Best of 2025
A Grammar for Listening
2008. Paris and Glasgow. Eric La Casa recording sounds for Luke Fowler's 16mm triptych. Not compositions but investigations into the infra-ordinary - that space-time at low intensity where background noise meets the inaudible. How to create a meaningful dialogue between looking and listening? This question drove Fowler's film cycle. La Casa's answer: find a listening point in relation to everything taking place. The microphones amplify all living substances in motion - from the interior of the b…
Defiant Jazz: a Joe McPhee Taster
From the viral Severance TV dance party to spiritual jazz explorations, this vinyl compilation spans five decades of the Poughkeepsie legend's most electrifying moments. Funky grooves, cosmic transcendence, and raw improvisation collide.
Errant Ear
The legendary electroacoustic composer presents her most intimate work yet, weaving five decades of sonic memories into a profound meditation on time, perception, and the treasures of lived experience
Early Works
Bill Fontana investigates the physics of perception itself. Side A: tape collages where sound becomes both material and force. Side B: Wave Spiral for 5 Rin Gongs - a sidelong, 21-minute centerpiece where pure sine waves create interference patterns, frequency made sculptural. Sound spiraling through space, dissolving boundaries between observer and phenomenon.
Star Rover
Visionary Walter Maioli and electronic innovator John Zandijik’s 1980s late-night sessions fuse ancient flutes and cutting-edge technology, creating a cosmic soundscape that bridges ethnomusicology, psychedelia, and electronic experimentation.
What We Do When in Silence
Huge Tip! * Limited edition of 300 copies, Embossed cover, comes with insert and postcard * Killer record here! Three Italian heavyweights doing what they do best - radical improvisation that sits somewhere between electronics, silence, and pure Mediterranean mystery. This is the real deal. Nicola Ratti, Alessandra Novaga, and Enrico Malatesta - three names you need to know if you're serious about contemporary improvised music.
The sound? Imagine if AMM had been born in Southern Europe with lapt…
Traveling Light
From out of the dark, the crackle of feed back birdsong signals a return to the land of sound environments exclusive to the music of Rafael Toral. A year and a half after his epochal electric guitar album, Spectral Evolution, Traveling Light finds him sharpening his focus, moving boldly from abstract forms to concrete compositions in the form of a set of jazz standards. Based on Toral’s discography, this may seem an unlikely endeavor, but happily, Traveling Light transpires to be one of the majo…
Min Bul
VERY LAST COPIES - Gold Vinyl, edition of 100. We are pleased to announce the upcoming reissue of “Min Bul”, a milestone of Norwegian rock and jazz, included in the renowned Nurse With Wound list, from the band whose leader was a young Terje Rypdal. Recorded in the Rosenborg studio in September 1970, with Egil Eide as engineer, “Min Bul” is a highly experimental work for its time that grew out of the Samklang projects at the Henie-Onstad Art Center, where director Ole Henrik Moe encouraged adven…
Continuation
A cascading piano improvisation by Xiu Xiu's Hyunhye Seo, recorded live during a Nam June Paik exhibition in Turin. On Side B, Japanese avant-garde pioneer Phew reinterprets Seo's performance into a new electronic landscape. Music as surrender, dialogue between performer, space and the present moment.
Trabant II
With less than a year having passed since their incredible and widely celebrated, first-ever collection dedicated to the 1980s, Hungarian countercultural music collective Trabant, purge.xxx builds upon the momentum and its intoxicating highs with ‘Trabant II’, their second deep dive into clandestine, previously unissued recordings by the band. Meticulously culled from the collectively’s vast archive of DIY cassettes — capturing politically urgent expressions at the junctures of post-punk, synth …
Trabant Bundle
** Special Discounted Bundle ** The complete archival collection of Hungary's legendary underground collective Trabant (1980-1987), preserved by Purge in two essential volumes. Active behind the Iron Curtain during the harshest years of authoritarian communism, this loose collective of songwriters and filmmakers - including Mihály Víg, János Vető, György Kozma, and Marietta Méhes - created hundreds of DIY recordings that were hand-traded on cassettes within the Hungarian underground.
