We use cookies on our website to provide you with the best experience.Most of these are essential and already present. We do require your explicit consent to save your cart and browsing history between visits.Read about cookies we use here.
Your cart and preferences will not be saved if you leave the site.
The Bobo Stenson Trio’s ability of covering far-reaching idioms and wide-ranging repertoire within the scope of their personal diction has become both hallmark and custom, inspiring the New York Times to say the pianist “makes sublime piano-trio records without over-playing. It’s pulsating, with long improvised phrases; it’s alive.” Sphere is primarily comprised of works by 20th and 21st century composers including Per Nørgård, Sven-Erik Bäck, and Jean Sibelius and offers two originals by Jormin…
Brazilian percussionist Naná Vasconcelos’s Saudades album, recorded in March 1979, was the culmination of a dream for a musician who had long yearned to hear the berimbau in an orchestral context. This ‘concerto’ for an innovative player of a traditional instrument was made possible with the creative input of Egberto Gismonti, here the arranger of the material for strings, as well as co-composer and supporting soloist. The Radio Symphony Orchestra Stuttgart was conducted by Mladen Gutesha (who h…
*2024 stock* Barre Phillips was the first musician to record an album of solo double bass, back in 1968, and he has always been an absolute master of the solo idiom. In March 2017, Barre recorded what he says will be his last solo album, the final chapter of his “Journal Violone”: it is a beautiful and moving musical statement. All the qualities we associate with Barre’s playing are here in abundance – questing adventurousness, melodic invention, textural richness, developmental logic, and dee…
Tractus emphasizes Arvo Pärt compositions that blend the timbres of choir and string orchestra. New versions predominate, with focused performances from the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir under Tõnu Kaljuste’s direction that invite alert and concentrated listening. From the opening composition Littlemore Tractus, which takes as its starting point consoling reflections from a sermon by John Henry Newman, the idea of change, transfiguration and renewal resona…
The ECM New Series debut of Evgueni Galperine is one of the most strikingly original and evocative albums of the year. A composer of Russian and Ukrainian heritage, living in Paris since 1990, Galperine is working with sound, texture and dynamics in new and powerfully expressive ways. As he explains, the sound world of Theory of Becoming represents an “augmented reality of acoustic instruments, created from recordings made with real and virtual instruments. The numerous transformations the inst…
Big Tip! ** One-time pressing, strictly limited edition ** After more than three decades of whispered reverence among jazz cognoscenti, the complete story of Keith Jarrett's transformative return to his musical birthplace can finally be told. At The Deer Head Inn: The Complete Recordings, a sumptuous 4LP box set to be released in August 2025, captures every note from what may be the most emotionally resonant performance in the pianist's extraordinary catalog. On September 16, 1992, something ext…
Mysterious, dramatic and alluring, Luminessence comes from a peak period in the creative association between Keith Jarrett and Jan Garbarek, recorded in 1974, immediately after their vibrant Belonging album. Here, Jarrett creates shimmering orchestral frameworks to spur Garbarek to some of his most concentrated, impassioned and expressive playing. “The melodies that Jarrett writes sound like Garbarek improvisations, so great is the rapport between the two men,” wrote Ian Carr in his Keith Jarre…
This vinyl album by Micheal Mantler is new old stock from Ecm archives. For light relief from his darker, more existential works, Michael Mantler assembled two fine ensembles at the end of the 1970s to play music that might be described as the Thinking Man’s Answer to Fusion. Imagine walking into an art house cinema where the projector runs without film - the stories unfolding purely through Michael Mantler's haunting trumpet and the alchemy of his stellar ensemble. That's the experience of Movi…
This vinyl album by Micheal Mantler is new old stock from Ecm archives. Original first pressing – printed in the USA in 1977. The record has never been played and the vinyl is in mint condition. However, the sleeves are sealed but may have slight marks and ringwear on the cover and signs of aging. In 1977, Michael Mantler and Carla Bley's WATT label unleashed a quietly revolutionary take on Silence that still resonates today. This wasn't just a reissue - it was a complete reinvention, stitched …
Stephan Micus is a unique musician and composer. He collects and studies instruments from all around the world and creates his own musical journeys with them. This is his 25th solo album for ECM and its sound is dominated by the four-metre long Tibetan dung chen trumpet, an instrument he has recently learned and is using for the first time. It was the thunderous sound of this instrument that led to the album’s name and its nine tracks celebrating deities around the world. “I dedicate this music …
Widely regarded as one of Pat Metheny's most inspired recordings and now considered a classic of instrumental and improvised music, *80/81* unveiled a bold new dimension of the then-26-year-old guitarist's sonic world. Released in 1980, this groundbreaking album marked Metheny's first collaboration with jazz luminaries from multiple generations, including bassist Charlie Haden, saxophonists Dewey Redman and Michael Brecker, and drummer Jack DeJohnette.
