Best of 2022
Slowdown Records Box Sets bundle
2025 Stock, very last copies. "Merzbow's unpublished/excavated archive series by Slowdown Records began to be released in 2018, and so far 15 chapters have been published. This "35 CD Box" contains chapters 11-15 of this archival series, with the addition of "2017-2020" (5CD), a collection of five original Merzbow albums released on Slowdown Records from 2017 to 2020. These chapters are presented in chronological order of when the recordings were made, and each chapter was compiled with some con…
Reverberations: Tape & Electronic Music 1961-1970
11 CD set adapted from 12 CD edition. All tracks included. This dense 11-disc retrospective of Pauline Oliveros' early and unreleased electronic work includes her very first piece made for tape in 1961. Organized chronologically, this set not only documents Pauline's earliest electronic music but it also functions as an early history of electronic music itself. Follow as she participates in the establishment of the legendary San Francisco Tape Music Center and then moves to University Of Toronto…
Irida Records: Hybrid Musics from Texas and Beyond, 1979–1986
An incredible set of vinyl reissues explores the unfolding sonic fiction of Texan composer Jerry Hunt and others affiliated with his Irida label.
Zouroku No Kibyou
The first album by the most extreme noise project to ever come out of Osaka, now in a second deluxe edition that borders on insanity: natural birch wooden box, hand-numbered to 99 copies, color print lid reproducing the iconic cover art by manga master Hideshi Hino. Inside: the LP, a 40-page book of raw concert photos, a cassette of six rare studio tracks from April and June 1980 - Hijokaidan's primal first breaths - four postcards, a massive poster, a live photo book, liner notes by Jojo Hirosh…
Improvisation Sep. 1975
**Ltd. 300 copies, perfect replica of the original packaging and newly remastered for optimal sound.** Toshi Ichiyanagi, Michael Ranta and Takehisa Kosugi originally got together in the summer of 1975 for an open-air concert in Sapporo. The concert felt like a great success but was unfortunately not recorded. As the desire arose to record together, they managed to arrange a studio session in the NHK Studio in Tokyo, with presence of sound engineers. What was supposed to be a soundcheck for this …
Eclipse
Masayuki Takayanagi was one of the truly iconoclastic musicians to emerge from Japan, or anywhere else, in the 20th Century. Though he won acclaim in the 1950s and '60s as a master of the electric guitar and jazz improvisation, Takayanagi was a restless spirit, deeply engaged with the era's new movements in contemporary art, music, literature, and philosophy. His work, beginning in the late 1960s placed him on the leading edge of these developments; he began expanding on the most radical element…
Kyo Mu / Hochtöner
Tip! ‘Kyo Mu’ and ‘Hochtöner’ both reveal a mesmerizing symbiosis of innovative sound exploration and visionary interior music, a sublime compound of fine-drawn intricate arrangements skillfully projected in space and time, or perhaps beyond space and time. Johannes Fritsch (1941–2010) was an award-winning composer, musician, publisher, studio owner, author and music teacher. He studied viola and composition with Bernd Alois Zimmermann and was member of the Stockhausen Ensemble from 1964 to 1970…
Jacques Bekaert (LP)
Edition of 500. ‘A Late Lunch’ is the soundtrack to Akiko Iimura’s eponymous movie realized in 1978. It is based on acoustic instruments and field recordings, brilliantly reconfigured and mixed by Jaques Bekaert to create a surreal, immersive soundscape. The technique used includes superposition and speed change of recordings, radical sound effects and juxtaposition of sounds. The players were prominent musicians of the 1970’s, including Maggi Payne, George Lewis, David Rosenboom and Blue Gene T…
Atlantic Crossing
La Scie Doree returns with an absolute stunner, the LP “Atlantic Crossing”, a reissue of a rare privately released cassette recorded by the Bayerischer Rundfunk, from 1988
The Body Is A Message Of The Universe
Limited edition reissue of 1000 copies. Pressed on black vinyl for better sound quality. Includes an insert. Reissue of this rare and unusually dreamy electronic ambient new age album. Originally created and released in a small edition in Japan back in 1987 by the mysterious musician / magician Shiho. The Body Is A Message Of The Universe features floating shimmering synthesizer textures. The Body Is A Message Of The Universe features floating shimmering synthesizer textures. It’s unique and ext…
A Group for Experimental Music
In the mid 1960’s, there was a collective of contemporary musicians in Osaka, called Art Zyklus. Because Hajime Yamashita, one of the core members, had sold a part of his privately stored sound source over the Internet, the whole picture of amazing and completely unknown activities was revealed. The release compiled works created by Art Zyklus as well as Yamashita. Worth mentioning is that ‘Music for Electric Metronomes’ by Toshi Ichiyanagi was premiered in Japan. Apart from that, the fact that …
Blue Notes for Johnny
Otoroku is proud to present the first vinyl reissue of "Blue Notes for Johnny" - a defining statement by one of the greatest ensembles in the history of jazz. Recorded in mid-1987 by Blue Notes - then reduced to the trio of Dudu Pukwana on alto sax, Louis Moholo-Moholo on drums and Chris McGregor on piano - it encounters the band 25 years after their founding embarking on an inward meditation through collective music making dedicated to Johnny Dyani, their former bandmate and friend.
