Back in stock
Insane 80s Tracks from the Insane Label
Insane Music, run by Alain Neffe, has been one of the greatest and biggest Tape-Labels promoting the international cassette-culture of the 80's. Full of raw analogue electronics, and plenty blood-curdling screaming, thise selection feature BeNe GeSSeRiT, Pseudo Code, Human Flesh and I Scream
In Session
Huge Tip! 200 copies limited edition - While most musicians spend years developing chemistry, Exotic Sin and Julian Sartorius achieved something close to musical telepathy in a single afternoon at BBC Broadcasting House. What started as a radio session for BBC Radio 3's Late Junction became something far more significant—a masterclass in how three minds can think as one organism when the conditions are exactly right.
In Session documents this first studio encounter between the London-based duo …
Journey to Nabta Playa
Big tip! Spiritmuse Records is proud to present Journey To Nabta Playa, a new album from composer and multi-instrumentalist Angel Bat Dawid and multidisciplinary artist and musician Naima Nefertari (aka Karlsson), releasing May 2, 2025. A powerful meditation on memory, mythology, and ancestral science, the record draws deep inspiration from the ancient astrological stone circle of Nabta Playa, nestled in the remote deserts of Nubia. Journey To Nabta Playa is grounded in a shared inquiry between …
Mégapneumes
Gil J. Wolman's revolutionary Mégapneumes reveals the radical origins of sound poetry. This essential collection documents the Lettrist pioneer's organic infra-language from 1960s recordings, including material found on his tape recorder after death - anticipating Chopin and Gysin by a decade
Catalogue d’oiseaux & Petites esquisses d’oiseaux
Olivier Messiaen saw birds as his greatest teachers, capturing their songs with passion and precision. His piano works, especially Catalogue d’oiseaux and Petites esquisses d’oiseaux, translate birdsong into rich, colorful music. Messiaen’s fascination with rhythm, color, and nature shaped his compositions, blending ornithology with spirituality. Pianist Alfonso Gómez delivers an astonishing interpretation on this recording, adding to his acclaimed discography for this label. As Messiaen himself…
Works for Violin and for Viola
** In process of stocking ** Giacinto Scelsi (La Spezia, 1905 – Rome, 1988) is one of the most original Italian composers of the twentieth century. Musician and poet of aristocratic descent, Scelsi spent his childhood in his family’s castle, in Valva, where he received “un’educazione medievale” in which he recalls “scherma, scacchi, latino”, 1 and developed an early attraction towards improvisation on the piano. “De l’age de trois ans et demi, j’ai commencé à improvisers au piano. [...] je ne s…
Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus
** In process of stocking ** “The mystery of incarnation is the most beautiful aspect of divinity – and it is the reason why I am a Christian. I do not consider the differences between Orthodox, Protestant or Catholic: a Christian is someone who understands that God has come.” This was taken from an interview with Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992) where he talked about Christmas being the one festival in the Christian calendar most important to him. In his music about the incarnation of God, Messiaen…
Caminantes... Ayacucho
2007 release - Luigi Nono No hay caminos, hay que caminar … Andrej Tarkowskij (1987) “Wayfarer, there is no path. Yet you must walk”, in Spanish: “Caminante, no hay caminos. Hay que caminar.” These words are the contents of an inscription, which Luigi Nono read on the wall of a monastery in Toledo in the middle of the 1980s. They must have affected him most deeply, since in the last three years of his life he made them the basis of the titles of a trio of works. In “Hay que caminar” he surely re…
Como una ola de fuerza y luz - Unfolding Waves
Between April and June 1971, after the democratic election of Salvador Allende’s government, Luigi Nono visited Chile for three months, meeting several artists, composers and politicians, among whom was Luciano Cruz Aguayo, one of the leaders of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR, Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria). Back in Italy, Nono started working on his next musical composition, which was meant to be a piece for piano and orchestra, for Maurizio Pollini and Claudio Abbado. In …
Èclairs sur l'Au-Delà...
