Reissues
Teodros Makonnen With His Organ
Some recordings can foreshadow the future in ways that are hard to grasp in the moment, and Teodros Makonnen With His Organ (Teodros Makonnen ከኦርጋኑ ጋር) is one of them. Known as Teddy Mak, Teodros Makonnen helped define the digital sound of Ethiopian music that emerged from the 1980s onward, not only as a keyboard player but also as a producer, songwriter, performer, and sound designer. Although electronic instruments and digital production are now taken for granted in Ethiopian music, the early …
God Is Good
It's been years now. OM have done their time in the desert, and ever-changing, are returned. Today, they say, God is Good. Are you surprised? Perhaps you've haven't understood what OM was saying to you. But perhaps you felt something... It's true that the one way pursued by OM leads in many different directions. It is a mystic path. Songs come from innumerable sources, filtering through the external and the internal. OM albums are rituals, personal convictions transcripted into verse. Playing th…
Advaitic Songs
More than a decade after its initial release, Om's Advaitic Songs continues to stand as a towering achievement in heavy music's ongoing evolution - a record that demolished preconceptions about what drone-doom could become while establishing new possibilities for consciousness-expanding composition. Where God Is Good represented the first step in a more ornate and sophisticated direction for Om, Advaitic Songs achieved a level of composition that would have been impossible to foresee from the du…
In Pas(s)ing
On In Pas(s)ing), Mick Goodrick turns understatement into signature, floating a cool, singing tone across an ECM all-star backdrop. John Surman, Eddie Gomez and Jack DeJohnette move with almost invisible precision around his quietly lyrical themes, creating a session where momentum whispers rather than shouts, and melody lingers long after the notes fade.
For The Raven
*300 copies limited edition* For the Raven was due to be the next release after Ligeliahorn on the Nekrophile Rekords label. Sadly the project fell through and, even more sadly, it coincided with a number of the celebrants being rounded up to enjoy a short holiday at Her Majesty's Pleasure, expense and, indeed, insistence. By the time our intrepid Disciples Of Doom re emerged the momentum had been lost and For the Raven was consigned to the Metgumbnervaults to, until recently, only make an occas…
Ligeliahorn
*300 copies limited edition* Ligeliahorn was the second release from Metgumbnerbone, the first being the cassette Dreun (recently re released as a handsome double album on the Infinite Fog label). Ligeliahorn was originally released on the A Mission record label in 1984. The whole album was the product of but one night.. Improvised in a derelict factory down on the fog enshrouded banks of The River Tyne in north east England. The instrumentation comprised mainly of what was already there augment…
Starring LeChat
An FM dial tuned to Japan, 1985 - then fed through the loudest band the country has ever produced. Kyonetsu No Hatsune Kaidan, issued by Alchemy Records in 2018, was the first new studio album in three and a half years from Hatsune Kaidan - the union of noise legends Hijokaidan and the Vocaloid singing synthesizer Hatsune Miku - and it aims its feedback at a very specific target: the golden age of Japanese pop, from anime themes to the classic kayokyoku songbook.
By 2018 the project had settled …
ベスト : Best
Japan's most famous pop star does not exist, and here she fronts its most ferocious band. Hatsune Kaidan is the improbable union of Hijokaidan - the Kyoto-born group that has defined Japanese noise since 1979 - and Hatsune Miku, the turquoise-haired Vocaloid singing synthesizer developed by Crypton Future Media, a virtual idol who has filled arenas without ever drawing breath. Best, issued on CD by Alchemy Records in 2018, gathers fourteen tracks from the project's strange and glorious run - stu…
Alternate Flash Heads
Ninety-nine tracks in thirty minutes - the physical limit of what a compact disc can hold. Alternate Flash Heads, the second solo album by the saxophonist Ryoko Ono, issued in 2015 by Alchemy Records and produced by Jojo Hiroshige himself, is one of the great conceptual gambits of recent Japanese music: a single composition shattered into 99 palindrome-titled fragments, designed to be shuffled - so that no listener ever hears the same album twice.
Ono, born in Sapporo in 1975 and long based in N…
Giga Noise
Twenty-five artists, eight hours, one room. In May 2016, the Giga Noise mini festival brought together an entire cross-section of Japan's noise underground at Tokyo's Akihabara Goodman - a marathon showcase of mostly lesser-known and emerging acts from across the country, an event with few precedents even within a scene famous for its density. Giga Noise (Future of Noise), a sprawling double CD issued by Alchemy Records, is its official document - twenty-five live performances, and a snapshot of…
Dove Va La Tua Strada?
