Experimental / Spoken Word

Soundtrack to Kahlil Joseph's 2017 film installation Fly Paper, a portrait of Harlem inspired by Roy DeCarava, with music by Kelsey Lu, Alice Smith, Thundercat, Flying Lotus, Kelan Phil Cohran and Legacy and soundscapes by James William Blades.

Space Afrika, the Manchester/Berlin-based duo of Joshua Tarelle Reid and Joshua Inyang, make raw, intensely detailed, visceral music with shades of ambient, trip-hop, techno, and modern classical, drawing spacious urban dubscapes from the contours of their city. 'Quiet Storm', the duo's highly anticipated follow-up to their 2021 LP on Dais Records, expands on its predecessor’s sound and scale in every direction as a sprawling, collaborative vision shaped with profound patience and intention. The…

The Hafler Trio's double LP Idiots: Laughing Matter, years in the making and seeded with early material by Wire's Bruce Gilbert: four long sides of slow, dark drones, spoken passages and sudden loud bursts. Embossed metallic Pantone jackets.

*200 copies limited release* After Le jardin perdu (2023) and Depuis les cimes (2025), Antoine Bellanger takes another new turn with La flûte, an album that continues along his singular path between song, poetry, illustration, and documentary storytelling. “In middle school, my music teacher told me I would never make music. Later, when studying drawing proved out of reach, I decided to turn to music instead. Thirty years later, here is La Flûte, an album full of flutes and poetry, in which I al…

*300 copies limited edition* The first Af Ursin album in a decade, this release features extraordinary Belgian vocalist and performer Bénédicte Davin. Ad Fontes is a personal response to the fractured reality of our time. Created in the wake of visible social decay, manipulation, and institutional control, the album serves as a sonic mirror to an era defined by corruption and systemic failure. Instead of preaching political manifestos or claiming to have answers, this work is an intimate persona…

*2025 stock* Astro-Darien is a 26-minute sonic fiction about the break-up of Britain narrated by synthetic Scottish voices and framed as an eponymous video game. It is the 2nd vinyl release on Hyperdub’s sub-label Flatlines and its dark green 10” comes packaged in a triple gatefold sleeve,  with artwork by Kode9’s long time collaborators Lawrence Lek & Optigram. Whereas the first release on the label, Mark Fisher and Justin Barton’s ‘On Vanishing Land’, wove an audio essay  around a walk along t…

Dark Entries release Terminal Fascination, a retrospective release of the music of Camille O’Grady, subversive artist, leather witch, punk poet, and gender saboteur. O’Grady cut her teeth in New York’s burgeoning punk scene at clubs like CBGB’s, where her band Leather Secrets would share the stage with acts like Television. She became one of the few women to be welcomed into the Mineshaft, Wally Wallace’s legendary Manhattan gay BDSM club. Towards the end of the 70s, she would trek west to San F…

On Today’s Special, Hanne Lippard and Renato Grieco turn speech into score and accompaniment into acoustic typography. Reduced, exacting compositions for voice, viola da gamba, piano and Wurlitzer shadow the rhythm and contour of language, transforming wordplay, online debris and intimate anecdotes into a dryly comic, strangely moving suite of musical rhetoric.

Tulpa by Charmaine Lee transforms voice, electronics, and feedback into a vivid organism of noise, song, and silence. Produced by Randall Dunn and released on her label Kou Records, the album bends improvised vocal gestures into sculptural form—an intimate encounter between body and circuitry that questions where identity begins and resonance ends.

