Best of 2017
Studio Umiliani
Four Flies Records strikes again, releasing their first archive compilation of Piero Umiliani’s work and the first compilation focussing on the Maestro’s legacy in years. “Studio Umiliani” is a collection of sunken treasures and hidden beauties yet to be re-released, and of stunning unpublished works surprisingly unknown for quite some time. The project, born from the initial effort of Andrea Fabrizi, who has far and wide been exploring Umiliani's soundtracks before anyone else, led Four Flies …
Discaholics!
**Small repress available** Swedish saxophone player/improviser/ composer/music archivist Mats Gustafsson has worked in the outer regions of jazz, avant-garde, experimental rock and free improvisation for more than 35 years. Gustafsson is also a passionate record collector who strongly believes that actively nurturing the urge to seek for rare and obscure vinyl is a gateway to higher musical knowledge – a knowledge that it is a musician’s duty to share. He has coined the term Discaholism – and o…
Divine Music
3CD version. 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 S…
Time Machines
“4 Tones to facilitate travel through time.” So begins the listeners’ journey into what has become one of the most treasured and revered pieces of Coil history ever released. Each of the four pieces on Time Machines is named after the chemical compound of the hallucinogenic drug that they were composed for, and the album was meticulously crafted to enable what John Balance referred to as "temporal slips" in time and space, allowing both the artist and audience to figuratively "dissolve tim…
Saivo
**last copies** Out of the twilight emerges this debut offering by Ilta Hämärä, the duo of Bart De Paepe (Sylvester Anfang II, Bokrijk, Charles Vögele) and Timo van Luijk (Af Ursin, Elodie, La Poupee Vivante). An imaginary source that combines Bart’s hazy psychedelic antics and Timo’s subtle and abstract sound manipulations in otherworldly spheres of cosmic dimensions, like a spectral veil covering an odoriferous botanical garden. The gates are open to golden clouds… Limited to 300 copies.
...E Il Pavone Parlo' Alla Luna
Originally released in 1980 (and privately issued only in 1987) Arturo Stalteri’s …E Il Pavone Parlo’ Alla Luna falls among the last artifacts of Italy’s great wave of musical Minimalism. Like the movement to which it belongs, rigorously resistant to categorizations and definition, this overlooked marvel sculpts a startling singularity. A radical and democratic vision in sound, blending elements of New Age, the avant-garde, and Prog, with Western and Indian Classical musics. Long oversha…
Olympic Signals
Limited clear vinyl, edition of 100. Giovanni Venosta’s Olympic Signals, is one of the great lost documents of the Italian avant-garde - the first solo outing from one of the movement’s seminal voices, most recognised for his collaborative work with Roberto Musci. In a sea of unjustly neglected works, Venosta’s debut rises from the tide time as a towering gesture of sonic creativity. A shimmering, complex wonder of overwhelming Minimalistic beauty. One of the great records of the 1980’s, that al…
Strumming Music
The classic minimal music album, available again on vinyl for the first time since the '70s. Primed with a glass of cognac, Charlemagne Palestine sits at the keyboard of a Bösendorfer Imperial grand piano. One foot firmly holds down the sustain pedal while both hands perform an insistent strum-like alternation on the keys. Soon Palestine and his Bösendorfer are enveloped in sound and bathed in a shimmering haze of multi-colored overtones. For 45 minutes, this rich pulsating music swells and…
Vang Circular
Vang Circular is the first outing from Timo van Luijk (La Scie Dorée / Af Ursin, Elodie) and Mark Harwood (Penultimate Press / Astor). Employing vibes, mellotron, natural reader, an iron ant, synth, metal pipes, slide guitar and a double bass these audacious souls conjure a wonky musical vision that gently peels away the familiar The results are a surprising synthesis of two individual and somewhat oppositional aesthetics. From the farthest reaches of the galaxy to the highest celestial p…
Tiger Balm / Amazonia Dreaming / Immersion
Black Truffle presents a new issue of Annea Lockwood's classic 1970 tape piece "Tiger Balm", unavailable on vinyl for over thirty years, accompanied by two exquisite unreleased works for percussion and voice. "Created while Lockwood was living in the UK, the side-long 'Tiger Balm' is a singular work within the cannon of tape music. Inspired by research into the ritual function of music, the piece explores the possibility of evoking ancient communal memories through sound. Breaking entirely with …
Raft
