Best of 2023
Quartz Mirliton Cassettes
Biggest Tip! Quartz-Mirliton Cassettes has been among the most obscure of 1970s experimental music labels. This forthcoming VOD release, presented in two boxes, throws light on this mysterious cassette venture, its context and associated recordings. Closely associated with the London Musicians Collective, Quarz was launched by Paul Burwell and David Toop in 1977. Produced in tiny editions with handmade covers, the cassettes largely documented live sessions and field recordings made by a close ne…
Electroacoustic Works 1960-80
Super Tip! Last copies... Anestis Logothetis (1921-1994) is known as one of the leading pioneers of 20th century composition. His graphic notation system, developed around 1958, is a milestone in the evolution of musical notation. Logothetis employs this system to different ways of imprinting the contemporary sound on the score in order to express the sense of space in musical notation and redefine the roles of the composer, the performer and the audience, during the composition and performanc…
EX HK
** Edition limited to 150 copies ** While preparing a new edition of Anton Bruhin works in 2008, Alga Marghen discovered some mysterious tapes by Hans Krüsi. Fascinated by the raw and brute contents of those sounds, mixing field recordings of insects, sheep and distant bells with primitive chanting, percussive noises and distorted radio folk songs, Alga Marghen started to conceive one of the most obscure editions in his catalog, an LP to be issued in collaboration with the Swiss Kunstmuseum des…
Japanese Cassette
** Much-Needed Repress, Red Vinyl ** Tom Recchion is a legendary character. He is a world-famous art director, a founding member of the L.A.F.M.S., and was even the drummer for Sonic Youth for a brief period. Since the '70s, Tom has been creating screwed-up music in a dizzying array of formats, from large fully-clothed ensembles to buck naked solo explorations. The Japanese Cassette album falls into the latter category, and it is a head spinning doozy. The music here was originally created in 19…
Winter Songs, Wedding Songs
Biggest Tip! ** 250 copies. Deluxe LP comes complete with a 20pp booklet * The long-anticipated LP of folk songs from Ukraine’s Mykolaiv region — one of the worst affected by Russia’s invasion. - The Black Sea folklore of Mykolaiv is a women’s history in song: neglected by folklorists and ethnologists for the area’s late settlement and mixed ethnic composition. This LP corrects that oversight.
Collected over the last decade by the young musician and ethnographer, Tetiano Chukno, these recording…
Frans Zwartjes (2LP)
** Numbered + handmade in an edition of 300 copies only; 180gr 2xLP vinyl in custom-made screen-printed outer ** Frans Zwartjes’ studio remains untouched since his passing in 2017. In early 2023, we returned to the studio and discovered a trunk of unlabelled 3/4 inch tapes, containing completely unheard music by Zwartjes. These works, largely synthesiser-based improvisations for films either unmade or unfinished, were played and recorded by Frans Zwartjes between the late 1960s, through his most…
Senderos de Luz Y Sombras
A 16-channel piece inspired by astrophysics, the mystery of the pre-Big Bang era and some of the uncanny motions of the unconscious mind, where strangeness meets the ordinary.
Pokkeherrie
Emerging out of Amsterdam's vibrant squat scene in 1979, The Ex – a name chosen for the ease and speed with which it could be spray-painted onto a wall – have for four decades been an entirely self-sustaining musical entity, charting a course through the global underground with a spirit of freedom and radical exploration. On 1985's Pokkeherrie (Dutch for "terrible noise"), The Ex return to the more stripped-down instrumentation on their early LPs. A key lineup change would also see the arrival o…
Zuckerzeit
Cluster was the pioneering German duo of Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius. Formed on the cusp of the 1970s, they were a part of West Germany's nascent Kosmische Musik scene. The group would use restrained improvisational techniques similar to Gruppo Nuova Consonanza, working with both electric and acoustic instruments (organ, guitar, tone generators, cello, etc.) to create a singular sound that Julian Cope called "a huge beating heart, planet-sized and awesome."
