Reissues
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…
Zouroku No Kibyou
The first album by the most extreme noise project to ever come out of Osaka, now in a second deluxe edition that borders on insanity: natural birch wooden box, hand-numbered to 99 copies, color print lid reproducing the iconic cover art by manga master Hideshi Hino. Inside: the LP, a 40-page book of raw concert photos, a cassette of six rare studio tracks from April and June 1980 - Hijokaidan's primal first breaths - four postcards, a massive poster, a live photo book, liner notes by Jojo Hirosh…
Remblandt Assemblage
One of the most essential early documents of Japanese noise, originally recorded and mixed at home in 1980 and released in 1981 on cassette by Lowest Music & Arts, now given the physical treatment it always deserved: a 2LP set housed in a natural birch wooden box with laser print, hand-numbered edition of just 99 copies. Ninety-nine! With a double-sided 42 x 60 cm poster, heavy card insert reproducing the original master tape cover, and black cardboard strip with album credits. An art object, pl…
The Black Ark
Huuuge Tip! In the pantheon of classic free jazz, Noah Howard's The Black Ark looms large. Recorded at Bell Sound Studios in New York City in 1969 - just prior to the alto saxophonist's relocation to Europe - the album was eventually released in 1972 on Alan Bates's Freedom label, and has since acquired near-mythical status among collectors and devotees of the music. Now, Superior Viaduct presents the definitive remastered edition on vinyl, restoring this landmark to the visibility it has always…
The Tapscott Sessions Vol. 8
Solo piano from the heart of the Los Angeles underground. Horace Tapscott completely alone at the keyboard, recorded in the early '80s when the Nimbus label was documenting his every move. This is contemplative music of the deepest order - yet the closing piece devastates. "As A Child", Tapscott's own composition dedicated to Adele Sebastian who died just four days before this recording in 1983, aged only 27. She was a pillar of the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, and this was her favorite Tapscot…
Synths, Sax & Situationists (Music From The French Underground 1973-78)
France's near-revolution of May '68 kicked the country's small but vibrant counter-culture into overdrive and birthed a local underground music scene. The bands it spawned made music with far less rock purity than groups from the UK and US - their influences foregrounded improvisation, disjunction and genre-blending: Soft Machine, Pink Floyd, Frank Zappa, free jazz and radical politics. The introduction of the synthesiser in the early 1970s added fuel to the fire. This six-track compilation inau…
Live at IUCC - Complete Series
Few copies available. The Los Angeles based pianist, band leader, and composer, Horace Tapscott, always stood apart from the pack. A true visionary who was fiercely principled and independent, across the 1960s, '70s, '80s, and '90s, leading his legendary Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, he produced a tour de force of sound, seeded by social, political, and community-based action. For the entirety of their run together, Tapscott and his Arkestra, which continues to this day, were among the most impo…
Solo Orchestra In Real Time
A beautiful, dreamlike expression of spiritual jazz recorded in 1981 at City Recorders - a time when this kind of music was considered completely out of vogue. Yet here is Gary Bias, unspooling a suite of deeply soulful and profoundly far-reaching original compositions that vividly evoke the blue skies of the record's Los Angeles origins. Bias plays alto and soprano saxophone and flute with a tone and sensibility that sits somewhere between the lyricism of early Pharoah Sanders and the bold atta…
Sharps and Flats
The only album ever released under the name of saxophonist, bandleader and composer Jesse Sharps - a major, largely unsung figure in the history of jazz music in Los Angeles. Recorded in 1985 for Tom Albach's legendary Nimbus West imprint, Sharps And Flats lay unreleased until 2004 on CD and never saw a vinyl pressing until 2018. Sharps studied under Cecil Taylor at college, then returned to L.A. and took over band-leading duties from the great altoist Arthur Blythe in Horace Tapscott's Pan-Afri…
Live at IUCC
The only live recording the Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra ever released - and arguably the most complete document of this extraordinary musical community in full flight. Recorded between February and June 1979 at the Immanuel United Church of Christ on 85th & Holmes in Los Angeles, where P.A.P.A. played every second Sunday, developing their sound and building an audience rooted in the community. As a culturally radical, communal big band with a visionary approach to American Black music, the Arke…
