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Actions
Recorded live at the Donaueschingen Music Festival on October 17, 1971, Actions features a truly mind-bending confluence of musicians of the avant-garde, in the broadest sense of the term. Don Cherry -- the brilliant American free jazz trumpeter -- had recently expatriated to Sweden and was finding his way not only among the emerging free-jazz scene of Europe but also within his own constantly expanding musical palette that had begun to incorporate elements of African rhythms, Turkish folk idiom…
Dancing The Line
Ultan O’Brien is a fiddle player and composer from the wilds of County Clare in the West of Ireland. Ultan is a performer as well as a regular at sessions all of Ireland and can be found by chance in any pub in Dublin, Cork or some remote village on the edge of nowhere, flying jigs and reels around the room. Ultan was reared in the rich tradition of Irish music which is so commonly found and heard in Co Clare, but he also delves deep into sound art and experimental music.
He has often been heard…
Riddles of the Sphinx
Lost 1977 electronic score by Soft Machine's Mike Ratledge, crafted with enigmatic Denys Irving on modified Moog/ARP synthesizers delivering ten hypnotic sequences of minimalist repetition. Transferred from BFI archives after master tapes vanished, this new 300-copy reissue follows the long out-of-print 2016 edition. Essential Riddles Of The Sphinx finally unearthed.
Diary: How To Improve The World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)
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…
The Surgeon Of The Nightsky Restores Dead Things By The Power Of Sound
The renowned and widely acclaimed music label Intuition, well known since the 1980s, is proud to announce the release of its most important and successful back-catalogue titles on vinyl under the name 'Intuition Master Series'. The American trumpeter and multi-instrumentalist Jon Hassell (March 22, 1937-June 26, 2021) was an international legend despite never having managed a popular breakthrough. Hassell was a musical visionary and pioneer, one who was inspired by ambient sounds and new music. …
Music in Continuous Motion
Bill Orcutt is back with what might be the most beautiful record in his 21st-century guitar quartet series. Music in Continuous Motion (Palilalia, LP/CD) pointedly steps away from the cut-and-paste constructivism of Music for Four Guitars into a sonic stratum that's - as Tom Carter writes - "yearningly melodic, resolutely human, and built for performance." Four guitars, twelve tracks, most hovering around two-and-a-half minutes each. No waste. No fat. Pure music.
Where Music for Four Guitars ope…
Nommos
CD edition (mastered from the analog tapes). First appearing incongruously on John Fahey's Takoma label in 1981, Nommos remains enshrouded in impenetrable mystery – from its understated artwork to the rich assemblage of analog synths contained inside. According to Head Heritage, Nommos is the "missing link between the proto-industrial rhythm and drone of Suicide and the whole minimalist drone / static / repetition method of Terry Riley and La Monte Young." Best known as a producer, Craig Leon wo…
You'll Never Come Back
Reissue of Harry Pussy's Ride A Dove, originally released on Siltbreeze in 1996. "By 1996, with one LP, a handful of 7"s, and a couple dozen gigs under their collective belts, Harry Pussy had thoroughly scrambled the mid-90s scuzz-rock ecosystem. Their acclaimed first LP, described by David Keenan as 'a black hole that devoured genre and flattened any attempt to classify it,' fused Japanese noise, '80s hardcore and post-Ayler jazz into a dense, white-hot ball of punk anger and insanity. The band…
Moon On The Water
**CD version** A mysterious sound aurora on the magical paths of the infinite universe of percussion, originally released in 1985 and then almost completley lost. Moon On The Water were a trio of percussionists based in Italy - David Searcy and Jonathan Scully, both American tympani players in the Scala Philarmonic Orchestra, with the legendary Italian jazz drummer Tiziano Tononi, who worked with everyone from Roberto Musci, to Muhal Richard Abrams, Pierre Favre (who later joined the group), And…
Gagaku Suites
Tip! Gagaku is the oldest of the Japanese performing arts, with a history more than a thousand years old. The term refers to Japanese classical music and dance, traditionally performed by families of musicians linked to the ancient Imperial court, and later passed down in Buddhist temple ceremonies and Shinto shrines. Shiba Sukeyasu, founder and director of the Reigakusha ensemble, descends from the Koma clan, whose origins date back to the end of the 10th century.
