New Arrivals
The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Book)
*2023 stock* The Audible Past explores the cultural origins of sound reproduction. It describes a distinctive sound culture that gave birth to the sound recording and the transmission devices so ubiquitous in modern life. With an ear for the unexpected, scholar and musician Jonathan Sterne uses the technological and cultural precursors of telephony, phonography, and radio as an entry point into a history of sound in its own right. Sterne studies the constantly shifting boundary between phenomena…
The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront (Book)
In The Williamsburg Avant-Garde Cisco Bradley chronicles the rise and fall of the underground music and art scene in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn between the late 1980s and the early 2010s. Drawing on interviews, archival collections, musical recordings, videos, photos, and other ephemera, Bradley explores the scene’s social, cultural, and economic dynamics. Building on the neighborhood’s punk DIY approach and aesthetic, Williamsburg's free jazz, postpunk, and noise musicians and gr…
Universal Tonality: The Life and Music of William Parker (Book)
*2023 stock* Since ascending onto the world stage in the 1990s as one of the premier bassists and composers of his generation, William Parker has perpetually toured around the world and released over forty albums as a leader. He is one of the most influential jazz artists alive today. In Universal Tonality historian and critic Cisco Bradley tells the story of Parker’s life and music. Drawing on interviews with Parker and his collaborators, Bradley traces Parker’s ancestral roots in West Africa v…
Soundscapes of Liberation African American Music in Postwar France (Book)
*2023 stock* In Soundscapes of Liberation, Celeste Day Moore traces the popularization of African American music in postwar France, where it signaled new forms of power and protest. Moore surveys a wide range of musical genres, soundscapes, and media: the US military's wartime records and radio programs; the French record industry's catalogs of blues, jazz, and R&B recordings; the translations of jazz memoirs; a provincial choir specializing in spirituals; and US State Department-produced radio …
Soundworks Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production (Book)
*2023 stock* In Soundworks Anthony Reed argues that studying sound requires conceiving it as process and as work. Since the long Black Arts era (ca. 1958–1974), intellectuals, poets, and musicians have defined black sound as radical aesthetic practice. Through their recorded collaborations as well as the accompanying interviews, essays, liner notes, and other media, they continually reinvent black sound conceptually and materially. Soundwork is Reed’s term for that material and conceptual labor …
Live At The Tavastia, Helsinki, Finland, June 18th 1993 - Fm Broadcast
The show at Tavastia, in Helsinki, Finland, recorded on June 18th 1993, his first visit to the country. Stripped back, it features just the voice and guitar of Townes Van Zandt, a voice that whilst still full of conviction, appears somewhat more fragile than on the previous recordings. Described by Billboard magazine as "largely-obscure-if-legendary," Townes Van Zandt was a remarkable singer/songwriter, and this release is worthy of consideration, shining, as it does, more bright rays of light o…
Live At The Whole Coffeehouse, Minneapolis Mn, November 1973 - Fm Broadcast
The Whole Coffeehouse set is nothing but the man and his guitar. The focus here is acute and sharp, the Whole Coffeehouse in 1973 is an essential addition to the late great Van Zandt discography. Van Zandt's lyrics and melodies were filled with the kind of haunting truth and succulent beauty that were instinctive.
Be Quiet!!!
Sax player Junji Hirose and guitarist Kazuo Imai, both Tokyo residents born in 1955, are renowned Japanese improvisers who have long propelled the country’s improvised music scene. Australian drummer Darren Moore, who is currently based in Singapore, carries on his performance activity while also teaching at Lasalle College of the Arts.
Darren Moore lived in Tokyo for several years in the mid-2010s. Since then he has often visited the country and performed with Japanese musicians. In 2022 he cam…
Kinetic Vision
Composer Masamichi Kinoshita, cellist Tomoki Tai, and composer/computer musician Takumi Ikeda perform on electrical equipment and electronics in the electric noise project Electric Powered Music. Kinoshita and Tai started playing sessions together around 2008 and were joined by Ikeda soon thereafter. This album includes two live improvised performances presented at Ftarri, Tokyo. The performance on track 1 (42 minutes) took place on February 26, 2023; the track 2 performance (31 minutes), on Oct…
Kanon Aonami Composed Works: Performed by Sean Colum, Kanon Aonami and Fumi Endo
Born in Yokohama in 1994, Kanon Aonami is an alto saxophonist and composer who plays jazz and improvised music at performance venues mainly in Tokyo and Yokohama. She is also a talented composer, and at Ftarri she often performs her own compositions in addition to improvised music. In June 2021 Aonami started appearing periodically at Ftarri; she has performed with musicians including pianist Fumi Endo, alto sax player Masahide Tokunaga, and British guitarist and Tokyo resident Sean Colum.
