New Arrivals
Love’s Lesson
Fifth vinyl album (there have been four cassettes as well) by this Baltimore-based duo with international roots. Zomes began as a solo project by Asa Osbourne (ex-Lungfish, The Pupils), and recorded mostly solo drone-based instrumentals for several years. While performing at a festival in Stockholm, Asa met vocalist Hanna Olivegren, who shared his musical conceptions. Zomes's first record as a duo was 2013's Time Was (Thrill Jockey), and they have remained a two-piece ever since. The music on Lo…
La Prise Electronique
"There's a pleasant perfume reminiscent of Air emanating from the music French artist Fabien Guiraud presents on his third album La Prise Électronique (The Electronic Plug) particularly in the filmic element they both share. In the last ten years, diligently clocking up his 10,000 hours with bands like Chateau Marmont and Cargo, Guiraud's work has progressively found focus in music for film, latterly as a member of Odd Collective. The fourteen tracks here represent a snapshot (like a faded Polar…
Does Spring Hide Its Joy
Created between March and May 2020, Does Spring Hide Its Joy is an immersive piece, positioned as a “study in harmonics and non-linear composition with a heightened focus on just intonation and beating interference patterns”.
Non Band
2023 repress, edition of 300 copies, double-sided insert w/ liner notes of this Japanese no wave gem from 1982. With extended liner notes and interviews with band members about the recordings of the album, as well as unpublished photographs from 1981 by Jibiki Yuichi.
'The Japanese punk rock movement known as Tokyo Rockers began in the summer of 1978. It incubated an independent music culture as well as a host of fascinating, individualistic musicians. One of the more striking units was the male…
Sirens
Eight years after its original release in 2015, and sold out upon release, Umor Rex finally presents a vinyl repress of Sirens, by Kara-Lis Coverdale and LXV. This new edition is limited to 500 copies and comes with revised artwork.
Inspired by the link between seduction and violence, Sirens comprises a series of timbrally vast anamorphic pieces that poise the voice as a newly imagined tool of multiplicity. Processes of sample manipulation, signal processing, routing, and source design inform in…
Crashin' From Passion
In the 1970s, Betty Davis defied genre and gender by pushing her voice to extremes and embracing the erotic. She articulated a kind of pre-punk, funk-blues fusion that had yet to be normalized in mainstream music – a style that few musicians have come close to replicating. As one of the first Black women to write, arrange, and produce her own albums, Betty was a visionary who disregarded industry boundaries and constraints. Raw, unapologetic and in full control, Betty paved the way for generatio…
Is It Love Or Desire
Silver Vinyl Edition. Betty Davis was a musical maverick with vision. Image, substance, sex, and grit combined with a badass band that could deliver the funk bed backbone to the sultry music between the sheets. After cutting two notorious discs for the Just Sunshine label (Betty Davis, and They Say I’m Different), and Nasty Gal for Island Records, Davis went to work on her most personal and expressive record yet. After capturing 10 hard-hitting tracks in 1976 at the remote Studio In The Country …
Casanova’70 (Expanded Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Quartet Records, in collaboration with Sony EMI Music Publishing Italia and GDM, presents a greatly expanded release of an Armando Trovajoli gem from a Marcello Mastroianni comedy. Directed by Mario Monicelli in 1965, Casanova’70 tells the story of UN diplomat Andrea Rossi-Colombotti, whose globetrotting adventures leave him sexually frustrated. Women throw themselves at the handsome man, but he unfortunately has performance issues: he can only get aroused if there is some sort of chase involve…
Jazz Al Folkstudio
Back in 2021, we bore witness to the reissue, by Dialogo, of the Rome based ensemble Spirale’s lone 1974 self-titled LP, a towering obscurity of 1970s Italian jazz. Made of up Gaetano Delfini (wind instruments, vocals, percussion), Giancarlo Maurino (saxophone, flute, percussion), Corrado Nofri (piano, marimba, mbira, siren, Jew’s harp), Giuseppe Caporello (contrabass, guitar, percussion) and Giampaolo Ascolese (drums), the band ranks among the most sinfully neglected outfits of its moment, 1970…
I Tarantolati
Digipack CD. The second LP in Black Sweat’s latest batch, ‘I Tarantolati’ the first outing of Antonio Infantino with his band, Il Gruppo Di Tricarico, while very different in its musical approach, belongs to the same wild ferment around Folk Studio in Rome, and was issued by the Folkstudio label the year prior in 1975.
