Best of 2018
Spiritual Jazz 8: Japan Part Two
2018 small repress. Double LP; Part two of two double LP versions. Textured, gatefold sleeve; Obi strip. Jazzman Record's latest examination of esoteric, modal, and progressive jazz of the 20th century has taken them to Japan. The liberating force of jazz has been created and felt all around the world, but few nations on earth embraced the jazz message with the passion and intensity of Japan. From the dawn of the jazz age to the present day, Japanese audiences have been renowned tastemakers, ent…
Elicoide
** edition of 200 copies only, few available** Franco Nanni’s ‘Elicoide’ is a lost gem previously released in 1987 only in few copies. The Italian musician has developed (with the assistance from Paolo Grandi on double bass) a minimalistic and repetitive structure expressed into five long compositions ranging from jazz, avantgarde and of course ambient music, each one with its own precise character. It is an album that showcases his idea of “Ascetic Trance” by referring to the music of John…
Spontaneous 1971
Edition of 300 copies, newly remastered for optimal sound.The meeting of Masahiko Sato with Albert Mangelsdorff in a recording studio was planned in summer ‘71. Sato, Japan’s leading pianist, had recorded with Wolfgang Dauner, Attila Zoller, Jean-Luc Ponty, Gary Peacock and Charles Mingus. He wanted to play on a record with Albert Mangelsdorff and as both were invited for the Berlin Jazz Festival 1971 there was a good opportunity to record them there. This – first released as an original ENJA pr…
La Casa delle Chimere
** Limited edition of 200 copies ** Recorded live at Plivka, Kiev, 2017 Mixing and additional production by Hanno Leichtmann at Static Music, Berlin. Thanks to Riba and Maxim Werner. Hanno Leichtmann: Percussion, loops and synthesiser Valerio Tricoli: Revox B77
FRKWYS Vol. 14: Nue
Composer Tashi Wada has performed for years with his father Yoshi Wada—artist, composer, and early member of the Fluxus movement. However, they have rarely appeared together in studio settings. Nue, the fourteenth entry in RVNG Intl.’s intergenerational FRKWYS series, finally brings Tashi and Yoshi, along with an eclectic group of close friends and extended family, together on tape. Nue draws on aspects of Tashi’s background for his widest vision to date—among them the minimalist bagpipe music o…
La Brûlure De Mille Soleils
Very Last Copies. Collector Edition. Silver Procédé Héliophore sleeve, made with the original Prospective 21e Siècle covers (the legendary series devoted to electroacoustic and avant-garde music curated by François Bayle and Pierre Henry begun in 1967). Limited to 100 copies. Previously unavailable and mind-blowing film scores by the late French composer and electronic music pioneer Bernard Parmegiani. Both drawn up for motion pictures by director Pierre Kast, 1965’s La Brûlure De Mille Soleils …
Colored Music
At the dawn of the 1980’s, a few years before her now legendary LP, Through The Looking Glass, took form, a young percussionist playing with the Berlin Philharmonic, Midori Takada, found her creative ambitions looking further afield. Her ideas brought her home to Japan, then peculating with new notions of what avant-garde and experimental music could be, to form The Mkwaju Ensemble with fellow percussionist Junko Arase and Yoji Sadanari. The project quickly recorded two astounding LPs in 1981 – …
Les Soleils De L'Ile De Pâques
Collector Edition. Silver Procédé Héliophore sleeve, made with the original Prospective 21e Siècle covers (the legendary series devoted to electroacoustic and avant-garde music curated by François Bayle and Pierre Henry begun in 1967). Limited to 100 copies. Previously unavailable and mind-blowing film scores by the late French composer and electronic music pioneer Bernard Parmegiani. Both drawn up for motion pictures by director Pierre Kast, 1972’s Les Soleils de L’île de Pâques were far ahead …
Planetarium
Post-Nuclear Mind Music? Lizard Strategies? Void Spirit...? These bizarre titles are just a few of the self-coined terms that Australian electronic musician Ian MacFarlane has conjured to represent his eccentric sonic world. An artist whose unique style of electronic experimentalism has balanced dangerously close to the edge of popular convention, existing outside the mainstream and extending well beyond the fringe of any sanctioned independent scene. A futurist outsider whose extraordina…
Cutheart
**Incredible pioneering recording of extended synthesiser and percussion technique from the Australian experimental underground. Edition of 500** Welcome to the strange musical world of Tolley & Dara, an experimental duo whose incredible music held a marginal yet vital position on the fringe of the Australian music industry during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Consisting of jazz bassist and synthesist David Tolley and percussionist Dure Dara, their union was a relationship of romance and inten…
Discreet Music
