Best of 2023
Canti E Vedute Del Giardino Magnetico
2023 Repress American composer and multi-instrumentalist Alvin Curran has remained one of the great emblems of experimental music for the last half-century. In 1966, along with Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum, Curran co-founded Musica Elettronica Viva, a seminal gesture in collective free improvisation. In the early '70s, his solo work would become a crucial bridge between minimalist traditions on both sides of the Atlantic. Canti E Vedute Del Giardino Magnetico, Curran's solo debut, was…
Children of the Forest
Black Editions Archive is ecstatic to announce the next chapter in the Milford Graves Archive series, the double LP Children of the Forest, previously unreleased 1976 sessions with Hugh Glover and Arthur Doyle that re-write the book on Milford Graves' ensemble music of the 1970s. Graves recorded these sessions himself in his legendary Queens basement laboratory and workshop in the months immediately leading up to the March 1976 session that produced what many consider his most iconic album, Bäbi…
The Complete Obscure Records Collection
** CD edition ** We’re thrilled to announce the first ever box set gathering the entire ten album collection of Brian Eno’s Obscure Records, originally issued between 1975 and 1978. Containing the debut releases of Gavin Bryars, Michael Nyman, John Adams, David Toop, Max Eastley, Harold Budd, Christopher Hobbs, Jan Steele, and Simon Jeffes / The Penguin Café Orchestra, in addition to important works by John Cage, Tom Phillips, and John White, not to mention Eno’s seminal “Discreet Music”, the la…
Bioelectrical Music
We have not had a physical release by composer and ecologist Michael Prime since the release of Borneo in 2007. This new 3CD set brings us up to date with a series of recordings from across the years. It also sees a new refinement in his working practice as well as a new extension to his original name. Bioelectrical Music by Michael Allen Z Prime consists of recordings that fall into 3 defined categories - Bioelectrical Compositions, Bioelectrical Field Recordings and Bioelectrical Installations…
The Sound Pool
Pioneers of live electronics, found sound and urban environment-as-instrument, Musica Elettronica Viva created suites that were as imaginary as imaginative.
Extensions
McCoy Tyner looked towards Africa on his stunning 1970 album Extensions, a far-reaching exploration of Black identity that marked the masterful pianist’s fifth recording for Blue Note Records. After leaving John Coltrane’s band Tyner had moved from Impulse to Blue Note and made his enduring post-bop classic The Real McCoy in 1967. In the following years Tyner steadily expanded his musical scope: writing for a 9-piece ensemble on Tender Moments, exploring the textures of a piano-vibes led quartet…
Indefinitive Atmosphere
Giovanni Tommaso is the greatest Italian Jazz bassist and founder and member of the most important ever Italian Jazz Rock ensembles, the Perigeo band. Sonor entirely restored the full session from the original tapes found, and digitally remastered the sound for a greater sound experience, chasing the original analog source
Outspan No 1
Tip! It's hard to imagine how this record -- and it's mate, Outspan No 2 -- managed to remain more or less out of circulation from the CD era onward. Outspan No 1 is nothing less than an ideal distillation of the broad approach to sound creation utilized by the three-ring circus that is Brötzmann, Van Hove, and Bennink, here with the added bonus of Mangelsdorff. Two short numbers, two long, too perfect.
Long Gradus
** 4xCD edition, housed in a rigid outer slipcase Box with a 16 page booklet, with 16 tracks and features all 4 interpretations of Long Gradus, spread across 4 discs** A new longform commissioned work for any ensemble of four similar instruments. The definitive string quartet version of 'Long Gradus' is available as a 2LP and CD, and the collection of all four arrangements (strings, woodwinds, brass & organ, choir & electronics) is presented as the 'Long Gradus: Arrangements' 4CD set.
'Long Grad…
Eric Dolphy
**English edition. 272 pp., Large format. Hardcover** Some think Eric Dolphy was an otherworldly apparition. His stellar career lasted little more than 5 years. He was one of the most important pioneers of the jazz avant-garde of the 1960s. As a multi-instrumentalist, Dolphy played flute, bass clarinet, alto saxophone and clarinet. He also composed and arranged. His brilliant solos in performances with the Mingus Band, among others, are milestones in jazz and music history. Guillaume Belhomme t…
Musique de Courts Métrages, Music of Patrick Bokanowski’s Short Films
From Invisibilia Editions comes a brand-new release of incredible electroacoustic works by the French composer Michèle Bokanowski. Building on the back of their 2019 release, "La Plage", and Recollection GRM's LP, "Rhapsodia / Battements Solaires", issued earlier this year, "Musique de Courts Métrages, Music of Patrick Bokanowski's Short Films", gathers more than 50 years of output across two mesmerizing CDs. Traversing musique concrète, stunning ambient efforts, and brilliant electroacoustic hy…
I Tarantolati
Huge Tip! **300 copies, comes with a printed insert** The second LP in Black Sweat’s latest batch, ‘I Tarantolati’ the first outing of Antonio Infantino with his band, Il Gruppo Di Tricarico, while very different in its musical approach, belongs to the same wild ferment around Folk Studio in Rome, and was issued by the Folkstudio label the year prior in 1975.
