Experimental / Free Improvisation

*300 copies limited edition* This record contains four tracks taken from a live performance which took place on December 3rd 2021 at the vinyl harvest record store in Esch-sur-Alzette Luxembourg. The concert was curated by non-profit organisation I am esch twenty too and the label mint.conception.recordings. I am esch twenty too was founded in 2020 as an alternative suggestion to the city of Esch-sur-Alzette being European Capital of Culture 2022 and its role and program. The budget for this con…

*200 copies limited edition* Impetus Group is Dirk Serries’ big band formation. The band name naturally refers to the Latin meaning: urgency, driving force, but even more spiritually to the moving language and strength of each musician in the ensemble to realize this free improvisational music. Impetus group is also a tribute to the improvisation scene of the sixties and seventies, more specifically the London scene led by guitarist Derek Bailey with his Company group. The group has a fluctuatin…

Following 'Gargoyles' and 'Light Industry', Colin Webster and Dirk Serries recorded their third studio album at the Sunny Side Inc. Studio in May 2022.  With Colin on the baritone, the pressure is high.  Carefully selected from a way longer session, this shorter album is just that : full-on free interaction with no boundaries hold, spiced by the friendship of both musicians and the respect for each other' skills and approaches.

"Ilog3 was recorded only a little more than a year after the epic Ilog2 session. In-between the two album releases the duo has performed a few high profile festivals like Jazz Em Agosto in Lisboa, A’Larme in Berlin, Meaksuma in Eupen or La Nature in Wallonie. While Ilog3 originally was only intended to be a video shooting session the duo put down another suite of incredible music and decided to release it in triple format as DD, CD and LP. The music is a succession of densely improvised electro-…

*2023 stock* Achim Kaufmann and Ignaz Schick met for the first time in 2015 when they performed together on a Finland tour with Sestetto Internazionale. Both musicians work with refined textures and strongly abstracted sounds, thus a more intimate and direct collaboration in a concentrated duo format was a logical fit. At that time, Ignaz Schick also immediately asked Kaufmann to join his large ensemble Circuit Training, as he felt the pianist, with his subtle playing, would enrich the sound of …

Tip! "During one of my early teenage trips to Strasbourg/France in an urgently needed escape from provincial Lower Bavaria and with the aim of making some money by basking in the streets of France with my saxophone I found amongst some other jewels a copy of „Jila-Save! Mon. - The Imaginary Suite“ LP by George Lewis & Douglas R. Ewart in the sales bin of a local Jazz record store. I had already seen George Lewis performing live with Bill Frisell and John Zorn as "News For Lulu", and listened to …

Nehan is a Japanese free improvisation/avant-garde rock quintet formed in 2022. Their performance is initiated by a 9HZ brain wave emitted from a testee who has been brought into a deep meditative state. nehan respond with gongs, typani, tabla and other percussion, crumhorn, bagpipes, oscillator and mellotron, passing tranformatively through a musical prism, from east to west, from traditional folk and classical to rock, jazz, and electronic.

"Having known Nicole’s playing for over a decade, I’m always in awe of how she pushes the sound of the trumpet. I’ve been attuned to her immersive sound world since we began playing together in 2008. Whether it’s on her Bb trumpet, piccolo trumpet, or flugelhorn, Nicole’s playing is an individual voice. She has always had a unique way of expressing her instrument. Her choice ofsounds and the method in which she incorporates a rich palette of texture and timbre into herplaying takes the uncommon …

If you have a chance to celebrate, take it. Drummer Fredy Studer, one of Switzerland’s top percussionists, has good reason to celebrate. This year he will be 70, he’s playing Willisau Jazz Festival for the 27th time (making him the musician who has played this festival the most) and is publishing his very first solo recordings! He has recorded these with a total absence of overdubs and electronic effects. “Now’s the Time – Solo Drums” is issued as a superb box set by Everest Records und Maniac P…

