Best sellers
Zoe
Deluxe LP housed in tip-on jacket with gloss film laminate photo mounted on cover and printed inner sleeve. With each release and performance over the last ten years, saxophonist Makoto Kawashima has continued to stake his claim as one of today’s most captivating improvisers. Zoe is Kawashima’s first ever studio album and his second with Black Editions. Recorded at Tokyo’s storied GOK Sound, the album is one of the most beautiful and stark renderings of his voice to date. Over two side long excu…
Free Spirits
'When I first had the chance to listen at Markus Stockhausen performing live at Conservatorio Nicolini in Piacenza, some years ago, I immediately had the intuition of this musical meeting. I was sure that the poetry of Lino Capra Vaccina will melt with Markus’ one in a completely intuitive, spontaneous way, creating something really unusual, really new. When, some months later, I had the chance to produce then meet the great Santoor player Alireza Mortazavi for the album Hamdelaneh (with Markus,…
New Directions In Music 2
Morton Feldman’s New Directions in Music 2 is one of the true cornerstones of modern classical music. Originally released in 1959, the album captures Feldman at the very beginning of his radical journey into sound, space and silence, developing the sparse, floating language that would go on to influence generations of experimental composers and ambient musicians alike. With cover artwork by abstract painter Philip Guston and clear parallels to the chance-based ideas of John Cage, the record perf…
People In Sorrow
CD Digipack w/12 pages booklet. Edition of 500 copies. 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-mon…
Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive!
The music on Horse Lords’ Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive! feels both impossibly detailed and eminently human. The album’s twelve pieces are layered and interwoven, tonally and rhythmically complex––moiré-like patterns of interaction and tessellation that play out for both mind and body, full of sonic warrens with an inescapable groove. An electrifying leap forward for the band’s shared language, Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive! aims to liberate the listener into a spiritual, ecstatic, and…
We Owe Each Other Everything
Ali O’May and Frazer Brown met in early 2018 at an Electronic Music Open Mic in Edinburgh and quickly discovered a shared musical sensibility. Ali later gave Frazer a USB of stems from his extensive modular system; over summer and autumn 2019 Frazer used about a dozen of those stems to shape tracks across techno, lo‑fi, breaks, acid house and ambient. This collaborative process—Ali supplying raw modular material and Frazer instinctively arranging and producing it—became the Dohnavúr method, driv…
September Night
Recorded at Munich’s Muffathalle twenty years ago, in September 2004, this previously-unreleased concert recording of the Tomasz Stanko Quartet is a fascinating document, capturing a developmental chapter in the music between the song forms of the Suspended Night repertoire and the improvised areas that the Polish musicians would explore on Lontano. The Munich show was a highlight in a year in which the Stanko Quartet played a record number of gigs, with extensive tours of the US and Europe. T…
Introspection
Brazilian guitar music has a way of folding the whole century into a single instrument, and few players carried more of it in their hands than Luiz Bonfá. Most listeners know him through the songs he wrote for Orfeu Negro, the ones that helped carry bossa nova out of Rio and across the world. Introspection, cut for RCA in 1972, is the quieter counterweight to that fame: eight original pieces for solo guitar, recorded at a moment when Bonfá had stopped chasing the hit and turned inward.
He Said Boler o'
Vienna FLAMMeS, or: The noise of these post-jazz improvisers resounds from paradise. According to a widespread cliché, improvisation in jazz is supposed to help promote the free play of the imagination. It was the Viennese flugelhorn player Franz Koglmann who vehemently contradicted the image of the naively self-actualizing jazz musician. As a composer of cerebral “cool” pieces, whose melancholy sprang from a razor-sharp analysis of his own means of expression, Koglmann was the most qualified pe…
Sunshower
Kosuke Mine’s electric album, with a strong rock and funk flavor, is set for reissue as part of "Spin This Now!" Vol. 9. This classic album shines with the outstanding combination of Mine’s saxophone with a wah-wah pedal and Mikio Masuda’s psychedelic keyboards.