Described a…
A Question of Silence / Broken Mirrors
Purge.xxx unveils hidden gems of Dutch experimental cinema with the first ever release of Lodewijk de Boer & Martijn Hasebos' synthesiser soundtracks that have remained hidden in the vaults for over four decades. The centerpiece of this historic release is the collaborative score between Lodewijk de Boer (longtime collaborator of avant-garde filmmaker Frans Zwartjes) and Martijn Hasebos for Marleen Gorris' explosive 1982 debut film “A Question of Silence”, alongside de Boer's solo score for Gorr…
Learning
‘Learning’ - Sophie Agnel’s first solo LP, feels like the dark, physical inversion of her excellent ‘Song’ which came out on Relative Pitch earlier this year. Sinking her unique sound into vinyl for the first time, the LP arrives as Agnel recovers from a brain tumour - a shocking discovery that will require Agnel to start again with the piano. It’s a terrifying prospect, but Agnel has been here before, having reorientated herself almost entirely away from her early classical training over the la…
Magnetism
Super Tip! Kali Malone and Drew McDowall have orbited each other's work for over a decade, their individual explorations of sustained tones and harmonic space suggesting an inevitable collaboration. When they finally entered McDowall's Brooklyn studio together, what emerged on Magnetism transcends mere musical compatibility. Malone has spent recent years extending the legacy of Éliane Radigue, redefining what electronic minimalism can accomplish through pipe organ and synthesizer. Her compositio…
Che mi Guardi Attraverso Una Fiamma
Tip! A dream within a dream - Innocent and whimsical song-craft from a vibrant pocket of the contemporary Italian underground via Naples-born Lucia Sole aka La Festa Delle Rane. New split release between ANF and Tokyo friends Conatala.
It’s impossible not to be totally captivated by this. Lucia’s explorative, imperfect song-writing leans into a sense of cranky, domesticated nostalgia and soft melancholy - songs (you can just about call them that) are just about held together by a loose thread …
The Ancients
Bomb! The debut recording by The Ancients, the intergenerational coalition of Isaiah Collier, William Hooker and William Parker formed by Parker to play concerts in conjunction with the Milford Graves' “A Mind-Body Deal” exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and now a working group. Across 2LPs of side-length long-form improvised sets recorded at 2220 Arts & Archives in LA and The Chapel in San Francisco, The Ancients bring the free jazz trio languages first explored by t…
415 Steppsss to DingggDonggg Paradise
Huuuuge Tip! Edition of 200. Where the bells begin, everything else follows. Long before Charlemagne Palestine discovered the thick molasses sonority of the Bösendorfer piano, before the strumming technique that would define his maximalist-minimalist vision, there were bells. Colossal carillon bells in the tower of St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue in New York, where a teenage Palestine hammered hymns into the Manhattan sky before spending hours lost in spectral improvisations that drew Moondog,…
Live At Teater Tribunalen
Huge Tip! ** Edition of 300.** The long overdue first proper jazz album on Discreet Music! After years of releasing experimental electronics, drone, and avant-garde sound art, the Swedish label finally documents what's been happening in their own backyard: ferocious, life-elevating free jazz performed by three of Sweden's leading improvisers. Niklas Persson Trio - saxophonist Niklas Persson, double bassist Patric Thorman, and drummer Raymond Strid - started ten years ago on Thorman's initiative.…
Lapsikuninkaan Fanfaari
Juho Toivonen's third album navigates memory's fluid terrain through off-key piano, tape loops, and spectral melodies. Featuring Ramo Sinnemäki's trumpet, this Nordic ambient masterwork recalls Basinski while exploring childhood fragments and imagined futures. Pure Scandinavian melancholy—essential contemporary ambient.
Blue Veil
Black vinyl. Edition of 700. The first release to document the solo cello work of musician and composer Lucy Railton, the 40-minute composition Blue Veil recorded at Église du Saint-Esprit in Paris invites listeners into the realm of precision-tuned states of resonance: states made manifest through Railton’s careful traversal of her cello's most subtle acoustic characteristics as they harmonically interlock with mind’s embodied modalities of attention and imagination. Blue Veil arises out of, is…