New Arrivals
2007
**1.000 copies, 2019 stock** Born in Brooklyn, Alan Vega was reared on the rock'n'roll sound of Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison, but originally struck out on a career as a visual artist and light sculptor, making pieces out of electronic debris. Seeing Iggy Pop fronting the Stooges at the New York State Pavilion in 1969 was an epiphany for him: "It showed me you didn't have to do static artworks, you could create situations. That show was the first time in my life when the audience and the stage m…
G.A.M.S.
**300 copies** Feedback leads a life of its own. It is an uncontrollable sonic accident, usually ear-numbingly loud but sometimes also delicately ethereal. The essence of feedback is being released from bonds, its path is always one of intensification and escape. Its a physical phenomenon and hard to predict. The duo G.A.M.S. makes music on the edge of losing control. A restless drummer works his way through waves of feedback, which span the full spectrum of frequencies from pumping bass to the …
The Nightmare of J.B. Stanislas
"Occasionally, a work of art falls into your hands with such a bizarre backstory, you just have to run with it. The implausible origins of Nick Garrie’s folk-pop album The Nightmare of J.B. Stanislas require just such a leap of faith. The Englishman recorded his masterpiece in France at the tender age of nineteen. The year was 1968 and Garrie felt ill at ease with the lavish arrangements accompanying his songs (beautiful as they may sound to our ears today). Worse still, the label owner committe…
The Best of Gabor Szabo
**Red vinyl, gatefold sleeve** Exotic jazz guitar mastery! Gabor Szabo’s singular style and authentic sound is on full display across a set of originals and choice covers highlighted by unusual instrumentation and ingenious arrangements. From the sitar-starring adaptation of Paint It Black to the Latin rhythms and bossa nova beats, Szabo’s savvy jazz guitar innovations shine throughout."Gabor Szabo was one of the most original guitarists to emerge in the 1960s; mixing his Hungarian folk music he…
Space Funk: Afro-Futurist Electro Funk in Space 1976-84
**1.000 copies** "The Black and Latin American space programme of the late '70s and early '80s was born on dancefloors and took more bodies into orbit than NASA ever did. Space Funk: Afro Futurist Electro Funk In Space 1976-84 charts a major phase shift between boogie-disco and electro-funk that came about as African American and Latin American artists really embraced the potential of computers and synths to express their ideas about alienation and utopian escapism. Taking cues from science fict…
Treasures
**1.000 copies** Soul Jazz Records release flautist Lloyd McNeill’s album Treasures (1976). Originally issued on the artists’ own private press Baobab label in New York, the album is a serious collectors’ piece, a heavyweight and fascinating fusion of deep and spiritual jazz sensibilities blended with Brazilian and Latin rhythms and melodies."Lloyd McNeill is a cultural polymath - a multi-disciplinarian flautist, painter, academic, poet, and photographer - who as a musician has worked with every…
Thousands On a Raft
Alternative Fox present a reissue of Pete Brown & Piblokto!'s Thousands On a Raft, originally released in 1970. London-based poet Pete Brown made a name for himself after joining Mike Horovitz's New Departures art group in the early 1960s, leading to a residency at The Marquee and a 1965 appearance at the Royal Albert Hall. Brown began co-writing lyrics for Cream the following year after a request from drummer Ginger Baker, yielding tremendous hits such as Sunshine of Your Love, White Room, and …
Monopiece & Jaap Blonk
"The improvising trio Monopiece lists its instrumentation as guitar, percussion, and electronics, but electronics describes far more than one third of its texture, since both guitar and percussion are amplified and electronically processed. On this release they are joined by the Dutch vocal artist Jaap Blonk in recording spontaneously generated music, edited and subtly processed to reflect the communal nature of its creation without interrupting the strong, improvised narratives of each piece.In…
Fela Ransome Kuti and his Koola Lobitos
**Clear vinyl edition** Before Afrobeat, there was Highlife-Jazz and Afro-Soul. Highlife music, originally from Ghana and widely popular across West Africa, dominated the music scene in Lagos when Fela Kuti returned to the newly independent Nigeria in 1963. Fela had been studying trumpet at Trinity College of Music in London where he met drummer Tony Allen, who also joined him in new group Koola Lobitos as they sought to mix things up by introducing the sounds they had heard in the capital's jaz…
Duets
**2019 stock** "This December 1976 recording features two of the most prominent AACM musicians, Roscoe Mitchell and Anthony Braxton. Mitchell’s compositions run the gamut, beginning with the darkly gorgeous opener that features Braxton’s contrabass clarinet nestling evocatively beneath the composer’s earthy flute… Mitchell’s other pieces investigate the sparer, more abstract realm, as the duo’s wide variety of reeds populate the sonic environment with scattered moans, squeaks and pops. Overall, …
Last Night
