Best sellers
Rökkur
*2024 stock* Øra Fonogram announces the worldwide release of Rökkur, the joint album of Norwegian composer and performer Maja S. K. Ratkje and Icelandic ensemble Nordic Affect (Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir, Marie Stockmarr Becker, Hanna Loftsdóttir, Guðrún Óskarsdóttir).
What is ‘rökkur’?
‘Rökkur’ is the Icelandic word for twilight — the hour when shadows fall, a time of transition, ambiguity, and magic. When ‘rökkur’ fell in pre-electric times, a space appeared for storytelling, reading, yarn s…
Stochastic Parrot
In the past some reviewers and critics of my series of Ambient / Electronic / Exotic releases mentioned Jon Hassell and even suggested that we should make an album together.
That never happened of course and probably never would have. An influence of his music on my exotica music is in some ways true but initially to be honest it was the cover art by Mati Klarwein for Aka/ Darbari/ Java and Dream Theory in Malaya that I would sometimes turn to look at for inspiration. They reminded me of places t…
Rainbow Electronics
Tip! *199 copies limited edition* Originally released on CD in 1990 by Alchemy Records as part of the Good Alchemy Series, Rainbow Electronics marks the pinnacle of Merzbow's late 80’s noise phase. Selected and transformed from about 21 hours tape of primitive raw material recorded during three years (1987-1990) in 14 fragments lasting about 74 minutes, this monumental work is an aural trip through a cold plotted universe of intergalactic space ships and golden celestial bodies. Remastered in De…
Prophecy
With the essential sidemen to express his unique voice and approach to free jazz, saxophonist Albert Ayler, double bassist Gary Peacock, and drummer Sunny Murray, recorded these sessions in 1964 for the ESP label as "Prophecy", this excellent reissue & remaster also adding the live "Albert Smiles with Sunny" (inRespect) from the same concert; essential.
Body Trip
Originally released in 2016 on Constellation Tatsu, Body Trip introduced Japanese ambient composer H. Takahashi’s quietly immersive approach to minimal electronic composition. Built from delicate synth tones, meditative repetition, and understated melodic movement, the album has become a lasting favorite within contemporary ambient circles. Over the past decade, Takahashi has developed an internationally respected body of work spanning releases such as Raum, Low Power, Escapism, Elegy, and Paleo…
People In Sorrow
Remastered LP edition. Finally back in print! Originally released by EMI's Pathé Marconi imprint in 1969, People in Sorrow — a 40-minute work by the four-piece lineup of Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Lester Bowie, and Malachi Favors — has long been unavailable on vinyl and CD, and then only in hard-to-find European and Japanese issues. It is arguably the finest and most ambitious of the 14 studio albums recorded by the Art Ensemble of Chicago during their 23-month sojourn in France, which laun…
Look Mom No Head!
Out of print since 2014!! Look Mom No Head! dresses rock ʼnʼ roll in its full regalia, with its many knobs, buttons and doo-dads. Man! The electric guitar sounds like it might launch a rocket! Replete with celebrations of intoxication and sexual prowess, The Cramps’ 1991 album sports “Dames, Booze, Chains and Boots” from the movie Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, a torchy rendition of Jack Nitzscheʼs slow-fuck blues “Hardworkinʼ Man” and the cross-dressing classic “I Wanna Get In Your Pants.” Minute…
Match / Soliloque 1&4 / Antifonia
Nicolae Brînduş's Match / Soliloque 1&4 / Antifonia reissues the composer’s most eccentric works from the PHTORA cycle (1968-1972), blending collective improvisation, spectral tradition, Romanian folklore, and free jazz into a mesmerizing tapestry. Tape manipulations and reverberation add depth, while Ana Golici’s sleeve art captures the album’s vivid sensibility.
The Juniper Tree
In The Juniper Tree, an interrelationship between the ethereal and terrestrial seems to cloak the ever-present Icelandic landscape. The film, written and directed by Nietzchka Keene in 1986 and released in 1990, is disbelieving of binaries such as life and death, natural and supernatural, stillness and unrest. It is perhaps best known as the genesis point for Björk’s career as an actor, but in its compelling feminist retelling of the Brothers Grimm story of the same name it recasts tropes of wit…
Cooked
On Cooked, Oren Ambarchi folds his all‑star studio jam aesthetic into something gloriously unhinged. Two side‑long epics twist piano ripples, synthetic “voices,” mutant trumpet tones, electric Miles haze and digital pyrotechnics into a foot‑tapping, brain‑scrambling, joyously cuckoo ride that still feels meticulously shaped.