*2023 stock. 300 copies lmited release* With over 150 releases under their belt, Tolin Asumer is their first proper US release in almost 20 years. Recorded in Buenos Aires in 2018-2019, and then mixed in 2021, the record opens with Coliso Atomro, an echo-drenched Can-esque excursion into the other-world, with Tomasin taking the role of travel-guide. The use of a bouncing stereo echo-effect mesmerized the listener into a chaotic rock head-nod. The 2nd half of side A features the track Etrol Rene …

"Piano and reeds duet. More precisely, Didier Fréboeuf, the pianist, is also credited for clavietta and objects and the prompter Jean-Luc Petit, tenor and sopranino sax as well as contrabass clarinet. Three Crusts. Not badly chosen title compared to the improvised music that they play towards each other: these two do not stay on the surface of things. They work in depth on their exchanges by developing a nice variety of playing modes both on the keyboard and in the strings and on the reeds. I ap…

"Intense and stormy "vintage" electronic music - ethereal loops or organ or keyboard effects - synalgias of the unresolved - (AKS by Jean-Marc Foussat) goaded and torn by the extreme bites of the soprano saxophonist (Guy Frank Pellerin). The feeling of duration of their improvisations (22, 19 and 25 minutes) diminishes as the spells fall in this weather of the emerging moment. A nice variety of games in the game phases means that we no longer follow the order of the music, nor its logic. We find…

"Most Americans discover European improvised music using a map dominated by Amsterdam, Berlin, and London, which dwarfs and shoves the rest of the continent to the margins. At some point, however, even they realize the land lies differently. Yet, extensive exploration is required to correct the proportions, label the tributaries, and overlay the trade routes. In this endeavor, recordings become the coordinates that begin to flesh out the map's heretofore blank spaces. Madly You is valuable in th…

*50 copies limited edition* "This is a set of solo guitar pieces recorded over the course of a few weeks that are sometimes percussive, sometimes droney, sometimes noisy and sometimes nothing. I have recently rediscovered my love for playing the guitar and I used these recordings to work out some sort of live solo guitar set, so there is very little post production and everything is a little gritty as a result. I like a lot of the sounds found in recording this and if you listen I hope you do as…

With over a dozen releases on Karlrecords, and a total output of more than 100 albums in general, Reinhold Friedl doesn't need much of an introduction to anyone interested in contemporary music / avantgarde: his ensemble zeitkratzer is as respected as it is feared for its radical approach on music, and it seems redundant to mention all collaborators and projects. Friedl is known for his unique piano sound, his advanced techniques, and his musical intensity paired with precise exuberant sound con…

*300 copies limited edition* Another collection of music that, instead of offering an escape route, loads you with questions. Music that originates in a grey, intermediate zone: pieces conceived and performed by an informal group of musicians which were not written. They are improvised but, instead of existing only in their own time, they are rooted in deep interpersonal relationships. A perfect balance between freedom and rigour, between visions and penumbra, between long and complex relationsh…

Cougouyou Music present a limited 7" single Brigitte Fontaine's masterpiece "Lettre À Monsieur Le Chef De Gare De La Tour De Carol", originally released on her legendary album Comme À La Radio in 1969. Fontaine is not an artist from Perpignan/Catalonia, but this beautiful track about the station master of the train station Latour-de-Carol, 1200 meters high in the Pyrenees, is emblematic for this region in the South of France. Nothing is known about concrete music composer monsieuRdurand. Based i…

Debut vinyl outing for Valentina Magaletti and Pino Montecalvo’s Avvitagalli project couretesy of London's Horn of Plenty label. Variegated percussion + WTF jams inspired by a visit to an abandoned, torched palazzo somewhere in southern Europe. Its charred, decaying splendour casts a fitting backdrop to the surreal push-pull of Valentina & Pino’s aural capers. None Corsa explores presence and absence, purpose and chance, and the tension between serenity and disquiet. Composing and decomposing, g…

A single saxophone, a glockenspiel, two microphones, a zoom recorder. These are the materials Patrick Shiroishi brought down with him late one night into the cavernous parking structure below a hot pot restaurant in Monterey Park. It was around 1:30AM; the spot was not too far from where Shiroishi grew up, a blank slate shown to him by his dear friend, Noah Klein. A vacant space for a new kind of collaboration—between saxophone and silence, between noise and reverberation, between negative space…

