Best sellers
Jeux de mains
Jeux de mains, a striking new album from acclaimed double bassist Joëlle Léandre and inventive composer-performer Rémy Bélanger de Beauport, arrives as a vivid exploration of spontaneous musical conversation. Recorded with immediacy and an acute sense of shared risk, the record captures two master improvisers at the peak of their creative powers.
Across the album’s immersive tracks, Léandre’s visceral arco, percussive pizzicato, and fearless extended techniques meet Rémy Bélanger de Beauport’s t…
Scientist Rids The World Of The Evil Curse Of The Vampires
*2026 repress!* After a stint learning the dub craft from innovator King Tubby in the late '70s, Scientist began mixing his own sessions, coming up with a more wide-ranging and effects-riddled sound than that of his mentor. One of a handful of choice Scientist albums on the Greensleeves label, Rids the World of the Curse of the Vampires (1981) not only ably displays the mix masters varied approach, but clocks in as one of his best outings. While Scientist heeds Tubby's minimalist call with "stri…
Libelocus-(alpha), Libelocus-(beta), Libelocus-(gamma)
Big tip! Romanian composer, conductor, and musicologist Iancu Dumitrescu is often described as one of the leading figures of spectral music, yet he has produced a body of powerful works resonating with explosive sound and friction that places him very much in his own universe. Dumitrescu studied under his compatriot, the conductor Sergiu Celibidache, who rarely left behind concert recordings. From him Dumitrescu absorbed phenomenology and conducting techniques, incorporating them into his own co…
Soleils Noirs
First in a series of collaborations between artists already on the label. Bruno Duplant on church organ, Alfredo Costa Monteiro on synthesizer, composing remotely a single long-form piece. The vocabulary moves between mass, flow and slow combustion: tonal accumulation that the artists frame in alchemical terms as an athanor of doubt and dream, a continuous sublimation that renews itself. Slow drone built across the organ-synth axis, mastered by Duplant.
Not Knowing
Costa Monteiro's fifth solo accordion album, and the one in which he deliberately reverses his earlier recording strategy. Where previous works placed microphones almost inside the instrument to foreground materiality, structure and deconstruction, Not Knowing instead treats the accordion as an object in space, with the architecture of the recording room becoming essential to the work. The result blurs the limits of identification, holding the instrument's identity in productive uncertainty.
Radiale
Originally released in 2004 on the highly influential Atavistic label, Radiale is back on May 22, 2026, bringing together explosive energy, avant-jazz improvisation and experimental rock in a landmark collaboration. Featuring saxophone player Ken Vandermark, bassist Nate McBride and gifted afro-american drummer Hamid Drake the record has a slightly more exploratory feel.
Listening to Radiale feels less like following a sequence of songs and more like being drawn into a continuous sonic current. …
Go On
Go On with the George Otsuka 5 was recorded in 1972 in Japan for the Three Blind Mice label. The album features a quintet led by drummer George Otsuka, a major figure in Japanese jazz in the 1960s and 1970s. The repertoire includes original compositions as well as contemporary hard bop standards.
Weerkaatsing
First studio meeting between two figures long circling each other in the Dutch experimental scene. The structure is itself a kind of mirror: Spiegeling is Machinefabriek's remix of Orphax's De Eerste Dag, Reflectie is Orphax's twenty-minute remix of Machinefabriek's 2007 piece Stofstuk, and the title track is the only fully joint composition. Long-form drone built through indirect dialogue, with each signature still audible but inflected by the other.
Love & Noise
Reemerging three decades on, C.C.C.C.’s Love & Noise hits vinyl for the first time, a still‑devastating artefact where Mayuko Hino’s charged electronics and Hiroshi Hasegawa’s Moog storms turn harsh sonics into something crushing, psychedelic and strangely exultant.
Members... Don't!
