Best of 2026
Acustica
Composed between 1968 and 1970 and originally issued by Deutsche Grammophon in 1972, there are arguably few works within the canon of 20th Century experimental music as beloved and sought after as the Argentine composer Mauricio Kagel’s Acustica. Created for “experimental sound-producers and loudspeakers”, comprising electroacoustic material assembled on 4-track tape in 1969 at Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in Cologne, and acoustic material for 2 to 5 musicians, scored over roughly 200 filing-ca…
The Great Learning
Limited and numbered edition, featuring original artwork and a newly designed, beautifully crafted collector’s sleeve with new liner notes by Bradford Bailey, and pressed on 180g vinyl. One of the most quietly radical entries in Deutsche Grammophon's legendary Avantgarde series - the run of albums issued between 1968 and 1971 that did more than almost any other label project to document the experimental music of its moment - returns to vinyl. Recorded in London in 1971, the Scratch Orchestra's r…
Il Metodo per Suonare
Mega Tip! Edition of 200 copies, comes with a large illustrated insert. Giuseppe Chiari arrived at music from the wrong direction. He read mathematics and engineering at university and studied piano and composition privately, and it was John Cage who turned him toward experimental music. With Pietro Grossi he founded Vita Musicale Contemporanea, one of the first Italian associations for new music, and with Sylvano Bussotti he assembled the travelling exhibition Musica e segno. In 1962 Frederic …
Postal Pieces 1, 2
** This bundle includes both volumes of James Tenney's "Postal Pieces" on Blume in a green cotton tote bag printed with the names of the suite's eleven dedicatees: - James Tenney "Postal Pieces" (LP, BLUME 022) - James Tenney "Postal Pieces" (LP, BLUME 027). The first volume has been sold out for a long time: the copies in this bundle come from a small return from a distributor and are the last available. **
Between 1965 and 1971, James Tenney wrote eleven short compositions on the backs of post…
Postal Pieces 2
Blume returns to James Tenney's "Postal Pieces" with a second volume: three "Swell Pieces" and "Koan", written for Alison Knowles, Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young and Malcolm Goldstein, on vinyl for the first time from one of the key suites of 20th Century avant-garde music.
L'Uccello del Paradiso
Big Tip! These three previously unreleased tracks reflect the cultural influences of a very young Riccardo Sinigaglia. In particular, the Anti-psychiatry movement founded by Ronald David Laing, author of the influential books The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise. As well as Jung's theory of archetypes, a subject explored in depth in the writings of Elémire Zolla. The compositional processes of concrete music are fundamental, while the extensive use of fragments from other cultures…
Afrodisiaca
* Edition of 300 copies. High thickness cardboard with opaque laminated cover. Comes with a printed insert * So… Steinmetz. Hugh Steinmetz. A Danish trumpet player my mentor Peter Brötzmann always talked highly about. 'Aaaaah jaaaaa - those crazy Danes!' Steinmetz was one of very few Scandinavian musicians who actually travelled south and collaborated with European musicians in the late 60s. He is a legend. And a key to understand the early developments of free jazz. The possibilities given to S…
Fantasy
On Fantasy, Piero Umiliani resurfaces four decades late with a perfectly preserved final statement: a 1983 library dream where analog synths, light orchestration and soft rhythms drift between science‑fiction shimmer and easy‑listening warmth, closing his universe on a quietly visionary note.
Dalbergia Retusa
Extraordinary double LP of solo guitar music by Hans Reichel (1949-2011), curated by Oren Ambarchi. Twenty-three pieces from 1973-1988 documenting Reichel's radical instrumental rethinking: custom-built guitars with additional strings, moveable pickups, special capos. Sounds simultaneously strange and beautiful, from romantic lyricism to alien sonorities. Essential.
No-input Mixing Board, Early Years
Big tip! A pioneering figure in Japanese improvisational music, Toshimaru Nakamura has collaborated and performed with artists including Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M, Keith Rowe, David Sylvian, and Christian Fennesz. Personally curated by Nakamura himself, this Early Best Album traces the formative years of his singular musical journey.