"Here we have two discs, received in the same parcel and which share a love for electronics and saxophones. I am never too fond of lumping things together, but it, in this case, is hard to avoid. Duncan Pinhas was born in 1979 and is a guitarist (any elation to Richard Pinhas is not mentioned), while Yerri-Gaspar Hummel (1982) plays the saxophone. Both musicians have a background in serious (read: composed) music and met "around the composer La Monte Young", as the bio says. I found the opening …

Acoustic trio with John Coxon [acoustic guitars] Ashley Wales [found percussion etc.] and AMM's Eddie Prevost. A slowly evolving and spacious piece originating from reading eddie's book 'minute particulars'. "I have a National Trojan guitar from the 1930s that i bought in a little shop in new orleans. I used this for the ‘acoustic trio’ recording with Ashley Wales and Eddie Prevost [amongst many other recordings]. I remember Eddie saying ‘the perfect instrument’ because it has both a membrane an…

A new group comprising Hot Chip's Alexis Taylor, This Heat's Charles Hayward and Treader label regulars John Coxon and Pat Thomas, this quartet are an explosive improvisational outfit, with Hayward leading from the backline via some stunningly powerful drumming. The remainder of the musicians take up predominantly electronic instruments - mostly synthesizers and samplers, but within Taylor's musical menagerie you'll hear a spot of electric guitar, percussion and shruti box. This record is more o…

Tip! Recorded at the concert marking the release of their previous album (Exta, Fataka 7, 2013), Lights is the second meeting of the trio of John Butcher, Thomas Lehn and John Tilbury. Carefully edited (nothing drastic, just some judicious trimming the way a photographer might crop an image, reframing it to make it more concentrated), Lights turns the two set continuum of the concert into four distinct pieces.

We are nine voices, sighted and blind, who have been singing and exploring together for 11 years. Our practice consists of listening to and imitating sound ecosystems. We become the sounds of biotopes, machines, endangered species, humans and non-humans. Our songs blend ancestral and experimental vocal practices. We are the stumbling blocks of a memory populated by tunes, buried melodies that emerge and carry us away for hybridizations, mutations.

We are thrilled to introduce the world to the innovative sounds of the Japanese improvisational music trio ‘I-I’. Composed of three exceptionally talented musicians, Kazuhisa Uchihashi (guitar, daxophone, pedals), Mitsuhisa Sakaguchi (synthesizers, pedals) and Tatsuhisa Yamamoto (percussion). This dynamic ensemble has embarked on a remarkable musical journey with their homonymous debut album. "There's no inspiration from others. We just played." With this raw and unfiltered approach to music, ‘I…

The ubiquity of Coxhill’s sax lines are here answered, cherished, enhanced by the excellent guitar touch of Enzo Rocco. It’s a sort of subtle anarchic dance, intriguing and true.

Introducing Tomo Jacobson's new cross-genre ensemble Sounding Society. Sounding Society's debut album "Homecoming Medley Or Society Into Sound" is a continuous 40-minute-long brewing-together of grooves, New Age, free jazz, world music influences, drones, and electronica in one, generously spacious cauldron over a retro-futuristic bonfire. The band consists of long-time collaborators, members of the duo Wood Oorganization, Tomo Jacobson (Warmbladder, Sun Araw, Mat Maneri) & Szymon Pimpon (Pimpon…

*50 copies limited edition* The Delphi was one of the greatest silent movie cinemas of Berlin. It was in operation since the late 20s, it shone in its own golden era, was bombed during the Second World War, was closed and then reused as a warehouse; its walls faded, its floor grew mildewy and its facade today does not indicate anything about what once went on the inside. The interior itself maintains a faded echo of its former glory and its integration in this century’s 20s makes it a hidden gem…

*2023 stock* First two tracks and Side A of New Bodies. From Los Angeles, also of Open City – first full length-- single takes, live--Intensely physical and abstract music that constantly, unpredictably shifts and evolves. Impulse, memory and intent, laid bare in real time. Post-melody, post-groove sound. Concrete, brutal, yes fun-----

tellKujira was born in autumn 2020. Since then it has self-produced a series of artistic residencies, focusing on improvisation and collective writing, instant composition, timber, prepared instruments, alternative tunings. It is in this process that a flexible musical path was born, in a continuous search for structure, open to contamination and which aims to discover a unique blend composed of abstract soundscapes, at times ambient, poly-rhythms, industrial timbres. A versatile blend, which do…

