Reissues
Everything That Rises
John Luther Adams's Everything That Rises, commissioned by SFJAZZ and the JACK Quartet, is an ever-in-motion virtuosic just-intonation work built of a series of 16 ascending musical “clouds.” Its pitches are derived from the harmonics of the piece’s subsonic fundamental tone (C0).The composer writes: “Everything That Rises, my fourth string quartet, grew out of Sila: The Breath of the World—a concert-length choral/orchestral work I composed on a rising series of 16 harmonic clouds. This music tr…
River of 1,000 Streams
Daniel Lentz's River of 1,000 Streams is a complex, slowly growing, densely textural piece for solo piano and up to 11 layers of “cascading echoes” (which are created in a live performance via a computer running a MAX patch). Each of the piece’s hundreds of “echoes” is a short moment (generally one to a few bars in length) of the piano solo that may reappear anywhere from a half-second to 25 minutes after the pianist first plays it. Floating sparsely amid the piece’s rich primary texture of trem…
Torrid Zone The Vertigo Recordings 1970 - 1975
Mindblowing! Esoteric Recordings are proud to announce the release of a newly re-mastered 6CD clamshell boxed set anthology featuring all the recordings released by Vertigo Records by the legendary jazz-rock group Nucleus and their founder Ian Carr.“Torrid Zone – The Vertigo Recordings 1970 – 1975” features every track from the highly celebrated albums “Elastic Rock”, “We’ll Talk About It Later”, “Solar Plexus”, “Belladonna”, “Labyrinth”, “Roots”, “Under The Sun”, “Snakehips Etcetera” & “Alleyca…
Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O.
Black Editions presents the deluxe, first-ever vinyl edition of Acid Mothers Temple's classic self-titled first album. Over the last 25 years no group has been more prolific or dedicated to pushing psychedelic rock to its limits than Japan's Acid Mothers Temple. Their maximalist technicolor vision was first revealed on this, their now legendary self-titled 1997 debut released by P.S.F. Records. Led by Makoto Kawabata, the album contains some of the group's most cosmic, hypnotic and over-the-top …
Homo Sacer
Makoto Kawashima was born in Saitama, a prefecture of the Greater Tokyo Area, in 1981. He picked up the alto sax in 2008, and started playing solo in 2010. He is the founder of the Homosacer (Sacredhuman) label. Homo Sacer was originally released in 2015. It was Kawashima's second solo release and his first full-length album. It was also the final release by P.S.F. Records. The album was recorded live during a heavy rainstorm at the gallery and café Yamanekoken in Iruma, Saitama. Facing up towar…
The Velvet Underground
On Limited Edition Translucent Gold Vinyl!The original overview/collection from the legendary band. On Sundazed compact disc and 180gm vinyl, from the original masters.Originally released as part of MGM's "Golden Archive Series," this 1970 album (simply referred to as Velvet Underground) is a terrific sin-and-salvation selection from the first three VU albums, just the kind of thing to take along to a desert island or to the end of the world. It's essentially their earliest greatest hits collect…
Foggy Notion / I Can't Stand It
Between May and October 1969, the Velvet Underground:Lou Reed, Sterling Morrison, Moe Tucker and Doug Yule recorded fourteen songs at the Record Plant in New York City for what would have been the band's fourth album for MGM/Verve Records. But when the Velvets left the label soon after, the recordings were shelved, and would not be heard by the public for a decade and a half. These songs, from those long-lost sessions, capture the Velvet Underground at a fascinating transitional point between th…
Magic Time: The Millennium/Ballroom Sessions
An awe-inspiring three CD set! We’ve emptied the Columbia vaults of material by these late-‘60s Curt Boettcher-led groups, whose dazzling soundscapes and choral arrangements created a perfect hybrid of sunshine pop and psychedelia. Produced with the bands’ full participation, Magic Time is the definitive compendium of Millennium/Ballroom material, including the entire Begin and Ballroom albums and an additional wealth of unheard songs and alternate versions, plus interviews and rare photos! Magi…
Passage
**Restocked, reduce price** A true lost rarity of American ambient/cosmic music: Chris Spheeris and Paul Voudouris' 1982 album Passage. Living and recording in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Chris and Paul composed and released several albums of folk-rock and album-oriented synthpop before their attentions turned towards sound healing music in the early 1980s. The duo was approached by a company doing Biofeedback therapy and asked to create an aural component for patients looking to regain control of ner…
Malachai-Shadow Weaver Part 2
Double LP version. "The Legendary Pink Dots' classic Malachai (Shadow Weaver Part 2) is now presented in a 2018 remastered version. Malachai is the second half of the Shadow Weaver project, recorded simultaneously with Shadow Weaver. Special guest for this one was Steve Stapleton (Nurse With Wound, Current 93). A tripped out, challenging dive into experimentalism and a favorite for fans of The Legendary Pink Dots."
