Best sellers
Now Jazz Now 100 Essential Free Jazz & Improvisation Recordings 1960-80 (Book)
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…
Battling the Invisible
Edition of 300. Comes with a 8-page booklet. In 1969, while American minimalism was consolidating into its most recognizable forms, Charlemagne Palestine was conducting solitary experiments with oscillators and sine waves that only now reveal their visionary scope. This was the New York of lofts and abandoned industrial spaces, of artists pushing sound toward its physical limits - a city where the boundaries between music, performance art, and bodily endurance were dissolving. Battling the Invis…
Topographie Parisienne
2025 repress. Originally released in 2019, this essential 4CD box set documenting one of the rarest trio meetings in the history of European free improvisation is finally available again.
Eleven years after the legendary The Topography of the Lungs (Incus, 1970) - one of the landmark early albums of English free improvisation, co-founded the Incus label itself - the trio reunites at 28 rue Dunois in Paris. Almost three and a half hours of non-idiomatic free improvisation captured by Jean-Marc Fo…
Free Jazz and Improvisation on LP and CD, 1965-2024 (Book)
More copies due in early December. 428 pages. This is exactly what we need. Big time. Johannes Rød returns with the massively expanded edition of his essential guide - a monument of discographic research spanning six decades of creative music documentation. 381 pages plus 47 unnumbered pages of label artwork. 185 labels mapped with obsessive detail and passionate advocacy. From the explosive emergence of free jazz in the mid-1960s through ESP-Disk, BYG Actuel, and Actuel, through the European im…
For the Birds
Edition of 250. Deluxe edition + insert. For eighteen months, between 1984 and 1985, Patrick Lysaght played flute, strings, and percussion inside the Rainforest Birdhouse at the Rio Grande Zoo in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His audience and collaborators: 150 birds of 42 species.
The result is one of the earliest and most radical documents of interspecies improvisation. Predating the current wave of sound ecology by decades, For The Birds sits comfortably alongside the biophonic research of Bernie …
Uranus - Tibetan Singing Bowls
** Edition of 300 copies ** In the late 1980s, Klaus Wiese (Popol Vuh) deepened his connection with Tibetan culture. The result is a series of works solely dedicated to the universal purity of the Singing Bowls. Uranus, perhaps the most rigorous of these, is an intense meditation on the trans-personal sphere of the VI chackra. The music becomes like a single harmonic chant, the reflection of a constant flow of divine light, which transforms the psyche and dilates the secret passages of the hear…
Antico Adagio - Complete 1978 Sessions
* Limited edition of 250 numbered copies. Deluxe 3LP box, bound in linen and embossed, Featuring a large 12-page booklet with previously unseen photographs from the 1978 recording sessions, and a large 4-page booklet with the original liner notes. The box graphics reproduce the original cover drawing by Dana Matus, while the three individual LP sleeves feature 19th-century Japanese naturalist paintings chosen by Vaccina himself. * For the first time, all the 1978 recording sessions of Lino Capra…
P V T
**Edition of 500 copies on clear vinyl.** This release documents a meeting of titans that, tragically, can never be repeated. Mika Vainio, one half of the legendary Finnish duo Pan Sonic and a towering figure in electronic music, passed away in 2017, leaving behind a body of work that continues to influence and inspire. His presence here alongside Charlemagne Palestine and Eric Thielemans makes P V T a document of considerable historical importance, a record of three extraordinary musicians find…
My Shadow
One of the most striking and enigmatic works to appear on Discreet Music in recent years. There is a long tradition of artists who have tried to set scripture to music and failed magnificently - the failure itself becoming the subject, the wound becoming the work. Carrie DeCunzo Mirande's debut album belongs to this lineage. In the twenty-four days before Christmas 2024, she read the twenty-four chapters of the Book of Luke and attempted to respond in sound. Two piano pieces emerged - one inspir…
MMXX-07
What is there left to say about Jim O'Rourke that hasn't already been said? The American composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist has been a defining figure in experimental music since the late 1980s, his fingerprints visible across so many crucial releases and movements that any attempt at a comprehensive summary would inevitably fall short. From his early work in the Chicago improvised music scene to his production of landmark albums by Wilco and Joanna Newsom, from his membership in Soni…
The Bottle Tapes
Selections from the Empty Bottle Jazz and Improvised Music Series (1996-2005) is a six-CD anthology that captures the vibrant, unpredictable pulse of Chicago’s improvisational scene. Meticulously compiled from over 500 performances curated by John Corbett and Ken Vandermark, this box set chronicles a crucial era with recordings from nearly 100 international artists, immersing listeners in the fearless experimentation that defined the Empty Bottle’s celebrated Wednesday nights.
