Reissues
Orchestral Works 1
New CD from Agencement, the long running solo project of the Japanese violinist, improviser, and painter Hideaki Shimada, the first release on Pogus in five years, and it closes a circle more than three and a half decades in the making. As Al Margolis, the label's founder and a singular force within American experimental music since the early 1980s, has long made clear, Pogus had wanted to issue Shimada's work since the very beginning. That it finally appears now, with Margolis himself among the…
Shortwave Memories
*2026 repress* Iconic Norwegian producer and composer Biosphere follows up his evocative 'Angel's Flight' release with a new album set for release early in 2022. Shortwave Memories is an album inspired by the post-punk electronic music of the late 70's and early 80's, especially the productions of figures like Martin Hannett and Daniel Miller. "The last few Biosphere albums have all been made using samples and software, but Shortwave Memories is a return to vintage analog hardware from the late …
The Petrified Forest
Norwegian ambient maestro Geir Jenssen aka Biosphere maintains his fascination with natural landscapes in The Petrified Forest, in a sort of impressionistic illustration of Archie Mayo’s 1936 film of the same name. After imaginary trips taking us to Trømso, the Wolski forest on Poland, and more esoteric corners of his mind, this time his music inhabits a noirish world on the edge of the desert, populated by nervous and disillusioned characters who crop up in snatches of sampled dialogue across s…
The Hilvarenbeek Recordings
Biosphere is the main recording name of Geir Jenssen, a Norwegian musician who has released a notable catalogue of ambient electronic music. He is well known for his works on ambient techno and arctic themed pieces, his use of music loops, and peculiar samples from sci-fi sources. His 1997 album Substrata was voted by the users of the Hyperreal website in 2001 as the best all-time classic ambient album.
The Hilvarenbeek Recordings are based on field recordings from the Dutch farm Biologische boe…
The Pain of Separation: Turkish Gazels, 1926-1935
A collection of spellbinding, melismatic vocal improvisations taken from 78s cut between the mid 1920s to mid '30s - a period defined by the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire’s partition, the Greco-Turkish War and the compulsory population exchange that followed. This same period also represented a time of intense efforts, following the establishment of the Republic, to westernise the new nation's music - coupled with a ban on traditional music education in schools, and later a complete ban on bro…
Jesus Hits Like the Atom Bomb: Gospel Quartet Singing in Jefferson County, Alabama
"Jefferson County is the heartland of black American a cappella gospel quartet singing. For more than [a century] black quartets have thrived in Birmingham and Bessemer, and they have provided immeasurable spiritual uplift and musical enjoyment to a large portion of the local population. The tenacious survival of black quartet traditions in Birmingham and Bessemer preserves a cultural and historical continuity that informs and enriches many lives. The older singers share a sense of brotherhood, …
The Neon Weeps Tonight
*300 copies limited edition* Following 'The Sympathy Portal' LP, released earlier this year, 'The Neon Weeps Tonight' was similarly recorded during lockdown and released as a very limited CDr in early 2022 before its being mooted for this slightly edited reissue. This time comprising six compositions, it begins proceedings with Edward in a typically reflective mood that sometimes feels barbed as much as steeped in a yearning for times lost as melodic yet sombre keys assume a haunted quality befo…
Béke
**CD Version* “Peace is not the word to play” rapped Large Professor on Main Source’s 1991 debut album. His plea to stop abusing the word “peace” simply for rhetoric flair sounds just as valid in today’s genocidal world as it did in the streets of New York over 30 years ago. For Oiro Pena to name this album Béke, meaning peace in Hungarian – or white people in French Caribbean creole – it seems like they finally have something to say. With this group/concept/project called Oiro Pena, circling as…
Introspection
Brazilian guitar music has a way of folding the whole century into a single instrument, and few players carried more of it in their hands than Luiz Bonfá. Most listeners know him through the songs he wrote for Orfeu Negro, the ones that helped carry bossa nova out of Rio and across the world. Introspection, cut for RCA in 1972, is the quieter counterweight to that fame: eight original pieces for solo guitar, recorded at a moment when Bonfá had stopped chasing the hit and turned inward.
Silver Music
For close to a decade the sound of Italian cinema and television ran through four musicians from Rome. I Marc 4 were the rhythm section the country's leading composers reached for first, and between sessions they cut a long run of library albums under their own name. The scarcest corner of that catalogue sits on two companion imprints, Silver Music and Silver Men, issued in 1976 and seldom seen since. This new edition draws the strongest material from both onto a single LP, in the original milit…
Bury Me In A Corner Of The Yard
Death Is Not The End issue a 14-track tape of vintage and archival Cajun ft. tracks from Segura Brothers, Amede Ardoin, Blind Uncle Gaspard, Sydney Landry & more.
Curse You, Foreign Lands
A 14-track tape pulling together rural Greek demotika recordings from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s. Soaring pentatonic improvisations, odd-metered rhythms, and vocal performances oscillate between heartbreaking laments and ecstatic celebrations.
All Thoughts Fly
Sacro Bosco (“Sacred Grove”) is the starting point for Anna von Hausswolff’s All Thoughts Fly. Here in solo instrumental mode, the entire record consists of just one instrument, the organ, and represents absolute liberation of the imagination. All Thoughts Fly radiates a melancholic beauty, and is distinguished by fluid transitions of contrasting elements; calmness and drama, harmony and dissonance, much like the place that inspires the music. Sacro Bosco is a garden, based in the centre of Ital…
Stella Kola
Originally self-released in 2023, Stella Kola, the debut album from Beverly Ketch (Jow Jow, Weeping Bong Band) and Robert Thomas (Sunburned Hand of the Man, Dalthom), now returns in a renewed edition - bringing wider attention to a record that already felt like a quietly essential artifact from the moment it first appeared.Given the pair’s respective roots - and the presence of collaborators drawn from across the Northeast experimental underground - one might expect “a brutal blast of acid swirl…
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…
Geträumt Hab Ich Vom Martinszug
Second edition of 500 on transparent green vinyl. The third stanza of Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem ‘Dem sonnengott’ evokes a narrator who is tortured by Spleen until slumber makes his childlike gloom disappear with music. Although today’s readers might judge these nineteenth century musings of the Imagination as mere stylistic platitudes, they also still speak beyond the grave as universal truths. A mere two hundred years later, similar anxieties and hopes are still channeled through various art f…
Stato Interessante
The premiere vinyl edition of Ennio Morricone's 1977 score for Sergio Nasca's Stato Interessante, pressed on 140-gram black vinyl.
La Polizia e’ al Servizio del Cittadino?
Big Tip! LP, 140-gram black vinyl, limited edition of 300. The film belongs to the golden run of the Italian poliziottesco, folding crime, political intrigue and social criticism into a cynical portrait of corruption and institutional power set against the unrest of the Years of Lead. Luis Bacalov, who would later win an Academy Award for Il Postino and whose Django theme is part of the western canon, answered it with one of the most distinctive scores of his prolific career.
Moving easily betw…
Il Sesso Degli Angeli
The premiere vinyl release of Giovanni Fusco's 1968 score for Ugo Liberatore's Il Sesso degli Angeli, prepared in full stereo as it was meant to appear in 1968 but never did.
The Mafia Film Music Collection
Three of Riz Ortolani's crime and gangster scores, long awaited by his admirers, gathered on a single two-disc set for the composer's centenary.