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The World Is But a Place of Survival: Ethiopian Begena Songs
The begena is a ten-stringed lyre central to Ethiopia’s Amharic heritage and Orthodox Tewahido Church. Reserved for spiritual music, it is revered for its mythical origins and unique buzzing sound. Symbolically crafted, the begena is believed to ward off evil and connect players to the divine.
Wet Lands Dry Me
K.W. Cahill records and plays electric guitars, lap steel, melodica and karimbas on May to June 2025 time. Mastered by Andrew Weathers.
We're all sitting here and no one's listening. We're just talking over each other while the world spins out of control. Who are you gonna believe if the walls were gone? If everything turned up empty fields? Us just standing around looking at each other and nothing blocking us or protecting us from each other or from ourselves. I'm at war with myself first. Let …
To Material Past
Akhira Sano is a Tokyo-based artist working across sound, drawing, installation, and video. His practice finds generative potential for music in life's fleeting incidents, etching meaning from unassuming spaces and resonances. With releases on 12k, LAAPS, IIKKI, and The Trilogy Tapes, Sano has steadily carved out a distinctive voice within minimal and experimental music - one that privileges attentiveness and patience over spectacle.
"To Material Past", Sano's debut for SWIMS, carries this threa…
Let Me Perish Without Return: Lament and Longing from the Fading Russian Empire, 1889-1917
Tip Our next release with Gary Sullivan's Bodega Pop project - rooted in a passion for digging for music in bodegas and cell-phone stores across NYC's boroughs. This edition focuses in on early recordings found in Russian neighborhoods in Brooklyn & Queens. "At the turn of the last century, the Russian Empire stood at a crossroads, caught between the weight of its imperial past and the promise of a radically altered future. Recorded during a period of profound cultural transformation and unrest,…
Earthbound
From 2019 to 2022, Gorgun drafted the record twice, then deleted most of her sketches. By the time she opened a new session, she had gone through an accidental electrocution, a cancer diagnosis, and an allergic collapse that nearly suffocated her. During treatment, chemotherapy left her in a cognitive fog known as "chemo-brain," forcing her to relearn the craft of composition from scratch. While rebuilding her own focus, she watched her friends, relatives, and musical heroes battle illness, reco…
The Appointed Cloud
Yoshi Wada has often said that The Appointed Cloud is his favorite of his own works, and listening to this remastered edition makes clear why. Staged at the Great Hall of the New York Hall of Science in 1987, the piece was Wada's first large-scale interactive installation, featuring a custom pipe organ and homemade instruments controlled by computer through an interface and software designed by engineer David Rayna, known for his work with La Monte Young. The space itself—designed for the 1964-6…
Fantail Vision
Slowdown Records will release a box of six new Merzbow albums. The box "Fantail Vision" consists of six new Merzbow albums from 2020-2022: "Mukogenerator","Mukomodulator", "Mukotronics", "Hinawave", "Animal Mukomodulator", "Magnetic Rain". The recordings include not only recordings that are being released for the first time, but also some that have been digitally distributed on Soundcloud and Bandcamp. Merzbow has released five original albums on Slowdown Records to date, "Kaoscitron", "Indigo …
Eye
*250 copies limited edition* Mariska Baars, aka soccer Committee is a force to be reckoned with: whoever heard one of her albums, or was lucky enough to see her live, knows that no one masters the art of peeling away every unnecessary layer of a song like she does. From the very first notes of 'Eye, it’s clear that Baars is at the peak of her powers. The most traditional songs here remind us why we fell for her songwriting in the first place: they’re delicately strong and quietly fierce. Other p…
Adela
*300 copies limited edition* A debut that is not a debut. Eva Fernández Suárez and Thomas Barrière have both been around for a while, just not as a duo. Eva is originally from the Asturias region in northern Spain but has been residing in France for quite a few years now. As a solo singer, her work is firmly rooted in classic folk-inspired material, more specifically in the bleak, bare-bones, and stripped-down kind. With her slow, rhythmic delivery, perfectly placed melodic nuances, and a vocal …
Mono Tono
*Special discounted pricing. 2026 stock* Skiantos had a void in their minds, and that was all they needed to revolutionize Italian music. They imported demented rock to Italy, drawing on an all-American, nonsensical movement (from Frank Zappa to Devo), fueled by the explosion of English punk. Before Skiantos, the only demented aspects of Italian songwriting had been the perverse (and perverted) obscenities of Squallor, who, while hilarious (sometimes even from a purely compositional standpoint),…
Kinotto!
