Best of 2017
Music With Memory
** Small repress available. An essential entry, offering crucial insight into one of America’s most important composers. Beautiful, challenging, and visionary, this what music should always be - the heights of creativity bound to the specificity of time** Since they emerged just over twenty years ago, the Milan based imprint Alga Marghen has shown an unparalleled dedication to Post-War sonic avant-garde, assembling a catalog of reissues and archival releases which traverses a remarkable breath o…
Antibarbarus
A reissue of Antibarbarus, issued as a compact disc in 1998, was the first edition Walter Marchetti released on Alga Marghen. The Antibarbarus cycle of five pieces makes use of original tapes coming from the same recording sessions that originated some of Marchetti's major musical works realized in the '80s. This former series of works presented some homogeneous and untouched sound sources in the "concrete" status of their inner - and necessarily chaotic - level of entropy. Nevertheless this ope…
Elements
Peter Brötzmann: tenor saxophone; Fred Van Hove: piano; Han Bennink: drums, voice; Albert Mangelsdorff: trombone. Recorded during the Free Music Market, August 27 and 28, 1971, in Berlin. Designed by Peter Brötzmann. Part of the legendary "Berlin Trilogy" originally released by FMP in 1971 (FMP 0030). 180-gram vinyl. One-time pressing of 500. First standalone reissue."What reveals itself in the über energetics on display here is the ability of one quartet to take so much for granted and ye…
Trans-Millenia Music
Since launching six years ago, the ReRVNG series - a curatorial effort by the New York based imprint RVNG, has carved a singular place in the cultural landscape. Dedicated to highlighting remarkable, but overlooked gestures in sonic expression, its effect has been so wide sweeping that the names found within its catalog - Harald Grosskopf, Craig Leon, K. Leimer, Ariel Kalma, Anna Homler, etc, have emerged from the shadows, becoming familiar to most. After a year hiatus, much of which has been sp…
Electronic Music 1960-1973
CD version. Bülent Arel's (1919-1990) work occupies a special place in the history of electronic music, with one thing being certain: Arel's work is still fresh, groundbreaking, and it always look outs for the next adventure in sound. Sub Rosa present a collection of his works here as part of their Early Electronic series. Bülent Arel was a Turkish-born American composer of electronic and contemporary classical music. He was also a devoted teacher, a sculptor, and a painter. From 1940 to 1947, A…
Indonesian Electronic Music 1979-1984
Incredible and unreleased before music by Otto Sidharta, pionneer of Indonesian electronic music. Head-vibrating electronic drones conjuring a rare and arcane kind of acousmatic magick, with electronic compositions that integrated natural sounds and urban sounds to this extent were extremely rare at the time, which gives them a unique form of intensity. An hallucinatory ascent into narcotic-hazed Indonesian rainforest atmospheres which could almost be scoring some Werner Herzog absorbing documen…
Analog and Digital Electronic Music #2 1980-2000
Selected unreleased works by André Stordeur, a key composer of Belgian electronic music, recorded from 1980 to 2000. Perfect complement to Analog and Digital Electronic Music 1978-80 (2015). Released as part of Sub Rosa's Early Electronic series. Belgian electronic music composer André Stordeur, born in 1941, started his musical career started in 1973 with a tape composition for the soundtrack to a film on Gordon Matta-Clark titled Office Baroque (1977). Later in the 1970s, he participated in …
Downdate
Seijiro Murayama, a percussionist/drummer currently based in Japan, lived in France for a number of years and has received acclaim in the west for his musicianship. He performs frequently both inside and outside Japan. This is Murayama’s first solo album since “Broken Iteration” was released on the Herbal International label four years ago, in 2013. It consists of two tracks of about 20 minutes and one of about 7 minutes (3 in total). Overlapping and combining with percussion and scraping…
10. Hose Horn
Schulz's first LP, 10. Hose Horn, was introduced alongside other debut LPs from Jim O'Rourke and Frank Dommert on Dommert's Entenpfuhl label in 1991. Combining the cathartic sounds of industrial, early techno, and innovative pop with inspiration from acousmatic, New Music, and Dada, Schulz's music is a prime example of the Cologne experimental music scene of the time. Rhythmic delights, outlandish juxtapositions and a sustained, unresolved, aurally-fascinating tension evoke dramatic, film-like m…
Gli Italiani e L'Industria
In stock now! From the legendary Omicron label secret archives, one of the rarest and nearly impossible to find album signed by Piero Umiliani. Awareness of Piero Umiliani’s genius is widespread nowadays,not least on this incredible Gli italiani e l’industria, a soundtrack of a mysterious TV documentary by Romolo Marcellini broadcasted in 1967, and never appeared again from then, which was focused on virtue and vice of Italian post-economic boom industrialization. The music perfectly reflects th…
