Like A Strange Matador
*2025 stock* Like moonlight playing on an ocean tide, Burn Into Sleep’s first record shimmers in the darkness with a perilous beauty. The core duo of David McLean and poet Lauren Bolger having been working with each other in various contexts since 2014, sharing the stage in Bolger’s iconoclastic no-wave band Locean, in a sorely missed free jazz trio with percussionist Pascal Nichols, guesting with Polish avant-garde collective Shepherd of Cats and Dream Skills of NYC and were both handpicked to …
Wedding Songs
*2025 stock* Wedding Songs marks the return to the label of filmmaker and composer, Clint Trofa, with his most ambitious and masterfully executed suite of music to date. Recorded with Jim Wallis throughout 2022, the 10 compositions that make up the album have been created with the patience of an auteur director, each piece of mise-en-scene delicately placed, unfolding with the grace, subtlety and emotional resonance of a European art house film.
Indeed, much of the album's melodic content has a…
Fudo
Introducing "Fudo," the acclaimed album by the avant-garde duo Mapa, now available in a specially remastered vinyl edition. "Fudo" stands as a pivotal work in the landscape of experimental electronic music, blending elements of punk energy, jazz improvisation, and electro-acoustic soundscapes to create a deeply evocative sonic journey.
Originally released to instant underground acclaim, "Fudo" is the fruit of the creative partnership between Paul Wirkus and Marcin Dymiter. The album delivers a d…
Live / Live
Just a few weeks back in a packed-full railway arch deep in South London, Jemima played their debut show and the moment seemed too good not to capture. Their gently lapping, invertedly melancholic sound is instantly recognisable from the first touch of the strings, although now songs, sketches and fragments from the album are elongate to have further room to breathe. Like finding a place of quiet refuge amidst the increasing urban chaos, these two extended live sets lower the pace for an ephemer…
Six Places
London-based musician Luke Cowan delivers his most expansive work yet with ‘Six Places’, a quietly dazzling suite that renders memory, geography and imagination as sound. Across six extended pieces recorded in Ely, Cambridge, York and London, Cowan bends the borders between composition and improvisation, everyday resonance and ensemble interplay, to arrive at a music that feels porous, fragile and strangely luminous. Cowan calls it “a collection of impressions of places. Some are real and some i…
Fireproof Sweat
Having written and sung in five languages on 2020’s “Uva Ursi”, Urs Graf Consort return to Italian for “Fireproof Sweat”, a record of irresistible charm, innovation and existential lyricism. “Ten years ago, a fire took the lives of four of our friends on rue Myrha in Paris, just a few months after Urs Graf Consort was founded. One of them — Nicolas Millet, a magnificent bookseller and Félix Fénéon specialist — was meant to be our bassist. The title Fireproof Sweat, and the album as a whole, ques…
Prynhawn Da!
Artist, composer and researcher Max Syedtollan arrives on bison with 34 minutes of merrie-making madness, written for a parade-performance by basketmaker Lewis Prosser and informed by the tradition of masked mummer’s theatre. Written to be blasted off the back of a lorry, ‘Prynhawn Da!’ accompanied a troupe of huge wicker figures - Parsnabler o Grog, Vogum Gertlin, The Woman with The Big Head and Goyle Cornett - as they paraded down the streets of Newtown, Swansea, Cardiff and Caernarfon as part…
Touch
With Touch, the Tortoise bandmembers — Dan Bitney, John Herndon, Douglas McCombs, John McEntire, and Jeff Parker — harness their collectivist songwriting approach, a slightly anarchistic but resolutely egalitarian process where ideas triumph over ego towards an abstracted muscularity. While there are still excursions into the dusky, elegantly gnarled jazz ambience that flourished on landmark works like Millions Now Living Will Never Die and TNT, Touch is perhaps most remarkable for Tortoise's un…
Feather and Pine
We are very proud to announce the second album by Michael Krassner for Dark Companion. This innovative, as ever, breathtaking music was originally intended as the soundtrack to a docufilm by Michael James Beck and Star Rosencrans of the same name: the film denounces the severe deforestation of North America’s majestic forests and all the associated problems. The music strikes arcane chords, buried in our collective memory. Ancient tales are told without words, preserving a profound sacredness th…
Schneider Serries #2
"Following their first collaborative LP, which I reviewed in Vital Weekly 1451, there’s a new album by Dirk Serries (guitar) and drummer Jörg A. Schneider. For me, that was an introduction to this musician (Dirk, I have known since 40 years!), who plays with Gaffa, Glimmen, Jealousy Mountain Duo, Les Hommes Qui Wear Espandrillos, Nicoffeine, Roji, SWWS, Tarngo, Teen Prime, The Nude Spur and has several collaborative projects, mostly with guitar slingers, such as Thisquietarmy, N, Mikel Vega, Aid…
A Few Meaningful Things
And now, something completely different. Marco Avitabile is an Italian guitarist and sound artist who shapes raw improvisation into fragile textures. Once rooted in post-hardcore and metal, his playing has since become stripped-down,ambient, guided more by instinct than technique. 'A Few Meaningful Things' — his second solo work and first for Colectivo Casa Amarela — lets strings collide with live processing, a luminous meditation on simplicity, touching many styles while belonging to none.
