New Arrivals
Bleaklow
New vinyl edition (300 copies) of this killer. Fully remastered by Matt Colton at Alchemy. One of the most destitute and absorbing albums in Leyland Kirby’s canon is finally given a much needed vinyl pressing, following on from its initial CD release 6 years ago. ‘Bleaklow’ is harrowing from the start, the opening "Something To Do With Death” reverberating dread via layers of unstable, radiant drones punctuated with pained, hi-pitched howls that cut through the mix with violent intent. ’Solemn D…
Formative North American Electronica 1975 to 1984
Third Noise Principle, a four CD box-set that covers nine crucial years in the development of electronic music in North America. The huge tracklist doesn’t just stick to one area (e.g. academic electronics or the nightclub), but includes all kinds of different areas, from Smegma and Suicide to The Residents and Laurie Spiegel. Top value release. A fantastic entry in the Close To The Noise Floor series – one that looks at early American experiments with electronics – but from the DIY generation t…
Butterfly Effect
Shinichi Atobe has managed to stay off grid since he made an appearance on Basic Channel’s Chain Reaction imprint back in 2001. He delivered the second-to-last 12” on the label and then disappeared without a trace, leaving behind a solitary 12” that’s been selling for crazy money (theres a copy up on discogs at the moment for $600 - go figure) and a trail of speculation that has led some people to wonder whether the project was in fact the work of someone on the Basic Channel payroll. That kille…
Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore
The score to the turner prize winning installation, newly re-issued on clear vinyl
. Edition of 500. The video installation Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) is one of the best-known and -loved works by Turner Prize-winning, London-based artist and Northern English emigre Mark Leckey. It's a hugely influential piece, and the soundtrack itself has been sampled endlessly, most notably by Jamie xx on "All Under One Roof Raving" (2014). A phantasmic and transcendent collage of meticulously sour…
Taiko No Uminari
Studio Mule presents Yoshimi Ueno's Taiko No Uminari, originally issued in 1980 on Johnny's Disk Record. Johnny's Disk Record is an independent jazz label run by the owner of jazz cafe Kaiunbashi No Johnny, located in Rikuzentakata City in Iwate Prefecture, Japan. The legendary label released a string of albums of high quality but down-to-earth music, spanning from modern and avant-garde jazz to left-field pop. Albums such as Teru Sakamoto's Farewell My Johnny / Left Alone and Eiji Nakayama's Ay…
Immediate Horizon
Lawrence English and Alessandro Cortini issue Immediate Horizon,
a live recording, made at the premiere of the piece, held at Kraftwerk
in Berlin. Having become mutual admirers of each other's work; English
of Cortini's Sonno (HOS 412CD, 2014) and Cortini of English's Wilderness Of Mirrors
(RM 460CD, 2014), the pair were very pleased to receive an invitation
to collaborate together. Following a number of months exchanging
compositional ideas and materials, Cortini and English met in Berlin…
Sileen II
An adaptation from "Sileen", a composition commissioned by Musica For The Festival Oortreders at Neerpelt, Belgium, 2016 performed with 50 members of a local music school; "Sileen II" was realized with only Gareth Davis on bass clarinet plus sounds from Machinefabriek, recorded in the same pitch and tempo as "Sileen', then slowed to half its speed and one octave lower. Stunning!
Spaces . An Hour For Piano
Performed by Keiko Shichijo. Tom Johnson's An Hour for Piano was written in 1971. The piece began as a series of short, improvisatory sketches in 1967 when Johnson was accompanying a modern dance class at New York University. Johnson gradually expanded these sketches and added transitions between them, writing a piece that is to be played in exactly one hour. Achieving this goal requires an absolutely steady tempo for the duration of the piece, which Johnson has set at quarter note = 59.225 beat…
Mundanas I - V
The title mundana comes from Boethius' (427-524 AD) printed work on ancient Greek music: De institutione musica. John McCowen is a New York based composer and performer whose work focuses on extending the possibilities of the clarinet family. John embraces long-form drones, difference tones, and beating harmonics as a means to extrude the dimensionality within - treating the clarinet as an acoustic synthesizer. His works for ensemble utilize spectral techniques to superimpose the timbral/sonic c…
Socrate
Beautiful rendering of French composer Eric Satie's 1918 masterwork "Socrate", originally for four sopranos and chamber orchestra, here stripped to its essence as a duo with Olalla Aleman on soprano and Guy Vandromme on piano, maintaining Satie's characterist reserve and refinement in the 3 parts: "portrait of socrates"; "banks of the ilissus"; and "death of socrates".
