted palette, the pieces emerge from musical systems set in motion and allowed to unfold according to their own internal logic. Rather than following a fixed compositional path, they drift, accumulate, and transform: forms revealing themselves gradually through interaction, repetition, and change. The work foregrounds the first gesture. Takes are retained as they arrive rather than rehearsed into place, preser…
The Solar System
Ten tones for ten bodies in orbit. Nothing else. The Solar System is one of Ryoji Ikeda's most reduced objects, a 12" containing ten locked grooves, each cut with a single sine wave at a frequency assigned to a different planet. Where Code Name: A-Z took language as its source, this record takes celestial mechanics, and pares it down to the purest signal available.
It was produced by The Vinyl Factory in 2015 for the UK premiere of supersymmetry, Ikeda's large-scale installation shown at the Bre…
Code Name: A To Z
**Clear vinyl, 26 locked grooves, edition of 500 - 2026 repress** An alphabet reduced to its bones. Twenty-six words, twenty-six frequencies, twenty-six grooves that never end. Code Name: A-Z is Ryoji Ikeda at his most austere and his most physical, a record that treats the vinyl disc not as a carrier of music but as an instrument in its own right. Ikeda's position in the landscape of experimental sound needs little rehearsal. A founding presence in the Kyoto collective Dumb Type and one of the …
Séance of Sleep II: La lévitation de Shéhérazade
On Séance of Sleep II: La lévitation de Shéhérazade, David Wunder Brägger turns folk memory, analogue circuitry and microtonal drift into a slow‑burning dream ritual. Droning fiddles, handmade electronics, metallophones and vintage organs rise together, making an ambient record that feels at once archaic, futuristic and gently unmoored from waking time.
