Experimental / Contemporary

Three excellent compositions spanning from 1968 to 1978 respectively for string trio and for for 2 electric guitars, 2 ondes Martenot, 2 electric organs and synthesisers, released on Sapphos's "Musique Française d'Aujourd'hui" series in 1978.

Three compositions spanning from 1967 to 1971 requiring improvisation and extended instrumental techniques, respectively for 20 musicians and a soloist, 9 brass instruments and 3 percussions, solo oboe, released in 1972.

Two pieces for solo trombone plus one for 2 clarinets, with unconventional and extended instrumental techniques and sounding quite amazing, composed in 1973 and 1974 and featuring Michel Portal, released in 1978.

One 1965 composition for three choirs, orchestra and narrator and one 1972 composition for eight singers and two instruments, recorded and released in Yugoslavia in 1983.

Three chamber pieces (respectively for 5 oboes, solo percussionist, string quartet) with unconventional and extended instrumental techniques, spanning from 1969 to 1982, released in 1985

Excellent LP on INA's "Collection GRM" with four beautiful electro-acoustic pieces realized between 1969 and 1977 at Bell Laboratories and IRCAM by computer music pioneer, released in 1978.

Great avant-garde percussion music by a composer mainly known for his library work, a 1978 album on the short-lived Arc En Ciel's "Espaces" experimental music series with embossed sleeves.

Another great LP on INA's "Collection GRM" with pieces for various combinations of instruments and electronics, released in 1979.

Where to From marks the much-anticipated solo return of Hildur Guðnadóttir, a composer-collaborator equally versed in spectral pop, avant-garde, and soundtrack work. Reaching beyond her acclaimed film and TV scores, Guðnadóttir crafts nine intimately reflective pieces for strings and choir—drawn from years of voice memos and melodic fragments—where minimalist restraint meets moments of luminous warmth. The album’s texture hovers between Scandinavian melancholy, sacred choral atmosphere, and a me…

*200 copies limited edition* Born from a profound devotion to the piano and a reverence for the organic flow of life, byt’ surprises listeners by presenting "paths of sand", a remarkable creation by Amsterdam-based composer Xico, offering sound and soul to those willing to listen beyond the surface. Through the magic of experimentation, xico captured the fleeting beauty of the muse of improvisation, as described by Nachmakovich, transforming the ephemeral into something lasting. Performances reco…

Excellent 1997 CD-only album of very dark and strong improvisations with electronics by Polish Quartet.

*200 copies limited edition*

*250 copies limited edition*

*220 copies limited edition*

Here are two extremely entertaining concoctions by two nineteenth-century American Romantics who wrote music on a grand scale. After a broadly lyrical first movement in the grand tradition of his friend and mentor Hector Berlioz, Gottschalk introduces, appropriately enough, a Cuban rumba into the second and final movement of his breezy south-of-the-border excursion, Night in the Tropics. The sources of Heinrich's musical style are in Haydn and to some extent Beethoven, but with the ornateness of…

Kommun, led by Swedish guitarist Finn Loxbo, resides in the tension between the experience of circular time; an elongated now, and the expectations contained within our linear perception of time. The ensemble explores the tension between the individual’s own lines and the collective meaning-making. Every sound is equally important, concrete in itself, as much a building block as a decoration. The ensemble collectively improvises phrases that are formed together as a singular element. They are di…

“Gyropedie,” Anne Guthrie’s third record for Students of Decay, takes us further into her hermetic practice, wherein expertly captured field recordings, French horn, and electronics are woven into potent and richly imagined electroacoustic environments. In Guthrie’s own words, “Quite literally a record of pilgrimage from East to West. Remnants of Midwest and East Coast soundmarks, instruments sold to lighten the travel load, sketched out and then buried under the new. Winter birds and crunching …

Following releases on West Mineral and Lillerne Tapes, Iggy Romeu’s inimitable Mister Water Wet project makes its Soda Gong debut. “Top Natural Drum” feels like a double entendre ode to digging culture, drawing equally from the plantlife in the dirt and the grooves in the stacks. Tracks like opener “Soak” concoct a haze of resonant ceramic/wooden percs, skittering drum programming, and addictive yet diffuse melodic and harmonic textures. Dusty-fingered nodders like “Caged at Last”, “Classicfit,”…