*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 …

Bruno Tonisi's debut full-length, Sensational Conversations, presents itself as an artifact of impossible communication - a spectral dialogue between the Italian artist and legendary New York rapper Sensational that unfolds like an intercepted transmission from some parallel dimension. Released on lugar Alto, this singular work transforms what began as a gesture of contact into something far more enigmatic: a deconstructed hip-hop meditation that feels equal parts cosmic and street-level. The al…

*200 copies limited edition* We’re delighted to announce the triumphant return of Steve Marreyt, aka Edgar Wappenhalter. Here he reverts to making gritty reverb-drenched folksongs. But the poetic and electronic elements from his previous album remain – they’re just incorporated in the songs this time. It makes ‘Ijsschots Veenlaag Mist’ probably Wappenhalter’s most balanced work thusfar. Songs like ‘Hallusineren’ or ‘Vogel rok diamant’ prove he’s one of the best intuitive songwriters around, wher…

As a member of British experimental group Morphogenesis, Adam Bohman was no stranger to wayward sound experiments when recording this solo CD. Favoring acoustic sounds over electronic he explores the minute tendrils of sounds coaxed from any number of non-musical instruments. The standout on this Paradigm CD is a cassette piece which the artist made of candid recordings of mundane experiences and conversations, using the stop-start technique to construct a collage of text and environmental sound…

"Fifty years after I first encountered the music of Orchid Spangiafora, it is a pleasure to be listening to new work by this most bonny of modern sound manipulators. Like Flee Pasts Ape Elf, which we reissued in expanded form in 2013, Eel Asp Flays Feet (the title of which is an anagram of the earlier set) is an assemblage of immaculate invention. It manages to produce a unique splotch of confusing analog surrealism in an increasingly digital world, and Robert Carey (aka Orchid himself) deigned …

On War Pur War, Frieder Butzmann and Thomas Kapielski distill West‑Berlin’s 1980s absurdism into a Dada‑charged clash of electro‑pop and sonic collage. Minimal synth patterns, spoken fragments and everyday noises tangle into a wry, musique‑concrète‑like diary of a city thinking against meaning.

Recorded in 1997, on The Shadow Ring’s return from their final American tour, Lighthouse captures the group at their most stripped-down and visionary. Graham Lambkin’s fractured texts conjure Folkestone’s haunted coastline—Vikings, the Morgawr, a fading Britain, the pull of the sea—under the sway of Alternative TV’s Vibing Up the Senile Man (Part One), the mechanical vernaculars of Robert Ashley, and the deflated humor of Dad’s Army and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum. Opening the trio’s famed final phase…

*250 copies limited edition*  - SynopsisA cosmic operator (Edward Ka-Spel), tasked with cleansing the Universe, stumbles upon the remains of a mysterious monastery scattered in Jupiter’s skies during his work shift. The monastery once housed a community of cloistered nuns devoted to cosmic solitude. Among the ruins, he discovers the diary of Suona Menfrem (Dorothy Moskowitz). Through her words, he uncovers the secrets of her soul—her love for a woman millions of light years away—and learns why t…

Debut album from Irrflug, the Berlin-based project of Mark Kanak. Irrflug is a changing artist group rather than a fixed band. In Silver it's comprising Ian King, BoBo (Christiane Hebold) and Ella Sturmvogel and some others. 2 tracks feature Blixa Bargeld's voice. Silver extends Sähkö vocabulary into new directions. "rhythmic studies of corroded atmospheres" says Mark Kanak

Sorry For Laughing is a project by Gordon H. Whitlow who is also a member of legendary US avantgarde collective Biota, formerly Mnemonists or Mnemonist Orchestra. Their music is a mixture of modern classical, experimental sounds, noise, industrial, avangarde, songwriting and free jazz. In 1986 Gordon H. Whitlow released a cassette under the name Sorry For Laughing: "The compositions stem from my beginning days with the avant-garde recording ensemble Biota, shortly after completion of the Bellowi…

First album in IT DEEL, a multi-year project by the Kleefstra Bros (Jan Kleefstra on poetry, Romke Kleefstra on guitar) with Popfabryk, addressing the ecological degradation of Frisian nature. Each volume is composed in residency at the Thomaskerk in Katlijk and presented live before pressing. Volume I is built with Polish composer Michał Jacaszek, whose electro-acoustic vocabulary surrounds Jan Kleefstra's Frisian-language spoken word with ambient and drone landscapes.

