Experimental / Free Improvisation

As Bill Orcutt’s most mature and exhilarating LP to date, Music for Four Guitars was a slab of undeniable Apollonian beauty. Its approachability and obvious novelty landed it not only on the year- end lists of every key-pushing codger in the underground in 2022, but also on NPR in the form of the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet, an ensemble assembled to perform this music and featuring Wendy Eisenberg, Ava Mendoza, and Shane Parish. But while their Tiny Desk Concert gave a whiff of the quartet’s easy…

*100 copies limited edition* "Utsnobi Matriarkaluri Tomis Simgherebi" is an improvisational cycle recorded by musicians Darja Kazimira and Zura Makharadze during the filming of the experimental, analogue film "Rue de la Lune" by the Irish director Juana Robles, dedicated to the comprehension of one matriarchal generation, embraced by the tendency to painful transformation and self-absorption, striving throughout the performance to get out of these boundaries, heal and to reborn. In this act, the…

*300 copies limited edition* FEN (Far East Network) is an improvised music ensemble made up of Otomo Yoshihide, who lives in Tokyo; Seoul-based Ryu Hankil; Yuen Chee Wai, who lives in Singapore; and Beijing-based Yan Jun. Since FEN's formation in 2008, the four members have gathered and performed in various countries on an intermittent basis. In 2018 FEN exhibited an eight-channel sound installation at the Gwangju Biennale 2018—an international contemporary art exhibition held in Gwangju, Korea—…

"Wewantsounds is delighted to reissue Brion Gysin's cult avant funk album produced in Paris by Ramuntcho Matta in the early '80s. The hugely influential Brion Gysin who, with his friend William Burroughs, was revered by the likes of David Bowie, Brian Jones, Laurie Anderson, Genesis P-Orridge, is accompanied here by Matta and French post punk stalwarts Yann Le Ker on bass (from the group Modern Guy) and Frederic Cousseau on drums (from Suicide Romeo) plus special guests including Don Cherry, Ell…

"A note, a sound, an air, you can write them down and then leave them to be read or played; but you can also write nothing, just sit down, play your note, watch it flow and expand, add another to it and then another, and on and on. There may also be two of you: the second sits down, plays a note, watches it flow, adds another to it, and watches it drift and blend with the others. And then there can be three; the third arrives, sits down, plays a note, adds another, and another, and watches them …

2005 release ** "As a composer, Fell applies serialism with an enthusiasm and relish which hasn't been heard since the advent of minimalism, when it was declared a dead dog. In Fell's work this dead dog proceeds to gnaw at accepted practice and compositional cliché with a rabid intensity that many listeners find shocking. The challenge is to get modern compositions played with the emotional commitment and trenchancy of jazz, and in this Fell excels; by going right into the complexitudes of Stock…

Open to the Sea was born around the musical experiences of Enrico Coniglio, here playing piano and synths, and of the music wizard Matteo Uggeri who adds his world of samples, noises, field recordings and recorded instruments played by friends. The first CD is a re-edition of the double mini-cd “Watering a Paper Flower” where an echoed piano goes through delicate and enchanted sound tapestries, remembering a river slowly flowing to the sea. The second CD, with the participation of a third musici…

At the beginning of 2024 I found myself on a trip up to North-West with my fellows Virginia and David (of Jooklo fame) in their legendary green Scudo van. I was ready for whatever adventure and trying to up-lift my friends from an uncomfortable situation they had at that time in a small town of the Ruhrgebiet named Moers, where they were temporarily based. The mood of the road that week was of rebellion, feeling of fixing injustice, and consequently the strenghtening of belief in underground bro…

*200 copies limited edition* Musician Ken Ikeda lived in New York and London for many years. Since his return from London in 2020, he has been based in Tokyo. Renowned British improviser, drummer and percussionist Roger Turner has been active on the music scene since the early 1970s. The two musicians performed together several times when Ikeda lived in London. Turner toured Japan in the summer of 2023 and performed with Ikeda at Ftarri, Tokyo, on August 19. This CD documents the two duo perform…

