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Finest Finger
The Prog Rock Italia Series continues with the reissue of Finest Finger, the fourth album by Sensations’ Fix, a musical project led by Franco Falsini of Tuscany, an eclectic musician constantly focused on exploration and electronic experimentation. The band immediately stands out for the international scope of its compositions, not only for the use of the English language but above all for its continuous musical exploration: Sensations’ Fix distinguishes itself on the Italian progressive scene t…
The Velvet Underground & Nico
45th Anniversary Remaster Over Half a century later, this record still slays; if any album is deserving of the "classic" tag, it's The Velvet Underground & Nico. Lou Reed's affected vocals, Nico's female Lugosi-style recitations, John Cale's droning strings, Moe Tucker's minimal kit - this landmark work laid down paths that musicians today are still trying to follow. Just pick any track: "I'm Waiting For The Man," "Sunday Morning," "Venus In Furs," "All Tomorrow's Parties," "There She Goes Again…
A Book of Noises (Book)
Sound shapes our world in invisible but profound ways, and here Caspar Henderson brings his characteristic curiosity, knowledge and sense of wonder to the subject to take us on an exhilarating journey through the heard universe.
A Book of Noises gathers together sounds from the cosmos, the natural world, the human world, and the invented world, and contains quiet pockets of silence. From the vast sound of sand in the desert to the tuneful warble of a songbird, to the meditative resonance of a te…
William S. Burroughs - A Life (Book)
It has been 50 years since Norman Mailer asserted, ‘I think that William Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.’ This assessment holds true today. No-one since then has taken such risks in their writing, developed such individual radical political ideas, or spanned such a wide range of media – Burroughs has written novels, memoirs, technical manuals and poetry, he has painted, made collages, taken thousands of photographs, made visual scr…
Hating Jazz - A History of Its Disparagement, Mockery, and Other Forms of Abuse (Book)
A deep dive into the meaning behind the hatred of jazz.
A Revolution in Music The History of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (Book)
Established in the 1950s by musician and engineer Pierre Schaeffer, the Groupe de Recherches Musicales would become the nerve center for avant-garde artists experimenting with sound and acoustics, as well as the birthplace of a genre of music-making enabled by new recording technologies and sound pioneers: musique concrète. Évelyne Gayou—herself a researcher, composer, and producer at the GRM—tells the history of the storied institution through the people, works, technologies, and research devel…
Sounding the Indian Ocean Musical Circulations in the Afro-Asiatic Seascape (Book)
Sounding the Indian Ocean is the first volume to integrate the fields of ethnomusicology and Indian Ocean studies. Drawing on historical and ethnographic approaches, the book explores what music reveals about mobility, diaspora, colonialism, religious networks, media, and performance. Collectively, the chapters examine different ways the Indian Ocean might be “heard” outside of a reliance on colonial archives and elite textual traditions, integrating methods from music and sound studies into the…
In Search of a Concrete Music (Book)
Pierre Schaeffer’s In Search of a Concrete Music (À la recherche d’une musique concrète) has long been considered a classic text in electroacoustic music and sound recording. Now Schaeffer’s pioneering work—at once a journal of his experiments in sound composition and a treatise on the raison d’être of “concrete music”—is available for the first time in English translation. Schaeffer’s theories have had a profound influence on composers working with technology. However, they extend beyond the co…
Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra (Book)
This ground-breaking biography is as much about Sun Ra’s music as it is about his passionate, often wildly unorthodox views on the galaxy, black people and spiritual matters. With the various incarnations of his inimitable Arkestra, his repertoire ranged from boogie-woogie to swing to be-bop to fusion to New Age, and his influence extended throughout the jazz and rock worlds. While Sun Ra made a lifelong effort to obscure many of the facts of his early years, he did acknowledge that he was born …
Compter Les Dents
"It begins with a shoebox of mysterious provenance, full of recordings from the Vendée department on France’s western seaboard: songs of love and war, life and death, played out on land and sea. Songs passed down and sung by ordinary men and women, gracefully delivered with the poetic economy which unites the folk song of all peoples. Next it takes a group of contemporary musicians to make selections from this treasure trove and sing these old songs anew; to sing them for their beauty, of course…