The Golden Age
Double LP version. "Legendary Pink Dots' classic The Golden Age is now presented in a 2018 Remastered version. 1988. Half of the six-piece Legendary Pink Dots had quit after a long tour. Edward Kaspel & The Silverman were living in a caravan. It was never going to be a happy album, yet it remains a personal favorite for the two survivors of LPDs class of '88. A masterful set of avant-garde, experimentalist melancholia."
Shadow Weaver (Expanded-LPx2)
Double LP version. "The Legendary Pink Dots' classic Shadow Weaver is now presented in a 2018 Remastered & Expanded version. Reflecting the Dots moving away from their electronic-based origin, organic instruments knit rich yet fragile tapestry throughout. Still as vital & relevant as band's primary influences -- Can, Faust, Neu & Meddle-era Pink Floyd, Shadow Weaver shows the bands mastery of psychedelic sound designs."
Mare Australe
"Another brilliant posthumous album by Letha Rodman Melchior. Letha's music, as her visual art, was a great collaged pile of extreme strangeness, with seemingly irreconcilable objects butting heads in ways that end up making great sense. I met Letha a long time ago, when she was in Cell, but I had not much idea of her work beyond that until she had moved to North Carolina and I started hearing her health was bad. Siltbreeze put out an amazing album called Handbook for Mortals (2013), and it was …
Home Fi
Edition of 400. "Vinylization of the recent Home Fi cassette (originally released on the Australian Brierfirld Flood Press label) by this magnificent New Zealand singer/songwriter. We were never able to score a copy of the tape, despite the fact we released Maxine Funke's last LP, Silk (FTR 410LP), so we figured we would perform the public service of making it generally available to the whole wide world. That's just the kind of guys we are! Recorded in stark and simple terms, Home Fi represents …
freeHorn
The form of both freeHorn and ii-v-i consists of a continuous modulation between three different harmonic series. freeHorn weaves together the live interaction of acoustic instruments and computer software written by Larry Polansky and Phil Burk. ii-v-i, a reverberant cloud of moving intonation, gradually drifts from one natural harmonic series to another. Only open strings, 2nd, 3rd and 4th harmonics, and notes stopped at the 7th and 12th frets are used, and the guitars are audibly re-tuned fro…
Windmill
Stephen Whittington writes:“…from a thatched hut draws upon a particular strand of Chinese culture: the Chinese scholar who withdraws, temporarily or permanently, from society. The thatched hut was the place where the great Tang dynasty poets Du Fu (Tu Fu) and Li Bai (Li Po) withdrew from the world. Their example was followed by many others, including the poet Bai Juyi (Po Chu-I), author of Record of the Thatched Hut on Mount Lu, and Xia Gui, the Song dynasty painter of Twelve Views from a Thatc…
Ecstatic Descent
Erik Griswold's Ecstatic Descent is a prepared-piano work that melds composed and improvisational elements to create an intensely animated, one-of-a-kind textural sound world. Performed here by the composer, at times it may call to mind an enormous out-of-control music box or mechanical toy. It also readily lends itself to comparisons to various ever-changing (yet ever the same) natural sound phenomena, and has been likened by composer Annea Lockwood to the bubbling frequencies of a river.The co…
Bhajan
Nicholas Chase's Bhajan, described by one critic as “a pas de deux between violin and electronics,” is in four joined/continuous sections. Influenced by many musics from around the globe, the work tantalizes and bewitches the ear with a breadth of sounds that ebb and flow as if guided by an elusive but inherent sense of logic. The composer performs its electronics/computer part while noted violinist Robin Lorentz (who has appeared on four previous Cold Blue CDs) propels the music compellingly, i…
Twilight Of The Dreamboats
Chas Smith's Twilight of the Dreamboats, one of his quintessential electro-acoustic work, is an ever-evolving single gesture, a seamless blend of tones and timbres from his metal sound sculptures (instruments with such names as Bertoia 718, Que Lastas, lockheed, Mantis, Sceptre, DADO) and his homemade and hot-rodded steel guitars (Clinesmith, Emmons, Guitarzilla, Cadillac bass), performed by the composer. “Reaffirming its status as one of the most exciting innovations in the recording and market…
After the Wars
Peter Garland's After the Wars, a resonant, sometimes clangorous four-movement piano solo, displays a unique sense of grace and a sincerity of expression that is quintessentially Garlandesque. In some ways it marks a slight shift of focus from his more overtly melodic and rhythmically driven material of the past 30 years. Garland writes about the piece:“After the Wars was commissioned by pianist Sarah Cahill as part of her A Sweeter Music project. The idea (I believe) was to focus on the idea of…