End To End
*2024 stock* Barre Phillips was the first musician to record an album of solo double bass, back in 1968, and he has always been an absolute master of the solo idiom. In March 2017, Barre recorded what he says will be his last solo album, the final chapter of his “Journal Violone”: it is a beautiful and moving musical statement. All the qualities we associate with Barre’s playing are here in abundance – questing adventurousness, melodic invention, textural richness, developmental logic, and dee…
Variaciones Sobre Las Instrucciones
*250 copies limited edition* Alvear, Bondi & d'incise consists of Cristián Alvear from Chile, and Cyril Bondi and d'incise from Switzerland. The three musicians collaborate frequently in duo and trio formats. This album documents a duo performance by Alvear (guitar) and d’incise (vibraphone, electronics) of “Sleepless Night” (2022), a work by Spanish composer/sound artist Clara de Asís; and a trio performance by Alvear (guitar), Bondi (vibraphone) and d’incise (electronics) of “uno, dos o tres e…
Masahiko Okura / Naoto Yamagishi / Fumi Endo
*250 copies limited edition* Masahiko Okura, a reed instrument player and composer who has been performing actively since the 1990s, has previously released a number of solo and collaborative albums on Ftarri’s sister labels, Hitorri and Meenna. Percussionist Naoto Yamagishi lived in Europe for several years in the 2010s, and since then has been engaged in wide-ranging activities inside and outside Japan, frequently carrying out overseas tours and organizing concerts in Japan featuring musicians…
Memory Is A Poet, Spinning Stories
*2024 stock. 250 copies limited edition* Born in 1964, Tetuzi Akiyama is a guitarist/improviser active inside and outside Japan. Masahide Tokunaga, who was born in 1982, is an always-original alto sax player. Masatake Abe, born in 1993, is an innovative electric bass player on the jazz/improvised music scene. These three musicians of different generations performed together at Ftarri, Tokyo, on June 6, 2021. This CD contains two improvised pieces (about 25 minutes each) from that concert.This is…
They appear on the circuit from which we disappeared
*250 copies limited edition* Ai Watanabe is a Tokyo-based composer. After studying at Tokyo College of Music’s graduate school, she went to France and completed a graduate program at the Conservatoire à rayonnement régional de Paris, and subsequently earned a doctoral degree at Tokyo University of the Arts. In recent years Watanabe has been focusing on electroacoustic music using field recordings as additional materials, earning high praise inside and outside Japan. Kokichi Yanagisawa is a guita…
El Amigo
*200 copies limited edition* Aquiles Hadjis was born in Maracaibo, Venezuela. In 2009 he moved to Tokyo, and in 2017 he received a Ph.D. in Fine Arts from the Department of Painting at Tokyo University of the Arts. Still based in Tokyo, he is engaged in creative work in the fields of film, painting and music. Antonio Mazzei, also from Venezuela, is a pianist and composer. He studied with Fred Hersch and Kevin Hays at New York's New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, and has since continued …
The Lightgiver
*200 copies limited edition* Canadian musician Lee Noyes (born in 1977) lived in New Zealand from the mid-1990s to the 2000s and subsequently moved to Sweden, where he continues his work on the improvised/experimental music scene, playing electronics, percussion and other instruments. American guitarist Barry Chabala (born in 1961) has released numerous recordings on improvised/experimental music labels such as Erstwhile Records, winds measure recordings, and Another Timbre. Noyes and Chabala ha…
Mushoku In Excursion
*200 copies limited edition* Ongoing since 2014, Mushoku In Excursion is a duo project by Takahashi 'Takakhan' Seiji and Yuko Nexus6. Kyoto-based Takahashi has planned and organized a wide variety of performances and events. Yuko Nexus6 is a performance artist/writer who lived for a long time in the Kansai area and now resides in Tokyo. The creation of this album began with the two making a one-hour recording by the Uji River in Kyoto. The tape became a foundation over which Yuko Nexus6 (piano, …
California Sigh
Guitarist Lee Underwood’s syncretic blend of jazz, folk, and blues was a tremendous force behind Tim Buckley’s genre-stretching late 60s/early 70s music – but his 1988 acoustic guitar opus California Sigh has remained a unsung footnote to his story. Until now! This first time vinyl-edition reveals Lee’s free-floating acoustic moods, with synths and co-production from ambient avatar Steve Roach, as a soulful work of tranquility and transcendence.
