Reissues
Ultraman vs. Alien Metron
Tip! In the first years of its existence, starting in 1997, the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet worked as a collective, inviting all and any of its participants to contribute compositions to the band's repertoire. Eventually, the Tentet would jettison scores and pre-planned structures altogether, opting for free improvisation, but on their early tours and initial recordings they played pieces written by the various band members. A marathon set of summer studio sessions in 2002, just off a U.S. …
Applecores
*2022 stock* Exact repro, originally released in 1978. One of the hippest, tightest sessions ever recorded by drummer Sunny Murray – a large group set recorded with his Untouchable Factor group – a great ensemble that includes Frank Foster on soprano sax, Oliver Lake and Arthur Blythe on alto saxes, Hamiet Bluiett on baritone, Don Pullen on piano, and Cecil McBee and Fred Hopkins on bass! The sound is somewhat straighter than Murray's free jazz of a few years before – almost in the mode that Fos…
Flee Past's Ape Elf
*2022 stock* Splendid, expanded reissue of this monster album, which most people know from its placement on the NWW List. Stapleton even went so far as to name a track of his ("Fashioned to a Device Behind a Tree") after a mis-hearing of one of Flee Past's' many memorable lines. The music has its roots in Hampshire College's Electronic Music Studio in the early 1970s. While taking a class on electronic composition, Robert Carey was smitten by the potentialities lurking inside piles of reel-to-re…
Perfect Lives
*2022 repress now in digipak, with new cover art* Robert Ashley's Perfect Lives has been called "the most influential music/theater/literary work of the 1980s." At its center is the hypnotic voice of Robert Ashley. His continuous song narrates the events of the story and describes a 1980s update of the mythology of small town America. Perfect Lives is populated with myriad characters revolving around two musicians - "R", the singer of myth and legend, and his friend, Buddy, "The World's Greatest…
You think you really know me
2024 Small Repress, gold foil cover. Gary Wilson's monumental 1977 LP reissued with a glamorously shiny foil cover bearing the original cover art (care of Owen Maercks's well-loved copy), delicately laid out by Scott Allison. Which makes it, perhaps, the last copy you'll ever need. You Think You Really Know Me (also the title of Michael Wolk's 2005 documentary about Wilson) was Wilson's second LP, but the first he recorded as a vocalist, hewing to his own bizarre vision -- a syncretic collision …
Seikatsu Kōjyō Iinkai
Ferocious JP / US free jazz bomb. A rare meeting between the NYC free jazz scene and the Japanese free music scene. Old-style Gatefold LP, with rare photographs & liner notes by Alan Cummings.
Complete "La Grima"
Famed free jazz concert registration of an early New Direction for the Art performance. Recorded in 1971. Old-style Gatefold LP, with rare photographs & extensive liner notes by Alan Cummings.
I Live In A Utopia
This sprawling collection by Belgian loner blues savant Bram Devens aka Ignatz encapsulates the mystery, murk, and melancholy of his uncanny craft at its most windswept and wayward. Originally issued via Goaty Tapes in September of 2015, this long-anticipated vinyl edition expands the saga with an additional 17 minutes of archival material. Deven’s palette remains constant throughout: feathery fingerpicking, modal loops, and intuitive six-string navigations interspersed with candlelit passages o…
A Rainbow In Curved Air
*2022 stock* One of Terry Riley's most enduring works, and a haunting record that contains two extended modal minimal jams. By capturing Riley as both a conceptualist and as a virtuoso performer, this 1969 LP revealed a suppleness that stands in contrast to the baggage associated with “minimalism.” The range displayed over its two sides reaches out to the world (and, yes, the cosmos) rather than sitting inside any restrictive aesthetic field. As a result, the album can simultaneously suggest a f…
Four Compositions
*2022 stock* "Any resemblance between these pointillistic chamber compositions and Schoenberg is purely coincidental. Delicate as to texture, curiously dispassionate as to mood, these mostly notated woodwind, string, and piano chamber works are motivically atonal, but tend to collapse into tonal cadences just to show you they know where they are. Like Ornette Coleman, Mitchell's playing with the tension between center and periphery, but in a milder, more abstract idiom and from the other directi…
Water Babies
*2023 stock. Blue Transluscent Vinyl* 'Every morning, about an hour before sunrise, the day breaks gradually, with little noticeable fanfare. It’s the best time of day outdoors. The nighttime goblins have gone to their hiding places, loud day creatures have yet to rise, and it’s just us with the cool morning mist and that dim kind of landscape that lets us see only what we want to see.When Water Babies was recorded in 1967 and 1968, Miles Davis had with him one his best working units. His and Wa…
Live In Allentown
*2022 stock* Jim Sauter & Don Dietrich (saxophones), Donald Miller (electric guitar), Adam Nodelman (bass guitar). The 3rd annual Halloween extravaganza. Recorded October 29, 1986. Reissue of cassette only release Live in Allentown (Lowlife LL02). Includes the entire second set with Scott Legath on electronics, not previously released.