Through the groundbreaking technique he developed known as the No-Input Mixing Board, Toshimaru Nakamura has established a truly unique musical language. For nearl…
In C - 60th Birthday Full Moon Celebration At Kiyomizu-dera Temple
Big tip! Sixty years after the groundbreaking premiere of In C forever changed the course of contemporary music, Terry Riley celebrates the work's enduring legacy with a historic live recording captured at Kyoto's Unesco World Heritage site, Kiyomizu-dera Temple.
One of the most influential composers of our time, Terry Riley has continually redefined the possibilities of music through a career marked by innovation and originality. Described by Riley himself as his signature composition, In C (19…
Erotica 70
Plush shag carpeting, jazz flutes, analogue synths, funk grooves, exotica, and sultry, Italian-style vocalising: Erotica 70 is the new album from Larry Manteca, known for their inventive, tongue-in-cheek reimaginings of classic Italian soundtrack aesthetics. This time around, the Milanese collective sets its sights on the distinct sonic landscape of 1970s commedia sexy—a film genre that, for better or worse, defined an era and fed richly into the cinematic education of Larry Manteca’s members.
T…
Birth of Consciousness
The latest instalment in Whitefield's Temple Jazz series brings you an enhanced collective improvisation inspired by the meditative styles of Pharaoh Sanders, Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra. An aural approach to soothe ones soul in overly hectic environments.
Complete Feedback Works
Numbered edition of 200 copies. Six LPs in a box, with restored original artwork reprinted in monochrome blue. Each record comes with its own extra materials: inserts, booklets, postcards and posters. Between 2011 and 2022 Alga Marghen devoted an archival series to the early, unreleased magnetic tape and feedback works of Éliane Radigue: five LPs, issued in small runs and repressed only in tiny quantities, that quietly rewrote the story of where her music came from. A few months after the compos…
Ensamseglaren
Huge Tip! Small repress. "I stood on top of the mountain and looked out over the landscape. It was so beautiful that my chest hurt. The light vibrated, time stood still, and the contours dissolved for a moment. Everything had changed; I felt it then. I took their little hands so as not to lose contact with the ground. Then we ran down the mountain, scraping our knees. Still, we didn't make it. You had already put away all the nautical charts, loosened the moorings and steered out among the skerr…
Giant Beauty
2026 Repress! Custom die-cut rigid slipcase, 5 CDs in double card sleeves, 96 page perfect bound book including an interview between Seymour Wright and John Chantler and additional texts by silvia tarozzi, magnus granberg, nate wooley, valerie mol, pär thörn and lars grip and drawings by guillaume delcourt and aliocha delcourt. Limited Edition of 500 copies. [Ahmed] is the quartet of Pat Thomas (piano), Joel Grip (double bass), Antonin Gerbal (drums) and Seymour Wright (alto saxophone). Togethe…
The Electronic Works
Dutch Oscillation Series (DOS) proudly announces the release of a box set featuring the complete electronic works of Ton de Leeuw (1926–1996). This publication marks the first instalment in a new series that brings the history of Dutch electronic music to life for a broad audience. The official presentation will take place on Saturday, 12 September, during the Gaudeamus Festival for contemporary music in Utrecht.
Unique discoveries from the archive. For far too long, twentieth-century Dutch elec…
The Mild Temper
On The Mild Temper, Kevin Drumm stretches his language of drones, electronics and micro‑acoustics across six hours, fashioning vast, slow‑shifting fields of frequency where restraint becomes a kind of pressure and detail blooms only if you stay. Mastered by Jim O'Rourke.
Further Explorations
Huge Tip! Further Explorations follows on from Gentle Fire’s 3CD retrospective box set Explorations, released in 2020. These new archive recordings came to light in the process of unearthing the tapes for the 4CD box set by their fellow Stockhausen collaborators Intermodulation. The pieces used on this CD are taken from two sessions recorded for German radio in 1973 and 74, one for Sender Freies Berlin and the other for Hessischer Rundfunk in Frankfurt. These beautifully recorded and preserved p…
Cybernetics III / Contrappunto Dialettico Alla Mente
Limited and numbered edition, featuring original artwork and a newly designed, beautifully crafted collector’s sleeve with new liner notes by Bradford Bailey, and pressed on 180g vinyl. A reissue of one of the most singular documents in Deutsche Grammophon's legendary Avantgarde series - a single LP that sets two radically opposed ways of working with magnetic tape against one another, both realized within months of each other at the same address: the Studio di Fonologia della RAI in Milan.
On o…