Members… Don’t! is the tour-de-force new release by acclaimed drummer and composer Tyshawn Sorey that offers a bold reinterpretation of Max Roach’s potent album Members, Don’t Git Weary, connecting its message of resilience in the face of struggle to the present day. It follows on a string of albums from Sorey that feature pianist Aaron Diehl, the latest of which – The Susceptible Now (Pi 2024) – received 5-Stars from Downbeat, which describe it as “a garden of sonic ecstasy… Sorey’s trio conjur…
La Manzana Mágica
One of 12k’s most endearing artists is back with a new album. From Argentina, Federico Durand presents La Manzana Mágica, an album in signature Federico style inspired by his collection of Cinderlla stamps, in a way only Federico could do. Named after the folk-tale heroine, Cinderellas, throughout the last century, were considered inferior to official postage stamps, but became a sought-after collector’s item. There are some pieces whose origin, circulation context, or illustrator’s name are unk…
Conversation
*Text in French and English* A few months before the death of Edgard Varèse (1883–1965), Gunther Schuller (1925–2015) sat down with the composer for an in-depth conversation: his career and friendships, collaborations, new instruments, and the rare freedom he allowed the sounds they produced... Published for the first time in English and French, this is a rare testament for all lovers of "sounds."
1001 Est Cremazie
On 1001 Est Crémazie, the self‑titled orchestra of middle‑schoolers and Cégep staff capture the exuberant birth of modern Quebec: raw jazz‑rock, DIY tape lore and Quiet Revolution aftershocks pressed into one unlikely, fiercely alive school‑band artefact.
Malarial Dream
On Malarial Dream, Alvarius B. drifts out of Cairo with a fevered, mostly instrumental songbook that bends late‑period Sun City Girls melancholy through Middle Eastern modes, psych‑warped folk and the quiet volatility of a hand‑picked Cairo/avant‑jazz ensemble.
This House is a Body
London experimental spoken word and electronics duo BAG land on Phantom Limb with mesmerising new album This House is a Body, marrying visceral poetry with exploratory production to achieve beguiling, occasionally screwy and occasionally dreamy sonics. “This album functions as a floor plan, a house in itself, collecting and containing the ecosystems of multiple rooms,” write BAG - Canadian artist and poet Jody DeSchutter and London producer Daniel Allison. “The roles we play can be defined by th…
Sub Re
Kassel Jaeger (aka François J. Bonnet) returns to Shelter Press after Swamps / Things, Shifted in Dreams, and the recent reissue of the classic Zauberberg, co-composed with Akira Rabelais and Stephan Mathieu. With this major new album, entitled Sub Re, Bonnet continues his long exploration of the musical possibilities of sound, extending the concrete approach developed at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, the historic and essential Parisian studio that Bonnet has been directing since 2018. Sub…
Ramune And The Power Plant
"Ramune and the Power Plant" is the first duo album by Otomo Yoshihide and Ruike Shinpei, who have performed together many times in groups such as ONJQ. This recording captures almost the entire completely improvised live set held in October 2024 at the café-music gallery Kakululu in Ikebukuro. In this project Otomo primarily uses turntables as his main instrument and, on some tracks, electric guitar; Ruike plays trumpet as his primary instrument and employs electronics on certain pieces.
Record…
Atomique Tape
Edition of 101 copies. Recorded in June 1980 and self-issued the same year on cassette, Atomique Tape belongs to the legendary first wave of releases under the MB name, the moniker Maurizio Bianchi adopted that spring after closing his earlier project Sacher-Pelz. Across roughly twelve months, working from his home in the Mantuan town of Pomponesco, Bianchi produced an extraordinary run of self-released tapes that would, almost immediately, place him at the centre of the international industrial…
Industrial tape
This is where it begins. Recorded in May 1980 and self-released the same year as catalogue number 01, Industrial Tape is the founding document of the MB project, the first cassette Maurizio Bianchi issued under his new name after closing the Sacher-Pelz chapter. Working alone in his home in the Mantuan town of Pomponesco, twenty-four years old, equipped with little more than an analogue synthesiser, a tape machine, and a small bank of effects, Bianchi laid down four pieces that would set in moti…
The Twenties (Book)
Set in the heady atmosphere of revolutionary Moscow, The Twenties is the young poet and communist Varlam Shalamov’s celebration of the new culture of the Revolution, the brave crazy brilliance of his generation of writers, the mass poetry readings, the boundless optimism and creativity. Shalamov writes of them all with the wonderful subtlety and empathy and humour that secured him his place with these dazzling new talents, and have made him known as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth c…