Best of 2026
Lummernikt
Lummer is the Swedish name for the now protected family of vascular plants (Clubmoss/Lycopodiaceae). Lummer grows slowly and the spores with which it reproduces can take 12—20 years to develop. These spores, known as Nikt in Swedish, were once ground into an extremely flammable light yellow “old woman’s gunpowder” that was used for early theatrical pyrotechnics. Volatile and explosive, Lummernikt requires careful handling. There is something of the small scale dangerous in Finn Loxbo’s Lummernik…
Appearance/Music for Solo Performer
Big tip! Beyond Rare! These historical recordings of a 1967 concert at Hope College in Michigan involving John Cage, Toshi Ichiyanagi and David Tudor, performing compositions by Ichiyanagi and Alvin Lucier, were recently discovered in an archive in Japan. The Lucier piece, "Music for Solo Performer", was the first musical composition to utilize human brainwaves; this 1967 performance, released here for the first time, is an early realization of the piece, featuring Tudor, Ichiyanagi and Lowell C…
Intégrale Acousmatique
200 copies. 3LP special edition in screen printed linen box + 8 page booklet + download code. Metaphon is pleased to present this première edition, which brings together a near-complete collection of the acousmatic works of Liliane Donskoy, recorded in the 1970s and 1980s. Liliane Donskoy (*1933) is a French, classically trained pianist, music teacher, and composer of both instrumental and acousmatic music. She began her musical training at an early age, undertaking private piano studies with Yv…
Dogon A.D.
Complete sessions / expanded edition. One of the most important jazz albums of the 1970s – finally in its definitive edition. Julius Hemphill's Dogon A.D. is the missing link between the avant-garde and the blues, between the cotton fields and outer space. Recorded on a freezing February day in 1972 at Oliver Sain's Archway Studios in St. Louis – no heat, malfunctioning equipment, some musicians didn't even show up – and yet what emerged was nothing short of a masterpiece. An "almost accidental …
Hìeratico
Biiig Tip! Italian drummer, composer and sound artist Nicolas Remondino announces the release of his new album Hìeratico, a work that delves into the borderlands between ritual, abstraction and contemporary experimental music. The record presents a radical reimagining of the drum set and percussion as an autonomous sound-world, where pulse, noise and silence continuously collide and reconfigure. On Hìeratico, Remondino treats rhythm as a living architecture rather than a mere time-keeping device…
Soundtracks for Toshio Matsumoto
250 copies. A third, extraordinary document. Purge.xxx continues its quiet, singular excavation of the work of Japanese composer Takashi Inagaki with Soundtracks for Toshio Matsumoto - five soundtracks gathered for the first time, newly transferred from the original tapes, mixed and mastered, and accompanied by an original essay by Jennifer Lucy Allan.
Toshio Matsumoto (1932-2017) was a foundational figure in Japanese experimental cinema - a film director, video artist, and theoretician best kno…
Disappointment - Hateruma
Wewantsounds is delighted to announce the first vinyl reissue of Disappointment–Hateruma, the 1976 ALM Records release by percussionist Toshi Tsuchitori and Ryuichi Sakamoto. The album is notable as Sakamoto's first recording issued under his own name and represents one of the few occasions he explored fully improvised music during the 1970s. It provides a vital document for understanding Sakamoto's early development as a composer and performer, capturing a period when he was experimenting with …
Lucciole
Lucciole is Silvia Tarozzi’s luminous follow-up to the intimate reflections of Mi specchio e rifletto and the deeply rooted folk dialogues of Canti di guerra, di lavoro e d’amore with Deborah Walker. Here, Tarozzi draws together voices, memories, and musical lineages to create an album where avant-garde composition, personal narrative, and collective resonance exchange freely. The album opens with a radiant brass ensemble - chosen for its popular, celebratory, spiritual sound—and closes with the…
The Third World-Underground
CD edition. A title like a manifesto, and music with the conviction to carry it. For a few nights at the close of 1972, the Jazzhus Montmartre in Copenhagen held a trio that would barely survive the season. Abdullah Ibrahim - then still recording as Dollar Brand - sat at the piano; Don Cherry stood with his trumpet; Carlos Ward raised his alto. From the performance of November 14 came The Third World-Underground, a record that surfaced only in Japan, on Trio Records' Nadja imprint in 1974, and t…
Embryo's Rache
**Gatefold black vinyl, remastered** One year on from Opal, the Munich collective threw open a window that would never quite close again. Embryo had announced themselves in 1970 with a debut steeped in dark, psychedelic murk. Embryo's Rache - their second, issued on United Artists in 1971 - is the sound of a band stepping into the light and looking east. Founded by drummer and keyboard player Christian Burchard with multi-instrumentalist Edgar Hofmann, the group here absorbed flutist Hansi Fisch…
The Human Race Was Restored To Life Repeatedly / Yoshinotsune / Hadayro (3LP Bundle)
Across three decades of uncompromising sound, this series of vinyl reissues traces a raw and evolving lineage within Japanese noise. From the mid-1980s underground to the turn of the millennium, these works capture a continuous process of transformation—where noise is not only pushed to its limits, but constantly redefined.