Antonio Infantino was poet and singer, who operated in circles connected to Beat literature and Italian performance and gestural music cir…
Jazz Al Folkstudio
Huge Tip! **300 copies, comes with a printed insert** Back in 2021, we bore witness to the reissue, by Dialogo, of the Rome based ensemble Spirale’s lone 1974 self-titled LP, a towering obscurity of 1970s Italian jazz. Made of up Gaetano Delfini (wind instruments, vocals, percussion), Giancarlo Maurino (saxophone, flute, percussion), Corrado Nofri (piano, marimba, mbira, siren, Jew’s harp), Giuseppe Caporello (contrabass, guitar, percussion) and Giampaolo Ascolese (drums), the band ranks among t…
Half Dead Ganja Music
Platform 23 Records’ meandering, and sporadic journey continues, digging up archival treasures of known and unknown music sonics. The label’s close association with Paris’ based ‘ethno-industrialists’ Vox Populi! continues, here returning to their most heralded and possibly cohesive album, in Half Dead Ganga Music.
The beautifully apt title precedes their most intense trip, pushing the boundaries away from the percussive psychedelic of albums ‘Mystcitismes’ (1985) and Aither’ (1989) to create …
Femenine
"Femenine stages Eastman’s shaping and buildingof the black queer masculine form – caught notnecessarily between two poles of gender, but withhis work constantly driving his own self-making.He was an inventor and sculptor, reminiscent of Jean Tinguely and Harry Bertoia. Clanging, noisy, joyful, and playful in turn, the sound sculptureemerges from these primary elements, mouldingand pressing, jiggering and jolleying, through alinear flow of sound and insistent chordalpunctuations. The contin…
Out there in the middle of nowhere
*Limited edition of 500 copies* Experimental musician John Also Bennett’s latest full-length emerged from a bicoastal pandemic road trip through the badlands of South Dakota. Moved by the scale and complexity of the landscape – “remnants of an ancient seafloor mixed with the ash of a volcanic eruption, eroded over millennia and now resembling the tangled folds of earth’s brain” – he sculpted a series of stark, microtonal arrangements using a 1940’s Oahu lap steel guitar, a Yamaha SY77 multi-timb…
Duo in Concert
Frozen Reeds is proud to present the only recorded duo playing of two legendary musical figures.
“This is one of those moments that we’re always hoping for, and it's so rare. And it's so hard to talk about, because it's so beautiful. It's like you're seeing some new species of plant that you never knew existed or something.” – Bill Frisell
Building Something Beautiful For Me
*2024 stock* In 1990, the composer Julius Eastman quietly passed away, out of the spotlight, a young man. By his death substance-addicted, homeless and broke, he was unforgivably overlooked in his lifetime. Still, the legacy of creative work he leaves is far more befitting to celebration than destitution. Only a portion of his music remains - a deeply regrettable sidenote to an already heartbreaking story - but this work represents a glorious and beautifully hued depiction of a composer totally …
A Day Of The Sun
** Black Vinyl edition ** A spiritual jazz masterpiece full of poetry by two geniuses of the Japanese musical scene. Masahiko Togashi and Isao Suzuki, pivotal figures in jazz with a unique talent and sensitivity that transcends conventional jazz forms and styles. In addition to being skilled performers they demonstrate extraordinary compositional talent that transcends their sensibilities and wisdom of more conventional jazz.
They are together a wonderful combination of techniques, but without …
Il Calore Animale + Zoomachia
Ginevra Bompiani (w/ Caterina Barbieri and Tomoko Sauvage) - Il Calore Animale / Francesco Cavaliere - Zoomachia Disc 1
After some brilliant releases by Soundwalk Collective over the last few years, Dischi Fantom returns with the first two installments of their new Sussurra Luce series, Ginevra Bompiani’s ‘Il Calore Animale’ (Animal Warmth), combining texts by the writer with new musical pieces by Caterina Barbieri and Tomoko Sauvage, and Francesco Cavaliere’s ‘Zoomachia Disc 1’. Bridging the …