New Arrivals

*2023 stock* Music after the Fall is the first book to survey contemporary Western art music within the transformed political, cultural, and technological environment of the post–Cold War era. In this book, Tim Rutherford-Johnson considers musical composition against this changed backdrop, placing it in the context of globalization, digitization, and new media. Drawing connections with the other arts, in particular visual art and architecture, he expands the definition of Western art music to in…

Nostalgia for the Future is the first collection in English of the writings and interviews of Luigi Nono (1924–1990). One of the most prominent figures in the development of new music after World War II, he is renowned for both his compositions and his utopian views. His many essays and lectures reveal an artist at the center of the analytical, theoretical, critical, and political debates of the time.This selection of Nono’s most significant essays, articles, and interviews covers his entire car…

*2023 stock* Rising out of the American art music movement of the late 1950s and 1960s, minimalism shook the foundations of the traditional constructs of classical music, becoming one of the most important and influential trends of the twentieth century. The emergence of minimalism sparked an active writing culture around the controversies, philosophies, and forms represented in the music’s style and performance, and its defenders faced a relentless struggle within the music establishment and be…

*2023 stock* The Hum of the World is an invitation to contemplate what would happen if we heard the world as attentively as we see it. Balancing big ideas, playful wit and lyrical prose, this imaginative volume identifies the role of sound in Western experience as the primary medium in which the presence and persistence of life acquires tangible form. The positive experience of aliveness is not merely in accord with sound, but inaccessible, even inconceivable, without it. Lawrence Kramer’s poeti…

*2023 stock* There is more to sound recording than just recording sound. Far from being simply a tool for the preservation of music, the technology is a catalyst. In this award-winning text, Mark Katz provides a wide-ranging, deeply informative, consistently entertaining history of recording's profound impact on the musical life of the past century, from Edison to the Internet. Fully revised and updated, this new edition adds coverage of mashups and Auto-Tune, explores recent developments in fil…

*2023 stock* The experience of the divine in India has three components, sight, performance, and sound. One in a trilogy of books that include Diana Eck's Darsan: Seeing the Divine in India, and Susan L. Schwartz's Rasa: Performing the Divine in India, Mantra presents an introduction to the use of sound -- mantra -- in the practice of Indian religion.

On the South Side of Chicago in the 1960s, African American artists and musicians grappled with new language and forms inspired by the black nationalist turn in the Civil Rights movement. The Freedom Principle, which accompanies an exhibition on the topic at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, traces their history and shows how it continues to inform contemporary artists around the world.The book coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Association for the Advancement o…

*2023 stock* In 1977 NASA shot a mixtape into outer space. The Golden Record aboard the Voyager spacecrafts contained world music and sounds of Earth to represent humanity to any extraterrestrial civilizations. To date, the Golden Record is the only human-made object to have left the solar system. Alien Listening asks the big questions that the Golden Record raises: Can music live up to its reputation as the universal language in communications with the unknown? How do we fit all of human cultur…

*2023 stock* Sounding New Media examines the long-neglected role of sound and audio in the development of new media theory and practice, including new technologies and performance art events, with particular emphasis on sound, embodiment, art, and technological interactions. Frances Dyson takes an historical approach, focusing on technologies that became available in the mid-twentieth century-electronics, imaging, and digital and computer processing-and analyzing the work of such artists as John…

*2023 stock* Mary Lou Williams—pianist, arranger, composer, and probably the most influential woman in the history of jazz—receives the attention she has long deserved in this definitive biography.

*2023 stock* This innovative collection of articles offers a major comprehensive overview of new developments in cultural theory as applied to Western music. Addressing a broad range of primarily twentieth-century music, the authors examine two related phenomena: musical borrowings or appropriations, and how music has been used to construct, evoke, or represent difference of a musical or a sociocultural kind. The essays scrutinize a diverse body of music and discuss a range of significant exampl…

*2023 stock* This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1961.

*2023 stock* The journal Source: Music of the Avant-garde was and remains a seminal source for materials on the heyday of experimental music and arts. Conceived in 1966 and published to 1973, it included some of the most important composers and artists of the time: John Cage, Harry Partch, David Tudor, Morton Feldman, Robert Ashley, Pauline Oliveros, Dick Higgins, Nam June Paik, Steve Reich, and many others. A pathbreaking publication, Source documented crucial changes in performance practice an…

*2023 stock* This book tells the story of the influential group of creative artists—Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick, Ramon Sender, William Maginnis, and Tony Martin—who connected music to technology during a legendary era in California's cultural history. An integral part of the robust San Francisco “scene,” the San Francisco Tape Music Center developed new art forms through collaborations with Terry Riley, Steve Reich, David Tudor, Ken Dewey, Lee Breuer, the San Francisco Actor's Workshop, t…