Beginning with Solmania and the 1985 cassette H·A·D·A·Y·R·O, we encounter a foundational moment: a fiercely physical and experimental approach where self-built instruments, t…
Waterforest
On Waterforest, Yoichi Kamimura turns a multichannel installation into an intimate atlas of water and ice, braiding global field recordings into a quietly immersive study of climate, memory and the act of listening to landscapes.
Sommer Im Pfirsichhain
Last copies...Second edition of 500 on transparent red vinyl. Brannten Schnüre is an experimental dark folk group out of Würzburg, Germany. Christian Schoppik composed and played all the music, Katie Rich whispers, recites and sings. Together they make astoundingly beautiful folk with a rich instrumentation leaning towards the atonal spectrum. Instrumental wanderings stand alongside Nico-esque poetry tales. Christian plays the accordeon and in some songs guitar and flute. Inspired by hierophants…
A Decent Run
Tip! *100 copies limited edition* "A Decent Run is the result of a journey that began in 2000 and was recorded in 2024, seven years after the death of Tom Raworth, whose poems I used as the basis for ten tracks—ten songs—to which I added two pieces by Steve Lacy. It is a journey through many different kinds of music, lyrics, images, and sounds, yet one shaped by a single principle: the idea of music and improvisation as a collective, choral process, in which space and prominence are given to ind…
The Habit
On The Habit, Go Hirano gathers decades of home and studio recordings into a single, slow‑glowing arc: spare piano, pianica and small percussion drifting through room tone and outdoor air, turning everyday imperfections into a warmly enchanted, lifelong diary.
I.A.V.C. Tapes
Limited edition of 66 copies in canvas bag. 1980. Working alone from his home in the Mantuan town of Pomponesco, twenty-four years old, equipped with little more than an analogue synthesiser, a tape machine, and a small bank of effects, Maurizio Bianchi closed the chapter of his earlier Sacher-Pelz project and inaugurated, almost overnight, the body of work that would place him at the heart of European industrial music. Across roughly twelve months he produced an extraordinary run of self-issued…
Somewhere in the Wind
Somewhere in the Wind is the third record that Loren Connors and I have made together. Of the three, it’s the first that consists exclusively of electric guitar duos and it’s the first that was recorded live. To me it feels very much like a live record; this music happened in crowded rooms in Brooklyn on two dates in 2025 and there’s an urgency to connect with others and a pleasure in doing so that can be heard on both of these tracks. On the first of our duo records (Arborvitae, 2003) I primari…
The Rest Is My Ghost
Nostalgia is not an ideology, though in this moment, we could be mistaken for thinking it might be just that. Over the past years, the idea of nostalgia has been filtered through various political and technological lenses and has become a tool used for forgetting, rather than remembering. Instead of embracing histories’ complexities and inconsistencies, this version of nostalgia seeks only singular recollection. This contemporary phenomenon of nostalgia has become a methodology at best, and a we…
The Sinking of The Titanic
2026 Repress. Mega-Tip! Gavin Bryars was born in Yorkshire, England in 1943. His first musical forays were as a jazz bassist working in the early 1960s with improvisors Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley. Bryars later worked with composers John Cage and Cornelius Cardew, founded the Portsmouth Sinfonia and collaborated with Brian Eno on his famed Obscure imprint.
The Sinking of the Titanic, Bryars' first major composition, was inspired by the tragic event of the British passenger liner's cross-Atlantic…