**2019 stock** Having recently contributed to Goner’s Yogascum LP, reissued in late 2017 as a vinyl release through Hallow Ground, Mark Godwin now returns to the label together with his musical partner Gareth Ormerod as zK. Formed in 1999 as a live project, zK first released on the legendary Mancunian Skam label in 2003, toured throughout Europe and were invited by Autechre to play the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival.In the following years, Godwin and Ormerod produced a slew of records that at o…
The Gorilla Variations
This is the first full-length collaborative release by Richmond, VA-based musician and sound artists Molly Berg and Stephen Vitiello. The CD title, The Gorilla Variations came about from a request for a short-soundtrack from Éder Santos, a Brazilian video artist who Vitiello has worked with for 20-years on an uncounted number of projects. For Santos’ recent video installation, Boxing The Game, Éder asked for a 3-minute soundtrack to accompany a video portrait of Idi Amin, a lonely gorilla housed…
Don't Believe It's Over
Mannequin Records is elated to present a rare lost demo tape recording of Caroline K - real name Caroline Kaye Walters - founder member of Nocturnal Emissions, one of the best UK experimental / industrial music groups in the 1980s. When we asked Nigel Ayers about the possibility to press a small batch of the edit made by Mannequin Records's head Alessandro Adriani, we would never expect to find more material from her solo productions. The only production of Caroline available is in fact her LP N…
Aunka Ma Kwacha
"There is music that falls right into place, a perfectly articulated expression of a few distinct influences. Then, there is another kind of median music, something more mysterious, the result of time, place, technology, and alchemy. Zambian writer and musician Smokey Haangala’s Aunka Ma Kwacha (The Money is Gone) released in 1976 is an example of this more mystical metallurgy, falling somewhere between psychedelic Zamrock, US folk, Kalindula, and Sundown Beat (music played after dark) from Tong…
19 Years Before the Beginning
**600 copies** “Sometimes our own creations surprised us,” says Inguna Rubene, flute player, guitarist, bassoonist and songwriter for 19 Gadi Pirms Sākuma (19 Years Before the Beginning). Created with the idea of lasting for a single performance, 19 Gadi Pirms Sākuma developed into one of the most delicate, intriguing groups in Latvia’s 1980s and early 1990s music scene. Formed in 1988, the band arrived at a time when the Soviet Union was showing the first signs of unravelling. Latvia remained a…
Epistasis
Following the success of her 2018 solo debut album Kontrapoetik (PRTLS 017LP), the Swedish composer Maria W Horn returns with Epistasis, her most ambitious record to date. The title track, "Konvektion" and the two parts of "Interlocked Cycles" see the XKatedral co-founder explore radical approaches to composition that combine avant-garde methods with electronic means. While Kontrapoetik highlighted Horn's strength as a conceptual and political artist, Epistasis is to be understood as an advanced…
The Moomins - Limited Xmas Sleeve
**500 copies - Limited Xmas sleeve** Imagine, if you will, a foreboding homemade electro-acoustic, new age, synth-driven, proto-techno, imaginary world music created on a Portastudio soundtrack for a Polish-made animated fantasy based on a Finnish modern folk tale and created for German and Austrian TV, composed in 1982 by two politically-driven post-punk theater performers from a shared house in Leeds. To even the most perspicacious and adventurous of alternative music fans, the genuine bloodli…
Woodland Band (Parade)
**500 copies** Just when you though it was safe to return to the Groke’s cave, Finders Keepers interrupt Moomin hibernation season to excavate some unexpected buried treasure from Tove’s trove via the cassette vaults of Graeme Miller and Steve Shill. Returning to our much loved stitched-felt format this new limited 7” single not only finds a home for an unaired extended version of 1983’s Woodland Band procession but introduces the first of a series of totally unused Moomin themes taken from priv…
Schattenspieler
**300 copies, purple vinyl** In 2010, Swedish composer and multimedia artist Marcus Fjellström's debut Miasmah release followed two critically acclaimed full length albums on Lampse (2006's Gebrauchsmusik and 2005's Exercises In Estrangement). In addition Marcus has had several commissioned works requested, leading to him working with, among others, the Swedish Royal Ballet, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, numerous ensembles, soloists and filmmakers including Salad Fingers creator David Firth. F…
IsoMonads
Killer. edition of 50 copies. “For every un-universe, then, an un-philosophy that must also negate itself.” ― Eugene Thacker - Jarra’s artistic exploration started with painting abstract artworks in which he aimed to minimise his part as a painter. The technical approach, craftsmanship and the concentration devoted to this process should define the artwork in its final state. Jarra’s perspective on sound has been in a similar way when he started with field recordings in the late '90s. He consequ…