The Hemphill Stringtet:
Curtis Stewart - violinSam Bardfeld - violinStephanie Griffin - violaTomeka Reid - cello
All music by Julius Hemphill (Subito Music Corporation).Recorded, edited, and mixed by Ryan Streber at Oktaven Audio.Mastered by Paul Zinman, Soundbyte Productions.Cover photography by Nina Contini Melis.Artwork + design by TJ Huff (huffart.com).
The Hemphill Stringtet would like to thank the Aaron Copland Fund and Continuum Culture for their generous financial support.
We would also …
Blood Burden is the debut album from Brooklyn-based saxophonist, composer, and bandleader Alfredo Colón. Deeply rooted in the blues tradition, Alfredo brings harrowingly raw emotion in the form of barely-contained chaos to Blood Burden — a meditation on the interplay of Dominican folklore and Catholic imagery and ethos, and an ode to his immediate family members in the face of intergenerational trauma. Recorded at Figure 8 studios in New York with Lex Korton on piano, Steve Williams on bass, and…
*2024 stock. 300 copies limited release* The Wind (music by Scott Clark, lyrics by Laura Ann Singh/Scott Clark)Dawn & Dusk (music by Scott Clark, lyrics by Laura Ann Singh)Silent Singing (music and lyrics by Scott Clark)Above The Gray (music by Scott Clark)
Tracks 1-4 recorded August 16, 2021 and mixed at Minimum Wage Recording by Lance Koehler.Tracks 5-8 recorded live March 28, 2022 and mixed at Spacebomb Studio by Curtis Fye.Tracks 1-8 mastered at Minimum Wage Recording by Lance Koehler.Album …
*2024 stock* Clamor rethinks the notion of 'women's work' as a space for both collaboration and singular voice. Just as our ensemble is limited and enabled by the written score, so might be individual enunciations of how gender norms limit agency. Clamor utilizes a collective, improvisational vision that prioritizes an intentionally fluid style by employing indeterminacy, navigated by the performers via time-based scores. These principles are balanced with metered notation to shape the overall f…
Christian Marclay's 2023 piece for the disused Chandoline hydroelectric plant in Switzerland: golf and tennis balls dropped into the penstock 4.5 kilometres uphill, recorded as they crashed into the turbine hall.
* 180 gram vinyl * The cover of Thrust reveals a lot of the album. Herbie's sitting comfortably his spaceship controlled by a synth froman alien world, reachingto the clouds and beyond. Well, that's what his stature was in 1974 - one of the seminal renewers of Jazz by incorporating new electric instruments like theARP synthesizer.
Thrust is the follow up to Head Hunters using the same band except for drummer HarveyMason, who is replaced by Mike Clark, a Jazz great in his own right.
Again, only f…
In Spacemen 3 Vinyl – Extended Edition, Danny Passarella assembles the definitive visual chronicle of Sonic Boom and J Spaceman’s recorded universe: a lavish, full‑colour archive of global pressings, ephemera and new interviews that turns their vinyl trail into a tactile, time‑spanning narrative.
London-based musician Luke Cowan delivers his most expansive work yet with ‘Six Places’, a quietly dazzling suite that renders memory, geography and imagination as sound. Across six extended pieces recorded in Ely, Cambridge, York and London, Cowan bends the borders between composition and improvisation, everyday resonance and ensemble interplay, to arrive at a music that feels porous, fragile and strangely luminous. Cowan calls it “a collection of impressions of places. Some are real and some i…
On Telegogue, Charlie Thall detonates a 29‑minute, eleven‑track riot of cartoonishly surreal genre‑mashups that feel born and bred in the infinite remix lab of the digital DIY. Frenetic keys, MIDI drums and warped child voices collide into neurotic, hyper‑danceable earworms that treat the internet’s trash heap as sacred compositional mulch.
On Slow Diet Ketamine Era, New York City Chapters and Weird Shit U.S.A. 2 yank sampledelia into a sleazy, rubble‑strewn mixtape fever dream. Two thirty‑minute collages of chopped‑and‑screwed B‑side rips, plundered dollar‑bin grooves and neon grime‑slime hip‑hop loops sketch a pitch‑black, hysterical fiction from the sidewalk’s ignored edge.