Label Introduction: East Wind was a groundbreaking jazz label established in 1974 through the full cooperation of Ai Music, as it was then known, and Nippon Phonogram, as it was then known. Over a period of about five years, the label pr…
Sweetly Doing Nothing
Few figures within the long, strange arc of American experimental music have occupied terrain quite as singular as Tom Recchion's. Co-founder, in the mid-1970s, of the Los Angeles Free Music Society - the gloriously unruly collective of basement noise-makers, exotica obsessives, tape manipulators, and assembled-instrument visionaries whose lineage runs through Smegma, the Doo-Dooettes, and Le Forte Four - Recchion has spent the subsequent decades assembling one of the most idiosyncratic bodies o…
Pyramid
Available for the first time since its original release in 1980, this is compelling, funky, exploratory jazz from Melbourne, Australia. The album opens with the floating Song For Bobby, a downtempo gem with the heartbeat aura of Herbie Hancock’s Butterfly; Orchestral Excerpts (From The Symphony Of Life), In The Basement and City Of Stone are high-grade fusion jams with one eye on Weather Report and Return to Forever, the other on the organic Australian sound of Alan Lee and John Sangster.
The al…
Black Power
Two real cinematic gemstones one 45. A companion single to the beloved 2x10“ vinyl compilation series The Tape Masters that keeps unearthing rare groove treasures and unreleased recordings from the vaults of film music extraordinaire Peter Thomas. Exclusive on this single and for the first time on vinyl ever is the rare German language version of „Black Power“, sung by a certain Donna Gaines. Later of course known as Donna Summer, the tune is her first recording as a solo artist at just 20 years…
End To End
Barre Phillips was the first musician to record an album of solo double bass, back in 1968, and he has always been an absolute master of the solo idiom. In March 2017, Barre recorded what he says will be his last solo album, the final chapter of his “Journal Violone”: it is a beautiful and moving musical statement. All the qualities we associate with Barre’s playing are here in abundance – questing adventurousness, melodic invention, textural richness, developmental logic, and deep soulfulness…
Last Live 1983
Double LP ltd to 300, black vinyl, 3 color (silver, dark blue & black) silkscreened jacket with obi (dark blue or paver red), with Miyanishi Keizo notes in French, English and Japanese, lyrics in Japanese and English and a postcard. Onna Last Live 1983 includes the final performance by the original line-up of Onna, the psych-rock project of revered Japanese manga artist, Keizo Miyanishi. Onna's legend has largely rested, until now, on one self-released and self-titled seven-inch from 1983. Reiss…
Blue Lake
On Blue Lake, Don Cherry dissolves borders in real time: a transcendent 1971 Paris trio set with Johnny Dyani and Okay Temiz, now restored by Charly and BYG, where flute, bass and percussion spiral through Native American echoes, Far‑Eastern tonalities and two sprawling, ecstatic journeys past the twenty‑five‑minute mark.
Night Falls. Music inspired by David Lynch’s Twin Peaks
*150 copies limited edition* This compilation continues a path that Unexplained Sounds Group has been developing over time, following the earlier CD project inspired by Eraserhead. While that release focused on the cinematic origins of David Lynch’s language, this new work turns its attention to Twin Peaks, the television series created by Lynch and Mark Frost that profoundly reshaped the relationship between narrative, sound and perception on the small screen. First broadcast in 1990, Twin Peak…
The Neon Weeps Tonight
*300 copies limited edition* Following 'The Sympathy Portal' LP, released earlier this year, 'The Neon Weeps Tonight' was similarly recorded during lockdown and released as a very limited CDr in early 2022 before its being mooted for this slightly edited reissue. This time comprising six compositions, it begins proceedings with Edward in a typically reflective mood that sometimes feels barbed as much as steeped in a yearning for times lost as melodic yet sombre keys assume a haunted quality befo…
Where The River Goes
Where The River Goes carries the story forward from Wolfgang Muthspiel’s highly-acclaimed Rising Grace recording of 2016, reuniting the Austrian guitarist with Brad Mehldau, Ambrose Akinmusire and Larry Grenadier, heavy talents all, and bringing in the great Eric Harland on drums. Much more than an “all-star” gathering, the group plays as an ensemble with its own distinct identity, evident both in the interpretation of Muthspiel’s pieces and in the collective playing. The album, recorded at Stu…
Geometric Reason
On Geometric Reason, Sissy Spacek reroute their long‑running extremism into a jagged strain of musique concrète, splicing voice, electronics and acoustic shards into a volatile collage charged by fire‑displacement, Japanese connections and their enduring taste for rupture.