*200 copies limited edition* Michael Thieke is a clarinetist and composer living in Berlin. Known for his delicate, deft playing style, he is involved in many projects on the improvised/experimental music scene. Thieke is also known for his work in the clarinet duo The International Nothing, which has released several CDs on the Ftarri label. Beat Keller is a guitarist, composer and sound engineer based in Winterthur (Switzerland) and Berlin. He plays the distinctive "feedbacker electric guitar"…

*250 copies limited edition* Quentin Tolimieri is a Berlin-based pianist, composer and improvisational musician. He earned a bachelor’s degree in composition and piano from California Institute of the Arts in the U.S. and a master’s degree in composition from the University of Southampton in the UK. He has released recordings on labels including Wandelweiser Records (Germany), pfMENTUM (U.S.), Creative Sources (Portugal) and elsewhere (U.S.). Musician and sound artist Eric Wong, also based in Be…

*200 copies limited edition* Seijiro Murayama is a drummer/percussionist, improviser and composer who has lived in Paris for many years. He continues to carry out tours throughout Europe, and nearly every year he returns to Japan for a time and holds concerts. Murayama has many releases on labels in countries around the world. Attila Gyárfás is a drummer, improviser and composer from Hungary. Along with his activities in a number of groups including Quelquefois and Identified Flying Object as we…

*200 copies limited edition* Tom Soloveitzik is a sound artist, composer, improviser and sax player from Tel Aviv, Israel. From 2022 to 2024, he lived in Tokyo and performed with many Tokyo-based musicians. From late March to early April 2024, Soloveitzik toured in Beijing and Shanghai, and on March 31 he carried out a recording session with the up-and-coming young electronics player and improviser Sun Yizhou, who is based in Beijing. This CD contains three performances from that session. (The f…

With Robert Ashley, George Cacioppo, Gordon Mumma, Roger Reynolds, Donald Scavarda, David Behrman, George Crevoshay, Philip Krumm, Pauline Oliveros, Robert Sheff, Bruce Wise. Ann Arbor, Michigan, seems an unlikely site for the establishment of a major avant-garde festival that would shake the new-music community. Tucked away in America's heartland, the city is equally removed from the Eastern metropolises whose artists pride themselves on sensing the pulse of the times, and from the nonconformis…

In ‘Punti d'Incontro’ the sound is fragmented and broken up, just like splinters or bits of broken glass, into infinite pieces. Through the stages of duets and trios, Eugenio Sanna, Lucio Bonaldo and Michele Scariot give life to buzzings, high-pitched sounds, like pinheads looking at and observing each other with caution, forming strange, gelatinous agglomerates; bewildered melodies that are swallowed up through a visionary plot and enter, swallowed up, into the gaps of an infinite space, in a r…

Electronic impulses, Trombone Sounds, Accents and Blasts of Air. Cutting and Roaring Melodies

*2025 stock. 250 copies limited edition* Tam Thi Pham (born in 1990) is a Vietnamese musician based in Hamburg, Germany. She plays the dan bau, a traditional Vietnamese one-string instrument, which she incorporates into improvisation and composing. On the occasion of a visit to Japan in December 2023, Pham performed at Ftarri, Tokyo, on December 11, together with Yukiko Shiina Sakurazawa (contrabass), Minami Takei (percussion) and Masahide Tokunaga (alto sax). This CD contains the two sets (of 3…

250 copies limited edition Percussionist Ryotaro Miyasaka gave concerts in the performance space of Ftarri, Tokyo, on three consecutive days in June 2024. One of these was a duo concert with Takako Minekawa. Unlike in the usual concerts at Ftarri, this time the instruments were placed both in the stage area in front of the audience seats, and in a space arranged behind the seats. While Minekawa played mainly in front and Miyasaka mainly in back, they frequently moved back and forth between front…