Music For Organ
**Digipack CD edition. Deluxe Cardboard & printed innersleeve** The last year of so has proved to be an incredible period for Phill Niblock. We’ve witnessed the emergence of long awaited reissues of his two first seminal albums, Niblock For Celli / Celli Plays Niblock, and Nothin To Look At Just A Record, as well as the fantastic disc, Music For Cello, and Niblock / Lamb, the split of works by the composer and Catherine Lamb, masterfully executed by Ensemble neoN. Now we’re overjoyed to offer ye…
Sounds Heard from the Moon Part 2
** Hand numbered edition of 250 ** There is a profound resonance between the practices of Nam June Paik and Park Jiha - separated by generations yet united by a shared impulse to dissolve boundaries between Korean tradition and contemporary expression. Paik, the pioneer of video art, wove shamanic ritual and Buddhist philosophy into the fabric of technological media; Park Jiha channels ancient instrumental voices through the sensibility of experimental minimalism. Both artists inhabit a liminal …
Organic Shelter
* Limited edition of 100 copies, gold etched title on front cover. * Andrea Penso has been active on the Italian experimental scene for the better part of two decades, working within collaborative projects like Surava and We Wait for the Snow, as well as issuing more than a dozen releases under the moniker Selaxon Lutberg - most notably on Denovali Records, where his work drew favorable comparisons to the decayed loops of William Basinski and Philip Jeck, the post-rock atmospherics of Labradford…
Viscount Gort - MMXX-16
In our small corner of the world, Oren Ambarchi needs little introduction. He is among the most important and prolific figures within the contemporary landscape of experimental music. First appearing as a drummer on the free jazz scene in Sydney, Australia, during the mid-1980s, by the 1990s Ambarchi had followed the gravity of an intense creative curiosity, subsequently reemerging as visionary electroacoustic pioneer focussed largely on the guitar.With a small group of peers, he helped spawn a …
Live in Roma 1980
Double CD box, perfect replica of the LP edition, with extensive booklet. The venerable Holidays, having already had an incredible 2023, returns with their final offering of the year and what might just be their most ambitions release to date, Sun Ra’s “Live in Rome 1980”, an astounding 3xLP vinyl box set that captures the Arkestra immersed in one of their greatest live gigs laid to tape. A perfect snapshot of why this band was so incredible, moving from furious free jazz fire into joyous June T…
Bestia Ire
**Edition of 300 copies, 180g Vinyl in Heavy Cardboard Sleeve** When Phill Niblock collaborates, the results are invariably fascinating, the master of sustained tone entering into dialogue with artists whose approaches may differ from his own yet share some fundamental commitment to the exploration of sound. On Bestia Ire, Niblock joins forces with two formidable figures in French experimental music: Franck Vigroux, a composer and performer whose work spans electronic music, contemporary classic…
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…
Fukushima
Sinsuke Fujieda - Tokyo-based saxophonist and flutist - leads a first-rate sextet through five stunning compositions that channel the deep, atmospheric sound of 1970s modal and spiritual jazz while weaving in elements of classical music, world traditions, and East Asian sensibilities. If you didn't know the recording date - May 2023, at Groove Studio Matsudo - you'd swear this was an unearthed treasure from the golden era of Japanese acoustic jazz.
The lineup is extraordinary: Fumiko Takeshita o…
Adage Vestige
From Matière Mémoire, one of the most striking and unique labels currently working in experimental music, comes “Adage Vestige”, the latest stunning statement from the French, Belgium based multidisciplinary artist Roxane Métayer. Encountering one of Europe's most unique voices pushing ever further into abstract realms with her signature hybrid of folk and rigorously experimental approaches, it's an absolute stunner that can't be missed.