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…
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…
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…
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…
Mganga
Japan goes to Africa ! It's more than a bit ironic that Tak Shindo's most "exotic" album, the superb Mganga!, boasts no connection to his own Japanese heritage, instead focusing on the primal rhythms and tribal chants of Africa. Rooted largely in the arranger's experience on the Latin jazz circuit, its Afro-Cuban rhythms, sampled animal sounds, and chants capture an African musical culture based far more in fantasy than reality, much as rival exotica maestros like Martin Denny and Les Baxter con…
Those Who Do Not
Ltd x 230 copies on red vinyl. Double 180gm vinyl in glossy gatefold sleeve. Red Vinyl. The sound of the classic period of Psychic TV - featuring Peter Christopherson and Geff Rushton (John Balance) of Coil, this full show is interspersed with recordings of the Pagan marriage between Genesis and Paula P-Orridge conducted by Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson Allsherjargodi. Psychic TV at their most esoteric, their most ritual, and often most extreme, a perfect accompaniment to the legendary 'Dreams Less Sw…
Lifetide = 生命潮流
Reissue of a soundtrack, originally released 1978. Yuji Ohno, is a Japanese jazz musician born in 1941. He's principally known for his musical scoring of Japanese animated television series, of which 'Lupin III' and the feature film 'The Castle Of Cagliostro' are his best known works. Ohno is also well-known as a member of the jazz trio which he forms with bassist Miroslav Vitous and drummer Lenny White. This is his fifth solo album released from Invitation (a sublabel of Victor/JVC mainly for …
Music From The Living Monument
Carmen Villain follows last years ‘Only Love From Now On’ with this new full length exploration of soporific, slow-moving ambience and disembowelled dub, a score she composed for a contemporary dance performance by acclaimed Choreographer Eszter Salamon. Simply put, it’s one of the most captivating things we’ve heard this year; all luxurious texture-cycles in possession of a delirious, dreamlike quality that hits a rarefied spot somewhere between Aphex Twin’s ‘Selected Ambient Works Vol.II’, cl…
Utopia Or Oblivion
‘Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment. Humanity is in a final exam as to whether or not it might qualify for continuance in the Universe.’
Warsaw
* Edition of 300 * In 1989, before the wall came down, Mona Mur and her producer Dieter Meier (“Yellow”) came to Poland. Under the musical direction of Polish rock star Grzegorz Ciechowski (“Republika”) and with renowned Polish musicians, arrangers and the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, she recorded her album WARSAW in early 1990. “WARSAW deals with the old topic of love as a marginal experience. Why does this intrigue me? Because this is how I experienced it at a very young age. There is hardly…
A Basement Suite
“Even without detecting in the figure of the refugee or exile the emblematic figure of our time, the loosening of the bonds with a place of origin is no longer rewarded by a search for a promised land. The loss of a deep-rootedness that would provide an identity is no longer perceived as a lack that needs to be filled. We strangers in our own land, and conversely we feel at home everywhere.”Mario Perniola, Ritual Thinking (tr. Massimo Verdicchio)The Italian philosopher Mario Perniola, in his 200…