Music from United States

Two seminal early Alice Coltrane albums on one CD. "Composer, pianist, keyboard player, harpist and bandleader Alice (McLeod) Coltrane married John Coltrane in 1965. She played in her husband's band until his passing in 1967 but his influence remained strong throughout her music thereafter. Few of her albums reflect this influence more strongly than Huntington Ashram Monastery, recorded in 1969, and World Galaxy, recorded in 1971, here combined as part of the Impulse!/Universal 2-on-1 Impulse! r…

Two seminal early 70s Alice Coltrane albums on one CD. "It may seem unfair at first to mention John Coltrane -- Alice's beyond-famous husband -- when talking about her music, but listening to Alice Coltrane, you get the impression you can't mention her without talking about John. In an interview with Alice Coltrane -- originally from the September 1968 issue of Jazz and Pop magazine, but later reprinted in the liner notes for then 1998 Impulse! reissue of her first solo record, A Monastic Trio -…

Harold Budd at his very best, coupled with an extra disc featuring a 70 minute re-working by Akira Rabelais. A timeless classic on David Sylvian's Samdhisound label. It's hard to over-estimate the contribution Harold Budd has made to modern music, his seemingly effortless take on minimalism and ambience imbuing this often academic genre with all the warmth and humility so often missing from the work of his contemporaries. Best known for his collaborations with Brian Eno and the Cocteau Twins' Ro…

2019 Repress. Laurel Halo delivers the follow up to her 2017 Hyperdub album Dust with the meditative meanderings of Raw Silk Uncut Wood for Latency, a work of abstractions featuring cello work by Oliver Coates and percussion by Eli Keszler.  Moving into the deepest realms of cinematic listening excavations, Laurel Halo's Latency debut follows in the labels now expected quest to pull the best, if rather unexpected, sounds from the artists of which they select for inclusion to the label project. R…

Saccharine Scores is an album/art book documenting Sean McCann's recent chamber compositions. Ranging from the 10-person ensemble performance of "Portraits of Friars" at Fylkingen, Stockholm in February 2018, to his first quartet piece "Victorian Wind", performed in Toronto in 2014. McCann's scores leak pastoral and bizarre passages, dancing in the banal beauty of sound poetry. The performances feature guest musicians Sarah Davachi, Zachary Paul, Geneva Skeen, Celia Eydeland, Maxwell Augus…

The Expanding Universe is the 1980 debut album by composer and computer music pioneer Laurie Spiegel. The original album is reissued here as a massively expanded 3LP or 2CD set, containing all four original album tracks plus an additional 15 tracks from the same period, nearly all previously unreleased and many making their first appearance on vinyl in this brand new 2018 edition. Since this album’s first reissue in 2012, it has gone on to be widely established as a classic of electronic, ambien…

An eight-CD box set that brings together the body of music the singer-songwriter recorded between 1966 and 1972. This set includes all seven of Buckley's studio albums from that era, as well as Works In Progress, the 1999's compilation of his 1967/68 recordings. Covering Tim Buckley's brilliant transition from folk to jazz styled material, the Tim Buckley Complete Album Collection (not exactly true as he did two more studio albums after leaving Elektra) gathers Buckley's best material with remas…

2015 Release. Triple LP. Needless to say, it is a grandly absurd undertaking, full of scatological comedy and hard-rock-jazz-fusion. "Frank Zappa’s satirical rock opera, Joe’s Garage, is ambitious and mad, brilliant, peculiar and incoherent — epithets that have also been applied to German expressionist Georg Buchner’s unfinished play, Woyzeck. This may seem like a ludicrously lofty cross-cultural reference to attach to an album most notorious for a song about Catholic girls’ aptitude for fellati…

2015 Release. In order to finance his artier excursions, which increasingly required more expensive technology, Frank Zappa recorded several collections of guitar-and song-oriented material in the late '70s and early '80s, which generally concentrated on the bawdy lyrical themes many fans had come to expect and enjoy in concert. Sheik Yerbouti was one of the first and most successful of these albums, garnering attention for such tracks as the Grammy-nominated disco satire "Dancin' Fool," the con…

2017 Release. 180 grams, sourced from the original 1970 Analog Master. A fascinating collection of mostly instrumental live and studio material recorded by the original Mothers of Invention, complete with horn section, from 1967-1969, Weasels Ripped My Flesh segues unpredictably between arty experimentation and traditional song structures. Highlights of the former category include the classical avant-garde elements of "Didja Get Any Onya," which blends odd rhythmic accents and time signatures wi…

