Best of 2025
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 In This Issue twelve previously unpublished works by:…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…
Upon Oanda's Wing
★ First reissue ★ With obi ★ Gary Marks, a folky jazz singer-songwriter with a career spanning 50 years, has left behind a long list of works, and the second album in his highly acclaimed trilogy released in the 1970s is finally being reissued for the first time on LP!
Gary Marks is a folky jazz singer-songwriter with a unique musical style. Born in New York in 1950, he moved to the West Coast in 1976 after releasing his first album, where he worked with Art Rande and Oregon member Paul McCandle…
Northern Michigan Snowstorms
"Northern Michigan Snowstorms" is an auditory journey that captures the serene beauty and introspective magic of stormy winters nights in the countryside. Each track transports listeneres to cozy cottages nesteld in tall pines. Music that mirrors the serene solitude of a snowy evening, where time slows, allowing the listener to be enveloped in a cocoon of sonic wonder. Ambient layers mimic the gentle wishpering of the wind through snow covered branches. Eight tracks of blurry loops, soft pads, a…
Meets the World
“Embryo meets the world” is a new compilation with previously unreleased Embryo's Ethno Jazz from 1979/80, recorded on the German band`s trip to Asia and recently discovered in the archives. It includes seven unknown studio sessions from Kabul, Essaouira, Cairo and Athens, produced with members of the Kabul Radio Orchestra or oud players and singers from Eritrea, Syria and Iraq. Eastern meet Western musicians, improvising with an astonishing deepness over wonderful traditional melodies from Afgh…
Aesthesis
Tip! Thorn Wych is a musical instrument maker and musician based in the Lancashire town of Bacup, specialising in work made from tree branches. Particular to her interest are UK native trees; so far Wych Elm, Lime, Wild Cherry, Oak, and Yew. With these unique instruments, crafted in her backyard workshop, she creates music that evokes memories of an unknown world—out of sync with time and place and beyond the boundaries of the material realm.
Her pieces consist mainly of bowed string instrument…
Zulaqrex
*150 copies limited edition* Zulaqrex, named after a mythical being that only exists in Richard Youngs’ head, is the album sequel to the now practically sold out Zerkelus LP and once again features themed artwork and is limited to 150 copies. Like its predecessor, Zulaqrex consists of two side-long tracks both given the same name as the title and once more charting a course into the beyond via a hypnotic approach that even some fantastically stumbling percussion cannot offset. Also employing shi…
Battling the Invisible
Edition of 300. Comes with a 8-page booklet. In 1969, while American minimalism was consolidating into its most recognizable forms, Charlemagne Palestine was conducting solitary experiments with oscillators and sine waves that only now reveal their visionary scope. This was the New York of lofts and abandoned industrial spaces, of artists pushing sound toward its physical limits - a city where the boundaries between music, performance art, and bodily endurance were dissolving. Battling the Invis…
Sama'a - Audition
Known for their exhilarating live-to-record albums such as last year's critically acclaimed Wood Blues and Giant Beauty, سماع [Sama'a] (Audition) is the first of two releases that will surface after [Ahmed]’s first studio recording sessions at North London’s The Fish Factory in early 2025. Since 2014, [Ahmed] أحمد have excavated and re-imagined the music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik, in an ever ongoing search for future music. Over a decade on, the group were given the opportunity to set up in the studi…
Peter Beyls
Peter Beyls stands as a pioneer at the crossroads of computer science and the arts, shaping generative systems in music, visual, and hybrid formats. In early works, inspired by figures such as Michel Waisvisz, Karel Goeyvaerts, and Lucien Goethals, Beyls fused electronic experimentation with precise tape artistry, notably advancing the crackle box synthesizer at STEIM.
Match / Soliloque 1&4 / Antifonia
Nicolae Brînduş's Match / Soliloque 1&4 / Antifonia reissues the composer’s most eccentric works from the PHTORA cycle (1968-1972), blending collective improvisation, spectral tradition, Romanian folklore, and free jazz into a mesmerizing tapestry. Tape manipulations and reverberation add depth, while Ana Golici’s sleeve art captures the album’s vivid sensibility.
Steady State
In a sonic dialogue that balances delicacy and depth, Clinton Green and Barnaby Oliver explore the shifting textures of acoustics and resonance. Employing bowed aluminum bowls, strings, and a grand piano, their work unfolds in patient layers that probe the very essence of sound and its environment, evoking an atmosphere of quiet tension and subtle transformation.
The Yellow Box
As trans-Atlantic alchemists pulling from a shared dialectic that somehow encompassed both postmodern deconstructionist tendencies and a delightfully subversive sense of poptimism, it’s easy to see how David Cunningham and Peter Gordon immediately hit it off upon initially meeting each other back in the late-1970s at the height of their youthful transgressions. Having initially worked together on the second Flying Lizards’ LP fourth wall, with its ingenious fusion of dismantled rhythms and rearr…
Animal Magnetism
*Limited Edition of 299 copies. Black vinyl * Masami Akita has been making noise since before most people understood noise could be made on purpose, and Animal Magnetism is what happens when forty years of sonic terrorism suddenly decides to sit you down and explain itself without raising its voice. Originally released on CD in 2003, this double LP reissue—remastered by Lasse Marhaug and pressed on black or purple vinyl in a gatefold sleeve featuring Akita's own photographs—adds a previously unr…
The Oracle
Big tip! Acclaimed New York-based composer Lea Bertucci offers The Oracle, a striking, vocal-focused collection of music that spans six tracks of adventurous sounds steeped in mysticism and imagination, over three years in the making. Her first purely solo endeavor since 2021’s much lauded A Visible Length of Light (Cibachrome Editions), The Oracle breaks new ground within the scope of Bertucci’s singular voice as an artist.
The Oracle is an alchemy of contemporary political anxieties illuminated…