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…
Transportées
300 copies. Marie Guérin (aka Marie de la Nuit, meaning Marie of the Night) is a sound artist. Since 2001, she has been manipulating field recordings, radio archives, traces left on the airwaves by "hertzian ghosts". A mixture of voices, textures, grains, anecdotal sounds, her work questions the sound heritage, its supports and the traces left on these supports; her music passes from radiophonic grammar to music. --- "Transportées is an electroacoustic work. From archaic to electronic trance, a …
Sweet England
Huge Tip! Recorded 67 years ago, reissued in Shirley Collins's 90th year in this universe. 'Sweet England' along with its sister album 'False True Lovers', was recorded in the spring of 1958 when I was twenty-two years old. I had been living for the previous two years in London with Alan Lomax, the American folklorist, working for him as editorial assistant on his book The Folk Songs of North America and on his field recordings from America, Great Britain, Italy and Spain. The tracks that make u…
Love
* Edition of 100 copies, silk-screened cover, hand numbered and intended for musicians and their families. High thickness cardboard with opaque laminated cover. Comes with a printed insert. Very Few copies available * Founded in 1969 by the pianist Ole Mathiessen, the bassist Henrik Hove, the saxophonist Jesper Nehammer, and drummer Jon Finsen, Tordenskjolds Soldater was one of the great - albeit short-lived - projects in Copenhagen’s thriving scene of free improvisation and jazz of the late 196…
Love / Action A B C E (2LP Bundle)
Returning with some serious fire for their first batch of releases in 2025, Alga Marghen newly launched Formalibera, dedicated to free improvisation, drops two absolutely mind-blowing, limited-edition LPs, drawing upon never before issued recordings by Tordenskjolds Soldater and The Contemporary Jazz Quintet, two of the most important groups working in Copenhagen's bristling context of avant-garde jazz at the end of the 1960 and early 1970s. Both hugely historically significant and creatively vi…
Action A b C E
* Edition of 300 copies. High thickness cardboard with opaque laminated cover. Comes with a printed insert. * Founded initially as the The Beckerlee Quartet sometime towards the late 1950s and early '60s, a time during which time they went through various lineup changes before morphing into The Contemporary Jazz Quartet, in 1962 they began playing the Vingaarden club in central Copenhagen as one of the earliest European adopters of the emerging movement of free jazz. It was there that they came …
OWsT
** Collector's edition of 20 copies, each featuring bespoke talismans, painted by the artist in squid ink, to be worn as patches or kept safe somewhere to ward off misanthropists **
Xing presents the new LP OWsT by Elvin Brandhi, eighteenth 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 featuring bespoke talismans, painted by the artist in squid ink, to be worn as patc…
Phardah - Humans and Beings
Huge Tip! Free Jazz band with a psychedelic touch, Phardah, is set to release their debut album Humans and Beings on the 2nd of May, 2025. The band features veterans of the Finnish experimental music and Free Jazz scene: saxophonist Sami Pekkola, double bassist Eero Tikkanen, and electric guitarist Topias Tiheäsalo, along with the younger generation drummer Veeti Hietala. The album was recorded and mixed by Teemu Markkula, known from the band Death Hawks. The album consists of two long pieces. V…
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…
White Phosphorus (Chris Connelly plays Throbbing Gristle)
Huge Tip! There is so much that we at Dirter could say about the legend that is Chris Connelly performing his takes on the music of the equally legendary TG, but this time we’re going to leave it in the words of the man himself. This record goes ahead with the blessing of the surviving members of Throbbing Gristle, Chris Carter & Cosey Fanni Tutti.
“Having carved a twisted career with behemoths Ministry and Revolting Cocks over the past 40 years, starting life with the formidable Fini Tribe and …
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 …
Machine Music
The Machines, created between 1967-1972, mark a shift from the traditional narrative style of Gavin Bryars other works. »I define a machine as a structured process that governs musical actions within a specific sound world, shaping how listeners perceive it. For example, Welsh Rarebit is a Machine that manipulates how bread and cheese are heard.« »Autumn Countdown Machine« features six pairs of bass melody instruments, conducted by percussionists who adjust a bell-metronome's timing, creating in…
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 …
Industria 2000
Marking what will inevitably be a holy grail moment for fans of Italian library music, and an inevitale revelation for anyone approaching it for the first time, the venerable Dialogo returns to their broader initiative dedicated to the Italian arm of RCA’s legendary “Original Cast” series with the first ever vinyl reissue of “Industria 2000”, an astounding 1974 LP created by the legendary Italian pianist and composer, Amedeo Tommasi, under the moniker Jarrell. Regarded by many as one of the grea…
Basho / Still Forms
Beatrice Dillon and Hideki Umezawa's split record for the Portrait series. The title of this work by Beatrice Dillon is taken from the notion of ‘basho’, developed by Kitarō Nishida, Japanese philosopher and father of the Kyoto school. Kitaro’s ‘basho’ (場) refers to a fundamental ‘place’ or ‘field’ where things exist and interact. Not just a physical location, but a more abstract space where all experiences, thoughts, and phenomena are interconnected. In Nishida’s philosophy, ‘basho’ is a dynami…
The Music of Butterfly
More than two decades since he blew minds with a suite of brilliant releases on Warp, Vincent Gallo returns to the world of music at long last in Butterfly, his duo with Harper Simon, with the project’s full-length debut, “The Music of Butterfly”. A gesture of gentle, DIY / bedroom left-field pop, falling within the rough territory for which Gallo became renowned during the late '90s and early 2000s, while interweaving fascinating flirtations with minimalism and experimentalism, it’s a truly ca…
Orchid Mantis / Breach
Breach, by American composer Olivia Block, engages in a dialogue between field recordings and synthesised sounds, creating a vibrant plea for wild spaces that face an ever-growing threat to their survival from human activities. The work is based on recordings collected in the San Ignacio lagoon in the Mexican part of Southern California. This lagoon is known as a breeding ground for eastern Pacific grey whales. With the help of precise electronics, the music unfolds like a drift, depicting the s…
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…