Tip! *300 copies limited edition* After years contributing to Italy’s heterogeneous and increasingly transnational music echosystem by curating his own dream & microsounds label Pampsychia, Reptilian Expo lands on Artetetra like an elegant jelly trainwreck hitting with a mix low-frequencies body-muzak filled with a cocktail of squeaks, wacky samples, manipulated vocal lines and a much-needed pinch of irony. Cunti is a collection of sonic short stories, fantastic journeys into an unconscious wor…
Do you remember when albums used to be fourteen tracks long, with clear song structures and a sense of narrative development? No? Neither do we. And that is exactly why Artetetra is thrilled to welcome Orange Car Crash in their roster with their new album Fake Man. Shaped by years of circulation across psych, jazz, punk, and experimental scenes, featuring collaborations with projects like Lay Llamas, Mamuthones and Snüff, Andrea Davì’s Orange Car Crash operates less as a solo project and more as…
On A Body of Water, Kaloja - the duo of Jan Anderzén and Paul Wilson - summon a strangely pastoral, hyper‑alive electronic ecosystem. Psychedelic synthesis, physical modelling and impressionistic sound‑painting converge into abstract figures that ripple through an unstable yet welcoming landscape, like sentient currents moving beneath a calm surface.
*300 copies limited edition* For the Raven was due to be the next release after Ligeliahorn on the Nekrophile Rekords label. Sadly the project fell through and, even more sadly, it coincided with a number of the celebrants being rounded up to enjoy a short holiday at Her Majesty's Pleasure, expense and, indeed, insistence. By the time our intrepid Disciples Of Doom re emerged the momentum had been lost and For the Raven was consigned to the Metgumbnervaults to, until recently, only make an occas…
Songs about the river are a common trope in the history of music. Psalms of being cleansed, being baptized, being redeemed. There are ballads of murder, lost love, jealousy, and all sorts of rank human emotion reflected in the surface of the water. Respect, praise, and worship of the river are other themes often channeled through music as well. Even in the realm of ambient music, digital mimesis of the aquatic is commonplace. Fossil Aerosol Mining Project, in their ongoing archaeological approac…
The first release of a 1995 studio session, produced by Evan Parker. The Kenny Wheeler Sextet includes Ray Warleigh, Stan Sulzmann, John Parricelli, Chris Laurence and Tony Levin.
Audion 87 arrives like a lovingly overstuffed mixtape passed between devotees, its 44 A4 pages packed with rabbit holes for anyone who still hears “progressive” as a verb, not a museum tag. At its core sit two major anchor features. The first is a deep excavation of choice German label classics, taking April and Schneeball as portals into a republic of small imprints, marginal bands and radical self‑organisation. Rather than recycling the usual Krautrock canon, the piece digs into catalogue corn…
In October 1984, Frans de Waard started his Korm Plastics label and his music project Kapotte Muziek. Shortly after, a fellow student, Christian Nijs, joined him as a musical partner. They quickly released a few cassettes and contributed to international compilations, and Nijs started a short-lived label, Disabuse Transmissions. In the summer of 1985, they published the first issue of Nul Nul, a fanzine, to promote their projects and to support the industrial music scene in The Netherlands and B…
425 pages, softcover, 17x24 cm All six editions of this UK fanzine, 1979-1982 Book containing all six issues of the Neumusik fanzine which David Elliott edited between 1979-82 while at university. The 'zine focussed on European, electronic and experimental music which had come out of krautrock, French progressive rock and the more esoteric side of British post-punk. David travelled extensively meeting musicians in Germany and France, and for a year was based in Strasbourg. Interviews and articl…
Before the internet collapsed distances and democratized distribution, the international noise underground operated through an intricate web of mail-order catalogs, hand-dubbed cassettes, and photocopied fanzines. Labels emerged from bedrooms and basements, their catalogs circulating through postal networks that connected isolated outposts of extreme sound across continents. Few figures navigated this world as actively as Frans de Waard, and few labels embodied its uncompromising spirit as purel…
On BBC Jazz Club Session April 1965, Don Rendell and Ian Carr capture a historic broadcast moment where British modern jazz finds its new voice. The debut of pianist Michael Garrick within the quintet injects modal colour and compositional bite into a set that pushes club‑band swing toward something more questing and contemporary.