Antonio Infantino was poet and singer, who operated in circles connected to Beat literature and Italian performance and gestural music circles, alongside figures like Sylvano Buss…
Free Form
Reissue, originally released in 1961. The West Indian-born alto saxophonist Joe Harriott was one of the most convincing boppers outside of the USA, though by the end of the 1950s he was exploring freer musical pastures, and the quintet with which he undertook the exploration was an outgrowth of the hard bop band with which he'd made a name on the British scene. Often in the past the group's music, in which trumpet and flugelhorn player Shake Keane figured alongside Harriott in the front line, ha…
Live I Kungsten
New album from Blod recorded during the second half of 2022 by Gustaf Dicksson. Där Ska Barnet Vara is a continuation of the themes explored on Pilgrimssånger and contains nine more songs dealing with faith in different forms, with a strong presence of death. Compared to Pilgrimssånger, the sound is slightly more lo-fi and fucked up and the approach is somewhat looser and more desperate, but here are some of the strongest and most fragile and heartfelt Blod songs to date. Additional players on t…
The Emerald Duets
Part of his 80th Anniversary celebration and subtitled "The Art Of The Trumpeter And Drummers", this 5-CD box set brings legendary improviser Wadada Leo Smith together with four long-time collaborators and masterful drummers--Andrew Cyrille, Jack DeJohnette, Pheeroan akLaff and Han Bennink--with Smith performing on both piano and trumpet. 5-CD BOX SET. Includes 60 pages booklet. The Emerald Duets is a crowning achievement among Wadada Leo Smith's many recorded duo collaborations with drummers/p…
Lineaments
Sofa is proud to release a new solo album from Fredrik Rasten, following his fantastic Six Moving Guitars (released on Sofa in 2019). Lineaments consists of two long-form solo pieces performed by Rasten, for an extended instrumentarium of guitars, voice and sine waves. Lineament I and II proceed from two different plucking patterns played on one acoustic and one electric guitar, both sharing a specific tuning from where the two pieces explore diverging tempos and structures. Humming voice, sine …
Renaissance
Modern and grounded in the 1960s hard-bop sensibility, the American pianist and composer Albert Dailey (1939 – 1984) had perfect control over his instrument. Since an early age he played with cutting-edge musicians of the likes of Art Blakey, Sarah Vaughan, Stan Getz, Charles Mingus, and Lee Konitz, only to name a few. But despite that, he was an underrated artist during his lifetime, receiving the deserved recognition only after his death. Renaissance 2 November 1977 is his second album, played…
The Wheel
Moon Bros. is more or less the solo project of guitarist 'Fred' Schneider and was brought to our attention by the Queen of Colorado herself (aka Josephine Foster). Fred appears on Foster's No Harm Done album, and she returns the favor by singing on one of the tunes here. Many of Fred's earliest recording efforts were done with a variety of Chicago-based post-rock/jazz-flecked combos (The Exciting Trio, HIM, etc.) But for the past few years, he has used Moon Bros. to explore contours of more rura…
Zoomachia Disc 1
*Edition of 200* First emerging during the mid 2000s in the field of experimental electronics, the Italian born, Berlin based artist, Francesco Cavaliere captivated us back in 2021 with ‘Viridescens’, his brilliant duo with Tomoko Sauvage issued by Marionette. With a handful of noteworthy releases having appeared since, he now returns with ‘Zoomachia Disc 1’, a remarkable fable bridging the territories of spoken word and electronic and electroacoustic composition.
For the better part of the last…
Il Calore Animale
*Edition of 200* Ginevra Bompiani is most likely unknown for fans of experiential music. In Italian literature and thinking, however, she is highly regarded writer, editor, translator, essayist, and academic, whose fiction, particularly, is informed by linguistics, feminism, and literary theory, and verges on the surreal and the fantastic, making her interdisciplinary effort, ‘Il Calore Animale’, collaborating with two of the most singular voices in contemporary experimental music - Caterina Ba…
Sound Plantings
Jonas Gerigk is a double bass player who is active as a composer/performer in the fields of improvised music. In addition, he collaborates in projects of contemporary composers and is involved in the realization of their works. A main focus of his work deals with the term Explorative Music. He is doing intensive research on the expansion of the sound spectrum of the acoustic double bass. With a physical as well as technical approach and the use of objects he explores the variety of timbres of hi…
Exotic Dreams – Martin Denny Presents The Enticing Voice Of Ethel Azama
Exotica masterpiece finally re-issued ! Which record is produced by Martin Denny, arranged by pianist Paul Conrad and features vintage Exotica's second lady who is only outclassed by the Peruvian chantress Yma Sumac? It's Exotic Dreams, released in 1958 that puts – so tells the cover artwork – "the enticing voice of Ethel Azama" (1934–1984), a Hawaiian Jazz singer, into the spotlight. Martin Denny discovered her a few years later and was able to negotiate with his house label Liberty Records, wh…