Mike Cooper's output of the past half century has been described as "post-everything". It's a fitting phrase really when you consider he has been at the beating heart of so many critical musical moments; from the development of the blues touring circuit in the UK, through the growth of the folk scene and into the explosion of free improvisation that came to define a generation of UK musicians. Amidst it all, working at stitching these disparate forms into some kind of de-territorialized z…
Musique Hydromantique
LP version. Reverse board-printed inner and outer sleeve; Edition of 500. Musique Hydromantique is the second solo album by Tomoko Sauvage archiving many years of her performance-based practice on the waterbowls -- the natural synthesizer of her invention, composed with porcelain bowls filled with water and amplified via hydrophones (underwater microphones). While her first album Ombrophilia (2009) was studio-recorded/composed work, Musique Hydromantique is about experimentation and improvisatio…
Electric
**Audiophile 2LP, edition of 500 copies in a beautiful gatefold sleeve with updated credits and liner notes** Arne Nordheim is among Norway’s most important post-war composers, particularly among those working within the field of avant-garde electronic music. Nordheim studied studied Musique concrète in Paris during the mid 1950’s, expanding his practice in Holland toward electronics and synthesis during the end of that decade. Upon returning home, he embarked on a stunning body of work, …
Israel Suite / Dominante En Bleu
Gatefold LP version. Includes download coupon. Sommor Records present a reissue of Rupture's Israel Suite / Dominante En Bleu, originally released in 1973. Rupture was born when famous French songwriter Boris Bergman (France Gall, Dalida, etc.) decided to record a conceptual album about the history of Israel. He approached ace drummer and singer Sylvain Krief (Airto Fogo, Michel Fugain, Aznavour, Clark Terry, Bud Powell, etc.) and soon, other musicians joined: Jean-François Jenny-Clark (Don Cher…
Ore Talks
*in restock now*Lavish gatefold sleeve with booklet. a double LP of essentially electronic and noise-based pieces paired with astonishing texts spoken by the legendary Anthony Moore. The concept is that objects of value, artifacts or minerals, buried deep in the ground send strange signals through the earth up to the planet's surface. they are detected by the ears and instruments of miners, explorers and archaeologists who are tuned-in to the subterranean frequencies. the album contains a …
Takt Der Arbeit
Originally developed as a film score, Takt Der Arbeit is inspired by a handful of industrial and instructional films from the early 1960s until the early 1990s that portray different forms of work. Felix Kubin translates these historic documents into a musical poem of conceptual depth. Takt Der Arbeit - "the beat of work" - is not only serving as a title but also as constructive element in this endeavor. Being hunted down by the ever-accelerated pulse of our reality is an omnipresent issue i…
Trax Test
Trax Test’ is the first ever survey of Italy’s pioneering, visionary and influential label and mail art collective Trax, which ran from 1981 - 1987 as a network for the creation of collaborative projects. The collective included a pre-NWW Colin Potter and some of the earliest work from Masami Akita aka Merzbow, but also had deep connections with the art world; a few trax members went on to become famous designers and artists - Ettore Sottsass of hugely influential Memphis Group even guests on vo…
Complete discography vol I
** very last copies** Everything starts when Maurizio Bianchi from Milano, with many years spent as a music journalist, realizes that writing (a very personal style both lucid and delirious) is no longer enough to describe the sounds he has in his mind. In that moment he started to deal with tape recorders, turntables, synthesizers, microphones, self-producing tapes and records under the name M.B., creating his own circuit of fans and aficionados always ready to plunge themselves into the…
Un Giorno in una Piazza del Mediterraneo
In the late 70’s the Italian music scene recorded a renewed interest in a sound research involved to a stimulating fusion of popular elements, jazz improvisation and suggestions of the middle-oriental classical heritage. Starting from the experience of Aktuala the idea of a common "Mediterranean air", that could compare and harmonize rhythms and timbres of various regions, enlivened a large number of musicians.
In this context, it also placed the short history of Zeit and of his main mem…
Stoned - An Electronic Symphony
Official re-issue of Danish electronic music from 1974! Vinyl LP comes with booklet and limited to 500 copies - no repress. Frederiksberg Records announces the first re-issue of ‘Stoned’ which is exclusively licensed from Gunner Møller Pedersen in person and has been carefully restored from the original master tapes. It comes with a booklet of liner notes by Thomas Knak. ‘Stoned’ by Gunner Møller Pedersen is a pioneering partly-electronic composition from Denmark. Gunner believes that it’s m…