*2023 stock* Coverscaping focuses on the semiotics, poetics, and rhetoric of album covers. Working from the assumption that record sleeves may represent a visual genre in its own right, the essays engage in various ways with what one might call the pictorial component of recorded music. The contributors run the whole gamut from close readings of individual covers to more theoretical or philosophical explorations of the aesthetic nature and artistic value of album covers. Coverscaping aims to car…

*2023 stock* Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew is one of the most iconic albums in American music, the preeminent landmark and fertile seedbed of jazz-fusion. Fans have been fortunate in the past few years to gain access to Davis’s live recordings from this time, when he was working with an ensemble that has come to be known as the Lost Quintet. In this book, jazz historian and musician Bob Gluck explores the performances of this revolutionary group—Davis’s first electric band—to illuminate the thinkin…

*2023 stock* Mainframe Experimentalism challenges the conventional wisdom that the digital arts arose out of Silicon Valley’s technological revolutions in the 1970s. In fact, in the 1960s, a diverse array of artists, musicians, poets, writers, and filmmakers around the world were engaging with mainframe and mini-computers to create innovative new artworks that contradict the stereotypes of "computer art." Juxtaposing the original works alongside scholarly contributions by well-established and em…

*2023 stock* Earth Sound Earth Signal is a study of energies in aesthetics and the arts, from the birth of modern communications in the nineteenth century to the global transmissions of the present day. Douglas Kahn begins by evoking the Aeolian sphere music that Henry David Thoreau heard blowing along telegraph lines and the Aelectrosonic sounds of natural radio that Thomas Watson heard through the first telephone; he then traces the histories of science, media, music, and the arts to the 1960s…

"Ten adventurers searched for the Temple of Crystalline Joy, which exists somewhere in the perpetually snow-covered Valley of the Eternal Dream. None of them found it, but in their quest, they performed brave deeds that become legends. They are... the Heroes of the Last Glare." He had charmed us with the long track called "the Pyramid" included in HDK Dungeon-Synth Magazine #3, now Orcus is back to HDK with an exciting, hypnotic, amazing full length: a timeless synth-music spell! Each song is a …

In September 1986, the first comic book dedicated to the character of Tomas Caine was released; it was entitled "La Pastorale del Destino" (The Pastoral of Doom). It could have been one of the many comic books that filled the shelves of the Italian newsstands of those years, but it wasn't like that: the success of Tom Caine was extraordinary. Balancing horror atmospheres typical of the time, irreverent irony, and love stories, Tomas Caine immediately met the tastes of the young Italians of the 8…

“Il teschio brilla nella notte” was an Italian board game for children aged 6 to 10 set in a haunted house. The winner of the game was the player who was the first to reach the end of the course after passing the four rooms of the house. A gimmick of the game was that inside the box there would be an audio cassette to listen to in the background during the game. The musical commentary was commissioned to the musician Simonetta Frixi aka Ad Cryptas, who created a soundtrack for each of the rooms …

Make way for the Golden Knight! The sword of Sir Richard of Warwick is always ready to defend the good guys from the bad ones... or just to fight as a pastime! His costume is flamboyant, his soul noble (or so he likes to believe), the world in which he lives is a strange Middle Ages where the crusades and the space race are both popular activities. Despite his princely appearance, Sir Richard is a vagabond: under the guise of going to fight the infidels in the Holy Land, he wanders the world (an…

This is the second release from our dear friend Sebastian Bruun. He makes truly beautiful ambient music, with a slightly melancholic but still optimistic sensibility, uniquely his own. His music is primary based on warm synth-loops and Field-recordings recorded to tape. This is a quite minimal release hence the limited nature of 4 track tape recording, but the compositions are filled with emotion and care for detail in sound. This is a beautiful tape that we are happy to put out.

Bysund is in my humble opinion one of the most interesting Danish noise projects these days. With releases ranging from minimal and dense guitar noise to sharp and unpredictable computer music. This is the first non self-released Bysund album, and probably the projects most varied output yet. One hour of meticulously composed textual exploration. This is by the way the first album in a planned trilogy of guitar-based releases.

From Yann Novak In Greek mythology, the legend of Theseus describes how the king-founder of ancient Athens rescues the children of his city from King Minos’ minotaur on the island of Crete. In commemoration, Athenians began a pilgrimage to honor his victory, taking the ship of Theseus and sailing it from Athens to Delos. It was with this tradition that a philosophical paradox about the historic ship was raised: As the ship was repaired, piece by piece, until it was no longer composed of any orig…

The live performance recorded in the ancient Church of S. Giuliano, in Vercelli, encompasses some of the music conceived and written over the last few years, which Francesco Aroni Vigone spent in Valle d’Aosta. The recording location was chosen for its particular acoustics, perfect for a saxophone ‘solo’ and its aptitude for meditation. The performance took place during worship hours to have an unusual ‘audience’ in an unusual ‘liturgy’. The pieces are monodic songs that can be traced back mainl…