*Special discounted pricing. 2026 stock* The third album by this combo from Bologna is the apotheosis of their histrionic verve. Directed in studio by Italian progressive rock luminary, Paolo Tofani, Kinotto was released in 1979, and as Freak Antoni himself declared, the album was closer to new wave than previous efforts and its best-known track, "Mi Piaccion Le Sbarbine", was soon on heavy rotation. With Kinotto came also the artistic consecration of Skiantos, who went from being a cult band to…
Live In Gorizia 8/12/1978
*2026 stock* Originally attached to the new version of the book "Skiantos una storia come questa non c'era stata mai prima e non ci sarà mai più" by Gianluca Morozzi & Lorenzo "Lerry" Arabia, now available wiithout the book.
Carpathes
"Percussionist Paul Lovens turns in some exemplary work on Carpathes, joined by Michel Pilz (bcl) and Peter Kowald (b). Actually it is mostly Pilz' date as he appears throughout the record either in solo, trio or duo with Kowald. But it is Lovens who most impresses me here as he hammers, rings, jingles the percussion, managing to both give rhythmic freedom and abstraction while implying a more traditional rhythm and he sustains himself very well. Actually the rhythm is constantly outstanding in …
Schlingerland / Dynamische Schwingungen
Cien Fuegos present a reissue of Sven-Åke Johansson's Schlingerland / Dynamische Schwingungen, originally released in 1972. Sven-Åke Johansson (Mariestad, Sweden, 1943) works as a composer, drummer, accordionist, poet, and visual artist. Longtime collaborator of the free improv scene in the German '60s with Kowald, Brötzmann, Schlippenbach. He contributed to numerous exhibitions, publications, and recordings. Sven-Åke Johansson - drums. Recorded 1972 in Stockholm, Schweden. Engineered by Göran F…
Inaudible Works 1994-2008
What have we here? 16 pieces of hard-to-classify music, created during the period 1994-2008, a cornucopia of playful, intelligent, questing and eminently listenable electronic music from Osaka-born artist Hyu, who released two albums on Nobukazu Takemura's Childisc label, in 1999 and 2002. Although a member of the turn-of-the-century generation of artists subsumed under the rather vague term "electronica", his work stands apart in many ways, particularly in his unique exploration of microtonalit…
Hamburg '74 (LP)
This date by the Globe Unity Orchestra featured pianist Alexander Von Schlippenbach, guitarist Derek Bailey, drummers Paul Lovens and Han Bennink, saxophonists Peter Brötzmann, Evan Parker, Rüdiger Carl, Gerd Dudek, and Michel Piz, bassist Peter Kowald, trumpeters Kenny Wheeler and Manfred Schoof , and trombonists Paul Rutherford and Günter Christmann -- a completely gone lineup at the height of Euro free jazz in 1974. To add to the drama, the band is joined by the Choir of the NDR Broadcast und…
Motore Immobile
To quote Pitchfork, this is 'one of the most sumptuous, spiritual ambient albums of any era or provenance.
MPB Especial 1972 TV Broadcast
Dive into an extraordinary musical moment with Jorge Ben - MPB Especial 1972 TV Broadcast, a rare and captivating live performance recorded during a turbulent era in Brazil’s history. This unique album captures Jorge Ben, one of Brazil’s most influential musicians, delivering extended versions of his timeless classics such as "Fio Maravilha", "Mas Que Nada", "País Tropical", and "Domingas", along with other beloved tracks.
Recorded live for television in 1972, while Brazil was under a strict mil…
Om Shanti Shanti Om
Much needed repress. **Never-before released document of Don Cherry blowing cool fire in Rome, 1976. First official release. Mastered from the original master tapes. CD version** 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 bel…
Uscire da Fuori
**Edition of 200** Electronic composer Marco Papiro confirms his eccentric and multifaceted personality. The sound articulation of his analog synthesizers flows into in an artificial hyperrealism of great thematic and expressive variation. The tracks unfold between ascending cosmic moments, more ecstatic meditative tones, symphonic planetary floods, exotic Afrodelic and psycho-Andean drifts. Papiro synthesises and converts echoes of acoustic wind instruments (oboe, recorders, bamboo flute), whil…