2026 Repress. Sublime release from Masaru Imada Trio. Imada's got a way of letting a tune really find its way organically – almost as if the songs here are little flowers opening up in his fingers on the keyboard of the piano – although never in a style that's "flowery" at all, because Imada's a master of finding just the right notes at the right moment – never embellishing things just to show off. Instead, his imagination finds all the best paths forwards, especially on his original tunes on th…
Bassist Isao Suzuki's popularity shot up to stratosphere with the release of Blow Up from the Three Blind Mice label. By the time he recorded this, fourth album for the label, he was actually the winner of the Swing Journal Readers' Poll. And this rather strangely titled album doesn't disappoint.Suzuki had a knack for surrounding himself with superb musicians and playing brilliant, groovy music that is firmly rooted in the jazz tradition. This time, he picked as the all-important horn player Ken…
A piano-bass duo session cut in a single day at Tokyo's Onkio Haus on 24 October 1977, during one of the bassist George Mraz's rare passages through Japan. The format leaves nowhere to hide and the two players treat that exposure as the point of the exercise: Masaru Imada's voicings opened up to admit Mraz's lines as full equal voices, the Czech-American bassist drawing on the resonant, singing tone he had developed through his work with Tommy Flanagan and Stan Getz.
The programme alternates two…
A fantastic electric album from one of the most unique bassists of the 70s – Blow Up is one of the most sough-after titles from the acclaimed Three Blind Mice catalog. Isao Suzuki's Blow-Up is virtuosity and class all rolled up into one. A great combination of upbeat blues and mellow grooves! The album was awarded "Jazz of Japan" Award and the Jazz Disc Award of "Swing Journal" in 1973."This adventurous set finds Suzuki and his band mates (drummer George Otsuka, pianist Kunihiko Sugano, and bass…
2026 Repress. Recorded over three December days in 1979 at Epicurus Studio in Tokyo and issued the following year, Cool Jojo documents a side of Masayuki "Jojo" Takayanagi that sits at considerable remove from the noise-as-method work he was simultaneously pursuing with the New Direction Unit. The guitarist's Second Concept was his vehicle for an explicit return to the Tristano school — the lineage he had absorbed as a young player in postwar Tokyo and never fully set aside — and the programme m…
Stunning duo comprised of two of the most important musicians of the Japanese underground/avant-garde, Otomo Yoshihide in a duo with the great Japanese drummer, Hiroshi Yamazaki – who has Kaoru Abe among his extensive list of past collaborators, and was also a member of Masayuki Takayanagi’s pioneering New Directions group. This album is dedicated to Masayuki Takayanagi.Otomo Yoshihide moves between free jazz, noise, improvisation, composition and the unclassifiable with a generosity that opens …
Feelings marks Jake Henry’s long-awaited return as a leader, more than a decade after his debut with Sweet Talk Glitterbomb. This album is a deeply personal exploration of the intricate harmonic language and angular counterpoint Henry developed during his formative years as a guitarist. Drawing on the frenetic energy of math rock, raw intensity of metal, and chaotic textures of noise, Henry recontextualizes common song form into a bold, genre-defying soundscape.
The quartet—featuring Brian Krock…
**300 copies, 2019 stock** "Dirk Serries and his wife, double bass player Martina Verhoeven, meet British tenor sax player Colin Webster, who also participated in the Dead Neanderthals’ Endless Voids, for a live improvisation, recorded at the DIY club Cinépalace in Kortrijk, Belgium in May 2015. A month earlier Serries performed with Webster in a quartet that was recorded as Live at Cafe Oto, and released on Webster’s Raw Tonk label. This recording, titled after the club name, highlights the hig…
Originally released in 1967, Mama Too Tight stands as one of the most daring and structurally innovative albums from Archie Shepp, a pivotal figure in the free jazz movement and African-American cultural protest of the 1960s. Distinct from his more explosive works, this album showcases a refined compositional complexity, featuring avant-garde marching-band-style arrangements, masterful horn orchestrations, and a unique blend of humor and improvisational tension.