Solo Orchestra In Real Time
A singular, radical entry in the Nimbus West catalogue from one of the true pioneers of the free jazz piano. Burton Greene was there at the very beginning - co-founding the Free Form Improvisation Ensemble with bassist Alan Silva in early-60s New York, recording for ESP-Disk and Columbia, playing the legendary loft sessions at Slugs'. After relocating to Amsterdam in 1969, Greene spent decades exploring the intersections of free jazz, Indian music, klezmer and electronic composition. Solo Orches…
East 101
A beautiful, dreamlike expression of spiritual jazz recorded in 1981 at City Recorders - a time when this kind of music was considered completely out of vogue. Yet here is Gary Bias, unspooling a suite of deeply soulful and profoundly far-reaching original compositions that vividly evoke the blue skies of the record's Los Angeles origins. Bias plays alto and soprano saxophone and flute with a tone and sensibility that sits somewhere between the lyricism of early Pharoah Sanders and the bold atta…
Nimbus West vinyl bundle
Specially priced bundles drawn from the catalog of Nimbus West — the American label widely regarded as the greatest single depository of West Coast avant-garde jazz. With the label's future uncertain and no represses planned, this is a final opportunity to explore one of the most vital and visionary corners of recorded jazz before it disappears from circulation for good.Nimbus West bundle four contains the following LPs:
Curtis Clark "Amsterdam Sunshine"
Curtis Clark "Deep Sea Diver"
Horace Tap…
Morgenmusiken
On Morgenmusiken, Green Cosmos expand their small‑town German jazz into a quietly epic, Coltrane‑lit cosmos, braiding modal vamps, Indian classical colour and spacious free improvisation into seven meditative journeys where silence and a single note carry as much weight as any crescendo.
Dogon A.D.
One of the most important jazz albums of the 1970s - finally on vinyl 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 classic" that has haunted col…
Kids Mysteries
Recorded live at the Bimhuis, Amsterdam. The debut album of M.O.B. - "My Own Band" - the project that would become the main vehicle for this South African giant in exile. Eight tracks, almost an hour of music, with titles that tell you everything you need to know: "Purtles," "Ice Cream Man," "Tea and Scones," "Monkey Woman," "Beach Balls," "Kids-Trainride."
Sean Bergin (1948-2012) left Durban for Amsterdam in 1976, escaping apartheid, carrying South African jazz in his blood. Half Irish, half So…
TA
Live at the Music Academy of the West, Santa Barbara, April 12, 1987. Cello and percussion. Two Europeans conquering California with nothing but strings, drums, bones, bodhran and squeaky toys. This is the duo that gave us Cellotape & Scotchtape in 1982 - now captured live on American soil, over an hour of pure duo improvisation.
Reijseger needs no introduction: Dutch cellist extraordinaire, ICP Orchestra veteran, Clusone Trio with Han Bennink and Michael Moore, later Werner Herzog's go-to compo…
L.A.'s Unsung
Nine rare tracks from the Nimbus West archive, a map of Los Angeles underground jazz the world never heard enough of. Horace Tapscott, Nate Morgan, Jesse Sharps, Dadisi Komolafe, Roberto Miranda - the names that built UGMAA and the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, the movement that kept spiritual jazz alive in South Central for decades while the music industry looked elsewhere.
"Desert Fairy Princess," "U.G.M.A.A Ger," "Prayer Of Happiness," "Mrafu," "Calvary" - titles evoking the Pan-African consc…
Electronic Cottage - The complete collection (Book, Hardcover)
Hardcover, 468 pages, 21×27 cm! In the wake of his Cause And Effect cassette label and distribution service, Hal McGee launched Electronic Cottage International Magazine. From 1989 to 1991, its six issues focused on the independent home recording community – artists who had developed their craft in the post-punk DIY era. The contributors were nearly all members of the hometaper community. The magazine featured articles providing helpful tips and highlighted the challenges hometapers faced. It in…
Complete Acousmatic Works — Vol 2 (16CD Box)
Second monumental box set of Denis Dufour's complete acousmatic works: 16 CDs, 17 hours of listening. Direct heir to Pierre Schaeffer at the GRM, Dufour redefined acousmatic art by reintroducing theatricality, voice and narrative into a sonic universe of unprecedented rigor and freedom.