Best of 2019
Unlimited
Naphta was born in 1978 but differently from the most of other bands from Bologna (in the same manner of Confusional Quartet) at that time, they came up with a very peculiar jazz-rock formula mixed up with elements from the almost "out of time" progressive genre. The result was unsettling; their music was mostly improvised with no apparent distinctions between rhythm section and soloists, in fact everybody in the group could have taken a solo at any time but in close relation with the others. Al…
Re.Sort
Sora’s celestial 2003 Japanese electronica LP Re.Sort released on vinyl for the first time. Conceived by Sora aka Takeshi Kurosawa, Re.sort is a miracle of Japanese electronica. Widely unknown but very necessary. Fragments and textures playfully flirt with each other, bossa nova and jazz records float in the air, an old phonograph sits by the sea. Leftfield that feels like a home away, where joyful nothings are everything. Sweet minimalism and micro melodies. Kyoto composer and producer learned …
Petra
Last copies. The first time Maryanne Amacher's music has ever been available on vinyl. Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009) was a composer of large-scale fixed-duration sound installations and a highly original thinker in the areas of perception, sound spatialization, creative intelligence, and aural architecture. She is frequently cited as a pioneer of what has come to be called "sound art", although her thought and creative practice consistently challenge key assumptions about the capacities and limit…
Symphonic Songs
Double LP on black vinyl. Recorded between the release of Sand (1977) and Lost Secrets (1981), Symphonic Songs is a formerly unreleased work that chronicles the dynamic shift and development in experimental Swedish composer Ragnar Grippe’s canon. Following his seminal release Sand in 1977, Swedish experimental composer Ragnar Grippe worked on various art and performance commissions, often returning to Stockholm during the summer months to focus his efforts on his compositional practice. It was t…
Changes: 64 Studies for 6 Harps
James Tenney, for almost the entirety of his career, was one of the great, unsung giants of the American musical avant-garde - an artist’s artist, whose towering contribution and influence was everywhere - equal to Feldman and Cage, but who, like Nancarrow and Partch before him, was a maverick - radical to the core, refusing to play by the rules, and thus suffered at that fate’s all too predictable hand. Since his death in 2006, his legacy in devoted hands, recognition has slowly begun to grow, …
Processions
*Reduced price. Last copies* Besom Presse is pleased to announce the July 2019 release of Processions, a double LP by composer, performer, and instrument-maker Werner Durand, with Amelia Cuni and Victor Meertens. Recorded and mixed in his home studio in Berlin from 2012-16, Durand offers four just-intoned drone works distilling global influence into compositions of singular beauty. Performed on an unlikely array of instruments including various self-made wind and reed instruments, sarod, mirlito…
Neighborhoods
Ernest Hood’s Neighborhoods was released some two decades after the Portland, Oregon born and raised musician’s first forays into field recordings. These very recordings, and those captured over intervening years, define the universal sound and aural images of childhood, a theme memorialized by Hood’s privately-pressed opus of 1975.Sprawling through a haze of zither, synthesizer melodies, and foraged pedestrian sound, Neighborhoods is both a score and documentary composed and directed by Hood to…
The Fire Each Time
This landmark production from the renowned Polish label is finally here! Not Two Records presents, "The Fire Each Time," a 6 CD boxset of recordings from the DKV Trio with Joe McPhee as a guest, and dedicated to James Baldwin. The music was recorded during the quartet's tour in Europe which took place in November of 2017, and at shows in Chicago and Milwaukee from December of that year. These performances are historic in many respects: the DKV Trio (with Hamid Drake [drums], Kent Kessler [bass]…
Agraka
Agrakal is the trio of Marco Colonna (clarinet), Augusti Fernandez (piano), and Zlatko Kaucic (percussions), three musicians able to cross cultures and attitudes and develop a new language of abstract collective jazz, Fernandez being the pivot point between the trio, having previously recorded and toured as a duo with both Colonna and Kaucic.