In the space of a couple of years, Stephen Grew has recorded three absolutely sparkling solo piano releases for Discus Music. All three are spontaneous improvisations arising from years of practice and refinement. Grew is a massively undervalued artist - follow the story he tells across this release and its two predecessors and I'm sure you'll agree. Stephen Grew writes: "Recorded in the Great Hall, Lancaster University, on the 22nd November 2024. This music was recorded on a Steinway D and what…

A historical live recording by Blaine L. Reininger and Steven Brown, founders of legendary post-punk band Tuxedomoon, here in their parallel guise as a classical piano and violin duo, one they have maintained throughout the decades. This is the "other" 1989 Blaine and Steven concert in Portugal, performed two days after the Lisbon gig immortalised many moons ago on "One Hundred Years of Music". "Live in Porto 1989" is undoubtedly the better of the two gigs (just listen to "Iberia"!…), but the oc…

The second volume of Sub Rosa's Fluxus edition, built around a broken piano now left to decay in the open air in Prague. New and old works, scores and improvisations from a Fluxus who's who (Knizak, La Monte Young, Cage, Paik, Ono, Brecht and more), with booklets of essays and photographs. Double CD

*300 copies limited release* It Deel is the multi-year project of the Kleefstra Bros together with Popfabryk; production house for Frisian pop culture.For It Deel III the Kleefstra Bros have entered into a collaboration with the Belgian multi-instrumentalist Karen Willems. Together they worked in the Thomaskerk in Katlijk on new material that was released on vinyl by Moving Furniture Records. The Kleefstra Bros are poet Jan Kleefstra and guitarist Romke Kleefstra, both also members of Piiptsjill…

In November 2020 Phill Niblock sent out an email informing a group of us that Experimental Intermedia planned to have their usual December concert series. However, due to the Covid pandemic, the series was set to be streamed online via Zoom or Vimeo Live. I, along with Earl Howard, Marcia Bassett & Bob Bellerue, Gill Arno, Mike Bullock, Lars Åkerlund, Matthias Kaiser & Hans Tammen and Austin Larkin were asked to perform from our own home/studio/space either live or prerecorded. At the time, I wa…

*150 copies limited edition* Jeremy Barnes began Human Error while teaching music to kids: incarcerated teens at the YDDC juvenile detention center in Albuquerque, as well online classes in recording and songwriting to refugee youth in New Mexico from Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Tanzania. The recording techniques and music composition aspect was all computer based, and so, Barnes began to write music in that way. And often, while the students were working, he was also working on little tunes as a …

Inside Automatic Popular Music there are two people sitting in a room, their backs to each other. One plays a piano with no particular attention to detail and tuning of the instrument, and another, sitting behind him, claps his hands on his own legs. They do not see each other, they never look at each other, they can only listen to each other, look around. The room is large enough, it is daytime, there are four windows through which enough light enters to illuminate the objects and furniture wit…

Heirloom is the first Lisa Ullén solo recording to appear on LP and exploits the two-sided nature of the physical format with two variations of the same three-part suite, exploring what it means to be ‘in between’ — be it genre, method or identity. The combination of Ullén’s deft control, patience and unconventional technique makes ‘Heirloom’ a sublime, ravishing listen. The LP is pressed on clear vinyl in an edition of 300 copies and housed with a photo of the small box of the possessions she b…

“The score aims to evoke the experience of proximity to the sun—a dual force that can be soothing one moment and hazardous the next. Sunkiss embodies this duality, where the sun's radiant energy sustains life's flourishing while also capable of devastating destruction. To be kissed by the sun signifies both blessing and curse, illuminating the fragile balance between vitality and peril that defines life on Earth.” Sunkissed is a live recording of a four-hour performance directed by Mylan Hoezen …

"Sweet dreams, come back!" The title, the last line of Matthäus von Collin's poem set by Schubert in 1825 as Nacht und Träume, suggests longing for night's return upon waking. Magnus Granberg's 2021 composition takes Schubert's song as departure point, fragmenting its rhythmic phrases into tiny cells and extracting tonal structures to create a new modal framework. The result exists at the intersection where composition meets improvisation, realized here in two versions across this double album. …