2018 Release. Zoot Allures, released in October 1976, is mostly a studio album (there are some basic live tracks, as in the title track and "Black Napkins") featuring a revolving cast of musicians who, oddly, do not correspond to the ones pictured on the album cover (for instance, Patrick O'Hearn and Eddie Jobson did not contribute). Compared to previous releases like One Size Fits All, Roxy & Elsewhere, or even Over-Nite Sensation, and to upcoming ones such as Zappa in New York, Studio Tan, or …

2018 release. 180 grams, Taken from the original 1970 Analog Master. It's 1970, and look what Frank Zappa's up to: The band now includes jazz players like George Duke (keyboards) Anysley Dunbar (drums) and Ian Underwood (guitar and keyboards) plus a mysterious pair of singers called The Phlorescent Leech & Eddie -- who, it would turn out, were singers Mark Volman & Howard Kaylan, who'd recently jumped ship from LA pop group the Turtles (they weren't contractually allowed to use their real …

2025 stock  180 grams, sourced from the original analog master. "It's all one album. All the material in the albums is organically related and if I had all the master tapes and I could take a razor blade and cut them apart and put it together again in a different order it still would make one piece of music you can listen to. Then I could take that razor blade and cut it apart and reassemble it a different way, and it still would make sense. I could do this twenty ways. The material is definitel…

2015 release. Terry Riley's In C Mali by Africa Express is the first ever recording of Riley’s minimalist work by an African ensemble. In C Mali was originally written by Terry Riley in 1964. Upon hearing this new version the composer said that he was “overwhelmed and delighted”. The piece is conducted by Anton De Ridder who has lent his expertise to Max Richter, Jonny Greenwood and These New Puritans to name but a few.

Recorded in ’73 and rejected by tin-eared major label execs in ’75, Crystal Spears (or “Crystal Clear” as it appears on the tape box) subsumes a cathartic brawl between Minimoog and Yamaha combo organ, with percussionists providing tonal textures, and plaintive oboe colliding with roaring electronic keyboards over waves of rollicking marimba, devilishly chattering below the fray. Crystal Spears is Sun Ra’s once lost aural cinematheque! Includes a quad-ra-color Sun Ra poster!Crystal Spears, inten…

This really is a treat, a re-issue of the incredibly rare debut LP from legendary blind outsider Moondog. Originally released back in 1956 on the musician's own Moondog Recordings imprint, this incredible album showcases the man at his way-out best, blending Eastern instruments and ethnic music with American exotica to come up with a sound which is impossible to categorise. A mostly self-taught musician, Moondog (real name Louis Thomas Hardin) performed in the streets of New York City for most o…

Four pieces for flute and voice composed between 1985-2018 by Mary Jane Leach, a pivotal part of NYC’s pioneering avant-garde community since the 1970s and an active member of the legendary DownTown Ensemble, working alongside peers including Arthur Russell, Ellen Fullman, Peter Zummo, Philip Corner and Arnold Dreyblatt, as well as devoting years to the preservation of Julius Eastman’s legacy since his death in 1990. Mary Jane's vinyl debut 'Pipe Dreams' arrived last year via the Blume imprint a…

Agharta was recorded on the afternoon in 1975, at one of two concerts Miles Davis performed at the Osaka Festival Hall in Japan. He performed with his flautist and saxophonist Sonny Fortune, bassist Michael Henderson, drummer Al Foster, percussionist James Mtume, guitarist Reggie Lucas, and Pete Cosey, who played guitar, synthesizer, and percussion. Produced and recorded by Teo Macero, the album's four seemingly unstructured segments emphasize the playing of Davis' sidemen rather than his own tr…

Miles Davis' 1974 album Get Up With It is a collection of tracks recorded between 1970 and 1974. Released as a double LP, it was Davis' last studio album before five years of retirement from music. He Loved Him Madly was recorded by Davis as his tribute to then-recently deceased Duke Ellington, who used to tell his audiences I love you madly. English musician Brian Eno cited it as a lasting influence on his own work.This album is an essential. An overlooked classic of Psychedelic Soul, represent…

"Listening to Miles Davis' originally released version of In a Silent Way in light of the complete sessions released by Sony in 2001 (Columbia Legacy 65362) reveals just how strategic and dramatic a studio construction it was. If one listens to Joe Zawinul's original version of In a Silent Way, it comes across as almost a folk song with a very pronounced melody. The version Miles Davis and Teo Macero assembled from the recording session in July of 1968 is anything but. There is no melody, not ev…