577 Records is proud to welcome the adventurous Japanese ensemble K Trio to the label's roster with their remarkable new album, Parientes De La Vida. K Trio reminds us what experimental music can be at its most vital: pure risk, pure discovery, pure adventure. On Parientes De La Vida, poetry and improvised sound meet in a work that continuously reshapes the listener's sense of space, language, and perception.  The album serves as an acoustic document in which poetry reading and spontaneous music…

On Amelia, Laurie Anderson turns Amelia Earhart’s final flight into a 22-part dream-report: chamber strings, electronics and spoken word trace a route from Oakland to disappearance, where navigation data, weather reports and ghostly lullabies fold into one drifting, time-bent monologue.

"La Vera Storia di una Macchina Inventata" is a conceptual album built as a surreal sonic narrative. Conceived as a continuous journey rather than a collection of tracks, the album tells the story of an “useless machine” and its inventors, moving through exhibition halls, highways, rest stops and imaginary radio stations. The project was born from an intense period of collective research by Metameccanici, a trio formed by Angelo Trabace, Alessandro Trabace and Sebastiano De Gennaro. Working betw…

*50 copies limited edition* Aster are poets and experimental sound makers Alex Keramidas and Catherine Norris. Their practice is informed by perpetual choirs, sacrificial stones and top of the pops, as well as being guided by divination. Party Down the Hall is their first album - a collaboration built on ethereal narratives, samples and melodies, creating invocations for the modern era.“In an apartment in a big old building. It used to be a hotel where people would stay in order to be healed. No…

Tip! *Numbered + handmade in an edition of 250 copies only; 180gr vinyl in custom-made screen-printed outer (sealed), containing two risograph inserts with a specially commissioned essay* Generated in part by his 2022 exhibition in London and produced to coincide with his 2023 exhibition at Argos, Brussels. Includes contributions / interventions from Gary Stewart, Aniruddha Das (AKA Dr. Das / Asian Dub Foundation) and Kate Shortt.

Without premeditation nor haste, Omertà re-emerges with its third album, Âmes Bleues (Blue Souls), gracefully deepening its own unique furrow, between lyrically rich songs and singular harmonic explorations. After ambling through the Corsican air currents and immersing itself in smoke, Omertà continues to unfold its geographical and sensory music, seemingly finding its reach in the suspension inherent in the subtle tension it produces. The group expands its sonic palette with soothing and psyche…

*Dubbed on new ferro tapes* Wonderful collaboration between guitar-duo Yngel and author Rasmus Daugbjerg. A chest filled with stories, sounds and songs. About trolls, kings, moons and wolves. About care and disgust, loss and friendship.

*100 copies limited edition* "This album holds a special meaning for me, as it gave me the opportunity to reconnect with Pier Luigi, with whom I shared so much music in the early '80s. Together, we founded A.T.R.O.X., bonding over the intimacy that two people in love with music and the avant-garde scene can share. We spent countless evenings listening to records and creating music together. Pier Luigi later pushed the boundaries of his work through incredible collaborations and received widespre…

Ella Fitzgerald meets Gangsta Rap and the Beach Boys encounter their despotic father. American Psyche by Raymond Pettibon & Oliver Augst is an ABC of Jazz standards and nostalgia on speed, "that the world will never forget."

*2026 stock. 350 copies limited edition* The recording features the poem “Democracy Destruct” by David Henderson, produced by Kjell Bjørgeengen at Harmolodic Studios, New York in 2003. The title leaves never fall in vain is taken from the Japanese poet Chori (1739-1778). Performed and recorded at Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, 31 October 2023. Kjell Bjørgeengen – Dave Jones synthesizer and Flood CoilInga Margrete Aas - Double bassAimée Theriot - Electric celloIngar Zach - Vibrating membraneDavid Hender…

