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Phillo Jazz winks at improvisational traditions Akita has always both honored and subverted. Jazz's spontaneity finds its noise equivalent - though the relationship is more conceptual than sonic. Where jazz improvisation operates within harmonic frameworks, Merzbow improvisation occurs in texture and density, shape and duration.
The "Phillo" prefix remains mysterious - perhaps referencing philosophy, philology, or simply playing with sounds. These recordings demonstrate fluidity at its best: not…
Clarity, more often than not, is a lie, a red herring. Truer, it seems, are blurred images and misty conceptions. Music history as a whole is undecipherable. Zooming in may bring some sense of understanding but many lineages lie far beneath the surface, made of obscure stories and oblique connections, like the ones that tie Joan La Barbara, Meredith Monk, Robert Ashley & Jacqueline Humbert - a scrawny branch in the genealogical tree on which now sits Thelma Cappello. Its motto reads: “voice is a…
*2025 stock* A collection of the best recordings selected by the Dutch sound artist Felix Hess from his "Frogs" series featuring frog calls from around the world, released on cassette tapes, vinyl, and CD-Rs from the early 1980s to the early 2000s. A limited-edition pressed CD of this long-discontinued series, with new artwork by Sakura Kondo. It is a series that inspired the artist, who was a physicist studying the trajectory of boomerangs, to create sound works later in life. Palenque is a rec…
** 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…
After playing complete improvised music with no constraints from 2016 on and releasing their first Album “Torbid Dayligtht” the quartet “Gratkowski / Zoubek / Landfermann / Mahnig” got renamed in 2023 to “In Cahoots” and now performs compositions by Frank Gratkowski, still with plenty of space for creative improvisation. In Cahoots also extends to a Quintet featuring Ingrid Laubrock on Tenor and Soprano Saxophones. The new Quintet version had its debut in Darmstadt 2023.
“Beneath the subatomic…
* Includes a 28-page booklet with liner notes by Senri Miyazato in Japanese and English (English translation by Linda Havenstein) * Historical recording of the sacred Izaiho ritual, an inauguration ceremony of female priests held once in twelve years in Kudaka island, which is located approximately five kilometers east west from the Okinawa island. Izaiho ended in 1978 due to a lack of successors, and this is a recording of the final ritual.
Yet another triumph from the legendary multi-instrumentalist, Joe McPhee, Corbett Vs. Dempsey drops "The Mystery J", their first ever full-length vinyl release, issued in a limited edition of 500 copies. Recorded in 2014 with violist Jen Clare Paulson and Brian Labycz on electronics, it writhes with bristling tension, while retaining a remarkably minimal form. Visionary experimentalism and freejazz reimagined on entirely singular terms, 'The Mystery J' encounters McPhee producing some of his bes…
Ex Agent’s debut EP New Assumptions… is a collision of no-wave beauty, improv-adjacent disorder, and spoken-word poetics that teeter on the edge of collapse. Within this exquisitely precise disarray lie carefully constructed moments of fragility, repeatedly unsettled by bursts of sudden, free-jazz chaos. Across five tracks, the Bristol-based five-piece explore queer and neurodivergent identity through sonic themes of refuge, instability, and resistance.
Formed in late 2021 in Bristol, the group …
'Songs and Bodies' is best described as hypnagogic post-rock, an impressionistic blur of dissociated riffs, jazzy rhythms and half-heard voices that casts a beguiling digital silhouette of '90s indie music. The album began as a personal experiment, a question that emerged as Piotr Kurek cast his mind back to the era that birthed bands like Gastr del Sol, Bark Psychosis, Labradford and The Sea and Cake. Curious how this music might sound in today’s cultural climate, he started recording sketches …
On Clandestine Anticipation, Krisma leave Italo-disco behind for a humid, video‑age dystopia, nine songs where synthetic funk, proto‑industrial atmosphere, and tropical mirages collide into one of the strangest Italian pop artefacts of the early 80s.
Sandro Brugnolini's soundtrack to “L'Uomo dagli Occhiali a Specchio” is an unbeatable mix of dark psychedelic themes with heavy jazz drums, exotic percussions, obsessive piano bits, creepy harpsichord, free jazz to wah-drenched psychedelia, stiff funk, and abstract avant-gardism with atonal sounds and tonal passages. Originally issued in 1975, it has long remained one of the most coveted and sought after artifacts of the fertile soil surrounding the 1970’s Italian library and soundtracks. For ma…
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.
Tip! *300 copies limited edition* An’archives is proud to present [sensitive], a new album, and the first solo vinyl release, by Japanese keyboardist and synth player, Mitsuhisa Sakaguchi. A deftly assembled suite of glistening electronic tonalities, [sensitive] is the latest in a lengthy run of excellent, idiosyncratic albums by Sakaguchi. A low-key yet productive artist, Sakaguchi has released banks of solo titles via his own Bandcamp page, and is also an in-demand improvisor for electronics: …
«The project “a sad song for A.” was born from an insight Stefano Gentile had, driven by his moods and, in particular, a regret he had experienced in the past. It all began almost by chance, one evening, during an informal conversation. Stefano suggested that I narrate what I was experiencing most intensely at that moment: anxiety. After thoroughly analyzing this emotional state, he asked me to translate it into words, to write texts that could give voice to the emotions surrounding it. From the…
For his third new album release for Drag City, Tashi Dorji turns to the electric guitar. After the furious acoustic improvisations that drove the previous two—"Stateless" and "we will be wherever the fires are lit" — it’s easy to imagine an album of his electric guitar improvisations as an encompassingly incendiary essay. Especially when titled low clouds hang, this land is on fire. After all, this is a man capable of tearing up the place with the tactile musical violence of Bill Orcutt and Dere…
As trans-Atlantic alchemists pulling from a shared dialectic that somehow encompassed both postmodern deconstructionist tendencies and a delightfully subversive sense of poptimism, it’s easy to see how David Cunningham and Peter Gordon immediately hit it off upon initially meeting each other back in the late-1970s at the height of their youthful transgressions. Having initially worked together on the second Flying Lizards’ LP fourth wall, with its ingenious fusion of dismantled rhythms and rearr…
On Kachouzu, Merzbow compresses his late‑period harshness into four short movements, a 2×6″ lathe‑cut blast where metallic textures, searing feedback and dense midrange roar behave less like tracks than like successive cross‑sections of the same noise storm.
Loveland Music is proud to announce the release of The Montclair Session, a rare meeting of four titans of contemporary jazz: trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, guitarist Jakob Bro, pianist Marilyn Crispell, and drummer Andrew Cyrille. Recorded in Montclair, New Jersey, this album captures the essence of improvisation at its most searching, delicate, and alive.
Each of the four musicians brings a lifetime of artistry to the music. Wadada Leo Smith, a pioneer of creative music and recipient of numerou…
Double feature stint on Kashual Plastik. Twofold recreational Nordic spice, cultivated for dreamy solitude escapades and meditative tune voyages in witchcraft mood. Side A comes from Finnish experimental musician Juho Toivonen, shaped in his home in the city of Pori. A veiled minimalistic dream of gentle noise loops and environmental sounds, meeting a desiring voice that echoes haunting, mantra-like lyrics. Ship horns and other slow mechanic found sounds convoy it into eternity, while we, the au…