Søndag I Spejlet
Demeters Döttrar is the new trio of Ida Skibsted Cramer, Charlott Malmenholt and Astrid Øster Mortensen. Søndag I Spejlet was mainly recorded in Gamlestaden, Gothenburg between 2022 and 2023 and consists of 8 tracks that lies somewhere in between 90's lo-fi experimental bedroom music and brash text-sound compositions channeled through the ever-inspiring cassette underground. Listening to Demeters Döttrar is like stepping into a parallel universe; a tiny unexplored corner with paper-thin walls or…
Kata No Wadachi
LP ltd to 315 copies. Kata No Wadachi is the latest album by Banetoriko, the solo noise project of Tamaki Ueda. Her first release both on An’archives and on vinyl, it follows several albums for the Neurec imprint–2017’s Beside the Sluice and 2022’s Yorioto Hogiokuri–and several other cassettes and CD-Rs. With Kata No Wadachi, the Banetoriko world, inspired by the Yokai (“strange apparitions”–supernatural figures, ghosts, spirits) of Japanese folklore, is at its most resonant yet.Recorded across …
The Milk-Eyed Mender
2024 repress. "Drag City takes great pleasure in introducing to you a remarkable new musical singer, songwriter and all-around talent, Joanna Newsom. Joanna's music has more of an affinity with the folk revival of the 60s, or the bluegrass movement at present, than with most contemporary 'folk' (or 'anti-folk') scenes. Affinities aside, her style could hardly be called bluegrass; nor does it evoke the pastoral tonalities of 60s folk: she sings about whalebones, sleep, grammar, mollusks, accumula…
Ys
2024 stock. Double LP version; deluxe gatefold sleeve, with inserted 12"x12" booklet of lyrics. "Five songs, fifty-five minutes, what-an-album! Ys is to Joanna Newsom a dream collaboration between her voice and harp and a full orchestra -- a sound many of us fans have thought we were hearing when listening with closed eyes at her concert performances. Songs familiar to Joanna's following are a big part of Ys, having been performed in concert over the past year -- but not with the arrangements yo…
Inner Weather
A diagonal chance encounter – chromatic undergrowth blossoming to a myriad tints of inner weatherings. Formations, fields, densities gather and dissipate. Outwards inverted, spiralling across. Orange dawn flowers upon the temple of the addicts. Radiating motionless fire. Sipping the morphium of the aether. Choir of the undertow and the roots of the air. Ljubljana-based piano player Neža Naglič (1984) devoted herself to exploring extended piano techniques in the context of free improvised music a…
Clearing
“Peridot dives right in, and so I will. It’s a gemstone, peridot, and may become your favorite gemstone (as it has mine since I’ve dug in to its history and cultural significance). I like volcanoes and volcanic land formations. “Peridot,” the musical piece presented here by Powers/Rolin, is soundtrack to memories of in-person witnessed lava floes and the infinite parade of Herzogian docu-footage of rivers of fire and constructive destruction. There are edits or augmentations evident, creating (o…
Creiriau Y Delyn Rawn / Relics Of The Horsehair Harp
"This collection is a companion piece to my solo album ‘Telyn Rawn’ AMGEN 001 (2020). I have invited some of my favourite musicians to respond to the eighteen improvised pieces on ‘Telyn Rawn’. I asked each contributor to imagine that the musical material improvised in 2020 was an ancient musical form that had fully existed in the medieval period, and, that each of their responses were to have happened centuries after the imagined formation of the ‘Telyn Rawn’ pieces. This album therefore propos…
Telyn Wrachïod
Cildraeth Sienco is an improvisation based on an amalgamation of the notation and structure of Angharad Jenkins’ Brandy Cove with the alternative string tuning of ‘Cywair yn Nghywair y Wrach’ from Robert ap Huw’s manuscript."Ceimion wrachïod cymwysYn siarad bob teimlad twys""Precise, angled braysSpeaking every profound feeling."From a cywydd requesting a harp by Huw Machno fl. 1560-1637
Marsaskala
*50 copies limited edition* Pieces of debris washed up on a coastline shrouded in mist. Gratification comes from an eternal search for solace. Locked away at the top of a lighthouse somewhere on an unnamed isle, Grady Steele broadcasts to those within the beacon’s reach. A soundsystem built of driftwood and salvaged car stereos is pieced together with precision and laboriously dragged to the top of the obelisk. A timeless fugue state spent playing arpeggios on a Spanish guitar, the PA system ebb…
Sleepless
This album was recorded at Liu Ying Studio in Shenzhen. An improvised session on acoustic guitar from start to finish, it nonetheless demonstrates a highly original, coherent artistic conception: a distinct “Oriental” aesthetic redefined by Mamer’s own creative vision. In tracks like “Sleepless”, “Man from the East”, and “Backyard”, Mamer ingeniously deconstructs and deploys traditional Han Chinese music scales to serve his own purpose, adding artful ambivalence and rich subtleties to an unmista…
Saxophone Solo For Reel-to-reel Tape Recording
*2024 stock* This series of reel-to-reel tape recordings, to be jointly released by Old Heaven Books and Liu Ying Studio, aims to offer to our listeners the best quality of sound we can achieve so far. Whilst a small part of these releases come from historical archives, the majority are freshly made by musicians we invite to our studio. We record these studio sessions − some of which free-improvised, others more composition-based − on reel-to-reel tapes. With high-quality studio equipment, we ma…