A truly stunning piece of work, Aspen Edities’ latest - Eyvind Kang’s “Sonic Gnostic” - radically bridges the worlds of minimal composition, rigorous experimentation, and improvised forms, in ways that locks Kang in the mind as one of America’s most original thinkers in the contemporary landscape of sound.

Huge Tip! 250 copies. A sinopia is an ancient preparatory sketch technique for a fresco. If you scrape the final work off the wall, the sketch remains; simplified and powerful in it’s starkness. Alessandra Novaga, an experimental guitarist/composer based in Milan, Italy found this historic technique resonated with an album she recently recorded with NYC-based drummer Kid Millions (aka John Colpitts of Oneida, Man Forever and many other projects). Italy’s cultural past is the often transcendent a…

*300 copies limited edition* Treader is proud to announce the first solo release from label-founder John Coxon. Best known for his work in Spring Heel Jack and Spiritualized, as well as extensive collaborative work with J. Spaceman, Evan Parker, Charles Hayward, Han Bennink and Pedro Reyes to name a few, it was perhaps inevitable that recent times allowed Coxon the space and time to experiment on his own. Real Magic Vol. 1 is the result of a year’s worth of early morning recordings made during 2…

Tip! This brand new transatlantic collaboration unites three renowned improvisers in a stellar first time matchup. Electric bassist Farida Amadou’s stratospheric rise over the last several years has been shaking the roofbeams of the European improvised music scene. She’s participated in high flying collaborations with heavyweight improvisers like Peter Brötzmann, Steve Noble, and Thurston Moore, many of which have been documented on the Antwerp-based Dropa Disc label. She's also been touring rel…

Live At Loft Shinjuku Tokyo Japan 23 July '81 (with Totsuzen Danball) is a jazz related improv/composition music live album recording by Fred Frith released in 1982.

Recorded and mixed by Chloë Sobek and Vijay Thillaimuthu. Mastered by Joe Talia.

*2023 stock. 250 copies limited edition* On March 17, 2021, Tetuzi Akiyama, Ayako Kataoka and Kiyomitsu Odai gave a concert at Ftarri in Suidobashi, Tokyo. This CD is a complete recording of the two sets they performed that day (25 and 34 minutes respectively). Akiyama played electric guitar; Kataoka used turntable, electronics and voice; and Odai performed on computer. Internationally renowned improviser/guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama lives in Tokyo and performs frequently both in Japan and overseas.…

2023 stock. Very much in the tradition of Anthony Braxton's seminal For Alto, or Evan Parker's Monocerous, this wonderful new album by clarinettist Alex Ward is improvised free jazz at its most unencumbered and radical, charting a solitary musician's excursion into pure expression. Divided into four segments, this set was committed to tape at Abbey Road Studios at the beginning of the year, taking in all manner of logic defying techniques and virtuosic sequences, as well as stretching the parame…

*2023 stock* Wakana Ikeda is a flute player whose activities range widely, from performances of composed works to improvised and popular music. She also leads the experimental music group Suidobashi Chamber Ensemble. In 2021, Ikeda and Swiss cellist Stefan Thut released the duo album "afar" on the Ftarri label. Guitarist Takashi Masubuchi started playing improvised music in the latter half of the 2000s, and since 2018 has focused on acoustic guitar performance. While Ikeda and Masubuchi are musi…

Sax player Junji Hirose and guitarist Kazuo Imai, both Tokyo residents born in 1955, are renowned Japanese improvisers who have long propelled the country’s improvised music scene. Australian drummer Darren Moore, who is currently based in Singapore, carries on his performance activity while also teaching at Lasalle College of the Arts. Darren Moore lived in Tokyo for several years in the mid-2010s. Since then he has often visited the country and performed with Japanese musicians. In 2022 he cam…