Blue Notes…
Blue Notes for Mongezi
Otoroku is proud to present the first vinyl reissue of "Blue Notes for Mongezi", one of the most passionate celebrations of a life in music ever laid to tape. Recorded in late 1975 by Blue Notes, then reduced to a quartet - Dudu Pukwana on alto sax, whistle, percussion, and vocals; Johnny Dyani on bass, bells, and vocals; Louis Moholo-Moholo on drums, percussion, and vocals; and Chris McGregor on piano, and percussion - and issued the following year by Ogun, the album is a kairos; the first com…
To Call Out Into The Night
Full recording of one of the most engaging and beguiling Late Junction live sessions we’ve ever heard - the one off first meeting between Korean multi-instrumentalist Park Jiha and writer and performer Roy Claire Potter. Park Jiha plays the saenghwang, a Korean mouth organ which she blows in long multiphonics to set pace for Potter’s words. Together they unfurl a scene slowly in front of you, rich and focused, shifting your field of vision and drawing you in, elsewhere. It’s impossible not to f…
Neighborhoods
2022 Repress expected to ship early November - 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 …
American Rituals
Tip! On the outskirts of late 1970s Olympia, Washington, something stirs, sings, and breathes. Cheri Knight, a music composition student at the Evergreen State College, is developing her practice in a quaint but adequately equipped campus recording studio, amalgamating with the sonic timbre of the surrounding time, space, and place, while devoting to her own inner maxims. At once performative and meditative, electronic and organic, collaborative and self-contained, Cheri’s early compositions are…
Nowhere In The Night
Psychic Ills and Gibby Haynes’ Nowhere in the Night arrives from somewhere sometime ago, a document of sound bending, twisting, and stretching with the joy of collaboration and untethered aspiration.
Psychic Ills, then the trio Tres Warren, Elizabeth Hart, and Brian Tamborello, first intersected musically with Gibby Haynes, then and forever the founding member of Butthole Surfers, when the two groups with Texas roots toured extensively in 2009, and next when the Ills invited Haynes to contribute…
Quincicasm (LP)
Saved from the dust of time, here is a truly rare and obscure piece of vinyl by one of the most enigmatic bands in the whole history of British Progressive Jazz. Originally released in 200 copies in 1973 and reissued here for the first time, Quincicasm's only release stands as a brilliant document of the 70's British underground electric jazz scene. Somewhere at the crossing of open form jazz and art rock explorations.
Ken Eley - saxophone, Dick Pearce - flugelhorn, Julian Marshall -vibraphone. …
Il Terzo Reich
** Edition of 400 copies ** Xing presents the artist record Il Terzo Reich by Romeo Castellucci and Scott Gibbons, fourth release in the XONG series, accompanied by an insert that collects on a long strip of black paper an extract from the flow of words screened in the homonymous stage work.
Il Terzo Reich is the image and sound of an inculcated communication. The nouns of the Italian language flash on a black screen, about fourteen thousand words. Here, a language-machine devours entire spheres…
Up Your Sleeve (LP)
** Edition of 500 copies with a numbered 4-page insert ** Previously released in 1980 on David Toop’s Quartz label at a time when improvised music in London was settling into a long spell of excellence. The players here are Steve Beresford, Peter Cusack, Terry Day and David Toop. Terry had been a member of The People Band in the 60s, one of the groups forming part of the first wave of British improvisation. The rest of the group could be regarded as pioneers of a second generation of improvisers…