Erosion
Mental Experience present an expanded reissue of Ildefonso Aguilar's Erosión, originally released in 1985. Spooky, meditative soundscapes inspired by the desolate volcanic environment of Lanzarote (Canary Islands), created using Minimoog, Polymoog, vocal loops, and field recordings. Originally recorded in Germany in 1978 by Spanish painter/sound artist Ildefonso Aguilar, only a selection of the original recordings were released a few years later on a very rare limited edition cassette and LP. Er…
Orion Awakes
Mental Experience present a reissue of Golem’s Orion Awakes. Orion Awakes was recorded and produced circa 1976 by Toby Robinson, aka Genius P. Orridge, while he worked as second engineer at the famous Dierks Studio in Cologne. Memories from those hazy times are sketchy, but all evidence leads you to believe that the musicians featured here were well-known names from the kraut scene working under pseudonyms, recording 100% underground, non-commercial music under Toby’s guidance, just for fun. App…
Materia Oscura
Squadra Omega is one of the bands which best represents the vast spectrum of the Italian underground. Psychedelic, avant-garde, jazz-rock, improvisation, kraut-rock, rock in opposition and ethno-tribalism blend seamlessly into the work of a collective that moves and expands depending on the urgency of the moment, focused around a core that rotates around the two members OmegaMatt and OmegaG8. In the band's wide discography we find compositional freedom, improvised jam-sessions in and a am…
Divine Music
History can be a motherfucker - its authors vindictive and deeply unfair. Though Jazz - long heralded as the great American art form, got its due, buried within its canon are the legacies of systemic neglect. Its narrative is a mere shadow of the truth. Robert Northern is a lost giant - a name that almost no one has heard - a prodigy once recruited by Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Roland Kirk, Donald Byrd, Charlie Haden, Don Cherry, Freddie Hubbard, Eric Dolphy, and Sun Ra, who ve…
Hard Off
Against the odds of geography - continuously coming together within various collaborations and combinations of the three, Giovanni Di Domenico, Jim O'Rourke, Tatsuhisa Yamamoto have begun to assemble one of the most exciting bodies of organized sound to have appeared in recent years. The trio’s second outing under the moniker Delivery Health is no exception to the rule. Recorded in Tokyo between 2012 and 2013 and emerging on the ambitious Silent Water imprint, Hard Off sidesteps signifiers and e…
Orgelkonzert Jesuitenkirche
Hermann Nitsch playing the church organ in the Jesuit church of Vienna, November 20th, 2013. Four heavy drone pieces, mastered by Martin Siewert. Double LP version comes with an eight-page booklet with artwork and an essay by Nitsch about music (in German). These four tracks of Nitsch performing solo on organ are made of sustained drones that are soothing and intense. Music is beautiful and meditative, as it slowly evolves and transforms, full trills that shimmer with celestial light and glide s…
Look'n for Ya (1973-75)
In 1973, when Smegma (the band) was born they had only one rule: No Musicians! That way they could re-invent the musical wheel with a new primitive, suburban, anti-hippie approach. 44 years later perhaps the world is ready for the first full LP of this original, uncompromising sound. At the time, it seemed they thought they were on a solitary journey, but shortly after these recordings, it was discovered that there was another local group, The Los Angeles Free Music Society, that they shortly be…
Epitaph For Venus
Mental Experience present a reissue of Galactic Explorers' Epitaph For Venus. Another album from the Pyramid label shrouded in mystery and produced by Toby Robinson in Cologne, circa 1974. Kosmische and head sounds with plenty of Minimoog, analog synths/keyboards, effects, loops, tape manipulation, treated percussions, etc., courtesy of Galactic Explorers, an electronic, minimal, ambient krautrock trio featuring Reinhard Karwatky (Dzyan). Take a trip to the inner regions of your mind, see ancien…
La nuit est au courant
Souffle Continu Records present the first vinyl edition of Jac Berrocal's La Nuit Est Au Courant, originally released on In Situ in 1991. Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman" on the radio, Renaissance motets, his grandfather in a Zouave military band, Syrian deserts... Columns of tanks in the streets, the soundtrack to Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (1956), Juan Manuel Fangio's car, the fall of the Berlin wall: from the first and fantastic Musiq Musik (1973), this is where Jac Berrocal's trumpet com…
Conditions of the Gas Giant
Bureau B present a reissue of Conrad Schnitzler's Conditions of the Gas Giant, originally released on cassette in 1988. The Berlin artist first released these recordings on a small American cassette label. Admirers of the seminal artist Conrad Schnitzler can be found all over the planet, including the USA, of course. Matt Howarth, illustrator and independent comic artist, is one of them. He has been following Schnitzler's music since the early 1970s whilst drawing offbeat science fiction stories…