Experimental / Free Improvisation

Premiered at 20th Annual San Francisco Electronic Music Festival (SFEMF) as a multichannel piece, spatialized through the exclusive 32-channel system of Envelop SF, alongside a piece by Jim O’Rourke

** Double Single-Sided Art LP. Edition of 100. ** My Cat Is An Alien releases The Secret of the Space Bubble / Eternal Beyond IV, a double album documenting two distinct collaborative approaches within the Italian duo's ongoing experimental practice. Brothers Maurizio and Roberto Opalio present new work with French musicians Talweg and Joëlle Vinciarelli, expanding their exploration of extended compositional techniques and spatial audio processing. Issued on May 2, 2025 by Elliptical Noise Recor…

Which is the more productive situation for improvisation: the shock of the first time encounter, unhindered by history or habit, or the long-term association and the evolution of more complex interactions? It's an unresolved, perhaps even undecidable, question. This recording brings together four improvisers together in a multi-layered situation which combines multiple permutations of the untried and the familiar. The four had never all played together before but the quartet contains various his…

After the wild Afro-jazz fusion of Trancedance (reissued as BT118) and the meditative solo Christer Bothén Donso n’goni (BT133), legendary Swedish multi-instrumentalist Christer Bothén returns to Black Truffle as part of a dream quartet completed by the three members of Ghosted: Oren Ambarchi (guitar), Johan Berthling (bass) and Andreas Werliin (drums). Recorded at a rustic studio built by Werliin and Hans Fredriksson in the sylvan surrounds of Hamburgsund, Sweden across a few days in September …

*300 copies limited edition* Berlin-based percussionist and vocalist Teresa Riemann presents Can I stare at you publicly?, a new collection of solo works for percussion and voice. The pieces are meticulously composed, while their origins lie in improvisation, and improvisation remains part of the way Riemann performs them. The compositions stay open, allowing her to interpret them differently each time and keeping the music in a state of movement rather than fixing it into a final form. On “The …

*2026 stock. 100 copies limited edition* "Bill Harris is a community builder first and foremost. As one of the founders of the Amalgam collective, he has helped to keep Chicago’s storied improvised music scene together through the dark ages of the 2020s. Additionally, his studio space Marmalade has hosted performances from some of the most boundary-pushing voices of contemporary experimental music - artists such as Charmaine Lee, Brandon Lopez, Sandy Ewen and more - during a time in which such s…

»Baby Ghost« is the debut album by double bassist and vocalist Jordan Sand. Released through Hallow Ground, it blurs the lines between different genres and modes of expressions, improvisation and composition and showcases the unique playing style the composer has developed. Sand blends her voice with the bowed harmonics and subharmonics of her double bass. At once conceptually rigorous and musically open-ended, Sand’s wordless meditations on death and what comes after are both visceral and explo…

On Tending, James Creed threads four ensemble works through a shared practice of careful, collective attention, letting sparse parts, quiet doublings and gently unstable textures accumulate into music that feels like weather slowly forming in the air around you.

*300 copies limited edition* Percussionists Mika Kallio and Janne Tuomi have each spent decades at the edges of Finnish improvised music. Oresme, their debut duo on Mustik Motel, takes its name from the 14th-century philosopher who argued that all perceived motion depends entirely on where you stand. Nine tracks navigate that same double territory: outward into astronomical scale and inward toward something quieter and untranslated. Two percussion setups, one vibraphone, and a great deal of room…

*2026 stock* Zach Cooper weaves recordings with the Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble, high school demos, solo compositions and eraserhead-less tape experiments into the shining fabric of The Sentence. A debut album brimming with many talents and tales, The Sentence is atemporal, a divining of Cooper’s personal history to map his musical travels through formative years in New York state, his studies and collaborations within the University of Vermont’s music theory and composition department, …

*2026 stock* Polish drummer and composer Tomek Chołoniewski presents Music To Make Your Body Suffer, a visceral and uncompromising album that treats percussion not simply as rhythm, but as a force capable of transforming the entire body. Raw, intense, and deeply physical, the record explores the boundaries between composition and improvisation, control and release, structure and collapse. In Chołoniewski’s hands, the drum kit becomes a laboratory of sound: an instrument of impact, resistance, re…