Focus…
Now that the audience is assembled
*2023 stock* Following his investigation into experimental music and sound recording in Records Ruin the Landscape, David Grubbs turns his attention to the live performance of improvised music with an altogether different form of writing. Now that the audience is assembled is a book-length prose poem that describes a fictional musical performance during which an unnamed musician improvises the construction of a series of invented instruments before an audience that is alternately contemplative, …
Improvisation and Social Aesthetics (Book)
*2023 stock* Addressing a wide range of improvised art and music forms—from jazz and cinema to dance and literature—this volume's contributors locate improvisation as a key site of mediation between the social and the aesthetic. As a catalyst for social experiment and political practice, improvisation aids in the creation, contestation, and codification of social realities and identities. Among other topics, the contributors discuss the social aesthetics of the Association for the Advancement of…
Sound An Acoulogical Treatise (Book)
*2023 stock* First published in French in 1998, revised in 2010, and appearing here in English for the first time, Michel Chion's Sound addresses the philosophical, interpretive, and practical questions that inform our encounters with sound. Chion considers how cultural institutions privilege some sounds above others and how spurious distinctions between noise and sound guide the ways we hear and value certain sounds. He critiques the tenacious tendency to understand sounds in relation to their …
Records Ruin the Landscape (John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording) (Book)
*2023 stock* John Cage's disdain for records was legendary. He repeatedly spoke of the ways in which recorded music was antithetical to his work. In Records Ruin the Landscape, David Grubbs argues that, following Cage, new genres in experimental and avant-garde music in the 1960s were particularly ill suited to be represented in the form of a recording. These activities include indeterminate music, long-duration minimalism, text scores, happenings, live electronic music, free jazz, and free impr…
Touch - The Sublime Sound Of Yuji Ohno
The space funk, jazz and disco sound of genius Japanese producer Yuji Ohno. a selection - the first outside of Japan - made in collaboration with Nippon Columbia and Yuji Ohno himself. Remastered audio and liner notes by Nick Luscombe in conversation with Ohno.
Eyoun El-Alb
First time on vinyl. Black LP with original cassette artwork plus a two page colour insert featuring liner notes by Disco Arabesquo. Remastered for vinyl by Colorsound Studio.
Ongaku Zukan
CD version. Wewantsounds is delighted to announce the release of Ryuichi Sakamoto's classic LP"Ongaku Zukan”, originally issued in Japan on his own School label in 1984. The reissue will replicate the original Japanese release, which offered two versions: a normal edition featuring the LP with a bonus2-track7" EP, and a limited edition which includes a 3-track 12" EP in place of the7". Remastered by Saidera Mastering in Tokyo the reissue boasts the original gatefold artwork plus an extra 2-page …
Something Strange In The Mountains
Tip! Something Strange In The Mountains is a new step ahead in the sound of Giron. Ambient soundscapes with hard references of the late 70s kosmiche vibe with a twist taste of modular approaches. Something Strange In The Mountains was recorded at Cosmic Electric Sector Studio during some sessions between June and November 2021.
Gear used: Korg Lambda, 900ps, Electribe 2, Microsampler, Monotribe, Dreadbox Abyss, Hades, Erebus, Make Noise O-Coast, Behringer Model-D, Vermona Perfourmer mkII, Novati…
Manifestación
*2023 stock* Pigmy is the solo project of Vicente Maciá, founding member of 90s Spanish psych band Carrots. Highly influenced by late 60s / early 70s UK psych, folk-rock and baroque pop (think Magna Carta, Fairfield Parlour, Pete Dello, Duncan Browne, Cat Stevens, Amazing Blondel…) as well as Spanish 70s folk-pop / SSW (Solera, José y Manuel, Vainica Doble…), Pigmy surprised everyone with his previous two albums, “Miniaturas” and “Hamsterdam”, which are now cult items between psych-folk fans.
Af…