Best of 2018
Sounds of the Projection Box
A sonic documentation of the history of the film projector (movie house version), from spool to digital. For this work, Michael Lightborne relies heavily upon the natural rhythms that the machine creates. Layer upon layer of sound comes into the fray with such majesty and grace. Even within these noises Michael Lightborne occasionally lets something more come in, the way that little melodies flicker about in mere moments. By letting these pieces gain a level of prominence within the album the wh…
Kaitai Teki Kokan, 1970
CD Edition. Replica reissue of one of the rarest free jazz LP ever made: Masayuki Takayanagi & Kaoru Abe's earthshattering Kaitai Teki Kōkan. Supposedly released in a limited run of 100 copies in 1970, this incredibly rare record igot finally its first vinyl reissue via Craftman Records. The album features a recording of the duo’s live performance at the Kōsei Nenkin Kaikan concert hall in Shinjuku on June 28th, 1970. The reissue also includes a replica flyer that advertised the original event.…
Urban And Tribal Portraits
At the beginning of the 1980’s the composer Roberto Musci returned to Italy after a decade wondering the globe - drifting between African, Indian, and the Near & Far East, studying music, making field recordings, and collecting instruments. In 1984 this journey was culminated by the release of his first album, The Loa Of Music, a sonic distillation and near perfect encapsulation of the democratic hybridity at the heart of the Italian avant-garde. It remains one of the most important and thrillin…
One Man Sessions Volume 2 // Unprepared Piano
After the oneiric journey through synthesizers on Volume 1, entitled Synthesis (2018), Massimo Martellotta (founding member of Calibro 35) returns with the second volume of One Man Sessions
exploring the tonal possibilities of the classical instrument par
excellence: the piano. The instrument is at the center of the scene, and
the prepared piano in the manner of John Cage is here
decontextualized and freely "In/Prepared" and reinvented in a very
personal way, placing objects of common use o…
Dreaming In Colors
Emotional Rescue begins the first in a series of reissues looking at the music of guitarist Carl Weingarten and his Multiphase Records label, starting at his highly sought after collaborate album with Walter Whitney, Dreaming In Colors. With an early interest in photography and Super 8 film leading to a degree in cinema production, Weingarten’s other, self-taught, love was the slide guitar. Taking its blues roots and merging them with his visual arts background created a unique “painting in soun…
A Dance with Fred Astaire
A Dance with Fred Astaire is an extraordinary collection of anecdotes and rare ephemera from the life of legendary artist, filmmaker and bon vivant Jonas Mekas, featuring a dizzying cast of cultural icons both underground and mainstream. Memories, diary entries, conversations, and insights into his work sit alongside collages of beautifully reproduced postcards, newspaper cuttings, film negatives, lists, posters and photographs, envelopes and letters, book covers, telegrams, cartoons and doodles…
Memoire Magnetique, Vol. 1 (1966 – 1990) LP
Transversales Disques announces the release of Bernard Parmegiani's Mémoire Magnétique, Vol. 1. Spanning 1966-1990, this is a revelatory collection of never-released commercial and secret music by electronic music pioneer Parmegiani. Since the late 50's, Bernard Parmegiani, a major figure of electroacoustic music and a founding member of GRM has created some sixty pieces. From the start, Parmegiani's work was closely linked to the screen, with dozens of documentaries, films, long features, anima…
Realm
Realistic Monk is the new performance project from Carl Stone in collaboration with artist and composer Miki Yui. Carl Stone is one of the pioneers of live computer music and has been composing electro-acoustic music almost exclusively since 1972. The Village Voice has famously hailed him as 'the king of sampling'. Miki Yui is an artist and composer who develops pieces of music, drawings and sound installations that start from a perception of the faintest sounds and noises and subtly reference e…
Nature Always Needs Improving
**Last copies. Limited to 100 copies only** Ned Milligan now presents his new album, Nature Always Needs Improving, building on the momentum generated by his admired third LP, Continental Burns. Echoing that album’s mode and structure, Nature Always Needs Improving offers a handful of tender, minimalist pieces before giving way to a spectral side-length conclusion. The deep intimacy of the album is enhanced by its process—primarily recorded outdoors on porches or in yards—and by the unpredictabl…
Originale
**very last copies** Private edition, limited to 100 copies "A documentation of a music happening recorded at Judson Hall, NYC. Sept 8-9, 11-13, 1964 with a stellar line-up that includes James Tenney on piano, David Behrman, Max Neuhaus, Alvin Lucier, Allan Kaprow, Nam June Paik, Allen Gingsberg and Jackson Mac Low. The idea, Allan Kaprow director explained, is “a collage of music and action”. The music was electronic, but the action was clearly electrifying as Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Originale …
Lydspor One & Two (Blue TB7 Series) LP