This second volume of solo piano from Grew comes hot on the heels of his 2023 Discus Music release “Chasm”, also for solo piano. For all the brilliance of that earlier work, Grew was keen to push himself even further and engage with a piano and a space with which he was already very familiar – at Lancaster Baptist Church, close to his home in the North West. Grew writes in the sleeve notes: “I have found this instrument a real challenge to play, its action is particularly unyielding, so my effor…

Threnodies and Ad hocs“My music flows from the paintbox I've assembled over the years from Steel City rehearsals in abandoned little mester warrens to Motor City gospel studios still echoing with the soundtrack of my youth.” Invocation“A Blood Red Prayer’’ ThrenodiesA song cycle featuring the force of naturę that is Sylwia Anna Drwal “..you shone like diamond studded sin ’’..She compels the listener ‘listen!‘ Ad hocsA prosaic Ulyssean voyage through the influences that shaped iconoclast Adi New…

In 2015, Lemur started a collaboration with German pianist Reinhold Friedl. Friedl is the leader of the international ensemble Zeitkratzer, working at the intersection of improvisation and composition. In this respect, Friedl's experience and working method have much in common with the ideas and working methods Lemur uses. Not least through an interchange between work with large and small ensembles.In collaboration with Reinhold Friedl, we focus on the use of extended playing techniques, form ex…

**This discounted bundle includes the latest albums released on Hego, a label that focuses on the works of experimental artists from the Basque Country in the north of Spain** The London-based imprint, Hegoa, returns with their final batch of LPs for 2023, delivering three more incredible deep dives into the incredible sounds emerging from the Basque region: Asier Maiah’s “F(r)icciones”, Dopelganger’s “Sainen Hildo”, and Bidai’s “Biarrezgaur”. Each following their own distinct trajectories of ex…

Dunscombe is part of the Berlin circle of just intonation researchers, and spent years on the music of the Romanian spectralist Horatiu Radulescu. Two Forests begins from a single central pitch and works outward from there.

From Matière Mémoire, one of the most striking and unique labels currently working in experimental music, comes “Adage Vestige”, the latest stunning statement from the French, Belgium based multidisciplinary artist Roxane Métayer. Encountering one of Europe's most unique voices pushing ever further into abstract realms with her signature hybrid of folk and rigorously experimental approaches, it's an absolute stunner that can't be missed.

Black Truffle is pleased to announce Down On Darkened Meetings, the first solo release on the label from the quietly prolific Giuseppe Ielasi. Recorded at Ielasi’s studio in Monza outside of Milan over two days in February 2022, the seven pieces presented here continue the renewed exploration of the guitar that marks much of his solo work over the last few years. Emerging in the late 1990s as an improviser working primarily with prepared acoustic and electric guitars, the instrument became less …

Long after the year 4000, it's highly likely the sun will shine a different light. Equatorial rain belts may have turned into white-ash flotsam. Animal forms will have undergone a major metamorphosis, with only the memories of danger still archaically intact. Razen tackle the theme of reincarnation hypnosis on Hier L'an 4000, their new album for Hands In The Dark, set for release September '23. Inspired by the writings of Donoso and Slauerhoff, by 1940s SF drawings, sky burials and a fantasy of …

Already in its title, Plume Girl’s debut thoroughly lets things go and takes them in – all at once. “In the End We Begin” is the first solo full-length from Sowmya Somanath, a Hindustani classical singer/composer and half of alt-pop duo Felt Out. Plume Girl’s music takes inspiration from the semi-regular musical form of the rāga (translated as ‘tinting’), invoking mood and atmosphere, each rāga thought to have its own distinct nature and personality, brought to life through improvisation. String…

White vinyl Limited Edition to 300 numbered copies When two musicians of this caliber come together, expectations run high - and Double Consciousness not only meets them but transcends them entirely. Oren Ambarchi, the Australian guitar alchemist whose work has redefined what the instrument can do and mean, joins forces with Belgian drummer Eric Thielemans, a player whose sensitivity and restraint have made him one of the most sought-after collaborators in European improvised music. The title i…