Best of 2025
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! Industrial music legend Chris Connelly returns to his first love with White Phosphorus (Chris Connelly plays Throbbing Gristle), a suitably uncompromising homage to the "random, tense, scary & compulsively fascinating" phase of industrial music's catalysers and ur-agitators. Having carved a twisted career with behemoths Ministry and Revolting Cocks over the past 40 years, starting life with the formidable Fini Tribe and collaborating with disparate characters such as Killing Joke, Caba…
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 …
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…
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 …
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 …
The Stone
Mega Tip! Purple Trap, the powerful trio of Keiji Haino (voice, guitar), Bill Laswell on bass, and Rashied Ali (drums), recorded live on stage at The Stone. Recorded in December 2005, this furious live album by what can easily be called a super group remained unreleased till in 2023 Bill Laswell made it accessible in a rough-mixed digital version for his bandcamp subscribers program exclusively. For this vinyl version, the music has been newly mixed by Dirk Dresselhaus (SchneiderTM) and mastered…
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…
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…
If Tomorrow Gets Here
200 copies. A towering statement from one of experimental music’s most singular voices, If Tomorrow Gets Here compiles a vast selection of Kevin Drumm’s recent self-released and unreleased works into a single, panoramic whole. Spanning ten discs, this collection captures Drumm’s prolific output across his many moods: from searing noise and tension-laced drone to haunted ambient drift and pointillist electroacoustics. Not merely an archive, this box acts as a sonic self-portrait, unfolding the br…
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…