This…
Heavenly Arms with Otomo Yoshihide
Heavenly Arms – featuring Otomo Yoshihide – is a bold new sonic journey that bridges experimental sound, improvisation, and emotional resonance. The record, released in collaboration with the visionary Japanese composer and guitarist Otomo Yoshihide, showcases a meeting of worlds where free improvisation collides with delicate melodic structures.
Across its tracks, Heavenly Arms captures the raw immediacy of live interaction while preserving an intimate, cinematic atmosphere. The album moves f…
Juvenile Rock
Once whispered about in underground circles, Juvenile Rock—a crucial artifact from Japan’s vibrant 1980s post-punk scene—returns in definitive form. Originally circulated only as a CD-R and later on cassette, this rare collection of unreleased material from Dendo Marionette is now finally available on double vinyl, bringing new life to a body of work that until now was largely inaccessible outside of dedicated collectors. Juvenile Rock presents an expansive portrait of the band at their most dar…
Dendö Marionette
At the dawn of the 1980s, Osaka’s Dendo Marionette stood at the forefront of Japan’s first great Synth-Wave explosion—an underground movement where icy electronics collided with the raw urgency of Post-Punk. Their sound was both futuristic and deeply atmospheric, channeling a restless creative energy that mirrored the global wave of experimentation while remaining distinctly Japanese.
This definitive double LP brings together the band’s complete studio legacy, finally giving shape to a story t…
Paradise Mambo
Formed in Hakata before relocating to Tokyo in 1984, Akebonojirushi quickly established themselves as one of the most adventurous acts in Japan’s underground music scene. The six-piece band defied easy categorization, blending sharp-edged New Wave textures with the groove and freedom of Funk-Jazz, then distilling it all into daring, unpredictable Pop songs.
Originally released in 1987 on the influential DIW label, Paradise Mambo captured the energy of a vibrant era when Japanese musicians were…
Trap
Originally released in 1985 on Japan Records, "Trap" marks the second solo venture from pioneering Japanese musician Chiko Hige. Delving deep into the raw energy of the No-Wave movement, Hige crafts a powerful, hypnotic sonic journey brimming with hyper-kinetic grooves, jagged guitar textures, and contorted saxophone lines. "Trap" stands as a snapshot of controlled chaos—its blend of frenetic rhythms and edgy soundscapes continues to resonate with fresh relevance, captivating new listeners and l…
Harafuri
If punk culture and aesthetics ever had a poet, it would undoubtedly be Kō Machida. Best known as the visionary frontman of the pioneering punk band INU and later acclaimed as a novelist, essayist, and professor, Machida has built a career at the intersection of raw musical energy and razor-sharp literary craftsmanship. Eleven years after the groundbreaking 1981 masterpiece INU – Meshi Kuuna!, Machida returned with a new creative chapter: the album *Harafuri*. This record marked a significant ev…
Dance Till You Die
Dance Till You Die is more than just a track title—it’s a loud and clear order, a warning, and a timeless statement from one of the most uncompromising Japanese post-punk outfits of the early 1980s.
Emerging from Japan’s underground scene, Daisuck & Prostitute forged a raw yet magnetic sound that blended the abrasive edges of No Wave with an almost ritualistic sense of groove. Dance Till You Die stands as a rare testament to their uncompromising vision: esoteric and challenging, yet undeniably…
Quelques idées d'un vert incolore dorment furieusement
For more than fifteen years, Toc – the Lille-based trio of Jérémie Ternoy (Fender Rhodes, Piano Bass), Ivann Cruz (guitar) and Peter Orins (drums) – has been pursuing a singular sonic quest where the energies of experimental rock, the unpredictability of improvised music, and a constant drive toward excess converge. On stage as on record, Toc invents a telluric and ever-shifting music, built from flows, ruptures, and accumulations, where hypnosis and chaos feed off one another.
For this new albu…
Traveling Light
From out of the dark, the crackle of feed back birdsong signals a return to the land of sound environments exclusive to the music of Rafael Toral. A year and a half after his epochal electric guitar album, Spectral Evolution, Traveling Light finds him sharpening his focus, moving boldly from abstract forms to concrete compositions in the form of a set of jazz standards. Based on Toral’s discography, this may seem an unlikely endeavor, but happily, Traveling Light transpires to be one of the majo…