Autoreverse brings together Arnaud Rivière (prepared turntable - we should say damaged or destroyed), a kingpin of the French noise underground as a programmer at Instants Chavirés and Sonic Protest, team player with Otomo Yoshihide, Erik M, and a hundred others, ; and Nina Garcia (guitar & feedback), recently recruited by Stephen O'Malley's Ideologic Organ label after giving the whole of the Paris region a taste for noise guitar solos with her Mariachi project ("Guitar, pedal. That's all’, as h…

Pekka Airaksinen’s Mangala is a landmark album blending experimental electronic and jazz influences, originally composed in 1986, recorded in 1998, and remixed for its 2015 reissue. The LP features five expansive works, including the title track Mangala, which Airaksinen described as capturing moods reminiscent of Miles Davis and Urban Sax at the Pori Jazz Festival. The album’s soundworld is complex, timeless, and immersive, with King of Snakes symbolizing the force that overcomes evil. This rel…

2007 release **  "Technically the full title is No Neck Blues Band Meets The Clear People with Mystery Gypped Live At Ken’s Electric Lake, but that seems unnecessarily long to me. In short, it’s NNCK with members of Sunburned Hand Of The Man.  Over the course of the two discs the few inevitable moments of dullness are obscured by glorious passages of spiraling rhythm, spaced hypnotics and trance grooves. Woods evoke a primal sense of refuge and sanctuary which the band coveys very well. If some …

*200 copies limited edition* K / S / R (the trio of Ben Kujawski, Abigail Smith, and Justin Rhody) play a unique form of delicate free-improvisation that blends deep listening, scree, and post-jazz sensibilities. As if Adris Hoyos & Tony Conrad created lounge music for Coast to Coast AM. Since 2022, the trio have also regularly performed works for expanded cinema in select locales across the US - with a prime example from an Oakland CA performance documented on this double disc set of essential …

*2025 stock. 100 copies limited edition* High Desert free-improv trio, K/S/R (Ben Kujawski, Abigail Smith, and Justin Rhody), provide an ultra-full-length album of studio sessions, private jams, and live expanded cinema recordings. A fittingly intense culmination of time spent, efforts made, emotional response, and intuitive composition. This is a music that's hated by the punks and the conservatory alike - executed in warehouses, microcinemas, and former cookie factories across the United State…

*2025 stock. 100 copies limited edition* Free-improv quintet recorded live in accompaniment to the early films of Harry Smith at No Name Cinema (an event organized in partnership with the Harry Smith Archives in celebration of Smith's centennial). Also featuring a 14 minute long remix by Cody Yantis (à la Jeph Jerman & Harry Partch daydreaming in the industrial sector).

Cardinal Fuzz and Feeding Tube Records have the pleasure of unleashing the sizzling contact high sounds of Yerba Mansa’s new LP release - ‘Gravity’s Joke’. As the heppest of you undoubtedly know, Yerba Mansa are Edwin Stevens (guitar and member off - Irma Vep, Klaus Kinski, The Web of Lies ) and Andrew Cheetham (drums - Richard Dawson, Jane Weaver, Waterless Hills) as well as both been members of Desmadrados Soldados de Ventura, and are purveyors of raging, mind-bending primitive garage infused …

*In process of stocking* Or, 'whose drum is it, anyway?' Recording of a drum solo concert given at Network Theatre, London on 6th February, 2012

Capturing two exceptional concerts at London's Cafe OTO in 2021 & 2022, in the launch of a new quartet expanding the longstanding trio of N.O. Moore on electric guitar, John Edwards on double bass and Eddie Prévost on drums, with Alan Wilkinson on baritone & alto saxophones, and for one performance on each night, tenor saxophonist Nathaniel Catchpole joining. "Launch show for the quartet to mark the release of new CD 'EMPoWered' on Brooklyn's 577 Records. Edwards, Moore and Prévost have comprise…

2017 release ** "Salvo Lazzara and Stefano Giannotti, two artists at opposite ends of the spectrum, but with strong musical and literary interests in common, meet between writing and improvisation, electronic landscapes and acoustic creations. A series of out-of-form and unreassuring stories is born, poetic and sound experiments, almost micro-radio-dramas, between ambient and free jazz, singer-songwriter and cultured avant-garde."

