The Hermetic Organ Vol. 11 - For Terry Riley
This newest edition of The Hermetic Organ is a beautiful and evocative tribute to one of John Zorn’s biggest mentors, the pioneer West Coast visionary, Terry Riley. Performed Mat San Francisco’s historic Grace Cathedral during the epic concert series presented by Fred Barnes at the Great American Music Hall in September 2023 for Zorn’s 70th birthday, this is one of the most touching and personal of all Zorn’s organ recitals.
Present in the audience were a large number of the composer’s closest a…
Outside The Dream Syndicate
Temporary Super Offer! Violinist, composer and filmmaker Tony Conrad started his career in New York in the early 1960s. As a member of the Theatre of Eternal Music (a.k.a. the Dream Syndicate) alongside John Cale, La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela and Angus MacLise, he participated in now-legendary and often legendarily loud drone performances with many pieces having no beginning and no end. During a fateful trip to Germany in 1972, Conrad met with avant-rock visionaries Faust and made the very fir…
Spacecraft
Temporary Super Offer! * Limited edition LP Translucent green vinyl* Musica Elettronica Viva, or MEV for short, was formed in 1966 in Rome by Allan Bryant, Alvin Curran, Jon Phetteplace, Carol Plantamura, Frederic Rzweski, Richard Teitelbaum and Ivan Vandor. From the very beginning the group was based on musical freedom and the shunning of convention. Using contact microphones to record and manipulate sound wherever it could be found – from box springs to vibrators – and improvisationally combin…
Bearings: Soundtracks for the Bardos
Ka Baird’s Bearings: Soundtracks for the Bardos intertwines elements of the New York based vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and composer’s ecstatic live performances within minimalistic, visceral compositions that expand in scope and sound through collaboration. The album’s eleven movements manifest as shapeshifting invocations defined by their own multiplicity; the emotional outcome of circumstance and grief, played against rigorous conceptualism and musical craft. Featuring a cast of contribut…
Tori Kudo & 3C123
LP ltd to 400, black vinyl, 2 color silkscreened jacket with obi (grey, tan), inserts and a postcard. An’archives are pleased to announce the release of a self-titled album by Tori Kudo & 3C123. A reissue of a cassette that was originally released on Uramado in 2020, this is the first time this live session has appeared on vinyl. The performance, featuring Kudo on piano and 3C123 on clarinet, was recorded on October 18, 2009, at the Uramado venue in Shinjuku. A beautiful and quixotic forty-minut…
III: Paz en las rupturas
The Kriego is the joint project of musicians and sound artists Fernando Feria & Emiliano Cruz. Born from cultivating similar creative interests in sound art, improvisation, and composition, the duo weaves a sound born of noise, ambient, and free improvisation; exploring various formats and using the electric guitar as their main mean of expression. The project emerged in October 2021 in Mexico City with the presentation of their album I at Casa Patricio, later performing at the first edition of …
MASS
Tip! *200 copies limited edition* From distant ocean song to the clang and howl of a murky forgotten memory, MASS is a dreamlike collage of shrill shrieks, gasps, corroded brass choirs, and melting modular synth soundscapes, all heard through a mist of hiss and noise. Fused together with equal parts frenetic improvisation, shrouded ritual, and meticulous arrangement, it presents a sonic topography at once tongue-in-cheek, sensitive, and nightmarish.
With discordant chorales and angular trumpet i…
Contact High With The Curators
*200 copies limited edition* Unbeknownst to the general public at the time and underappreciated until today, arguably the world's first punk record was recorded on September 28, 1966, in New York. On that day, The Godz got together to record their first album "Contact High with The Godz" in about 30 minutes, to be released on the avant-garde label ESP. It comprises eight rudimentary songs (plus one bizarre Hank Williams cover), played without prior rehearsals or repeats, sounding deliberately in…
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Tip! *100 copies limited edition* Chantal Michelle's latest work is an immersive composition across four movements, originally presented as a multi-channel installation and reworked for stereo. As with her previous release on Dinzu, Michelle exquisitely captures the raw, elemental processes of the natural world – here evoking the layered, grainy textures of geological formations. The track's titles both denote these geological processes and describe the composition's sonic behaviors and trajecto…
Present Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine
Ten years in the making, Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine is being released by Soleilmoon Recordings, in cooperation with The Hafler Trio and Simply Superior.
