This special bundle collects the recent reissues on Alga Marghen of two seminal albums on the newly founded Musique Brut series

Damião Experiença - Planeta Lamma

Alga Marghen returns with an amazing hard turn into the left-field, delivering the first ever reissue of Damião Experiença’s cult, 1971 LP, Planeta Lamma.  A definitive gesture of Brazilian countercultural music of its era, with original self-released copies distributed by the artist by hand, making them highly collectable and rare as hen’s teeth,  it’s a singular effort of outsider experimental folk that has absolutely no equivalent before or since. Totally bonkers and essential as it comes. Over the course of nearly three decades of activity, the Italian imprint Alga Marghen, has continuously cast light into the shadows of historical sound practice, offering particular focus to underappreciated artefacts at the juncture of visual art, sound-art, experimental music, and sound-poetry. With each subsequent release, the label has helped to reform our understanding of 20th century, and the voices that made it what it was. Never to be easily predicted as to where their next step will take them, their latest delves into the obscure shadows of the early 70s Latin American underground, with the first ever reissue of the Brazilian artist Damião Experiença’s debut LP, Planeta Lamma, original self-issued in 1971. A truly singular effort of outsider experimental folk, it’s a mind-blowing stunner with no equivalents anywhere, before or since. Issued in a very limited vinyl edition by Alga Marghen, with original copies as rare as hen’s teeth and commanding high prices on the collector’s market, this one is not to be slept on for a moment. It’s going to fly.

Damião Experiença (1935 – 2016) was a Brazilian singer-songwriter, lyricist, and multi-instrumentalist, who gained a passionate cult following over the course of his life and career, becoming regarded as a major icon of Brazil’s counterculture, as well as one of the country's most famous and prolific outsider musicians. Experiença was an unpretentious eccentric and compulsive hoarder who lived on the margins of society in the bairro of Estácio in Rio de Janeiro. During the early 1970s, he began producing his own LPs - the first of which was “Planeta Lamma” - which he sold in the streets and handed out for free, with many - dozens in number - becoming highly sought after collectors items over the course of his decades long career.

Recorded at a small studio inside his apartment, Experiença’s music falls entirely outside of any form of categorization, blending wild experimentation with an entirely freaked out form of folk and psychedelic rock. The songs that make up his debut LP - “Planeta Lamma” - defy logic, encountering the artist often playing multiple instruments at the same time - a one-string guitar, harmonicas, shakers, marimbas, etc. - and singing in a mix of Portuguese and a dialect he created himself - "Planet Lamma dialect" - freely improvising lyrics about a vast number of eccentric themes.

“Planeta Lamma” is, simply put, a wild and raucous affair falling somewhere between the psychedelia of Captain Beefheart, the outsider singer-songwriter efforts of Wesley Willis and Daniel Johnson, and the weirder and wilder ends of Brazilian folk and Tropicália. Truly singular and out on its own, while the album has long held a cult following in and outside of Brazil, Alga Marghen’s beautiful vinyl reissue finally allows access for the broader audience that it’s always deserved. 

Hans Krüsi - EX HK

Alga Marghen returns with a much needed and necessary repress of their incredible, long out of print 2008 release, Hans Krüsi’s “EX HK”. Resting at a unique juncture of field-recording and musique concrete, created by an artist with few parallels, its a crucial artifact of 20th century sound practice that blurs the perceived boundaries of the "artist record" in truly unexpected ways.

Over the course of nearly three decades of activity, the Italian imprint, Alga Marghen, has continuously cast light into the shadows of historical sound practice, offering particular focus to underappreciated artefacts at the juncture of visual art, sound-art, experimental music, and sound-poetry. With each subsequent release, the label has helped to reform our understanding of 20th century, and the voices that made it what it was. Within Alga’s broad reaching project of releases that blur the lines between the worlds of fine art and sound / music, this much needed repress of their incredible and increasingly sought release, pushes towards the out reaches of this realm. Originally issued in collaboration with the Swiss Kunstmuseum des Kantons Thurgau (the repository of the artist's estate) and published on the occasion of Alga Marghen invitation to the Artist's Record Pavillion at Art Basel 2008, it remains the only full length dedicated to the Swiss artist’s work in sound. Resting at a unique juncture of field-recording and musique concrete, it’s an incredible artefact by an artist with parallel that we can call to mind.

Hans Krüsi (1920–1995) was a Swiss self-taught artist, generally categorized within the outsider tradition, who is most well-known for painting that explored his experiences or memories of agrarian labor, and the relationship between humans and nature, that were often executed on napkins and other small scale supports. Krüsi only completed eight years of school, going on to work on rural farms and eventually as a flower seller during the 1970s, selling his painting from his stall before being offered acknowledgment and exhibitions that enabled work a larger scale, specifically monumental installations and sculptural pieces, constructed from found objects and multiple mediums. While Krüsi’s sound works are long the least well-known objects in his output - never exhibited during his lifetime and only having received a minor number of posthumous releases - beginning during the 1960s they occupied a central place in his working practice. In his studio he would play field recordings of a vast array of sounds from numerous tape decks, and then record these “soundscapes” with a microphone, creating a kind of rudimentary, real-time / lo-fi incarnation of sound collage.

The five sections of Krüsi’s EX HK are incredibly inventive and somehow aligned with 20th century experimental sound practice, while standing completely outside of it. From private recordings made by the artist and housed in the collection of Anton Bruhin,  the folkloric, psychedelic, and radically experimental intertwine, creating a hallucinatory intra and extra world, rich with pointillistic detail and allegory. Tape manipulation and the collision of recognizable sources collide, dance, and bristle against each other, sculpting remarkable abstractions that push toward the otherworldly.  

Easily some of the most unique and engaging sound collage work produced during the 20th century,  Krüsi’s EX HK is an astounding bit of work, entirely shifting perceived notions of experimental practice - the who and what - during the period these recordings were produced. Alga Marghen has done us a great service by bringing it back into the world with this brand-new pressing. If ever there was an artist who deserves far more attention that he has received, Krüsi has to be the one.