2006 release ** "Agents at Midnight, eh? Sounds like the kind of film noir title Barry Adamson might like. But the music doesn't: it's a collection of raw, powerful improvisations for saxophone (Chang) and electronics (and harmonica) (Howard), a fine example of how the fences that used to separate Noise and Improv have been bulldozed into the dirt by the younguns across the pond (and a few of them here in Europe too). Chang's playing – alto sax, is it? not always easy to tell for sure – is rough…

Thirty years of non-idiomatic improvisation and Eastern-leaning drone from an American group that once had the guitarist Jack Rose in it. They know the American folk vernacular well and have never treated it as a museum.

2006 release ** "Sparse mandolin music (very slow & deliberate plucking reminiscent of Derek Bailey), with a couple spurts of electronic noise throughout the duration."

In a rain forest of moments. the eye hears what the ear sees. through each moment of Karin Johansson’s and Finn Loxbo’s music runs the firm conviction that all points and layers of sound – in true democratic spirit, carry the same weight. Or lightness. as precise as scattered bird calls may be crucial to the totality and the outcome of the drama as a whole, as cautiously do they take care of the phrased line by being extremely exact with the gaps and the charged rest, where that very thing appea…

*2025 stock. 100 copies limited edition* During a 4-day residency at kunstencentrum Nona, april 2023, Ocean Eddie worked together with Swedish vocalist Sofia Jernberg (The End, Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, Mette Rasmussen), recording new material for their 2nd album. Adding vocalist Sofia Jernberg, the trio challenges itself, pushing the orchestral unbalanced combination of instruments even further. Written music, played from the perspective of free musicians, the music can be described as minimal,…

*100 copies limited edition* "When Kabas first left its mark on the Belgian music scene with Abel (2016), nothing could have prepared you for where they would find themselves nearly one decade later. Not that the quartet needed extreme makeovers or abrupt stylistic switches. On the contrary, every step Thijs Troch, Jan Daelman, Nils Vermeulen and Elias Devoldere have taken since their first debut feels like a logical next one. This is not the sound of calculation or imposed transformation, but o…

*2025 stock. 50 copies limited edition* Encounter between Swedish saxophone player Martin Küchen and Belgian improv-ensemble ocean eddie. Live at De Singer, Rijkevorsel on the 4th of May, 2023.

2001 release ** "The Spaceheads and Max Eastley have sculpted a complete work from a clash of ancient and future technologies. Music as, crafted soundscapes, sculptured washes of sound, deep textures, broad melodic invention, spontaneous meetings. The Spaceheads have been hurtling down a unique path of their own for many years now. This duo mix trumpet and electronics with drums and percussion. Plaintive trumpet calls are looped across pulsing beats that propel us into sheets of metal crashing a…

Tip! *100 copies limited edition* Eternities is an intuitive collaboration between bass clarinetist Katie Porter and sound artist Bob Bellerue. Their work is inspired by deep presence, resonant feedback, melodic drone, and overtone magic, in the fluid realm between intention and indeterminacy. They use harmonic tones from wind instruments played within feedback systems to create multidimensional spectral drones. This release is live recordings from 2023 and 2024 full of lush clarinet timbre and …

Herzog | Muche | Nillesen is a trio featuring Matthias Muche (trombone), Etienne Nillesen (extended snare drum), and Constantin Herzog (double bass). Their music operates in the liminal space between improvisation and composition, where shifting textures and microtonal structures unfold in slow- motion transformations. Drawing on minimalist, spectral, and extended instrumental techniques, their sound is less about individual gestures and more about emergent sonic phenomena— where the interplay o…

*200 copies limited edition* Blickwinkel presents ‘On a Tuesday and a Wednesday’, the first collaboration between Pierre Bastien and Casper Van De Velde. The album captures what the duo has been working on during a 2-day residency at Werkplaats Walter (Brussels), invited by the label. In their improvised sessions, they quickly found a way to merge Bastien's renowned mechanical sound sculptures with the playful and detailed style of percussionist Casper Van De Velde. The result is a blend of intr…

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,”…