New Arrivals / Today
Browning Out With Ivan The Tolerable
On Barker Final, Ivan The Tolerable closes the door on 1a Barker Road with a set of songs conceived, performed and mastered entirely by Oli Heffernan. The album feels like a final dispatch from a long‑running home studio, where restless experiments in tone and texture are distilled into a focused, late‑night farewell.
Mere Mortals
This album Mere Mortals is composer-producer Floating Points’s (Sam Shepherd) first full-length ballet score. Shepherd, who is known for mesmeric live sets that often combine acoustic and electronic instruments, wrote the work in response to a commission from Tamara Rojo, Artistic Director of San Francisco Ballet.
Inspired by the myth of Pandora and laced with metatextual poetry, Mere Mortals was premiered at San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House in January 2024, directed by Rojo, with chor…
ReComposed
Recomposed by Carl Craig & Moritz von Oswald is an extraordinary album that combines classical music and electronic sound art in a fascinating way. The two electronic music pioneers draw on recordings of Ravel’s Boléro and Rhapsodie espagnole, as well as Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, conducted by Herbert von Karajan and performed by the Berlin Philharmonic, and use them to create an original, cohesive musical work.
In doing so, Craig and von Oswald do not simply juxtapose classical and…
Friendship Survival Guide
The album Friendship Survival Guide by the late Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson and his close friend and composer Adam Wiltzie features a number of collaborative orchestral psychedelic drone compositions.
Wiltzie, co-founder of the now-legendary drone duo Stars of the Lid, and Jóhannsson, the award-winning composer and orchestrator, shared a decade-long friendship and creative partnership, writing, performing and recording together prior to the latter’s tragic passing in 2018. Friendship Su…
Mount A
Originally released in 2006, Mount A is Hildur Guðnadóttir’s debut solo album. Recorded alone with her cello and released under the pseudonym “Lost in Hildurness”, it marked the beginning of a deeply personal body of work created as a space to “hear my own thoughts”. Twenty years later, its music continues to resonate, inspiring new orchestral reinterpretations on This Will Be Us. This edition also marks the album’s first-ever release on vinyl.
The Voice That Is!
Drawn from two September 1964 sessions at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio with producer Bob Thiele, The Voice That Is! features vocalist Johnny Hartman in his third and final album for Impulse! following a celebrated collaboration with John Coltrane. The album blends two sessions arranged by Bob Hammer: one pairing Hartman with pianist Hank Jones, bassist Richard Davis, and drummer Osie Johnson, and another for octet, with English horn, flute, marimba and Latin percussion flourishes throughout. The rep…
Structurally Sound
Best known for his association with Charles Mingus, the Texas-born tenor saxophonist Booker Ervin was a distinctive soloist with an assertive and immediately recognizable sound. One of Ervin’s pinnacle statements as a leader was the first of his two Pacific Jazz albums, Structurally Sound, which he cut in 1966 shortly after returning to the U.S. from a two-year period of living in Barcelona and working across Europe. Featuring Ervin fronting a top-shelf quintet with Charles Tolliver on trumpet, …
Hub Cap
Trumpeter Freddie Hubbard burst out of the gates taking the jazz world by storm with his Blue Note debut Open Sesame in 1960. Within 14 months he had recorded three more hard bop classics—Goin’ Up, Hub Cap, and Ready For Freddie—each one a showcase for his dynamic playing. Recorded in April 1961, Hub Cap was the first of his Blue Note dates that also highlighted Hubbard’s growing skill as a composer, with four of the album’s six pieces coming from his pen including the hard-charging title track,…
Dear John C.
