Best of 2023
Underground Overlays From The Cistern Chapel
"This is where you have been forever and will always be forever." Stuart Dempster, speaking about what it feels like to be in a cistern where time seems to stop. Stuart Dempster created Underground Overlays From The Cistern Chapel in the same cistern where the legendary Deep Listening album was recorded. Reverberating with powerful, deep tones, this double LP is intended as a companion to the acclaimed Oliveros/Dempster/Panaiotis album Deep Listening. Underground Overlays From The Cistern Chapel…
The Devil's Interval (Alienation)
A visionary artefact from the mind of Steven Stapleton under the guise of Nurse With Wound, drawing some of the best of the project's recent output back into the light, Vasopressin delivers the first ever vinyl edition of "The Devil's Interval (Alienation)", comprising two stunning works of minimal, atmospheric experimentalism, that stand among the most striking and immersive to ever have been created by the project. A stunning and radical rethinking of the terms of ambient music, responding to …
The Weather Pieces
The set of The Weather Pieces are reflections on the perception of meteorological phenomena. The listener is immersed in a hybrid sound world, as the line between the live performer and the computer generated propositions becomes blurred. The musician follows a score that leaves room for interaction with the computer’s ever-changing proposals. The works also use the performer’s voice, using spoken texts to convey inner thoughts and feelings. Les si doux redoux for basset horn grew out of an…
Swing Bridge; Sizzles
This release brings together two works by Alvin Lucier centered on the pipe organ, a perfect instrument for Lucier’s compositional practice. Both are first recordings.“Swing Bridge” was commissioned by this record’s ensemble, the Australian Art Orchestra, for the Melbourne Town Hall Grand Organ. The score requires that specific pipes be removed from the organ and run into three specially constructed offset chests, each accommodating two pipes (six pitches total). These pipes are manipulated by t…
A Message From A Tribe Boxset
Super Tip! *Cover design B* Tribe’s inaugural release in 1972 would see three editions released in as many years. 1972’s first edition featured a photo of the ocean on the front, the following year’s second edition had a drawing of the Earth, while 1974’s third edition had a colorful illustration of Tribe founders Wendell Harrison and Phil Ranelin’s faces. Each version is unique.
A Message From The Tribe 1st version (LP + 7")
The inaugural release from Tribe is getting its first ever analog reis…
Innocent Canon
** Black Vinyl edition ** Original masters licensed by King Records Japan. Includes OBI and insert. 'Innocent Canon' is one of the hopelessly obscure Japanese underground albums that few people know about. It is a kind of unreleased delirious groovadelic soundtrack played by an acid-soaked Japanese big band with powerful drumming, heavy jazz fumes and delirious organ/guitar lines and luminary narration.Inomata was a well-known jazz musician at the time, but like many of his contemporaries, he w…
Outspan No 1 + 2
Tip! The two recent Outspan 1 & 2 in a (slightly discounted) bundle. Joining their longstanding dedication to the back catalog of the legendary German imprint, FMP, Cien Fuegos returns with the first ever reissues of two towering artefacts of European free jazz / improvisation from the 1970s, the quartet of Peter Brötzmann, Han Bennink, Albert Mangelsdorff, and Fred Van Hove’s Outspan No 1, and the trio of Peter Brötzmann, Han Bennink, and Fred Van Hove’s Outspan No 2. Both recorded live in 1974…
Story Of Wind Behind Left
** Black Vinyl edition ** Recorded in September 1975 at Columbia Studio, “Story Of Wind Behind Left” is a symphonic poem in the shape of a suite. On the album, Masahiko Togashi uses music to communicate the same feelings evoked by nature. The drummer demonstrates unique composition and performance skills in the way he imitates the sounds of nature or takes inspiration from nature itself to make music. With “Story Of Wind Behind Left” Masahiko Togashi revolutionized the Japanese free jazz scene,…
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 …
Orange Fish Tears
LP version. Eight-page booklet with rare and unpublished photos. Heavyweight 180-gram LP. In 1972, trumpeter Baikida Carroll and some of his colleagues from the Black Artists Group (more precisely saxophonist/flutist Oliver Lake, trombonist Joseph Bowie, drummer Charles "Bobo" Shaw and trumpeter Floyd LeFlore) took the advice of their friends in the Art Ensemble Of Chicago and left their native Missouri to come and discover the bright lights of Paris for themselves. The following year they would…
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…
Traveller Song / Thanksong
Black Truffle is pleased to announce its first release from celebrated London-based Canadian composer Cassandra Miller. Though her body of mature work stretches back almost twenty years, many listeners were introduced to Miller through the success of her astonishing 2015 Duet for Cello and Orchestra, which sets an imperturbable two-note cello part against a series of increasingly dense orchestrations of an Italian folk melody; in 2019, it was selected by The Guardian as one of the ‘best classica…
Outspan No 2
Tip! Recorded a month after Outspan No 1, this album offers up four more sonic delights from the core trio of Brötzmann, Van Hove, and Bennink. Rarely has free jazz/Euro improv/circus music/[your identifier here] sounded so unfettered and delightful -- adventurous without seeming self-serious, silly yet not without gravity. A must for any fan of these three maestros.
Tender Membranes
Tender Membranes is the the label’s first release from Swedish-Finnish sound artist and electro-acoustic composer Marja Ahti. Active for a decade in the Finnish underground music scene, in recent years Ahti has developed a distinctive approach to patiently unfolding electro-acoustic constructions, documented on a string of solo releases and collaborative projects with Judith Hamann and her husband Niko-Matti Ahti.
Working with concrete and instrumental sounds, field recordings, and electronics, …
Éliane Radigue: Occam Delta XV
Much-needed repress. "I was very honoured to receive this request from Quatuor Bozzini, whose immense talent I already knew. The first meeting was very warm, friendly and familiar, like a reunion of old friends after a long separation." —Éliane Radigue Thus began the collaboration between Quatuor Bozzini and Éliane Radigue. In the hospitable atmosphere of her apartment, the composer conveyed the intricacies of her sound to QB. Her entire career, Radigue has been dedicated to building a body of w…
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…
Sound Anthology (LP)
From the celebrated imprint, Recorthings & Zona Archives, comes “Sound Anthology”, the first ever full length dedicated to the output of Maurizio Nannucci. Gathering sixteen pieces created between 1966 and 2013, the collection is an absolute revelation, blurring the boundaries between musique concrète and noise and unveiling one of Italy’s great journeymen of experimental sound practice lingering in our midst.
Ruinous Spirituality (Book)
Back in mid-2021, the publisher, João Simões, delivered the marvelous “Three Essays on Spirituality and Art” by Henry Flynt, offering swirling insights into one of experimental music’s most philosophically visionary minds. The first publication of writings by Flynt to have appeared in years, it left us wanting for more. Now, thankfully, just a short way down the road, João Simões has attended to that need, bringing out a stunning second volume, “Ruinous Spirituality”, that Flynt describes as a s…
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…
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…