Brian Eno's pioneering Ambient album from 1975 re-pressed for 2018. Standard 1 LP version. While his earlier work with Robert Fripp on ‘No Pussyfooting’ and several selections from his own ‘Another Green World’ feature similar ideas, ‘Discreet Music’ marked a clear step toward the ambient aesthetic Eno would later codify with 1978's ‘Ambient 1: Music for Airports.’The inspiration for this album began when Eno was hospitalised after an accident. Whilst bed-ridden and listening to a record of eigh…
Ambient 1 (Music For Airports)
Brian Eno's Ambient album from 1982. Standard 1 LP version.. Though not the earliest entry in the genre (which Eno makes no claim to have invented), ‘Ambient 1 (Music For Airports)’ was the first album ever to be explicitly labelled ‘ambient music’. Eno had previously created similarly quiet, unobtrusive music on albums ‘Evening Star’, ‘Discreet Music’, and Harold Budd's ‘The Pavilion of Dreams’ (which he produced), but this was the first album to give it precedence as a cohesive concept. He gav…
Made In Spain
Edition of 300 copies. Official reissue of this experimental industrial electronic classic originally released by Discos Esplendor Geométrico in 1987. "After 41 years you should know De Fabriek means The Factory, a name not chosen because of a love for Andy Warhol or the UK label of the same name (which hardly existed at the time De Fabriek started), but because of what a factory represents; there are workers, creating a small portion of the final product. In the early days these workers were a …
Monster Movie
Exact LP repro edition of The Can iconic hi-energy debut LP, privately self released on their own Music Factory imprint in 1969. A grey-area edition of this stone classic. "Though Monster Movie was the first full-length album in what would become a sprawling and often genre-defining discography, Can were on a level well ahead of the curve even in their most formative days. Recorded and released in 1969, Monster Movie bears many of the trademarks that Can would explore as they went on, as well as…
Captain Tarthopom
Souffle Continu Records present the first ever reissue of Jean Cohen-Solal's Captain Tarthopom, originally released in 1973. "Nothing can stop a flutist. We can do whatever we want, whatever we feel. My flute, is a mirror of myself. I express feelings more easily with the flute than with language." This is what Jean Cohen-Solal said on the cover of his first album released in 1972, Flûtes Libres (FFL 044LP), renowned for its adventurous overdubbing of alto, piccolo, and bass flutes, in treble or…
A Noise, A Sound
**100 Copies Colored (Silver/Gold) ** Soave present a reissue of Roberto Musci and Giovanni Venosta's A Noise, A Sound, originally released in 1992. The third episode of the alchemical association between Roberto Musci and Giovanni Venosta, reprinted for the first time. This work seems to be even more enigmatic than the previous ones. The "plunderphonics" style of the compositional process, significant to allowing a technical experimentalism of inexhaustible variety of materials used (compendium…
Birds Of Venezuela
Sub Rosa present a reissue of Jean C. Roché's Birds Of Venezuela, originally released in 1973. The bird on the cover is a potoo; this metal-looking bird is one of the sonorous curiosities of this mad nature, the sound that he produces essentially is a death song that David Toop heard on his 1978 expedition, but was unable to record, amazement playing its role.Jean C. Roché on his recordings: "The bird songs which I had recorded in the West Indies in 1969 made me inclined to find out more about t…
Visceral Underskinnings
35 years after the release of their critically acclaimed 1981 album, Vibrant Stapler Obscures Characteristic Growth (SR 428LP), the British dadaist group Hastings Of Malawi release their second album, an epic sound poem entitled Visceral Underskinnings. It is a 40-minute film without light that reflects on the human condition, on modern society, on the nature of telephony and electricity and an attempt to make sense of the world in which we live that provides no answers. It is a sound collage of…
Towers of Silence
“Towers of Silence”, released on Malaysian experimental music label LaoBan, features Malaysian saxophonist Yong Yandsen and Tokyo-based Australian drummer Darren Moore. Recorded at GOK Sound studio in October 2017, “Towers of Silence” points to a distillation of Yong and Moore's individual sounds, where ghost tones and sounds of unknown origins create rarefied space. “In the days of my youth, I often saw saxophonists as obstacles since I wanted hear more and more guitar playing. For the same rea…
Africa Oscura
**Edition of 500 copies, killer afro-dark electronics masterwork** Recorded by composer and multi-instrumentalist Giuliano Sorgini between 1974 and 1976 in his studio in Prati district in Rome, a stone’s throw from Italian television offices, Africa Oscura is a set of tracks inspired by the wildest and most obscure secrets of those lands, intended to be the background of some tv documentaries.Some tracks were recorded during the same session of Zoo Folle, the album widely recognised as his maste…