Best of 2025
New Music
200 copies, black vinyl. A meeting of two uncompromising sound artists, Carlos Giffoni and Joachim Nordwall, New Music fuses pulsating electronic rhythms, immersive drones, and abstract textures into a vivid, physical listening experience. Emerging from the outer edges of techno, noise, and electro-acoustic composition, both artists channel their distinct sonic vocabularies into a shared space of tension and transformation. Giffoni's deep synth drones collide with Nordwall's ritualistic sense of…
When I sing, I slip into the microphone. Into that void, I bring comrade "prayers", then, turning to face the outside, together we explode
Like on the early solo Haino album that shares the group’s name (released on P.S.F. in 1993), the instrumentation swims in reverb (the use of which Akiyama recalls as ‘a kind of point of the band’), often obscuring the instrumental sources. On the short opening piece, a distant reed instrument arcs long buzzing melodies over a bed of cymbals and gongs, like a psychedelic take on Tibetan music. The epic second part, occupying almost 50 minutes, begins as a splayed, near-formless cloud of electric…
Mégapneumes
Gil J. Wolman's revolutionary Mégapneumes reveals the radical origins of sound poetry. This essential collection documents the Lettrist pioneer's organic infra-language from 1960s recordings, including material found on his tape recorder after death - anticipating Chopin and Gysin by a decade
Topographie Parisienne
2025 repress. Originally released in 2019, this essential 4CD box set documenting one of the rarest trio meetings in the history of European free improvisation is finally available again.
Eleven years after the legendary The Topography of the Lungs (Incus, 1970) - one of the landmark early albums of English free improvisation, co-founded the Incus label itself - the trio reunites at 28 rue Dunois in Paris. Almost three and a half hours of non-idiomatic free improvisation captured by Jean-Marc Fo…
Phardah - Humans and Beings
**2nd pressing, screen printed cover, risoprinted obi, letterpressed insert edition of 200** 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…
Improperis - Compositions et enregistrements
6 x Black 140 grs Vinyl each one in spineless sleeve, heavyweight cardboard slipcase/custom numbered at the back, insert-photo individually signed but the artist, marketing sticker. Limited & numbered to 500 copies for the world. Pascal Comelade, the visionary Catalan composer, unveils his latest sonic meditation with Improperis - Compositions et enregistrements, a remarkable work that celebrates four decades of uncompromising instrumental music since his emergence in 1984. This extraordinary co…
Destino Scifosi
Power trio brought together by Yann Gourdon on hurdy gurdy, Jérémie Sauvage on bass and Mathieu Tilly on drums, France take drone and minimalism at their most ecstatic and massive
1975 Mekeel Sessions
For years, Jackson C. Frank was as ghostly a legend as they come. Even the relatively few record collectors who revered his work were only aware of the lone LP released during his lifetime. For all most listeners knew, Frank made an incredible album in 1965 and then vanished, despite that record having been produced by Paul Simon.
1975 Mekeel Sessions features six tracks recorded in the mid-'70s at a studio in Lake Hill, New York about five miles from Woodstock where Frank was living at the time…
So Far
Black Vinyl Edition. Wümme, Lower Saxony. 1972. A converted schoolhouse. Inside: a tangle of cables, reel-to-reel machines, custom electronics soldered together by hands that refused manuals. This was not a professional recording studio. This was Faust's laboratory—and So Far was the experiment that proved you could rewire rock music's circuitry without killing the patient. Six months earlier, Faust had released their self-titled debut—a savage dismantling of what a rock album could be. Tape edi…
Is Spring a Sculpture?
"Is Spring a Sculpture?" is a collaboration between David Toop and Rie Nakajima, released as a limited edition CD and book on Lawrence English’s Room40 label. The work consists of a series of sound pieces and text fragments exploring the poetics of objects, ephemeral phenomena, and the ambiguous boundaries between sound, environment, and tactile form. Together, Toop and Nakajima sculpt a listening experience that is elusive and sensorially charged, extending their mutual fascination with the int…
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…
Visiting Cloud
What happens when electroacoustic thought migrates into the physical realm of acoustic instruments? Visiting Cloud documents a three-year collaboration between Finnish composer Marja Ahti and Italian ensemble Blutwurst, where two of Ahti's electroacoustic works - Fluctuating Streams (from The Current Inside, 2019) and Chora (from Vegetal Negatives, 2018) - undergo radical transformation into acoustic versions that stretch, deepen, and reimagine their original forms. Initiated by Blutwurst in 202…
Je Laisse à la Nuit son Poids D'Ombre
How does music inhabit the space between two worlds? Jürg Frey confronts this question directly in Je laisse à la nuit son poids d'ombre, a composition for ten musicians that exists in deliberate suspension, refusing the security of solid ground. Commissioned by ensemble]h[iatus, the piece emerged from extended collaboration between composer and performers, particularly in navigating two specific challenges: the distinctive voice of Thomas Lehn's analogue synthesiser and the relationship between…
Cat O’ Nine Tails
W.25TH is proud to announce the reissue of Cindy Lee's Cat O' Nine Tails, originally released in 2020 as an extremely limited edition of 50 lathe-cut LPs housed in silk-screened jackets. This essential collection, released in the wake of What's Tonight To Eternity, has long captivated die-hard fans with its perfect synthesis of classic songwriting and classical composition.
The album opens with the gothic drama of "Our Lady Of Sorrows," flowing into the manic exploration of the title track befor…
What's Tonight To Eternity
2025 Limited Reissue. For Patrick Flegel, Cindy Lee is more than just a recording music project. It is the culmination of a lifelong exploration of art, the electric guitar, queer identity and gender expression. "Singers like Patsy Cline and The Supremes carried me through the hardest times of my life," explains Flegel, "and also provided the soundtrack to the best times." Following the dissolution of Canadian experimental indie band Women, Flegel would delve deeper into songwriting that bends …
Transference
In the ever-expanding constellation of transnational electroacoustic collaboration, Marja Ahti and Manja Ristić present Transference, a profound investigation into the movement and transformation of energy between distant practices and places, arriving August 8, 2025 via Erstwhile Records. Transference emerges as what the artists describe as "a dialogue of sonic gestures and traces of visits to places and the spirit that occupies them." This collaboration transcends geographical boundaries to cr…
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 …
Ansamblul Hyperion
It's a miracle that some records ever get made. Right in the middle of Ceausescu's ultra-repressive dictatorship, composer Iancu Dumitrescu managed to arrange for his first LP, a compilation of radical new music by Dumitrescu and three of his Romanian colleagues, all older than him: Ocavian Nemescu, Stefan Niculescu, and Corneliu Cezar. Dumitrescu was -- and remains -- one of the most iconoclastic figures in contemporary music. Often referred to as a spectralist (though he distances himself from…
Forgetting is Violent
Forgetting is Violent, Patrick Shiroishi’s latest solo LP, is his most immediate release yet, expanding the scope not just of his music but of his extramusical considerations. Where his past releases on American Dreams reckoned with racism against Japanese Americans or presented Shiroishi’s saxophone as heard in a parking garage, Forgetting is Violent considers racism as a whole, historical and ongoing, with the urgency it deserves. Here, for the first time, we hear Shiroishi joined by a support…
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.