Odes To Bubbler
2024 stock. Controlled Bleeding was formed in 1978 in Boston. Over the years members have come and gone and the band has transformed and reinvented itself numerous times. In 2010 Paul Lemos remixed the Controlled Bleeding lineup. Drummer Tony Meola rejoined the band and Michael Bazini (a.k.a. DJ Butterface) came onboard to play electronics. The trio played a slew of live gigs in the New York City area, blasting audiences with an improvised instrumental mix of blistering guitar riffs, hypnotic ba…
La deviazione del profilo
'La deviazione del profilo’ (the deviation of the profile), is a sound/concrete work that focuses its research on environmental and sonic "profiles" of multiple landscapes, interior or otherwise. It is not about travel, but the freezing of an environment without identity, seeking the auditory erasure of the subject/object concept of a hypothetical territory, temporal suspension. Thus the sound as a weft or a fabric, where, in its spaces, between its threads, voids and smaller sounds nestle. At t…
The Nature
Repress of this gem by Jon Collin. Recorded in Stockport (UK) and Stockholm (SE) in late 2016 and early 2017, inside and outside. First released on Early Music, autumn 2017. This is the second vinyl pressing. Two-colour riso-printed cover pasted onto kraft brown or reverse-board white sleeves, with insert and hand-stamped labels.
Atlantic Crossing
La Scie Doree returns with an absolute stunner, the LP “Atlantic Crossing”, a reissue of a rare privately released cassette recorded by the Bayerischer Rundfunk, from 1988
Defiant Illusion
*200 copies limited edition* And if we thought we couldn't top a line-up, here's this unique quartet who brings a totally different experience. While Garuda Trio with special guest Rodrigo Pinheiro musters a fine balance between classic free jazz and improvisation, this quartet dives deep into the fantastic realm of pure improvisation and textural dialogue : the electronics of Carla Santana, the subtle horn contribution of José Lencastre, Maria do Mar drawing linear lines on the viola and the ev…
Tryptophan Suite
*200 copies limited edition* Our 2nd release in the Axis series, graced with the beautiful b&w photography of Martina Verhoeven, is a special one. When José Lencastre came over last year for a recording with Dirk Serries (a pending release somewhere), we did this last-minute trio concert for the Jazzblazzt series in The Netherlands. With Martina Verhoeven on the electric crumar piano, this trio became something else. Tryptophan Suite represents the very first notes this new trio played togeth…
Pokkeherrie
Emerging out of Amsterdam's vibrant squat scene in 1979, The Ex – a name chosen for the ease and speed with which it could be spray-painted onto a wall – have for four decades been an entirely self-sustaining musical entity, charting a course through the global underground with a spirit of freedom and radical exploration. On 1985's Pokkeherrie (Dutch for "terrible noise"), The Ex return to the more stripped-down instrumentation on their early LPs. A key lineup change would also see the arrival o…
Blueprints For A Blackout
Emerging out of Amsterdam's vibrant squat scene in 1979, The Ex – a name chosen for the ease and speed with which it could be spray-painted onto a wall – have for four decades been an entirely self-sustaining musical entity, charting a course through the global underground with a spirit of freedom and radical exploration. Blueprints For A Blackout, The Ex's fifth album and first double LP, combines caustic studio experimentations and loose songs from their gripping live-set at the time. The band…
The Henry Cow Box Redux: The Complete Henry Cow
**17 CDs, 1 DVD and 250 pages of histories, chronology, testimony and commentaries by the band, sundry contemporary documents, and rare photographs – in a sturdy box.** This collection brings together in an inexpensive and definitive edition the full contents of all earlier releases, with the addition of a further 60pp booklet of newly unearthed, or commissioned, band commentaries, pictures and other documents prepared specifically for this box - as well as re-mastered versions of all the studio…
Out of Cold Storage
** 2024 Repress. The complete official lifetime releases of This Heat: This Heat, Deceit, Health and Efficiency, Made Available and Repeat, re-mastered and re-packaged, with a substantial (48pp) book of interviews, recollections, information, documents and photographs in a sturdy box, PLUS a new CD of concert recordings ** This Heat were born in the years immediately preceding punk rock. Severe young men Charles Bullen and Charles Hayward were making things go pish-ding-whoosh on London’s free-…