Songs Our Mother Taught Us
*2022 stock* The work of upstate New York noise-jazz trio Borbetomagus is frequently described in terms of overwhelming power and aggression. In a live context, that's absolutely the dominant impression one is likely to get. On record, though, it's possible to have some control over the volume, and thus to listen closely and carefully and discern real technique at work, not to mention a subtlety that's not really surprising, given that saxophonists Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich, and guitarist Dona…
Noisembryo / Noise Matrix
Noisembryo definitively presented here on cd with bonus disc noise matrix including unreleased material from the same sessions as Noisembryo and counterpart 'hole' and selected recording from the time period. Absolutely can’t be missed for fans of this period of noise deity Merzbow. the bonus disc alone makes this essential for any Merzbow fanatic as well as new listeners. When people ask where to start with Merzbow? This is the answer! The holy grail, not only of Merzbow’s obsessive discography…
Early-Mart
Gideon Nxumalo was a key figure during the formative years of South African jazz in the 1950s, helping shape the emerging South African jazz sound as a pianist and composer and contributing to the scene as a radio presenter, music teacher and arranger. His recorded output as bandleader/composer is comprised of three iconic albums from Jazz Fantasia (1962) to Gideon Plays (1968) to Early-Mart (1970). Early-Mart was Gideon Nxumalo's tribute to his friend and musical compatriot, drummer Early Mabuz…
Flowering Tree, Distant Moon
Japanese multi-instrumentalist Masahiro Takahashi's latest album is a meditation on seasons and distance, recorded in isolation at his temporary home studio in Toronto. Following “the coldest winter I have ever experienced,” he began crafting hushed, lush vignettes of color wheel electronics with an array of software synthesizers, granular samplers, plug-in FX, MIDI controllers, and a shruti box. The songs sway, shimmer, and unspool in sparkling arcs, between reverie and lullaby, inspired variou…
Flatwise Huddle - Performing And Expanding Cracked Everyday Electronics 1968-2016
Andy Guhl’s career as an improvisational musician went from strength to strength in the 1970s but it wasn’t until 1983 that the Swiss experimenter and architect stopped using any traditional instruments in order to embrace electronic collage, a technique that incorporates the use of modified radios, turntables, transmitters and other objects in a sort of ante-litteram circuit-bending. A similar approach emerged in collaboration with Norbert Möslang as part of Voice Crack, a collective active fro…
Dieter Roth and Music
**Standalone 3LP set, few copies available** The oeuvre of the internationally renowned Swiss artist Dieter Roth reflects the multiplicity of his talents. He was active not just as a visual artist, writer, graphic artist, jewellery and furniture designer, publisher and musician, but also often united different media in works that one cannot assign definitively to any single field. Besides employing unusual materials such as foodstuffs, Roth also worked early on with the possibility of translatin…
The Power Of Feeling
'A lost bit of jazz funk from the 70s! This set is a lot more obscure – issued on the short-lived Encounter imprint, who gave us a handful of albums – all of them great! Sir Edward, we've been told, is really Harold Vick (although we've also heard that it might be Edward "Sonny" Stitt) – although we're not sure, and the album cover never gives a clear picture of Sir Edward's face. It does show the other players, though, like bassist Wilbur Bascomb, vibist Omar Clay, percussionist Jumma Santos, a…
Music For Commercials
Originally issued by Crammed in 1987, this is one of the most sought-after releases in our legendary Made To Measure series. Known for his numerous albums, soundtracks, and collaborations with an impossibly broad array of artists (from Ryuichi Sakamoto and DJ Towa Tei to Van Dyke Parks, Björk, Manu Dibango and Elvin Jones), composer, saxophonist and producer Yasuaki Shimizu also released several electronic music productions during the '80s, which are currently generating a lot of interest (a.o. …