Drawing equally from the freewheeling spiri…
A milestone. T H I R - Ten Hundred Inch Radii - is among the most historically significant works in Phill Niblock's output, and one of the genuinely undiscovered jewels of American experimental film. Completed in 1972 as the fourth and final chapter of his Environments cycle - begun in 1968 - it is presented here for the first time on DVD, with two alternate soundtracks, by the Italian imprint Von.
Niblock occupies a peculiar and underacknowledged position in the history of American Minimalism. …
A singular document. EyEar presents, for the first time, the visual dimension of Z'EV's practice - a body of work that had, until this release, remained inseparable from the live event, resistant to any fixed form.
Born Stefan Joel Weisser in Los Angeles in 1951, Z'EV stands as one of the most uncompromising figures in the history of experimental and industrial music. From his first solo percussion performances in San Francisco in the late 1970s - deploying self-constructed instruments assembled…
Somewhere in the Chukotka tundra, at the coordinates N 66°37' W 172°40', September 2006. A Vezdekhod tank - the all-terrain vehicle that remains, across much of Siberia, the only viable means of transport - moves through a landscape that resists every other form of passage. Carlos Casas is inside, recording. The noise is overwhelming: the resonance of the engine inside the cabin so intense, so physically present, that the only music capable of cutting through it, the only sound that could exist …
The elephant graveyard is a myth. No confirmed site exists, no documented mass of bones gathered in a hidden clearing. And yet the image persists - in literature, in cinema, in the collective imagination of what wild and remote nature might conceal. It is precisely this space between myth and evidence, between the archive and the unknown, that Carlos Casas moves into with Cemetery [Archive Works]. Since 2001, the Barcelona-born filmmaker and visual artist has built one of the most rigorous and e…
Estonian vocal ensemble Vox Clamantis and their leader Jaan-Eik Tulve have established themselves among the leading interpreters of Arvo Pärt’s music over a quarter-century of close collaboration with the composer – a relationship that builds on the almost half a century long artistic partnership between Pärt and producer Manfred Eicher. Of the ensemble’s ECM New Series recording The Deer’s Cry, the BBC Music Magazine wrote that “the level of artistry necessary to achieve the kind of living, bre…
Marking the occasion of Steve Reich’s 80th birthday (hup, big man!), The ECM Recordings compiles three CDs of the venerable minimalist composer’s major works, which were consecutively released in 1978, 1980 and 1982, and continue to influence and inspire myriad forms of modern music. Named “our greatest living composer” (The New York Times), “America’s greatest living composer” (The Village Voice), and “…the most original musical thinker of our time” (The New Yorker), Reich’s ardent, incisive wo…
“Songs of Ascension” is a major new recording from composer Meredith Monk and her vocal ensemble. Written in 2008, it is conceived as a continuous composition, a departure from Monk’s earlier collaged or episodic extended works. In recent years Meredith Monk’s been expanding into the worlds of orchestra and string quartet. On “Songs of Ascension” she teams up with a string quartet of New York players well versed in new music. With winds, percussion and two vocal groups added to her already extra…
*2024 stock. Deluxe packaging* The starting point for Litany was a commission received from the Oregon Bach Festival in Eugene, US. For this reason, Pärt selected an English text as the basis for his composition.
Arvo Pärt: “The English language lacks plasticity which is brought to music with long words. Working with a text in English, I had to make new discoveries and use melodic constructions that I normally don’t use in my music, to extract material from words and sentences. The text for Lita…