"This is the whole improvisation session we had on the evening of 25 April 2014, after a day spent recording some duets for Enrico’s project “Girotondo”. In the afternoon I had recorded with Mario Arcari “La prostituta e il soldato”, one of his compositions. The next day I was going to record my song “Il soldato e la cameriera” with Alberto Mandarini. So, during the evening break, after years of not playing together anymore, a little bit on my insistence, because Enrico seemed to want it too, we…

*100 copies limited edition* Fen is a selective evocation and invocation of a Kildare fenland. Focusing on the vocalisations and physical communication sounds of three bird species, it is comprised of field recordings of Grasshopper Warbler, Sedge Warbler (both Summer migrant breeders) and Snipe (resident breeder), alongside tuned percussion and synthesiser textures. As a birdwatcher and sound recordist the communication and language of birds fascinates me. The singular sounds made by the these …

*300 copies limited edition* New album from Josiah Wolfson’s X Or Size project, all washed out and reverberating dub. X Or Size throw just the right amount of darkened ambiguity into proceedings to render the sound at its most compelling, borrowing from the classic dub techno playbook with wave after wave of luxurious, eroded dub chords and fractured percussion somewhere between vintage Chain Reaction and the more contemporary wave of late night zoners as best exemplified by Actress’ ghost-in-th…

Born in 2012 when the three were living in the same apartment building in Cairo's Agouza district, the trio's instrumental improvisation-based explorations are propelled by Louca's North African percussion loops and shimmering keys, Shalabi's West African tinged free jazz guitar and grounded by Bishop's driving Krautrock-style acoustic bass. High Tide in the Lowlands was recorded in Brussels at Les Ateliers Claus on September 5, 2017 and is quite an intense experience. Most performances and reco…

After issuing an incredible stream of collections featuring archival and recent material in the last years, electroacoustic journeyman, Stephan Mathieu, returns with “Mauve District”, his first physical solo stand-alone release of new material since 2017’s “Radiance”. Created as the soundtrack for an exhibition of the American painter, Helen Frankenthaler, at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany, earlier this year, it encounters Mathieu weaving a truly mesmerizing minimalist work for piano and …

Release on Raw Tonk Records. Colin Webster - alto saxRachel Musson - tenor saxCath Roberts - baritone saxCharlotte Keeffe - trumpet / flugelhornGraham Dunning - electronicsDirk Serries - guitarJohn Edwards - bassAndrew Lisle - drumsRecorded live at Cafe Oto, London on 21st August 2022. Recorded by Pedro Subtil. Mixed and mastered by Dirk SerriesArtwork by Colin Webster. Layout by Rutger Zuydervelt

"After two and a half years of refining, calibrating, and reconceptualising their approach, pianist Darius Heid, cellist Emily Wittbrodt, and double bassist Jonas Gerigk are now releasing their debut CD. With great enthusiasm, the trio met frequently for playful and dedicated rehearsals, improvising freely then observing and discussing the resulting phenomena, delving further into the depths of their music. A long and involved process - creating trialogues that weave through constant re-examinat…

impakt Records presents the new record by Huhn | Schönegg | Mahnig "Was ficht dich an?" with Leonhard Huhn (alto saxophone), Stefan Schönegg (double bass) and Dominik Mahnig (drums).

impakt Records presents the new record by T.ON "plays Herzog | Muche | Nillesen" with Constantin Herzog (double bass), Matthias Muche (trombone) and Etienne Nillesen (extended snare drum).

"Kuden is a method of communicating information verbally in Japan. The word also refers to the knowledge of secret techniques traditionally passed on orally, be it from martial arts or from music and the performing arts. An apt title for this exceptional, non-arranged meeting of three musical experts who tell each other about the rich vault of their sound treasures in order to enrich it with something new through this musical dialogue, which is immediately passed on to the spellbound, amazed aud…

Fo[u]r Alto is the quadrupling of the alto saxophone as a unified body of sound. Since the ensemble was founded in 2008, the four Berlin saxophonists Frank Gratkowski, Christian Weidner, Leonhard Huhn (until 2018 Benjamin Weidekamp) and Florian Bergmann have found an unmistakable sound language characterised by artistic uncompromisingness and continuous musical research. In autumn 2012, they released their first CD "4 compositions by Frank Gratkowski" on the English label Leo Records. Now follow…

*300 copies limited edition* With three studio albums, four live releases and a number of tours, the Belgian-British Kodian Trio has built up quite a reputation within the European improvisation scene. The trio unites the attention to texture and detail often associated with the 'English school' with the fierce urgency of the 'fire music' of the sixties and seventies. The result is a wringing cocktail on the seesaw between European free improvisation and witty free jazz. Dirk Serries' disordered…

Next up on Africa Seven is the second edition of our "African Funk Experimentals" LPs. With these we took some of our favourite African artists, choose the most funky we can find and then put together a compilation of their choicest and funkiest tracks. Of course that may not be their most popular or best selling tracks… but that's just fine. We are digging for the funk.

Noise/noisecore/grindcore/cut-up in unparalleled intensity from Mumma/Wiese with two tracks featuring Jay Randall.