Best of 2025
For Renstemt Klaver
Though the piano arrives on stage without a player, it is not alone. Mounted on steel bars within the instrument are electronic magnets, one per piano key, that have been connected by a thicket of wires—reminiscent of monstrous braces, as though the instrument were suffering youth under orthodontic siege. The magnets come down to the strings, and, as they vibrate at the strings’ own frequencies, the instrument speaks. Wobbling yet fulsome tones suffuse the room, sounding almost nothing like thei…
Europe in Flames
200 copies. CD wallet with 8 page booklet including photos from a scrapbook, found in Willem de Ridder’s archive. The word Fanatic comes from the Latin fanum, temple. A fanatic is someone possessed, by God or the Devil. From 1985 until 1989 Willem de Ridder, Hessel Veldman, Cora Emens and Nick Nicole were the members of post-art ensemble Fanatic (or later FNTC). Willem and Hessel already worked together in the late 70s and early 80s on various radio shows and performed with musicians like Alvin …
Keyhole Mouth
Tip! 150 copies limited release
Xing presents the new LP Keyhole Mouth by Silvia Costa and Claudio Rocchetti, seventeenth release of Xong collection - artist records. The release is on white vinyl, in a limited and numbered edition of 150 copies, including a collector's edition of 20 copies, each accompanied by a keyhole of European and North American manufacture (from the 17th century till today) with the application of an original pen on canvas miniature by Silvia Costa.
Keyhole Mouth is the s…
Flowers Are Blooming In Antarctica
Delivering a career-defining statement from the Italian electroacoustic composer and saxophone player, Laura Agnusdei, Maple Death returns with “Flowers are Blooming in Antarctica” - a startling, multifaceted journey through imagistic sonorous worlds resting at the juncture of spiritual jazz, fourth-world minimalism, tropical electronics, tribal futurism, and rigorous electroacoustic experimentalism - rooted in thrilling ecological ideas, that marks the launch of Opale, a new suite of releases c…
Kwaidan
2025 Repress. Meitei (冥丁) is a Japanese artist from Hiroshima, who started out as a freelance composer, making various kinds of music across genres. Having done it for eight years, his goal was to eventually release his own original music as an artist. Living in Kyoto for the past two years has deeply influenced his current sound, which is a focus on musically crafting a “Japanese mood” called Meitei (冥丁 (thus, his name). Rich in history, Meitei wanted to borrow this lost “Japanese mood” and inc…
Irma
In 1977, for Brian Eno’s Obscure Records, I made a version of Irma. These notes arise from that experience and explore how the piece can be performed. Irma is an unusual score—printed on a single 50cm x 50cm sheet. Its notation consists of verbal fragments from Tom Phillips' A Humument, referencing “libretto,” “decor and mise-en-scène,” or “sounds.” These categories are arranged separately, with stave notation at the bottom. At first glance, it appears indeterminate—requiring preparation before …
Ensemble Pieces
A split album by Christopher Hobbs, John Adams, and Gavin Bryars, released in 1975 as the second title on Brian Eno's imprint Obscure. The album includes two pieces by Hobbs and one each by Adams and Bryars. Side A opens with the experimental compositions of Hobbs, followed by Adams’ spoken-word and orchestral work, while Side B concludes with Bryars’ dissonant, frontier-classical ambient piece, featuring contributions from Brian Eno and Derek Bailey. "Aran" and "McCrimmon Will Never Return" (19…
Raoul De Smet
Big tip! *300 copies limited edition* First LP in the ‘Signature Series’, a small new series in the Metaphon catalog, documenting previously unreleased archive works of less known composers. Metaphon presents their ‘signature’ in the most personal and elementary way.
