Upcoming releases
Autofonia (Il Clangore Della Propria Voce Nell'Orecchio)
Big tip! *30 copies limited edition. Remastered reissue of the original* "Autofonia (Il Clangore Della Propria Voce Nell'Orecchio)" cassette, self-released by Massimo Toniutti in 1986. Sound material, collected and composed from February to September 1986 by Massimo Toniutti. Digitalized in 2018 from the original master tape cassette, and remastered by Giuseppe Ielasi in 2022. After 39 year this masterpiece is again available in a proper form!
"My archive of sound recordings began to assume an …
Dew Point Harmonics
Balmat began our journey in 2021 with the release of Luke Sanger’s Languid Gongue. Now, three years later, we turn an important corner as the Norfolk musician rejoins us with Dew Point Harmonics, the first repeat appearance on the label. Sanger’s new album feels like a natural extension of his inaugural record for Balmat: It’s a bewitching collection of esoteric synth sketches that slips unpredictably between consonant repetition, poignant melodies, and gnarled bursts of noise that catch in the …
Trad, Gras Och Stener: A Collective History (Book)
Huge Tip! 400 pages, 387 Images. The story of the legendary Swedish psych rock band Träd, Gräs och Stenar is also a defining story of alternative culture. Across multiple incarnations, the musicians of this iconic group (whose name translates to “Trees, Grass and Stones”) have drawn on their roots in jazz and the avant-garde, the iconoclastic art and theater of the 1960s, and the back-to-the-land “green wave” movement to blaze a pioneering trail across fifty years of endlessly improvisational, r…
Book 3: 1990-1993 (Book)
The third and final book in the trilogy of volumes dedicated to Grim Humour fanzine, which ran between 1983 and 1993 and lasted a total of eighteen editions. Following on from the first two, published respectively in 2020 and 2022, this book continues the same approach through its mixing reprinted original pages with rewritten features, some insightful reflections on many of them and additional material by both editor/publisher Richard Johnson and various other contributors. Writers involved wit…
Cybernetic Defiance and Orgasm
Henry Kawahara has been called “the Jon Hassell of Japan”, but upon closer inspection one finds that his work operates on very different terms. Like Hosono's forays into computerized Ryukyu folk “sightseeing music” or Tsutomu Ōhashi's Ecophony trilogy, Kawahara's world projected ancient musical traditions and notions of cultural identity onto the modern digital plane through a fusion of cybernetic thinking and pan-asian cultural introspection that makes Western attempts to do the same seem quain…