Best of 2025
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…
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…
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…
NigmaEnigma أنيجم النَجم
Abdullah Miniawy is talented singer, songwriter, musician, and poet hails from Egypt, captivating audiences with his rich blend of poetry and sound. Leveraging the fusion of traditional Egyptian themes and modern electronic influences. Growing up in the vibrant atmosphere of revolutionary Egypt, Abdullah's formative years were colored by the socio-political climate, deeply impacting his connection to music. His initial encounters with different musical instruments and poetry laid the foundation…
The Island of Bouncy Memories
Big Tip! Memories are, to say the least, complex. They can weigh us down like stones or be treasured in their unresolved ambivalence. In Ciro Vitiello’s debut album, they take on a dynamic and elusive nature, both bouncy and tricky, moving away when approached and dipping into the haze of the subconscious. Dreams, in turn, find their shape through memory itself. The Island Of Bouncy Memories is, for Vitiello, a place populated by reveries and hypnagogic impressions, interwoven with the imprints …
Redux
Few available, sold out at source. Offset printed covers, gloss varnish. Stamped labels. Released October 2024 in co-production with Desastre. Tanz Mein Herz’s latest, 'Redux', out via Standard In-Fi, encounters the French collective pushing at the boundaries of folk tinged experimentalism, psych, and drone. Sprawling across two long tracks, it’s an absolute burner of throbbing, hypnotic sound and stunning creative interplay.Les Adieux is a send off, a tale of energy, death, bliss, cosmic yearni…
Graphème Vol.4 (Book)
Welcome to the fourth edition of Graphème: a collection of scores by composers and artists intent on sharing and collaborating with performers in the realisation of adventurous and creative sonic experiences. The pieces presented in this edition range from simple to complex. Some are more open to freedom of interpretation and some are more specific, but all are offered in the spirit of collaboration with the performer who interprets the work. In This Issue twelve previously unpublished works by:…
Dioramas
*350 copies limited edition* On Andrew Chalk's 2025 album for An'archives, 'Dioramas,' he returns to the art of the miniaturist, after the long-form exploration of 2024's 'Songs Of The Sea.' It's an appropriate mode of address given the title - each of these fifteen pieces indeed feels like a replica of a specific scene, rendered in miniature. As with much of Chalk's music, they set out to explore humble terrain, a thread of melody in slow motion, or a weave of texture, sometimes in aquatic repo…