Vol. 2
Tip! Despite the title of the album, it is the Tullio De Piscopo's third work, recorded in 1976. Comprising nine tracks in total across its two sides, “Vol. 2” falls somewhere between fusion and prog, straddling darker, brooding temperaments with joyous, funky lines. Predictably, as is nearly the case with music of this sort, the playing and artistry is top-notch, the band locked together with remarkable precision, but the journey that “Vol. 2” takes is far from expected. Interspersed throughout…
Il Casanova Di Federico Fellini
*In process of stocking* The original soundtrack for "Il Casanova di Federico Fellini” (1976) sees Nino Rota putting into music Federico Fellini"s opus on the legendary Venetian icon and “tombeur des femmes” Giacomo Casanova. Winner of an Oscar for Best Costumes in 1977, the film is one of Fellini's finest, a grotesque and hyperbolic take on the life of Casanova that is matched by Rota's compositions. "Il Casanova di Federico Fellini” possibly is one of Rota's most eerie and enigmatic scores, as…
François Dufrêne
2007 release. François Dufrêne (1930-1982) is one of the leading artists from the post-War European and French art scene. He played a key role in many of the initiatives of Lettrism, Nouveau Réalisme and sound poetry. In François Dufrêne's oeuvre, art and poetry intersect in a reciprocal experimentation of the possibilities of transgression of their specific grammars. His oeuvre constitutes a singular example of this special relationship between art and language, which throughout the 20th centur…
Paysages Planétaires
Paysages Planétaires on Alga Marghen may be the great unrecognized masterpiece of ethno-electroacoustic music, a 3CD box that arrived in 2004 with almost no fanfare and has waited two decades for ears ready to hear it. Henri Pousseur and Michel Butor, collaborators across forty years and more than twenty works, here achieve something that resonates uncannily with Jon Hassell and Brian Eno's "Fourth World" concept. Yet Pousseur, the serialist pioneer who worked alongside Karlheinz Stockhausen and…
Catalogue
2005 release ** Released in 1979 in a limited edition on his own d'Avantage label, Catalogue, with its overt theatricality is every bit as wild as the previous Paralleles. Not really jazz, not rock, having nothing to do with contemporary music either, Catalogue is a kind of sonic postcard which features not the group of the same name but instead numerous Jacques Berrocal associates including Potage (co-founder of the d'Avantage label in 1976), Parle, Ferlet, Pauvros and recording engineer Daniel…
Parallèles
Reissue of a magnificent, impossible-to-categorize French classic originally released on the hopelessly obscure d'Avantage label in 1976. Pretty much the definition of musical anarchy, "Paralleles" begins with an atonal duo for trombones, wends its was through accompanied poetry readings and cornet solos, vamps into a rap delivered by Vince Taylor (France's answer to Eddie Cochran and Bowie's inspiration for Ziggy Stardust!) on 'Rock N Roll Station' (which Nurse With Wound deconstructed later on…
Recordings 1980-84
Mike Vamp grew up in Frankfurt, played guitar in the early punk scene, then moved to West Berlin in 1980 and began experimenting with electronic music and synthesizers as the city's famous wall-era underground was at its most electrically charged. West Berlin in the early 1980s was defined by the painters of the Geniale Dilletanten movement and the music of Einstürzende Neubauten, Malaria!, Die Tödliche Doris, Sprung aus den Wolken, and Die Haut: a scene that celebrated difficulty and abrasion, …
Downwind
On Downwind, Pierre Moerlen's Gong trades cosmic whimsy for aerodynamic precision, fusing mallet‑drunk jazz‑rock, prog heft and a dash of pop clarity into a sleek late‑70s vessel where vibraphones, drums and guest guitar gods share the same thermal updraft.
Coldwater Basin No.2
Re-emerging from deep Fluxus celebrations in this 2012 summer, alga marghen realized that Philip Corner “Coldwater Basin” LP was instantly sold out. Could there be a better decision than issuing an alternative version of this masterpieces from the glorious 60s, by master of ecstatic music Philip Corner? If you fluctuated over sonic landscapes with the first version, then “Coldwater Basin No.2” will knock your socks off! More intense that Whitehouse, more liquid than your wildest dreams. “Rememb…
Running and Chanting and Falling and Ranting
Running and Chanting and Falling and Ranting is an immersive multimedia work by Charlemagne Palestine, combining his signature ecstatic minimalism with visual and textual explorations of ritual, trance, and performance.