Best of 2024
Guitar Solos / Fifty
Big tip! Lunching into 2024 after after a stellar 2023, Week-End Records delivers one of their most important offerings to date, the first vinyl reissue of Fred Frith’s seminal 1974 solo debut, “Guitar Solos”, in more than 40 years, marking the album’s 50th anniversary. A groundbreaking work in the field of avant-garde recordings that changed everything in its wake, incorporating a startling range of sonorities and approaches within constrained means, to celebrate its half-century mark, Frith ha…
Travels Over Feeling: Arthur Russell, a Life (Book)
The music of Arthur Russell defies classification. From his pioneering compositions as part of New York's vibrant avant-garde scene (alongside artists including Philip Glass, David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, John Cage, and Allen Ginsberg) to his genre-expanding disco productions, from his new wave and art pop to his posthumously released folk songs, Russell crafted timeless and foundationally influential work until his premature death in 1992 from AIDS-related illnesses.
Now, in a landmark publicat…
A Glimpse of Light
An absolute gem from the vaults of '80s Ambient music and the Dutch underground, Dead Minds’ reissue of Enno Velthuys’ astounding 1984 album, "Glimpse of Light", is a crucial missing link, one of the greatest unheard albums of its era, and one of the most beautiful records any of us is likely to encounter all year.
Amir
For years Amir, Henri Texier’s debut solo LP, stood slightly in the shadow of its follow-up, Varech, but is equal and towers in every possible way. There is no other record like it on earth - stunning from start to final turn. In our view, it’s one the greatest artifacts of the 1970s France scene, and that’s no small thing! Deceptively minimal and elegant, Amir is the first the world would hear of Texier’s signature sound - a universe of musical legacies, distilled and channelled through delicat…
Verbosonies and Phonographies
* 220 copies limited edition. * Herman Damen is a Dutch artist and language designer who, among other things, has created visual poems, performance works and verbosonies – a genre that Damen developed where vocalised morphomic elements are assembled in different ways. In his works he has been exploring ‘kinetic language’ and the spatial aspects of language. Damen’s manifesto “Semiotic Theatre” states that his work “places itself outside official literature and wants to fascinate, shock or activa…
Oersted
*Limited Edition of 99 copies only. Pink Vinyl * Introducing the ultra-limited pink vinyl edition: this release is a rare find with only 99 copies worldwide. It isn't just about the music; it's about indulging your senses in a visual feast that amplifies the magic of the auditory journey. So don't miss your chance to own a piece of this rare and extraordinary creation. Secure your copy of our limited edition double pink vinyl today and prepare to be captivated by its beauty and entranced by its…
Tidal Perspectives
Big Tip! Tidal Perspectives is an album by Giovanni Di Domenico, Pak Yan Lau, and John Also Bennett. Recorded across a single afternoon in Brussels, Belgium, the album’s four parts are a rippling alchemy of processed Rhodes piano, sizzling ceramics, and liquified bass flute, a rare meeting of three unique voices from the contemporary music landscape that manages to flow with the depth and effortless inevitability of the oceanic tides.
Giovanni Di Domenico, an accomplished composer and prolific …
Beginner's Mind
Over the years, the venerable New York based imprint, Mode Records, has operated to give Walter Zimmermann a solid platform, issuing both new work and reissuing lost classics. Mode continues this essential project with the first-ever LP reissue of Zimmermann’s first recording, the 1978 solo piano classic “Beginner’s Mind”, which will also be available soon in CD format.
Musica Elettronica / Computer Music 1966-1972
** Edition of 210. Deluxe cover with handmade silver foil printed on 450g paper, also includes a 30x30cm double-sided insert with detailed notes and a SMET / Enore Zaffiri exhaustive chronology. ** The Italian early electronic music scene has been at the core of Die Schachtel’s activity since their very beginnings in the early 2000s. The record that inaugurated the label’s venture was Pietro Grossi’s “Musica Automatica” (2003), followed in 2004 by the very first recording in LP format by Enore Z…
The Willisau Concert
Joe McPhee's first international release, Black Magic Man, was issued on the newly formed Hat Hut imprint in 1975. It was a watershed moment for the 35-year-old musician. Based in Poughkeepsie, New York, he was too far away from Manhattan to have participated extensively in the Loft Jazz happenings of the decade. European exposure, however, would give McPhee an alternative circuit, something of an escape route from the trappings of American cultural myopia.