Cut on February 23 and 25, 1965, at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio and released later that year on Impulse!, Dear John C. marks drummer Elvin Jones’s first album for the label as a full-fledged leader, boldly looking forward while honoring his transformative contributions with the John Coltrane Quartet since the beginning of the decade. Produced by Bob Thiele, the sessions feature alto saxophonist Charlie Mariano, pianists Roland Hanna and Elvin’s brother Hank Jones, bassist Richard Davis, and Jones o…
Meditations
Following the genre-redefining revelations of A Love Supreme in 1965, John Coltrane began a dramatic shift toward spiritual free jazz, abandoning familiar forms in favor of a more abstract sonic palette and bold questions he'd spend the rest of his life and career pursuing. Meditations, released by Impulse! in 1966, continues that emotional throughline while retaining, for the last time in full, the classic quartet that propelled Trane to greatness: pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison an…
Dimensions & Extensions
A saxophonist of striking originality, Sam Rivers’ music had a strong avant-garde undercurrent though he kept a foot planted firmly in post-bop and the blues, a sound heard to great effect on his masterful 1964 debut Fuchsia Swing Song. The last of Rivers’ four highly-distinctive Blue Note albums, 1967’s Dimensions & Extensions, is fascinating for the presence of trumpeter Donald Byrd who makes a rare foray into the avant-garde alongside Rivers on tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone, and flute, J…
Sympathetic Resonance
The “Sympathetic Resonance” LP by Momen is released on Unheard Of Hope and marks the debut of the London-based duo. Momen consists of Iván Muela (piano, guitar, electronics) and Nat Philipps (saxophone, electronics); in eight movements they explore a field of tension between restraint and catharsis. Sonic reference points range from Bach and Ryuichi Sakamoto to experiences in post-punk bands, giving the pieces an unusual blend of classical melodic lines, jazzy improvisation, and electronically s…
Deep Drive 2+
The identity of Deep Drive comes in large part from the way Peter Zummo moves through the world. Using his smartphone, he records daily fragments: of daydreams and conversations, signage and slogans, moments that that strike him as insightful, odd, amusing, thereby creating a sonic collage of rhythms, melodies and voices. His deep baritone is imbued with laconic humour, and Deep Drive"s track titles riff off his messaging. "Prepare For Docking" refers to the Staten Island ferry and the spectacle…
Song of the Night Mists
The writer Max Sebald often pondered over the nature of human memory, specifically, how our thoughts and desires - and their results - overlap and mutate over time. In A Place in the Country, he writes of the significance of what see as “similarities, overlaps and coincidences”. Are they the “delusions” of the self and senses, or manifestations of “an order underlying the chaos of human relationships, [...] which lies beyond our comprehension”?
Song of the Night Mists, the new album by post-clas…
Stills and Remains
Yuki Nakagawa’s musical roots lie in the improvisation and noise scenes of the Kansai region in Japan. After performing with electric bass and effects, he transitioned to the cello as a self-taught musician, developing a unique sonic language over more than 15 years. His practice spans composition, performance, and direction, as well as collaborations with dance, theater, and contemporary visual art. As one half of the duo project Kakuhan(with Koshiro Hino), he has performed at festivals in Japa…
Guild For Human Music
Masahiko Togashi's 1976 Denon Jazz album: six 'Expressions' for a percussion-led ensemble with Sabu Toyozumi, Tatsuji Yokoyama, Masahiko Satoh and three woodwind players, recorded in Tokyo with early PCM digital technology. LP reissue.
Forgetting You is Like Breathing Water
2026 stock Forgetting You Is Like Breathing Water, the self-titled debut from the duo of trumpeter Will Evans and guitarist, synthesist, producer and multi-instrumentalist Theo Trump, arrives like a vault revelation. It feels like a decades-old yet newly unearthed masterwork of gorgeous ambient improvisation, the sort of thing scholars live to research and shepherd into deluxe reissue.
The patient, crystalline chords that swell and resonate like a series of confessions; the textured brass murmur…
Hidden Among the Runes (Book)
Aldo Chimenti's history of Death In June, written with Douglas P.: from the punk years of Crisis to Operation Control (2023), with photographs largely from Douglas P.'s own archive, some never seen before. Softcover with French flaps, 516 pages.
Logrende tunger
Tip! “Logrende tunger” documents the first meeting between accordionist Kalle Moberg and saxophonist Kei Matsumaru — both extraordinary instrumentalists who pay great attention to the purely sonic qualities of their instruments, but also share a profoundly complimentary understanding of harmony and form. The duo was introduced by mutual friend and colleague Jim O’Rourke, whose inner ear suggested that the two might create something special together. And indeed, the recording O’Rourke made of the…
Bollywood Nuggets
A collection of mind-blowing songs from Hindi films 1958-1984. 12 musical gems from the Bollywood vaults with a wide variety of styles thrown in the mix, from the classic to the rare, a must! An astonishing overview of the magnificent musical talents populating Bollywood films. With a predilection for movies with a strong musical backbone where songs and musical numbers play a pivotal role, the Hindi cinema boom gave birth to a strong and creative music industry where composers, musicians, music…