Originally released in 2001. In the fall of 1966 a group of composers that included Frederic Rzewski, Alvin Curran, Allen Bryant, Jon Phetteplace, Giuseppe Chiari and Richard Teitelbaum organized "Avanguardia Musicale I," a festival of several consecutive nights at the Accademia Filarmonica Romana. The program included tape music, Fluxus performance art pieces, and live electronic works. It was also the beginning of the group MEV. One year later, the group was in Rome, Italy, but also involved i…

2006 release ** Mattin: gnu-linux computer feedback. Radu Malfatti: trombone. Recorded in 2005. Going fragile is the latest collaboration between Radu Malfatti and Mattin, following 2004's critically lauded "Whitenoise". This album sees them refining their approach; they string incidents of sound along a long axis of time, creating distinct events against a stark backdrop. The cumulative effect is the creation of an enormous scale, small moments building to coherent wholes. This album is a vibra…

2026 stock "A vibraphone, a snare drum, a knitting needle, a cymbal, and a marimba compose five flickering points: stars at the threshold between perceptibility and deep space. The constellation they form shimmers dully, its design clearly painterly, but out of grasp. I stand on the outskirts of a large city, trying to keep them all in view. But, I just can’t make out anything. So instead, I fix myself to a singular point of the five. My eyes strain and tremor as I gaze at one star amongst trill…

*2026 stock* Split The Sky, Sheets Dipped In Chrome is a new album from Chaz Prymek & Seth Andrew Davis. This recording was a long time coming, with both Prymek & Davis in discussion for a long time about when and how to collaborate after connecting online. The duo first performed together in Kansas City at Farewell in December 2022 and from there developed a sound together. The music heard here varies from sparse introspection, energetic catharsis, and the exploration of a new landscape created…

'14 musicians from nine different countries went on a sound journey directed only by their own musical fantasy, no borders – except one, more about that later. The venue, the newly built „Schwere Reiter“ in Munich, is perfect for this: clear acoustics, clear architecture. In the middle of the covid pandemic, in a short time when concerts were possible, such an intense and open exchange could happen, two days in a row, on October 1st and 2nd 2021 – a stroke of luck. A music that moves, stimulates…

There aren’t many all-female vocal groups in the world of improvised music, even fewer of them are working bands, and there are very few projects that are anything more than that. VoiceACT, conceived by Anna Gadt, is exactly that. VoiceACT is, above all, a platform for artistic exploration, generally without specific stylistic characteristics, but operating according to the sacred principle of free creation, to which each invited artist contributes whatever resonates in their improvisational sou…

Syrena:re is a concept programme by Ania Karpowicz and Dominik Strycharski for two flutists and tape. It reinvents and recycles musical motifs released on vinyl by the iconic Syrena Rekord label in pre-war Warsaw. The tape features poignant voices of synagogue cantors, fragments of popular songs, and blended sounds of the Shmul Weinberg orchestra. By using extended techniques and a variety of flutes representing diverse timbres, the artists combine the work of memory with unconstrained improvisa…

Oscar Jan Hoogland is the sound of Amsterdam in person. He plays in the Muziekgebouw (Amsterdams main hall for modern composed music) as well as in the Bimhuis (Holland’s main jazz venue) that is literally attached to it, as in its parking garage. He is an instant composer, pianist and inventor of his own instrument by putting a clavichord, a keyboard instrument from the 17th century, on 220 Volt electricity. As the last student of the late pianist, composer and improvisor Misha Mengelberg he te…

*In process of stocking* Un Drame Musical Instantané were founded in 1976, featuring Jean-Jacques Birgé, Bernard Vitet and Francis Gorgé. Their aim was to promote collective musical creation, co-signing their albums, which they consider as artworks in themselves, or their live shows which they tried to renew every time they played. Their sound was created with many influences: They borrowed their sources from rock (synthesizer player Birgé and guitarist Gorgé, both authors of the album, Défense …