Je Suis Un Sauvage / Le Moral Necessaire
A single produced by the highly-revered Saravah label at the time, featuring the Art Ensemble of Chicago backing the poetry of the little-remembered Alfred Panou, is not as well-known as the label's other releases. Seen in the 1967 film Weekend by Jean-Luc Godard, Alfred Panou who is of mixed Benin-Togolese origin, already had a career as an actor in political theater when, pushed by producer Pierre Barouh, he recorded two of his texts concerning Black Power. Panou's prose is one of the first, i…
Medio Occidente
**Reissued at last, a dream come true!** As we’ve said in the past, it’s a great moment for reissues of ambitious, historical gestures of Italian music. Long neglected and overlooked, one after the other these artifacts have emerged from the shadows, entirely rewriting what so many of us thought we knew. Now, at long last, before us rest another piece in the puzzle - the first ever vinyl reissue of one of the most sought after artifacts from the 80s scene - Francesco Messina’s legendary, Medio O…
River Without Banks
Enchanting, gorgeous works for solo piano, strings, organ and Eastern percussion by preeminent composer Leo Svirsky. Seeming to unravel and weave simultaneously in mid-air, ‘River Without Banks’ is a significant new opus that taps into a rich vein somewhere between Charlemagne Palestine’s sustained ecstasies, the phasing pulses of Steve Reich, and the beatific glory of Alice Coltrane... ““How to begin? No beginning... never ending reverberation,” Antoine Beuger writes in the accompanying notes …
Das Typische Ding - Reenactment I
Edition of 400 copies. LP box with 31 sound recordings of dildos and vibrators - A noble, stamped and numbered binder made of bookcardboard with 31 illustrations by Tabea Blumenschein and 31 reviews by Katrin Kämpf on natural paper - Infotext by Wolfgang Müller in German and English. Die Tödliche Doris are back, no kiddin': in the sound spectrum of thirty-one contemporary dildos and vibrators, we are residing in 2019 with a resurrection of The Deadly Doris. She now appears to us as a performer, …
Duos : Europa · America · Japan
Very last copies **Edition of 200 copies, clear vinyl, it comes with a 4-page insert. This is the fourth release in BeJazz reissue series of long-lost classics from the legendary vaults of FMP Records, presented in restored original packaging and newly remastered for optimal sound ** The masterpiece of Peter Kowald, one of the great spirits of Free Music, and pinnacle of the 20th century Improvisation canon. From the legendary vaults of FMP Productions, presented in restored original slipcase pa…
An Eternal Moment
Edition of 300 copies. Lovely archival recording by this incredible due comprised of Midori Takada - percussion and Kang Tae Hwan - alto saxophone. Recorded live on the 14nd March 1995 at Café Amores, Hofu, Yamaguchi, Japan by Takeo Suetomi. Concert produced by Takeo Suetomi. Mastered by Arūnas Zujus at MAMAstudios. Photos by Akihiro Matsumoto. Design by Oskaras Anosovas.
Hamdelaneh
CD edition. Another greeat release from Dark Companion Records. "Chance doesn’t exist. I met Markus Stockhausen after inviting him and his wife to “Musiche Nuove In Piacenza” festival in autumn 2018. Immediately I felt a strong empathy towards him. That doesn’t happen very often. I knew his work and had always admired it, especially the spontaneous compositions he performs and the way his unique talent blossoms in these situations.We talked at lunch and I dared propose to him to record an album …
Bamboo Music
Stemming from Jacobus Derwort’s 1987 solo debut tape ‘Bamboo’, this expanded and reshuffled compilation of ‘Bamboo Music’ celebrates more than 30 years of J. Derwort’s deeply focussed yet dilated and richly spirited recordings which have come to define an etheric strand of late ‘80s ambient pursuits. Pairing his gentle, breezy gestures with spongiform layers of subbass, colourful canopies of bird calls and trickling, fluid electronics, the recordings speak to a bucolic and blessed conception of …
Mirror
Paradigm Discs present a reissue of Amnon Raviv's Mirror, originally released in Israel in 1983 and only available in a handmade edition of just 50 copies. As such, this edition is the first widely available issue of this LP, giving it a chance to reach an audience beyond the 50 hardened collectors who got to hear this strange experimental record back in the '80s. There's nothing else quite like it from that era, let alone from Israel, although it does have some parallels with earlier avant-gard…
The Aerosol Grey Machine
Esoteric Recordings is proud to announce the release of a new re-mastered limited edition boxed set of the classic debut album by Van Der Graaf Generator, The Aerosol Grey Machine. Van Der Graaf Generator were true pioneers of so-called Progressive rock, and their impressive career spanning five decades features many ground-breaking works. Always progressing stylistically in the true sense of the word, Van Der Graaf Generator’s music remains inspirational. Formed in Manchester University in 1967…
Hyperthalamus
This is the first official reissue on vinyl of ultra rare legendary album "Hyperthalamus" of Hamburg group Dennis. Dennis were a kind of session group including a collection of musicians from Tomorrow´s Gift, Thirsty Moon, Xhol, playing free-rock to enthusiastic festival goers (according to A crack in the cosmic egg). Leading member was Frumpy drummer Carsten Bohn (the band was namedafter his son). But keyboarder Manne Rürup (of Tomorrow´s Gift fame), Michael Kobs and Willi Pape (of Thirsty Moon…