Reissues
Architettura Sussurrante
Clear vinyl, edition of 300 copies. The peculiar and relatively unknown musical experiment by Alessandro Mendini, crafted together with a strange company that included supposedly distant outfits like Matia Bazar (chart-topping Italian pop band) and Magazzini Criminali (experimental, highbrow theater collective) and released by a major label that printed a tiny amount of copies.The opening track “Casa Mia” included random quotes from Cinismo Abitativo, a “poetic” editorial written for the design …
Ars srA
Spittle Records present a definitive reissue of the long out-of-print first album from Italian experimental-rock band LA 1919, Ars srA, originally released in 1987 by ADN, the Italian Recommended Records branch. Ars srA was an early example of a long-distance collaboration album as result of a virtuosic exchange of tapes between the Milan-based duo and the legendary American guitarist Henry Kaiser and Canadian maverick sound artist John Oswald. The resulting music sounds like a perfect blend of …
Fabric for String Noise
Michael Byron's Fabric for String Noise, Parts 1 and 2 (2018), composed for New York’s notable violin duo String Noise, is wildly virtuosic music that is unlike just about anything else ever written for two violins. This two-movement work, a tremendous (and relentless) river of complex lines, may be said to resemble a sort of universal folk music of madly driven ecstasy, a sonic canvas wherein intense continuous activity shares space with an overarching sense of motionlessness.The composer chara…
Celesta
Michael Jon Fink's Celesta is a suite of a dozen quietly transcendent, gem-like celesta solos—a slowly unfolding ribbon of short pensive pieces composed over the past year and performed by the composer. The individual pieces, ranging in length from under two minutes to just over six minutes, are notable for the beautifully simple ways in which they reveal themselves through repetition and elegantly fashioned variation. The composer notes that these works “project a lyrical world of quiet intensi…
Moon Viewing Music (Inscrutable Stillness Studies #1)
Peter Garland's Moon Viewing Music (Inscrutable Stillness Studies #1) is a quiet, sparse, introspective six-movement work for three large gongs and a large tam-tam. Performed by celebrated new-music percussionist William Winant, it unfolds with a muted sensuality and a glacial inevitability—as if bent on suspending time. Each of the movements (or individual “pieces,” as the composer sometimes refers to them) has a distinct character, developing in its own fashion—utilizing such traditional means…
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
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…