LP version. Mika Vainio visited the Moog Sound-Lab in April 2015. He made one his last known solo studio recordings in the form of two vinyl-sized, side-long pieces entitled Lydspor, Danish for "soundtrack". Mika worked almost exclusively with the lab's Moog Modular System 55. This UK sound-lab instrument is the sole prototype model (containing several golden filters) of Moog's sold-out reverse-engineered edition (only 55 units) recreating the 1970s classic. On completion of his sessions Mika an…
Crackfinder
Zaradny is a composer, instrumentalist and visual artist; Piotrowicz a composer, author of sound installations and virtuoso of analog synthesizers. They founded and curated the Musica Genera festival and label. Noetinger, an improviser, publisher and instrumentalist, specializes in electroacoustic collages full of permutations on his tape recorder and using all sorts of electronics. What connects these musicians are their methods of work: experiment as the basis of action, controlled accidents, …
Stone-song
**300 copies on black vinyl** A one-hour performance presented in 1990 at the 8th Biennale of Sydney (The Readymade Boomerang: Certain Relations in 20th Century Art) where time is being scanned and animated by matter and where the genius of Henning Christiansen - with fellow artist Bjørn Nørgaard and Ken Unsworth, to whom this performance is dedicated - establish a deep dialogue with the nature (of sound) watching the time, stone on stone, being at the same time actors and audience of its epheme…
Casilina Tapes 2010-2017
Edition of 300. Heroin In Tahiti is a duo from Rome, Italy hailing from the Roma Est scene, a sort of local community based in the crumbling and deteriorated neighborhoods which were already eternalized by Pasolini and Neorealist Cinema (think of Pasolini, De Sica, Visconti, etc.) The duo plays a variety of cheap guitars, analog synths, drum machines, and pedals, achieving a dirtiness which is tragically lo-fi and out-of-time at the same time: a "Spaghetti Wasteland", as they call it. In 2012 th…
The Healing Music of Rana Vol. 2
Exceptional recordings by Randall McClellan, a founding member of the electronic music studio at the Eastman School of Music in 1967 where he later received a Ph.D. in Composition, Theory and Musicology. A growing interest inesoteric mystical traditions and personal practice of North Indian music - between the years 1966 to the early 80s - prompted him to develop his personal compositional practice into an active platform for inducing altered states of mind. He constructed his concerts to be s…
Cross Country
David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) was a writer and artist active in New York's Downtown scene in the 1970's and 80's. In the 1980's Wojnarowicz become one of the central figures in the AIDS struggle, as well as the target of homophobic censorship efforts by the American Family Association. Wojnarowicz kept written and cassette tape journals throughout his adult life. This three-disc vinyl release publishes for the first time three of Wojnarowicz's tape journals, documenting his thoughts, dreams, fea…
Sun Embassy
Roaratorio's survey of the unheard Sun Ra continues with Sun Embassy. Consisting of recordings from Sun Studios (aka Ra's house in Philadelphia) from 1968-1969, the album features nine tracks: six compositions which have never been heard before in any form, plus fresh coats of paint on such 1950s classics as "Sunology" and "Ancient Aiethiopia", and an early rendition of "Why Go To The Moon". Essential listening for Sun Ra devotees. Includes download coupon.
Oceanos
**Available in vinyl for the first time, edition of 200** An excellent set, shedding light on the otherwise undocumented early Portuguese Electronic Music community by Cândido Lima with his legendary ring-modulated & spring reverb-laden 'Oceanos', in own composer's words: the work was about the oceans to which Nasa has paid attention in recent times to Neptune! The proper graphics to illustrate this work would be distant images where there are hypotheses of the existence of oceans, because it…
Mouvements
Mental Experience present the first ever reissue of Mouvements, originally released in 1973. An impossible to find artifact from the Swiss underground avant-garde scene of Geneva, originally released as a private boxset limited to 150 copies in 1973, only sold at art galleries. A unique, instrumental mix of free-jazz, classical, psych-rock, folk, improv, kraut, funk, and musique-concrete with tape effects. In the late 60s, musician/guitar player Christian Oestreicher, "a savage in the era …
Planètes
**Small 2018 repress available** First time reissue on vinyl of this much sought after release by Jean Hoyoux on the brand new label Cortizona. Jean Hoyoux remains a mysterious figure. He was Belgian psychologist, astrologer, and musician who released two albums during the early 80’s, and seems to have died shortly after. Little information is available, beyond the fact that he was dedicated to the study of the healing properties of music - the guiding theme of the album we have before us. Heali…