Following the release of…
Sounds While Waiting
Sounds While Waiting documents the latest organ works by composer and musician Ellen Arkbro – following her phenomenal debut, 2017's For Organ And Brass, and the more recent Chords. Recorded at a centuries-old church in Unnaryd, Sweden in June 2020, these pieces reveal the enchanting qualities of sustained harmonic sound, how patterns of listening dissolve and emerge as textured space. On opening track "Changes," long radiant tones ebb and flow like divine breaths, while "Leaving Dreaming" build…
Mademoiselle Anne Sanglante Ou Notre Nymphomanie Auréolé
This is a masterpiece album released in 1993 on Alchemy Records by Masonna, a solo project of Mazo Yamazaki who is acclaimed as one of the leading artists of Japanoise along with Merzbow and Emergency Staircase. It is finally being revived on vinyl! Cascades of electronic noise, a psychedelic touch and vocal belching mixed together constitute the ingredients of Mademoiselle Anne Sanglante Ou Notre Nymphomanie Auréolé, the double-barreled name for Masonna. Maso Yamazaki founded his project in 198…
Tonic 19-01-2001 (LP)
Celebrating its one hundredth release, Black Truffle is honoured to present a major archival discovery: a stunning document of the only performance by the trio of Tony Conrad, Arnold Dreyblatt and Jim O’Rourke. Across a two-night programme organised by David Weinstein at legendary New York experimental venue Tonic in January 2001, Conrad, Dreyblatt and O’Rourke presented individual projects before performing a collaborative set each night, the first with members of Dreyblatt’s ensemble and the s…
Scheiße ’71 (LP)
Following on from the Bergisch-Brandenburgisches Quartett’s anarchic Live ’82 (BT095), Black Truffle continues its deep dive into the archives of legendary drummer/accordionist/photographer/composer/conceptual prankster Sven-Åke Johansson with Scheisse ’71. Recorded in November 1971 during the Berliner Jazztage at a heavy-hitting concert that also included the Spontaneous Music Ensemble and groups led by Peter Brötzmann, Manfred Schoof, and Masahiko Sato, Scheisse ’71 is the only document of a w…
II (LP)
From the London based imprint, Hegoa, comes one of the most beautiful and striking records we've heard all year, the Basque trio, Carcáscara’s second outing “II”. Issued in a very limited vinyl edition of 300 copies, its elegant arrangements of tonality, texture, and cascading arpeggiations and drones, sculpt a stunning, acoustic middle ground between a number of Spanish folk traditions, American primitivism, and musical minimalism. A likely strong contender for more than a few year-end lists.
Inspiración
This top-notch spiritual jazz album from Argentina will leave fans of Pharoah Sanders and John Coltrane astonished. Recorded in 1975 and still surprisingly off the radar, this is one of the deepest jazz albums from South America. Inspiración is the meeting of two generations united by music: Ara Tokatlian and Guillermo Bordarampé, members of the influential 70s rock band Arco Iris (which Tokatlian cofounded with the now Oscar award-winning composer Gustavo Santaolalla), join forces with Enrique …
Nana Vasconcelos Nelson Angelo - Novelli
Cult album of Brazilian music finally reissued. Official reissue of this real tour de force of Brazilian creativity, where the mighty Naná Vasconcelos is joined by his friends Nelson Angelo and Novelli (both members of the legendary Clube da Esquina) to create one of the greatest Brazilian albums ever recorded outside of Brazil. The three musicians grasp here for the kind of musical freedom that could then only be achieved outside of their country. A boundary-pushing experimentation that makes y…
Africadeus
Bomb! Spiritual, intimate and revolutionary, yet firmly rooted in Brazil's folklore. Africadeus was the breakthrough album of the mighty Naná Vasconcelos, in which he discovered the berimbau to the world and took the instrument to a universal level. Having played in the shadows for other artists such as Milton Nascimento, Gato Barbieri or Som Imaginario, Naná is here finally in the spotlight. Recorded in 1973 in France for Pierre Barouh's Saravah label, this is the album that definitely imprinte…
A Circle of Grey
Super tip! *150 copies limited edition* Xing presents the new LP A Circle of Grey by Valerio Tricoli, eleventh release of Xong collection - artist records. The release is on white vinyl, in a limited numbered edition of 150 copies. The collector's edition consists of 20 copies accompanied by a unique cassette tape loop, titled and signed by the artist: 20 short compositions, each developed from a different sonic fragment of the record.
A Circle of Grey is an electroacoustic composition blending …
Shortwave Encounters
* 400 copies, White Vinyl * Shortwave Encounters is Walter Maioli’s research on extraterrestrial sounds and radio communications started in Amsterdam during the orbital passage of the Comet Halley in 1986. This record is an imaginary interaction between a sender and a receiver, an attempt to create a logged communication between earth and space, combining radio eavesdropping and field-recordings as well as acoustic and electronic instruments, spanning from shells to bat calls, and from the ney f…
11 Dec 80
11 Dec 1980 is a two CD set containing Eliane Radigue's live performance of Chry-Ptus (1971), her first work for modular synthesizer, and the world premier of parts one and three of Triptych (1978). Triptych part 2 is also performed. Upon hearing these performances for the first time in many years Radigue declared them to be the best versions she'd ever heard. Radigue's sublime renderings of these major pieces are full of illusory stasis, slow change and dense, slow motion drone that has charact…