Christian Kobi is one of the leading names on the improv scene in Bern, Switzerland. His work includes collaborations with Phill Niblock, Jürg Frey, Taku Sugimoto, and Keith Rowe. His new album, “Cathedral”, closes a trilogy for saxophone solo that started with “Canto” (2010) and “r a w l i n e s” (2013), and which was recorded in the former Swisscom high-bay warehouse - probably the largest underground space in Bern. That space serves Christian as a place of exploration of sound, silence and ac…

Tip! You’re approaching the region where gravity feels tampered with; “Dreaming With The Lights On” is to drift into a zone where bodies and objects appear to have slipped into a dream’s editing room and reassembled themselves according to priorities still unfamiliar. The music begins long before the sound does—inside a suspended brightness, a sky that hums with the possibility of transformation. The listener’s mind becomes a surface onto which impossible gestures imprint themselves: limbs blend…

Original 1984 copy of self produced studio album from 1984. Recorded and mixed at Conny’s Studio. Insane instrumentation, expanding the boundaries of percussion. Michael Ranta is an american percussionist based in Cologne since early seventies. Known for his one off collaboration with Toshi Ichiyanagi, Takehisa Kosugi, live performances with Hartmut Geerken and his own improv group Wired. This one is a solo recording of Ranta playing Sha-tik, Mu-yu, Mok-eo, Mu-ban, Bamboo Tubes, Bungkaka, Tongat…

Duo in the mirror that, in a continuous game of doubling and multiplication, ventures into another world, dense with unexpectedness and vital thrills. Sun Ra and post-rock, as well as Chicago experimentation and echoes of the world of Suzanne Ciani and minimal music, are the hints one can sense while listening to Medea, a journey to the edge and beyond. Star Splitter's new album comes five years after the debut album, a period in which the two artists experimented with the infinite possibilities…

*100 copies limited edition* Solo. Acoustic but with unexpected sounds, without unnecessary virtuosity but full of surprises. Characterized by cowbells which, however, instead of being played, in the course of the concert are hung from the body and allowed to resonate. Soft, not aggressive. Melodic and full of noise. Dirty; and the dirt is the interesting part of it. An unshouted cry. A rustic in search of shibumi.

Bolt Of Void // Performance DocumentRecorded Live AtDuct // Nagoya JapanSubstore // Koenji-TokyoJuly 2026

Over top of Gillespie's nimble, pointillist drumming (he also plays piano and harpsichord), Hunerberg employs flute, organ, bass and balloon (that's not a saxophone on "Cucumber"). The disorienting opener "Cro Magnon/Two" recalls Kraftwerk precursor the Organisation, or contemporaries like Faust. There's a strange, disconsolate atmosphere to the proceedings, almost as if the air had been sucked out of a recording session booked for some avant-garde jazz heavies. Instead of Impulse, Phase Murmur …

*2024 stock. 300 copies limited edition* "It started in 2005 by colliding electrons against ferromagnetic material on a ribbon of rust to eventually excite phosphors behind cathode ray tube unless the thermal velocity of the yoke over modulates and restricts the flow of 60/40 rosin core anodized black under a waveform monitor. Plaid vectors, white fur, hex schmitt triggers, oxygen free copper and temperatures above 50° are equally as important mediums as 70% cocao in this cross disciplinary mult…

When the quartet of Luke Martin, Gabriel Salomon, Klaus Janek and Andy Graydon gathered to record an afternoon of sessions in Andy's studio, it was both the result of years of cultivation and an afterthought. Klaus and Andy had been long-time, and now long-distance, collaborators since their shared years in Berlin. That city was also where Andy was introduced to Gabriel at one of his solo performances by their mutual friend, the painter Paul McDevitt. Years passed, and cities. After meeting and …

Although Berlin-based musical seekers Jules Reidy and Sam Dunscombe are friends who’ve worked together in numerous contexts over the last decade or so, Edge Games is their first, long overdue collaborative album. Over two expansive, mind-bending excursions the former’s microtonal guitar lines are woven into a gorgeously unstable mass of synthesis, field recordings, and clarinet produced by the latter, but it’s important to note that the recording process was deeply collaborative, with a rigorous…