A road that waited fifty-two years to be walked. Recorded in Trieste in 1973 and never released, Dove Va La Tua Strada? is the lone document of Exit - a band that vanished without leaving an official trace, now resurfacing through Black Widow Records in a highly limited edition of 400 copies. This is Italian prog archaeology of the purest kind: not a reissue, but a first appearance, half a century late.
The story of its recovery has something novelistic about it. In the summer of 2021, at the Tr…
1982-1986 (Expanded)
Even with just basic knowledge of the conditions of the totalitarian regime in the former Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (ČSSR), it is not difficult to understand why the project Maťkovia was never allowed to release anything officially during its existence from 1982 to 1987. The ironic, nihilistic lyrics full of dark humor, describing the despair and greyness of the normalization era in Bratislava in the 1980s simply had no chance of passing through the censorship at the time. The work of the …
The Beating of Wings
The 40th anniversary edition of Andrew Poppy’s The Beating of Wings, originally released on ZTT Records. Hailed as “a major landmark in pop-classical genre-blending and post-minimalism” (Robert Davidson, Topology) and “… ahead of his time … he’d fit right in with the Max Richters and Nils Frahms of today” (Steven Wilson; Porcupine Tree, The Album Years podcast). Composed and produced by Andrew Poppy and performed by his bespoke ensembles, The Beating of Wings contains four mesmeric tracks that m…
Resonance
"Japanese pianist Yumiko Morioka initially released Resonance, her first and only solo recording, on Akira Ito's Green & Water imprint in 1987. Whilst by no means a commercial failure, the album was mostly found in the background of Japanese TV documentaries, maternity clinics and healing shops before drifting into relative obscurity. By 1994, Morioka had relocated to America and her solo music career had given way to the joys of starting a family and her new life in California. It was, and stil…
But Not For Me
First vinyl reissue since 1978 of Masabumi Kikuchi's percussion-laden New York session for Flying Disk. Gary Peacock, Al Foster, Badal Roy, and Brazilian and North African percussion surround the pianist's spare modal phrasing. Limited edition with obi and insert
The Thing = ザ・シング
Limited vinyl reissue of the 1978 direct-to-disc classic. Isao Suzuki on piccolo bass with Ron Carter, Hank Jones, Roy Haynes, and strings arranged by Masahiko Satoh. A summit of Japanese and American jazz from Tokyo's golden age of audiophile recording, with obi and liner notes.
String Band Featuring Isao Suzuki
On My Spare Time, Isao Suzuki steps out front on piccolo bass in a luminous set of standards and ballads, wrapping bossa, Ellington and songbook classics in a warm, conversational post‑bop glow with some of Japan’s finest players.
Triple Echo Live
Recorded in the same year that saw the release of the Triple Echo trilogy, Triple Echo Live is the document that completes the picture - the drone project of Jojo Hiroshige brought to the stage, unfolding in real time before an audience. Issued by Alchemy Records on CD in an edition of only 100 copies, it has remained one of the most elusive entries in the noise legend's vast catalog.
Hiroshige needs little introduction. Born in Kyoto in 1959, he founded Hijokaidan in 1979 - the band that, more …
Kel Tamasheq
Studio album from Bamako-based Tuareg band Amanar de Kidal. "Kel Tamasheq” is years in the making, a self produced DIY album, recorded in the small studios of the Malian capital over the past few years.
Carrying on in the tradition of assouf, the Northern Malian style of Tuareg guitar popularized by artists like Tinariwen, Amanar pushes the sound forward into tight upbeat groove and kinetic rhythms, reflecting the rich diversity of Mali and the energy of the capital. The band takes its name from…
Greek Variations & Other Aegean Exercises
*2026 repress* Recorded in '69, Greek Variations & Other Aegean Exercises is irresistible on two counts. First, for its daringly conceived and brilliantly performed music, inspired by Greek folk songs and instrumental textures and deep enough to reveal all its treasures only after many repeated listenings. Second, for being recorded at the moment when the Don Rendell/Ian Carr Quintet, a major force in British straight-ahead jazz since '62, had broken up and Carr's equally influential jazz-rock b…