" In support of the new record for thi…
Tenor
There are lots of outstanding Joe McPhee LPs. Nation Time being chief among them, but there's also Pieces Of Light, Oleo and Topology. The Poughkeepsie, New York-based multi-instrumentalist, by now an international star of free music, has amassed a daunting discography, no doubt. If you want to peer deeply into the soul of Joe McPhee, however, there's no way around it, you need to spend some quality time with Tenor.
" Tenor is McPhee's first solo record. He did not set out to make it. It was an …
Black Magic Man
Black Magic Man is arguably the pivotal Joe McPhee release. It bridged the span between the regional and the international, bypassing the national altogether. "Recorded in the same sessions that produced Nation Time, Black Magic Man consists of music not chosen for that LP. Like its much-feted sister, technically it falls under the domain of CjR, Craig Johnson's herculean effort in support of McPhee. An erstwhile painter, Johnson became a self-taught audio engineer, acquiring equipment expressly…
Flasket Brinner
** 1971 debut album reissue with bonus Lp with unreleased material. Limited edition 500 copies ** In the early 1970s, Sweden, similar to neighboring Germany, had a vibrant music culture that shunned American and British tendencies. Here, bands were allowed to experiment with a wide variety of musical styles without worrying about how they would fare commercially. Here, innovative rock acts like International Harvester, Algarnas Tradgard, Samla Mammas Manna, and Kebnekaise came together to create…
Matching Mole
** Expanded Edition. 180 gram audiophile vinyl. Deluxe sleeve with linen laminate finish. Limited edition of 1000 individually numbered copies on yellow & orange marbled vinyl. For the first time available as 2LP-set. Including 7 bonus tracks** Recorded in an abandoned CBS studio in the cold winter of 1972, this is the historical first album of Matching Mole, Robert Wyatt's immediate post Soft Machine grouping featuring himself on drums and vocals and three of the most creative musicians from th…
Great Star Theater, San Francisco
Joëlle Léandre and Lauren Newton have been performing together for nearly 30 years, having met in the mid-1990s in Paris. Throughout that time, they have always favored exploring the textures of music that are not arranged conventionally but rather are scattered, diffused, and dispersed through layers of sound. The voice’s high notes forge a variety of color fragments, while the low notes of the double bass create substance and depth. These two components remain inseparable as the sound settles …
Idiots + Revenge Of The Selfish Shellfish (3LP Bundle)
This bundle includes the latest albums released on Nihilist:
- The Hafler Trio, Bruce Gilbert – Idiots 2LP- Steven Stapleton, Tony Wakeford – Revenge Of The Selfish Shellfish LP
Japalm
Huge Tip! 200 copies. Japalm is a place in a vague geography, a place of memory and an abyss, fantasies and melancholies that take the names of imaginary cities. Loops, aleatory rhythms, the nostalgia of oniric places traced on an perpetual changing map, an image consumed by sunlight: LF RDamb, Dcramb, Nosun, Chllamb, Mneist, Niobu. Japalm is the second record from Hampar Soum, as well as the duo second work with Matteo Castro's label, Second Sleep. Hampar Soum are Stefano Scattolin and Guido Mo…
In the Merry Month of May
Huge Tip! In the Merry Month of May is the final studio recording of the late, great Tony Conrad, and the first duo release with Jennifer Walshe, one of Conrad’s most important collaborators in the final decade of his life. Befitting these two absurdly gifted hell-raisers, this is a wild, improvisatory flaying of song, with Walshe’s clarion voice at the heart of the enterprise. The sheer sonic force of opener “In the Merry Month of May” recalls the ecstatic charge of Conrad’s Slapping Pythagoras…
What Is Not Strange?
Five years on from “Nue”, his collaboration with his father, Yoshi Wada, and friends, Tashi Wada returns to RVNG with “What Is Not Strange?”, a startling new adventure in sound. Riding a razor's edge between experimental music and left-field song-craft, the album's eleven compositions enlist an all-star cast of collaborators - Julia Holter, Corey Fogel, Ezra Buchla, and Devin Hoff - to forge new water and create one of the most startling and mysterious records of the year.
Ozone
Stunning, moody, spiritual jazz from Ireland, recorded in 1979; featuring original compositions such as the deep collectors’ cut Spon Song, subtle Latin flavours on Spacer’s Delight, and a beautiful modal arrangement of the traditional Irish air Castle of Dromore. ‘A legendary recording in Ireland, Ozone reflects Noel Kelehan’s keen appreciation of classic quintet-era Miles, with touches of the cerebral fusion of Ian Carr and the arranging genius of Neil Ardley. Not just a landmark Irish jazz se…