*300 copies limited edition* Penultimate Press is proud to unveil a global collaboration that harnesses earth with combined members and atmospheres of Santiago, Chile, Salsipuedes, Argentina, Melbourne, Australia and Berlin, Germany. El Jardín de las Matemáticas (The Garden of Mathematics) was written and recorded by Alvaro Daguer (Glorias Navales/A Full Cosmic Sound/ETCS Records), Pablo Picco (Bardo Todol/Bolinga Everest Records), Tomás Salvatierra (Glorias Navales) and Mark Harwood (Penultimat…

"There are fewer great guitar trio records than you'd suspect. Guitar duo sessions are far more abundant, and these three players have all done their share of those. But the dynamics of a trio are more-fickle. And when creating collaborative non-hierarchical music, maintaining a balance between three distinct voices is not easy. It requires rapt attention, a fearless approach to entering the unknown, and very good ears to do it successfully. Clearly, Connors, Vallera, and Sharp display mastery o…

*2026 stock* Following 'Passenger' (tsss tapes, 2023), Ted Byrnes & Jeph Jerman Play Drums is a further exploration of percussive collaboration. Recorded in much the same way (iterative file exchange), Play Drums is quite literal in its title. It is entirely acoustic, with both participants playing a conventional drum set, albeit *all* parts of it. The recording is dedicated to Tim Barnes, close friend and constant source of inspiration to both Ted and Jeph.

Tip! Large ensemble improvisation has a history and already many historical references such as Globe Unity Orchestra, King Übü Örchestrü, The Celestrial Communication Orchestra, London Improvisers Orchestra… or more recent ones like Splitter Orchester, Insub Meta Orchestra, GGRIL, ONCEIM… How to combine energy, individuality, unexpectedness… with 26 people? How to develop different improvisation strategies without falling into the obvious drone? How can you simply improvise freely with 26 people…

Piano and electronics merge, transforming sound into ghostly landscapes through tape and distortion.

Tip! "Whether we experience music as abstract or concrete depends largely on our sensitivity to the richness of perception. Common opinion – often reductive – draws a sharp distinction: music is abstract when it does not “speak,” when it seems diffuse, branching into multiple, elusive directions. It is concrete when it “tells” a story, when its sounds and structures feel familiar, graspable. Yet this distinction quickly dissolves. From a scientific or cognitive perspective, structure itself is i…

On Die Dritte Ebene, Emilio Gordoa and Sven‑Åke Johansson let vibraphone, drums and accordion run in seemingly parallel lines until a mysterious “third layer” appears - a ghost‑music of overtones, pulse and texture that neither player could summon alone.

Big Tip! *200 copies * In the mid-70s in Northern New Jersey, some friends and I formed an ensemble called Atomic Squawk, with which we used our extremely limited musical techniques to play the sorts of whacked-out sounds about which none of our fucking peers gave a rat's ass. “Funny” talking blues, free form skronk, vaguely detourned covers of Beefheart and the Velvets -- these were our stocks in trade, and much happy time was whiled away in Randy Charles' basement drinking and making noise, si…

German guitarist Olaf Rupp combines elements of traditional flamenco (rasgueados, arpeggios, picados) with the fractured cadences of Derek Bailey, fusing them together with a blast-furnace tone recalling John Lee Hooker's most blown-out extremes. And yet, despite decades of concerts and releases on FMP and Emanem, often with marquee-grabbing collaborators like John Zorn, Peter Brötzmann, Butch Morris, Paul Lovens and Lol Coxhill, Rupp's music is largely unknown outside of European free improvisa…

In the lockdown of early 2020, Berlin fell silent. As reflects Nicholas Bussmann, “it felt like the early 90s in East Berlin”, the place where he grew up and experienced social change and uncertainty, and presumably a lot of empty, silent space.  Here, on this duo with his long-term accomplice Werner Dafeldecker, we hear the sound of two instrumental practitioners as they explore the nature of their respective instruments with a paced and thoughtful guidance, with little intervention or overt de…