Gothenburg Sound Workshop
*In process of stocking* A new 50-minute opus of desolate beauty from Gothenburg Sound Workshop. Imagine a handcuffed Terry Riley driving a ice cream truck down in the Göta Älv. The second disc compiles both Förlag För Fri Musik albums (released in small vinyl editions in 2020 and 2021 respectively). Together the three albums creates a massive trilogy of stripped down, melancholic and introspective synth minimalism. Six-panel digipack.
Open Air: The Complete Saxophone Quartet Compositions of Julius Hemphill
This recording brings together the forty known compositions for Saxophone Quartet by Julius Hemphill (1939-1995). These works were composed between 1978 and 1989 for performances with the World Saxophone Quartet. These compositions are, with the fewest of exceptions, written specifically “on” the saxophone quartet. He will at times set a piece written for his small-group ensembles onto the saxophone choir, but in the main, this music is created on and through the saxophones. He uses the saxopho…
An Unexpected Pleasure (Rare Live And Studio Sessions 1958-1972)
Double CD Edition, comes with a 36-page booklet. Every national jazz history has its unrepeatable figure. Britain's is Tubby Hayes, and this is the deepest single drop into his archive that anyone has yet managed - thirty-six performances, every one of them previously unissued, drawn from ten different settings across fourteen years. He was called the Little Giant, and both halves of that name did real work. Barely taller than the tenor he carried, Hayes was a professional at fifteen, a member o…
The Chair and the Faucet
On The Chair and the Faucet, Etelin transforms a Zen‑retreat image into 33 minutes of quietly volatile modular synthesis. Alex Cobb’s Serge system traces dry, microtonal drones and wavering harmonics that drift without resolution, making stillness feel less like peace than a lucid encounter with electricity’s own unstable, living grain.
Electronic Resistance
*500 copies limited edition* Since the late 1970s, Nigel Ayers (b. 1957, UK) has cut a bracing, subversive path through the contemporary underground, bridging DIY industrial enthusiasms with multimedia experimentation to form a singular body of work. Co-founder of the groups The Pump and Nocturnal Emissions (along with brother Daniel Ayers and then-partner Caroline Kaye), Ayers has been a contributor to and proponent of industrial music’s high-water marks, his Sterile Records imprint disseminati…
Sowiesoso
** 50th anniversary Limited Edition ** The fourth full-length album by legendary German electronic music duo Cluster, originally released on Sky Records in 1976. Sowiesoso follows on from their most highly-acclaimed album, Zuckerzeit (1974). Michael Rother's influence was clearly audible on the latter, Cluster having already recorded two albums with him under the name of Harmonia. 1976 saw the duo looking for new musical forms. More than any other Cluster album, Sowiesoso represents the utopian …
The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Book)
*2023 stock* The Audible Past explores the cultural origins of sound reproduction. It describes a distinctive sound culture that gave birth to the sound recording and the transmission devices so ubiquitous in modern life. With an ear for the unexpected, scholar and musician Jonathan Sterne uses the technological and cultural precursors of telephony, phonography, and radio as an entry point into a history of sound in its own right. Sterne studies the constantly shifting boundary between phenomena…
L'Oeuvre Musicale
Milestone Reissue! The three discs collected here - housed in a lavish cardboard boxet (+ Includes a 116 page booklet in French and English with biographical notes, essays and program notes for each work, and a 52 page booklet with photographs) - cover the bulk of Pierre Schaeffer's concrète works, beginning with his pre-tape days when he composed using multiple turntables mixing sound effects recordings direct to lathe. The earliest recordings here were created in 1948 during Schaeffer's days a…
Comme a La Radio (2LP)
Double LP version. Wewantsounds reissues Brigitte Fontaine's landmark 1970 Saravah album Comme à la Radio, recorded with Areski Belkacem, Wadada Leo Smith, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. This new edition pairs the original album with rare bonus material. The release is accompanied by a lavish 24-page bilingual booklet featuring an introduction by journalist Andy Beta, essays by Wadada Leo Smith, Brigitte Fontaine biographer Benoît Mouchart, and Benjamin Barouh, plus a recent interview with Bri…
For The Summer, Or Forever
*100 copies limited edition* Laconic haze, ethereal curiosities, nostalgic glimpses and fictional illusions. Northern Irish Halftribe’s (Ryan Bisset’s) third album arrives punctually to soundtrack the coming summer – or eternity, apparently, if you like. It is indeed suitably warm and familiar stuff, going straight for the bliss-out button with dreamy, droning pieces mixing airy synths and calm field recordings.