The recordings partly reflect …
Om Shanti Shanti Om
**Never-before released document of Don Cherry blowing cool fire in Rome, 1976. First official release. Mastered from the original master tapes.** An amazing document of the life experiment that was the Organic Music Society. This super quality audio, recorded by RAI (the italian public broadcasting company) in 1976 for television, documents a quartet concert focused on vocals compositions and improvisations. Here, Don Cherry and his family-community’s musical belief emerges in its simplicity, w…
I Tarantolati
Huge Tip! **300 copies, comes with a printed insert** The second LP in Black Sweat’s latest batch, ‘I Tarantolati’ the first outing of Antonio Infantino with his band, Il Gruppo Di Tricarico, while very different in its musical approach, belongs to the same wild ferment around Folk Studio in Rome, and was issued by the Folkstudio label the year prior in 1975.
Antonio Infantino was poet and singer, who operated in circles connected to Beat literature and Italian performance and gestural music cir…
Collines / Racines
Tip! Rarely has the term "soundscapes" seemed as appropriate as for 'Collines' and 'Racines,' these two long, captivating pieces for cello and Loopstation, respectively inspired by the landscapes of Gaume and the Forêt de Soignes. Gwen Sainte-Rose superimposes the sound layers of her compositions and sculpts the sound material. This CD nestled in a wooden box which, like a small cabinet of curiosities, also contains multiple photographic inserts by Beata Szparagowska and the graphic designer Cor…
Jesus
Two confrontative icons. Two artists willing to go where those icons point. Jesus is one of the most extreme and conceptually charged releases in the Von catalogue - a double LP that documents and extends a collaboration between Prurient and Nico Vascellari built around the figures of GG Allin and Klaus Kinski: two men who treated the stage as a site of absolute exposure, who understood performance as a form of self-destruction, and who attached to the name of Jesus a weight that had nothing to …
Resonant Cuts
Concert and Sound Installation, edited by Carsten Seiffarth and Michael Moser. 21x16 cm, 63 pages, b+w and colour fotos, English-German texts. Limited to 500 copies. CD-1 Concert Installation. Ensemble Polwechsel and guests: Burkhard Beins: percussion, Martin Brandlmayr (percussion), Werner Dafeldecker (double bass), Axel Dörner (trumpet), Theo Nabicht (contrebass, clarinet), Wolfgang Musil (live-electronic). Recorded live on July 24 2008 at Kleiner Wasserspeicher, Berlin. CD-2 Sound Inst…
Freedom of Choice (Book)
Finally, after all that waiting, The Future arrived in 1980. Ohio art-rockers Devo had plainly prepared with their 1979 second LP Duty Now for the Future, and now it was go time. Propelled by the new decade's high-tech, free-market, pre-AIDS promise, 1980's Freedom of Choice would rocket what Devo co-founder Gerald Casale calls his "alternate universe, hermetically sealed, alien band" both into the arms of the Earthlings and back to their home planet in one scenic trip.Before an artistic and com…
Histoire de Melody Nelson (Book)
Outside his native France, the view of Serge Gainsbourg was once of a one-hit wonder lothario. This has been slowly replaced by an awareness of how talented and innovative a songwriter he was. Gainsbourg was an eclectic, protean figure; a Dadaist, poète maudit, Pop-Artist, libertine and anti-hero. An icon and iconoclast.His masterpiece is arguably Histoire de Melody Nelson, an album suite combining many of his signature themes; sex, taboo, provocation, humour, exoticism and ultimately tragedy. C…
Paris 1919 (Book)
John Cale's enigmatic masterpiece, Paris 1919, appeared at a time when the artist and his world were changing forever. It was 1973, the year of the Watergate hearings and the oil crisis, and Cale was at a crossroads. The white-hot rage of his Velvet Underground days was nearly spent; now he was living in Los Angeles, working for a record company and making music when time allowed. He needed to lay to rest some ghosts, but he couldn't do that without scaring up others. Paris 1919 was the result.I…
Suicide (Book)
New York City in the 1970s was an urban nightmare: destitute, dirty, and dangerous. As the country collectively turned its back on the Big Apple, two musical vigilantes rose out of the miasma. Armed only with amplified AC current, Suicide's Alan Vega and Marty Rev set out to save America's soul. Their weaponized noise terrorized unsuspecting audiences. Suicide could start a riot on a lack of guitar alone. Those who braved their live shows often fled in fear--or formed bands (sometimes both). Thi…
Sorrow Tears And Blood (Book)
Sorrow Tears and Blood offers a glimpse into the complicated social, cultural, and political phenomenon that is Nigeria.