This Is Not A Lament
Return of Richard Youngs to Fourth Dimension, a label that has supported his work since the early 1990s via collaborations with Simon Wickham-Smith. The latter returns to this set, based around the notion of songs featuring special guests. Spread over the two discs, the eleven songs here assume all manner of sonic guises that are often difficult or sometimes blissed-out, but always rewarding. Most include guests, themselves from a wide variety of backgrounds (taking in all from groups such as Tr…
Rosso Napoletano Rework
100 copies in Red Vinyl. After 44 years, the real masterpiece Tony Esposito's Rosso Napoletano sees the light again with this marvellous 13-minutes rework by Mushrooms Project. Archeo Recordings is a reissue record label that regenerates old, lost, obscure and forgotten rare gems of mostly Italian music but also all over the world of the 70s, 80s and 90s. All outputs are licensed by the artists and the vintage labels; audio tracks are remastered in their original form; the sleeves and center lab…
Folio
A little while back, with the release of German composer and musician Stephan Mathieu’s sprawling 12 CD box set, Radiance, we predictably touched on the overwhelming ambition of such a thing - especially being as good it was. It was hard to imagine we’d be hearing from him again so soon. But here he is before us, issuing another incredible body of work - 8 CDs in total, under the title Folio, on his own Schwebung imprint in an edition of 250. Our minds are bent. His ambitious heights never seem …
Information
2016 Release. First time available since its original release in 1972. Jukka Hauru is hardly a household name, but in Finland he's a noted producer and journalist, and in the 1970s he released two albums featuring his wild guitar excursions. It's a basic psychedelic jazz avantgarde power-trio outing, featuring Jukka's ace six-string blasts, but is also joined by sax and violin, giving it a broader, more expansive sound. There is also a sense of humor prevalent on the album, as if Hauru didn't ta…
Day is Over
2016 Release. Day is Over, an album often credited to Esko Linnavalli Quintet but without any mention of performing group on the cover, was born during a series of Finnish Jazz Music Workshop events, led by Heikki Sarmanto and Esko Linnavalli, out which the New Music Orchestra UMO was born. A UMO-anticipating 14-headed workshop band gathered to rehearse at the rock club Tavastia in 1974. Out of that group emerged a quintet, who took a trip to Stockholm to record Day Is Over. The album appeared o…
Exquisite Ectasies
Approaching the Exquisite Corpus was an alternative title we considered for this DVD release. It would have indicated how the films introduced here from my early Super 8 phase already evidence an artistically consistent path leading to my most recent production to date, The Exquisite Corpus, and highlighted my endeavor since the 1980s to make the specific qualities of the analog film medium sensuously tangible in the form of "exquisite ecstasies". No matter how various the imagery of Blood-Letti…
Rebirth Cycle
Few copies in process of restock. Limited remastered edition of 250 copies only. Nearly everyone on the planet has heard Mtume. Notorious B.I.G.’s sample of his 1983 single Juicy Fruit, is as iconic as they come. What few know, is that prior to entering the world of R&B, the drummer James Mtume was a seminal figure in the 1970’s New York free jazz scene - among the wildest of its fiery voices. Part of a remarkable musical legacy - his father and uncles made up the Heath Brothers, he began his ca…
Soothing Songs for Babies
Incredible archival LP collecting lullabies recorded at different times and from several countries, co-published by the prestigious Museum of Ethnography of Geneva and swiss renowned Mental Groove Records. All the lullabies presented here come from records published with a copy kept in the Archives internationales de Musique Populaire of the Meg. Lullabies xist in almost every culture in the world: while they relate to the world of childhood, they also evoke the privileged relationship establis…
Naked City
Small repress available. "Regularly hailed as one the most important composers of the late 20th century, John Zorn is comfortable at the helm of an ensemble, as improviser on an array of instruments, and as a bold theorist of collaboration. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the New York artist and operator of the esteemed Tzadik label became known for assembling hardcore-inflected jazz ensembles and for devising 'game systems,' or intricate musical conditions intended to force players into new ter…
Nascimento
Legendary psychedelic-prog-groves LP from Brazil by the enigmatic group Perfume Azul Do Sol's 'Nascimento'. Recorded in 1974 in São Paulo, 'Nascimento' was the first and only album by the band 'Perfume Azul Do Sol'; mixing the talents of Pedro Baldanza (bass), Jean (guitar), Gil (drums), Ana Maria Guedes (voice and piano), with the Nordestine (north eastern) influences of Benvindo (voice and guitar). Husband and wife Ana and Benvindo were the heart & soul of the group, and together made a brilli…