“I will say: I have given this flame to these eyes; I have drawn from the ambiguous smile of the moon […] these two naïve stars open to the infinite”, wrote the poetess Cécile Sauvage in 1908 to her unborn son, Olivier Messiaen. It is amazing that the poem in a sense expresses in a prophetic manner Messiaen’s interest in and passion for themes that were to accompany him throughout his life: the cosmos, infinity. It goes without saying that the poetic lifestyle of his mother was to have a strong …
La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura
Experiencing La lontananza utopica futura has enriched my musicianship. The unusual openness of the original materials by Nono required the establishment of an interpretive path through tapes and scores. This need has led to the emergence of a creative approach to performance, where the lines between roles and figures are blurred; with La lontananza, we cannot identify the composer as the provider of clear and direct instructions, and the performer cannot remain an invisible score-reproducer. A …
Il silenzio dei tuoi passi
"Another luxurious CD in book’s clothing here on the 13 / silentes label, which specialises in combined music and photography into one hopefully cohesive entity. This is the second thing now involving Italian veteran relaxer Gigi Masin, this time accompanying photography by Stefano Gentile. While the matt black book contains 68 pages of some nice dusky imagery of a european city centre to immerse yourself into, I’m gonna concentrate on Gigi Masin’s 30 minute suite that’ll be doing the other imme…
Sound of Sounds (Book + 2CD)
*2024 stock* Pianist, composer and sound artist Hans Otte is still undervalued in Europe, and the Anglo-American cultural scene just starts to notice him. Ingo Ahmel's bilingual study of his biography and artistic work highlights Otte’s view of life and his aesthetical orientation, providing the fundamentals for an adequate reception. At the centre of the book are the solo piano cycles Das Buch der Klänge (The Book of Sounds, 1979-82) and Stundenbuch (Hours Book, 1991-98) as well as the related …
Un anno, a partire da lunedì. Dopo Silenzio (Book)
*Italian language edition* "I guess as contemporary music continues to change in the way I am changing it, what is to be done is to completely liberate sounds more and more from abstract ideas about them and let them with increasing exactitude be themselves physically, and that's it." - John Cage
Considered the creator of experimentalism in the 1950s, John Cage was a major inspiration to conceptual artists in the 1960s, and his music was instrumental in the emergence of minimalism in the 1970s a…
The contest of pleasures - Tempestuous
Late-night improvisation captured on a stormy November evening in an old church during the 2006 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. John Butcher's soprano and tenor saxophones intertwine with Xavier Charles' clarinet and Axel Dörner's trumpet across 51 minutes of remarkable sustained exploration that stands as one of the defining documents of contemporary European improvised music.
Tempestuous moves between the poles of calm and urgency that the setting might suggest, with the trio navigat…
The Middle Distance
Trio improvisations for two pianos and double bass
Duet
French cellist Martine Altenburger and British guitarist John Russell recorded this live performance at the Musique en Mouvement Festival in Jarny, France in November 2008. Altenburger, Toulouse-based and conservatory-trained, moves between performances of Cage and Scelsi and improvisation with sound explorers like Michel Doneda and Lê Quan Ninh (who mastered this session). Russell, a London hardcore improviser, brings decades of experience to this encounter.
One reviewer describes listening to …
And We Disappear
The Sealed Knot—Burkhard Beins (percussion, objects), Rhodri Davies (pedal harp, e-bow), Mark Wastell (double bass, bow, beaters)—are what Clive Bell in The Wire calls "one of the great free improvisation groups, comparable to the classic 1980s SME line-up of John Stevens, Nigel Coombes and Roger Smith for edge-of-your-seat attentiveness and sheer inter-group telepathy." This single 40-minute piece, recorded live at the Ear We Are Festival in Biel, Switzerland in February 2007, captures the trio…
Music For Shakuhachi
Four works spanning two decades document an extraordinary musical collaboration between British composer Frank Denyer and shakuhachi master Yoshikazu Iwamoto. They met at Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1974, where Denyer was a doctoral student in ethnomusicology and Iwamoto artist-in-residence in the World Music programme. What emerged is a folio of compositions that run like a vein through Denyer's output - a body of work unique in contemporary music.
Denyer was not interested in east-we…
Empty Matter
Lucio Capece (soprano saxophone, bass clarinet, preparations, sruti box) and Lee Patterson (CD players, pick-ups, e-bowed springrods, springplate, hazelnuts) recorded these eight pieces in what Norman Records describes as "absolutely beautiful music" where "two masters of tiny sounds meet up." Capece approaches his reeds "more as tubes for breath than as traditional 'instruments,'" while Patterson uses all sorts of sound processes—including amplifying burning hazelnuts.
Nick Cain in The Wire not…