Raoul De Smet (1936), mainly known for his numerous instrumental and chamber music works, started composing in the early 1960’s. Between 1974 and 1989 he also recorded several electro-acoustic compositions at the IPEM in Ghent, one …
Elektroakustische Projekte & Makro
Building upon the ground of their previous “Infra”, “Scanning”, and “Tektra” collections, Reiger Records Reeks continues its dedication to Roland Kayn’s monumental back catalog, delivering “Elektroakustische Projekte & Makro”, a towering 5CD box set reissuing two of the composer’s most important bodies of work for the very first time since their respective original releases in 1977 and 1981. Fully remastered from the original analog tapes by none other than Jim O’Rourke - allowing a number of th…
SOVT
'SOVT' is an album containing one 55-minute piece, written for piano by Sarah Hennies in 2017. SOVT stands for Semi-Occluded Vocal Tract which refers to vocal exercises that strengthens the voice by helping the vocal cords vibrate more efficiently. One may practice SOVT exercises by singing with a straw in the mouth which regulates air pressure and reduces strain on the vocal folds. Hennies encountered these exercises in a class on so-called “voice feminization” for transgender women which also …
Gatha
*200 copies limited edition* Laden with abstraction - one foot in the ethereal, mysterious, and ancient past, the other arching into unknown futures yet to be seen - “Gatha” is a total world, imagistically rising through sound. Saz, tanpura, sarangi, autoharp, synths, bells, flute, percussion and numerous other acoustic sound sources, intertwine in a droning, delicately percussive tapestry, amounting to a brilliant musical hybrid, the depths of which few have realised since the days of La Monte …
Sing and Play For the Guru
100 copies limited edition. Housed in high quality card stock with art silk screened by Alan Sherry at SIWA Printing * From their early '90s inception to the latter years of the 21st century's first decade, No Neck Blues Band appeared (to distant observers, anyway), to be something of the Platonic ideal for the "improvisational collective," in turn confounding ideas of authorship, recognition, and fame. A fragile symbiosis at best, the scrim of anonymity began to fray sometime around the turn of…
Songs of Eliphas Levi Zahed
Tip! 100 copies limited edition. Housed in high quality card stock with art silk screened by Alan Sherry at SIWA Printing * Tom Carter & Pat Murano - two adepts of improvisation again alight their paths with esoteric flame. The emotional tenor of their masterful double LP release 4 Infernal Rivers is maintained: frightful urgency blends with a kind of poised resolve, the auditory version of a thousand yard stare from an aloof predator. The guitar based sonics in evidence here on Songs of Éliphas…
Equinox / Solstitium (2 LP in bundle)
Among our favourite reissue labels working today, the venerable Dialogo returns in 2025 with an incredible deep dive into the glorious shadows of Italian library music with the first ever vinyl reissue of Gianni Marchetti’s 1977-78 LPs “Equinox” and “Solstitium”, among the rarest and most mysterious artefacts of the field. An immersive, joyous listen, marked by a rare sense of artistry - so imaginative that it almost becomes a film unto itself - these absolute stunners, fully remastered and issu…
Shitsurai / 室礼
* White Vinyl * Meitei / 冥丁 is the moniker of Japanese producer, composer, and musician Daisuke Fujita. The project stemmed from a preoccupation with the customs and rituals of his country’s past, and a desire to cast light on an era and aesthetic that he noted was drifting out of the collective Japanese consciousness with each passing generation, what he calls “the lost Japanese mood”. First came “Kwaidan”, a study into the lost art of Japanese ghost story-telling, followed by “Komachi”, an att…
The Island of Bouncy Memories, NigmaEnigma (2LP Bundle)
Drawing upon deep pools of meaning, woven into poetic states of abstract, electroacoustic sonority, Hundebiss returns with two stunning new LPs: “NigmaEnigma أنيجم النَجم”, the debut solo offering by the Egyptian composer, multi-instrumentalist, writer, and singer, Abdullah Miniawy, and “The Island of Bouncy Memories”, the latest offering from the Italian enigma Ciro Vitiello. Each of them is a freestanding world, rooted in deeply personal and culturally specific creative explorations, issued in…
Opera Poesia
Gatefold LP, w/ 52 pages book including scans of Tomaso Binga's original poem scores from 1976 to 2023. Italian and English. Offset printing. Limited edition of 350 copies. Opera Poesia is the first comprehensive audio collection of Tomaso Binga's poems performed by the artist. The practice of Tomaso Binga (Bianca Pucciarelli Menna, b. 1931) is embedded in the language of visual and sound poetry, aimed at observing and questioning the idea of gender. Her practice explores the rights, social role…
Haut les Vaches
*150 copies* Haut la vache is a record of sound exploration, a testimony to twilight contemplation, and by the way, the second field recording album by collectif_sin~. After Tour de Transmission (2016), a recording of celestial flutes created by the wind rushing through a metal structure at the top of a Pyrenean peak, we now head to Switzerland, where the tinkling of cowbells forms infinite landscapes for the ears, a metallic wave swaying over the green grass that you can listen to on side A, wh…
Snowblind
The intrepid composer and field recordist Jacob Kirkegaard is no stranger to perilous and hostile regions of the world. His 4 Rooms invoked the radioactive decay through the amplification of architectural resonance in Chernobyl, Ukraine; and he has ventured to the arctic environments of Greenland on a number of occasions to document that barren, icy territory. His recurrent use of shadow and mystery through his work both as metaphor and as extended sonic technique reflects the complex, existenti…
Lacinia
Returning to Die Schachtel with his forth full-length with the label, the Genoa born, Bologna based, guitarist and electroacoustic composer, Stefano Pilia, delivers “Lacinia”, a new, immersive cycle of compositions, delving deeper into the realm of metaphysical, spiritual, and divine meaning, weaving astounding arrangements of sonority from a palette of synths, strings, brass, organ, various electroacoustic instruments, and percussion. Resting at a refined intersection of the acoustic and electr…