The title track, Mama Too Tight, …
"The CD surprised me because it could be listened to with many ears. At first I felt I could not separate it from contemporary composed music, soon after that I could still place it in the context of contemporary improvised music, and finally the fantasticness of a journey that takes the best both worlds have to offer revealed itself to me. Much of the merit can be attributed to the sensible arrangement of the four movements, which, despite being at least superficially similar procedures - mixin…
The work of JJJJJerome Ellis lives comfortably in the gaps between silence and possibility. The Black disabled Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist creates atmospheric soundscapes with saxophone, organ, hammered dulcimer, electronics, and their voice. Improvisation is at the core of their artistry – often chipping away at large slabs of recordings to reveal the piece like a marble sculptor. It’s an expansive and interdisciplinary practice that allows JJJJJerome to adapt to any medium or form, incl…
On a perfectly smooth surface of silence, three hurled stones create their patterns of waves. The lines intersect, unite, cancel out, or reinforce each other. Sometimes, they form together a harmonious pattern. At other times, they express the beauty of chaos and entropy. But they always remain in relation to each other - no movement goes unanswered. No energy escapes into nothingness. These three stones are Scratching Fork. Three musicians with different characters, histories, and registers. Ma…
"There are many illusive or ephemeral descriptions that are often part of how words seek to elucidate the listening experience. In the music we have on this recording from Florestan and the trio he has formed to venture his musical initiatives, words such as space, transparency, suspension, stasis, momentum, tension, multiplicity, flow, cohesion, dimension, release are some of the ingredients that come to mind to articulate the musical experience this recording offers. To me, Florestan’s musical…
Is an open dialogue of polarity possible? A dialogue of human existence in the cosmos and in nature, set against the backdrop of contemporary technology? That the feeling of being torn or detached is permanently inscribed in human nature is a truism. Yet we don’t always recognize the nature of this detachment—sometimes it seems like a separation from something immense, completely different from what humanity itself is. From a certain perspective, one could say that the many myths, symbols, ritua…
*250 copies limited edition* "Play" is a set of 100 cards with instructions for ensembles of any size and instrumentation. The individual instructions vary from precise (two contrasting sounds, a very long sound) to vague (something funny, thinking of something you smell), sometimes requiring a high degree of interpretation. The release combines two excellent recordings of the piece: one including the composer himself with a group of Israeli musicians, the other introducing an ensemble around th…
Vocalist and songwriter Laura Ann Singh presents her new album Mean Reds, a deeply personal and sonically expansive project that traverses jazz, folk, and global influences with fearless honesty. Known for her evocative voice and ability to blur genre boundaries, Singh brings listeners into an intimate conversation about vulnerability, resilience, and the beauty that can emerge from darker emotional landscapes.
Mean Reds captures a spectrum of moods—from haunting ballads drenched in longing to…
Tip! In 1975, under the oppressive air of military dictatorship in Brazil, brothers Lelo and Zé Eduardo Nazario invited bassist Zeca Assumpção to join their musical experiments in a basement under Sao Paulo’s Teodoro Sampaio Street. As teenagers, the trio had already been playing together in Hermeto Pascoal’s Grupo, alongside guitarist Toninho Horta and saxophonist Nivaldo Ornelas, and it was while working together under Hermeto’s direction that the Paulista rhythm section (as they were then kno…
** The first cassette edition of this album to exist in the universe, ltd to 100 copies in white **Malik King was an important part of the St Louis jazz scene of the 70's & 80's. He studied under Albert Ayler in NY in the early 70s before returning to the Midwest. He was a member of the Shirley Le Flore's ensemble "Free N' Concert". He also served as musical director of The Creative Arts & Expression Lab, The African Peoples Continuum, & The Black Arts Alliance, The worrier poets, The Human Arts…