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Though ubiquitous today, available as a single microchip and found in any electronic device requiring sound, the synthesizer when it first appeared was truly revolutionary. Something radically new--an extraordinary rarity in musical culture--it was an instrument that used a genuinely new source of sound: electronics. How this came to be--how an engineering student at Cornell and an avant-garde musician working out of a storefront in California set this revolution in motion--is the story told for…
In 20th Century Ambient, writer Dusty Henry blends prose and comics to trace how ambient music quietly became one of the century’s most pervasive forms, from Satie and dub to Eno, Alice Coltrane and streaming‑era wellness soundscapes.
In Minimalist Music, critic George Jr. Grella treats minimalism less as a style than as a set of techniques, tracing how process, repetition and reduction have migrated across genres to become one of contemporary music’s most adaptable practices.
In 1970s Jazz Fusion, critic Matthew Reed Baker reassesses a once‑derided hybrid, showing how the electric experiments of Davis, Hancock, Corea, Mahavishnu and others reshaped jazz, rock, soul and hip‑hop from the 1970s to today.
In Volcanic Tongue, David Keenan gathers decades of visionary criticism, charting late‑20th‑century underground sound through ecstatic essays, interviews and close‑listening dispatches that treat marginal scenes as the true engines of musical modernity.
In As Serious As Your Life, photographer and historian Val Wilmer chronicles the free jazz revolution as a Black cultural vanguard, situating Ayler, Coltrane, Coleman, Sun Ra and others within the struggles, hopes and solidarities of 1960s–70s America.
In Neu Klang, journalist Christoph Dallach assembles an oral history of krautrock, letting Can, Neu!, Kraftwerk and their peers explain how post‑war Germany’s experiments in noise, rhythm and repetition became a blueprint for modern rock and beyond.
Big tip! Fifty years on, and it still sounds like a secret. Carlos Walker's A Frauta de Pã remains one of those rare Brazilian albums that collectors circle obsessively, its original RCA Victor pressings commanding reverence - and prices - entirely disproportionate to the world's awareness of it. That wait is now over.
Recorded in 1975, when Walker was just 19 years old, A Frauta de Pã arrived at a precise confluence in Brazilian music - that charged mid-decade moment when MPB (Música Popular Br…
A minimalist exploration of voice, breath, and human connection across continents: this rare 2013 LP release documents an extraordinary sound art collaboration between Norwegian artist A.K. Dolven and American poet John Giorno, produced by Edition Block in Berlin. The 22-minute work represents a unique transatlantic dialogue that explores the fundamental properties of human communication through the sustained repetition of a single word: "ja," the Norwegian equivalent of "yes." A.K. Dolven (born…
This extremely rare and long out of print LP from 1983 documents a remarkable multidisciplinary artistic collaboration between Philip Corner, one of America's most important experimental composers and Fluxus pioneers, and Klaus Peter Brehmer, a leading figure of German conceptual art. Selected by Ursula Block for her legendary gelbe MUSIK label in Berlin, this work represents a unique translation between visual art, music, and scientific analysis. Philip Corner (born 1933, The Bronx) is internat…
Comes with its original record bag/shopper! When George Maciunas died in New York in 1978, aged 47, Joseph Beuys and Nam June Paik did what artists do when words fail: they played. The piano duet they performed at Düsseldorf's Kunstakademie lasted precisely 74 minutes, the numbers inverted as if time itself could be bent backward in grief. An alarm clock ended the performance at 9:14 pm, another numerical echo of Maciunas's brief, incendiary life. This wasn't theater. It was something rawer, mor…
"Whether it's by improvisation in the African-American jazz tradition, or by a village kobza player standing on top of a damn hill - he feels connected to the stars."
The archive is not neutral. In 2019, Andrea Centazzo discovered unlabeled tape reels in his mother's attic in Udine - boxes assumed lost seven years earlier. What emerged from these deteriorating reels, transferred by engineer Sergio Tomasini during COVID lockdowns, was unexpected: unreleased recordings from the original Elektriktus sessions of 1973-76, alongside other archival materials including previously unknown collaborations with Steve Lacy and Evan Parker from the same period.
Centazzo's …
Holidays Records is on fire! Hot on the heels of their recent incredible vinyl releases of the Italian sound artist and musician Ezio Piermattei’s “Gran trotto” and the duo Acchiappashpirt’s “Ninulla”, they return with one of their most important and captivating releases to date: Hartmut Geerken’s “Requiem for the Snake of Maidan”, a mind-blowing body of archival recordings from the 1970s, made on a stony ridge in the Hindukush mountains of Afghanistan, encountering the artist locked in a sprawl…
Huge Tip! * Limited edition of 300 copies, Embossed cover, comes with insert and postcard * Killer record here! Three Italian heavyweights doing what they do best - radical improvisation that sits somewhere between electronics, silence, and pure Mediterranean mystery. This is the real deal. Nicola Ratti, Alessandra Novaga, and Enrico Malatesta - three names you need to know if you're serious about contemporary improvised music.
The sound? Imagine if AMM had been born in Southern Europe with lapt…
Includes an 8-page booklet with lyrics in English and Arabic. Nancy Mounir’s debut album, Nozhet El Nofous, is a remarkable communion with ghosts. Moody, hypnotic, and sneakily catchy, the album - whose title means “Promenade of the Souls'' in Arabic - explores microtonality, non-metered rhythms, and bold vulnerability through a musical dialogue between Mounir’s own arrangements and the sounds of archival recordings of once-famed singers from Egypt at the turn of the 20th century. Adding her own…
** Edition of 150 copies ** Pak Yan Lau: dismantled toy pianos, wind up toys, popping candy, bow, toy spring reverb, Buddha Machine, Tamayura bell, Japanese iron wind chimes, electronics, voice. Recorded and mixed at Outlau’d Studio, Brussels, in August 2020. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Cover illustration by Eleusi.
277 pages. 196 x 268 mm. Open NOW JAZZ NOW and you're not just looking at a book - you're entering the minds of three lifelong obsessives. Byron Coley (music writer and critic), Mats Gustafsson (saxophonist, The Thing, Fire!), and Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth founder, solo artist) have spent decades accumulating, discussing, debating, and above all listening to free jazz and free improvisation. This book is the result of that shared mania. What they've created isn't a conventional history or a ra…
Hatsune Kaidan (Hatsune Staircase) is a Japanese noise‑pop collaboration between legendary Osaka noise group Hijokaidan and the virtual Vocaloid singer Hatsune Miku, reinvented through live performance by real‑world vocalist Shirahata Kamin in a full “Miku‑style” costume. The project is part of Hijokaidan’s long‑running “Kaidan” (Staircase) series, which pairs the band with diverse guest artists, from idols to other avant‑garde acts. Hatsune Kaidan marks the first time a Vocaloid has been formal…