Best sellers
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…
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…
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…
Electronic Dance Music, 1966-1989
Often credited as the father of multi-media theatre, Alwin Nikolais (1910-1993) took complete creative control over his productions - including cutting-edge approaches to lighting and costume that transformed human bodies into shifting sculptural shapes, while also composing wildly innovative electronic music as accompaniment.
After initially experimenting with musique concrète and tape manipulation (as demonstrated on the 1959 LP Choreosonic Music of the New Dance Theatre of Alwin Nikolais) Nik…
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 …
Complete Acousmatic Works — Vol 2 (16CD Box)
Second monumental box set of Denis Dufour's complete acousmatic works: 16 CDs, 17 hours of listening. Direct heir to Pierre Schaeffer at the GRM, Dufour redefined acousmatic art by reintroducing theatricality, voice and narrative into a sonic universe of unprecedented rigor and freedom.
Sakura
With Sakura, Susumu Yokota unveiled an ambient masterpiece that blends sampled fragments of jazz, minimalism, and Japanese melody into a contemplative whole. Released in 1999 on Skintone and later on The Leaf Label, the album turns repetition into poetry, infusing electronic textures with a deep human warmth.
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…
Exotica
Limited and numbered edition, featuring original artwork and a newly designed, beautifully crafted collector’s sleeve with new liner notes by Bradford Bailey, and pressed on 180g vinyl. Includes hi-res audio download. Among the most playful and pointed entries in Deutsche Grammophon's legendary Avantgarde series, Mauricio Kagel's Exotica returns to vinyl - a work that turns the Western fascination with the music of elsewhere into a piece of high comedy and, beneath the laughter, a quietly devast…
Lacrimosa
Deeply tied to the composer’s own life, the narrative of Lacrimosa invites reflection in the face of loss. This sonic work draws inspiration from Alice Coltrane’s spiritual Eternity (1976) as well as the traditional structure of the Requiem, a mass for the dead. One of its sections, the Dies Irae, evokes Judgment Day and concludes with the Lacrimosa (literally, “full of tears”), depicting the weeping of souls in search of salvation.
In Lacrimosa, Low Jack transforms autobiographical elements int…
Time of the Last Persecution
Time of the Last Persecution is the second studio album by English singer-songwriter Bill Fay, released in 1971 by Deram Records. Following the baroque pop tendencies of his self-titled debut, Fay stripped away the orchestral arrangements for a darker, more intimate vision that would prove to be his most enduring work. Proper Records is proud to present this apocalyptic folk-rock masterpiece on 180g vinyl. Written and recorded during a time when Fay was obsessing over the Biblical books of Danie…
The Habu
**Edition of 300 copies** Poole Music is thrilled to announce its inaugural commission, the Habu, the latest full-length from Belgium’s Lieven Martens. For the better part of two decades, Martens has been expanding his Aloha-bedecked musical vision, transitioning from the basement tape environments of his Dolphins into the Future project to the rich compositional tapestries of more recent post-exotica modernist works.
The Habu represents a true culmination of these identities in one of his most…
Noise Matrix
Tip! Noise Matrix unleashes material from the same sessions as noisembryo and counterpart 'hole' and selected recordings from the time period. Originally released as a bonus disc on the definitive ’Noisembryo' 2xcd edition noise matrix absolutely can’t be missed for fans of this period of noise deity Merzbow. When people ask where to start with merzbow or the entire 90’s noise movement in japan - this is an answer! Masami Akita’s surrealism of the past stands prominently relevant to this day co…
Rope
*200 copies limited edition* Rope is a collaborative improvisation between musician and producer Al Wootton and musician and percussionist Irene Bianco. Wootton’s hardware processing of various sampling methods, plus guitar, bass guitar and clarinet, provides a counterpoint for Bianco’s experimental treatments of drum kit, bells, vibraphone and other percussion instruments. The result is foggy, dubbed out, glacial, free form compositions that defy categorization.
Touch This Fragrant Surface of Earth
Tip! Marja Ahti is a Swedish artist living in Turku, Finland. She works with found sounds, objects and electronics, creating auditory assemblages that reveal a profound sensitivity to sound’s tactile potential. This new record sees her palette expand to include more recognisable acoustic instrumentation, albeit working in collaboration with musicians who are already reconfiguring how those instruments can sound.
Touch This Fragrant Surface of Earth has its roots in a tape piece presented at Lamp…
Heaven / Earth
*Warehouse find!* A vocal band that made it through, the Free Design have been more than an exception in the glittering world of the psychedelic circus. That was the Age of Aquarius in the end, but in the long run the 4-piece had an enormous impact on the younger generation. Released in 1969 “Heaven/earth” is a cornerstone on its own and 30 years later the band had a sort of epiphany, thanks to the spanning interest of artists such as Cornelius, Beck, Stereolab and crate digger master Madlib. B…
Dalbergia Retusa
Extraordinary double LP of solo guitar music by Hans Reichel (1949-2011), curated by Oren Ambarchi. Twenty-three pieces from 1973-1988 documenting Reichel's radical instrumental rethinking: custom-built guitars with additional strings, moveable pickups, special capos. Sounds simultaneously strange and beautiful, from romantic lyricism to alien sonorities. Essential.
Live in Arles 1975 (2LP)
Seventh entry in the essential Can live series, and one of the great ones. A hot August night in 1975, the Roman Théâtre Antique in Arles, the core four locked in: Irmin Schmidt, Michael Karoli, Jaki Liebezeit and Holger Czukay. No safety net, just the band stretching out in real time.
For decades this concert lived only in the stories of the people who were there, the recording buried in the Spoon Records vaults. Unearthed at last for its first ever release, with sleeve notes drawn from first-h…
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…
Midlife Crisis Ambient Moniker
*40 copies limited edition* "Midlife Crisis Ambient Moniker" is a Personal Greatest Hits. A Selected Ambient Works Volume 1. Lost Episodes. Archival Deep Dive. Bastard tracks with no home nor family, but with proximity to one another. Unreleased recordings dating as far back as 2014, with source material as old as 2004. There’s even a few songs that once saw the light of day, but never got their time in the sun (“Drain, When It Hit Me,” excerpts from “Earth Day…”). Many of these recordings were …