2025 stock  The acoustic publication of this "Diary" by and with John Cage represents an impressive document, spoken by an extraordinary voice, produced by one of the great artists of the 20th century. The new design of the 8-CD set includes a 64-page booklet in a presentation box (digi-box, carton). The booklet contains several photographs taken in John Cage's loft and during the recording in 1991. “I began the Diary optimistically in 1965 to celebrate the work of R. Buckminster Fuller, his con…

On the occasion of famous French writer Michel Houellebecq's new album release, Tricatel reveals a special edition of his cult first album Présence Humaine, in a blue vinyl limited edition. The album has been arranged and produced by Bertrand Burgalat, who is also the music composer of the album.

*2026 stock* "One way to interpret Vernon’s evocation of Brussels is as a patchwork of interdependent absences. We hear numerous spoken stories, yet none of them in full; details are lost to magnetic erasure, to the truncations of compositional editing, to the recollective limits of fallible minds. A voice hesitates as it recounts an early memory of falling. Another falters into damaged tape as it describes a trip into the forest, words sunken irretrievably under disruptive plosives. Into these …

On Extracellular, Hidden Horse, Sophie Sleigh-Johnson, Johnny Richards & Dave King, Domotic, Revbjelde, Saïph, Oh Mr James, Secluded Bronte, Time Attendant, Etceteral, Dolly Dolly & Fogroom and Gong Girl plug into the “space between cells”, trading signals as pulsing electro, splintered jazz, industrial dub and spoken ritual fuse into a single, buzzing nervous system.

Joe McPhee's Unquenchable Fire, a work inspired by Rachel Pollack's award-winning novel of the same title, was commissioned by The Deep Listening Institute for the Deep Listening Band and premiered at Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors. The Deep Listening Band explores the sensual combination of musical sound combined with natural sound, as well as the sounds of daily life and one's own thoughts. One never knows what Pauline Oliveros will do next, but whatever it is, she is sure to go beyond boundaries…

Pioneering Swiss trombonist and composer Andreas Tschopp marries contemporary jazz with South African horns and homemade ocarinas, creating a record quite unlike anything you've heard before. "What if We Align Our Breath" disregards the curvature of borders, genre, and time itself - tugging a thread through the history of wind instrumentation with ghostly agility. At the heart of the record lie spiralling, bonelike kudu (antelope) horns - instruments that have lent their stirring calls to indige…

*300 copies limited edition* Over the last decade, Rome-born, Brussels-based eclectic composer Giovanni Di Domenico has been ranging through a diverse number of fields within experimental music. Now, in the midst of a close series of astounding releases, Di Domenico adds another superb piece to his prolific discography as proof of an ever more enduring state of grace. The first of his works ever to feature voice and language as foregrounding elements, the five truly visionary pieces making up Po…

*100 copies limited edition* Spoken word, synth, modules & beats invite the listener into an electronic landscape where smell is colour and sound has weight. 'Momentary Lapses' is the second collaborative album from London based artists BAG (Jody DeSchutter and Daniel Allison), and Collapsing Drums (Charlie Behrens).  This is a deeply artful work that is simultaneously engrossing and challenging, and one that benefits from repeated listening.

At the beginning of this journey, I had no clear idea of what I was getting into. What started as a simple poem, with embedded audio links referencing a selection of recordings I had made over the past few years and published on Metalabel and my website, eventually evolved into a video project designed as a proposal for an installation. Ultimately, it culminated in this music album. I am incredibly grateful for the amazing voice recordings that friends and family from all over the world sent me,…

"Collapsing Drums tells the stories that matter in a post-pandemic world" - The Wire Collapsing Tape is a sprawling 23 track compilation which celebrates 5 years of the Collapsing Drums label via a diverse pool of artists working across experimental music. It’s really hard to condense the amount of sounds going on in the 90 minutes — but here’s a brief attempt: there’s abstract vocal play (Elaine Mitchener), warm squishy electronics (Luke Sanger), frenetic turntablism (Mariam Rezaei and Dali de …