Experimental / All styles

*300 copies limited edition* More than twenty years of friendship haunt Vrhältnis, the new album by Antoine Chessex and Dave Phillips, out now on Coherent States and Krim Kram. Its source material reaches back twenty years, originating from live performances during a 2005 joint tour in Lausanne and Basel and a studio session recorded the same year at the Dynamo/Popkredit Studio in Zürich. Both sessions were then filed away, the recordings disappearing into the archive, untouched for nearly two d…

*100 copies limited edition* Inspired by macro photography, field recordings and the hidden world of insects, "Bugs" explores the fragile boundary between nature and electronics. Built through instinctive improvisations with analog synthesizers, acoustic instruments, drum machines and environmental recordings, the album unfolds as a collection of immersive sonic landscapes suspended between twilight and darkness. Rather than describing the natural world, "Bugs" magnifies it, transforming tiny mo…

No time to waste: nine months after Tim Vanhamel released 'Dubs Pour Oh La La', his debut album under the moniker Comité Hypnotisé, the Millionaire frontman presents already the second album 'Hiking The Trails Of Mount Muzak'. Hardly leaving any traces of the dubbed out vibe which marked the first record, Tim expands his Comité Hypnotisé universe to a surprising next level on this second album: exploring a place where James Last, Wu-Tang Clan and Dj Shadow are cooking up a Thai meal in a Peruvia…

A Senegalese Griot singer, an Amsterdam improviser and a Puerto Rican jazz drummer find eachother on an open playground, a stage build for improvisation, an old cinema now used for minute made story telling. Equiped with an m'bira, a xalam, a drumkit, a voice, percussion, house hold tools and an electric chlavichord on 220 volt, they sit down and take off: Wrrrrrraaang! Singer and percussionist Mola Sylla is in many ways a musical explorer. Born and raised in Dakar, Senegal, he grew up in the tr…

*300 copies limited edition* Soave returns with Dusty Colors, an astounding new full-length by Roberto Musci, one of the most enduring and important figures in the movement of Italian Minimalism. Utilizing the composer's longstanding, singular approach to electroacoustic composition that first altered the collective consciousness back in 1984 with the legendary LP, The Loa Of Music - intertwining field recording, samples, and Musci's own instrumental interventions - Dusty Colors draws its primar…

*300 copies limited edition* Ligeliahorn was the second release from Metgumbnerbone, the first being the cassette Dreun (recently re released as a handsome double album on the Infinite Fog label). Ligeliahorn was originally released on the A Mission record label in 1984. The whole album was the product of but one night.. Improvised in a derelict factory down on the fog enshrouded banks of The River Tyne in north east England. The instrumentation comprised mainly of what was already there augment…

London-based musician Luke Cowan delivers his most expansive work yet with ‘Six Places’, a quietly dazzling suite that renders memory, geography and imagination as sound. Across six extended pieces recorded in Ely, Cambridge, York and London, Cowan bends the borders between composition and improvisation, everyday resonance and ensemble interplay, to arrive at a music that feels porous, fragile and strangely luminous. Cowan calls it “a collection of impressions of places. Some are real and some i…

On Telegogue, Charlie Thall detonates a 29‑minute, eleven‑track riot of cartoonishly surreal genre‑mashups that feel born and bred in the infinite remix lab of the digital DIY. Frenetic keys, MIDI drums and warped child voices collide into neurotic, hyper‑danceable earworms that treat the internet’s trash heap as sacred compositional mulch.

On Slow Diet Ketamine Era, New York City Chapters and Weird Shit U.S.A. 2 yank sampledelia into a sleazy, rubble‑strewn mixtape fever dream. Two thirty‑minute collages of chopped‑and‑screwed B‑side rips, plundered dollar‑bin grooves and neon grime‑slime hip‑hop loops sketch a pitch‑black, hysterical fiction from the sidewalk’s ignored edge.

Do you remember when albums used to be fourteen tracks long, with clear song structures and a sense of narrative development? No? Neither do we. And that is exactly why Artetetra is thrilled to welcome Orange Car Crash in their roster with their new album Fake Man. Shaped by years of circulation across psych, jazz, punk, and experimental scenes, featuring collaborations with projects like Lay Llamas, Mamuthones and Snüff, Andrea Davì’s Orange Car Crash operates less as a solo project and more as…

On A Body of Water, Kaloja - the duo of Jan Anderzén and Paul Wilson - summon a strangely pastoral, hyper‑alive electronic ecosystem. Psychedelic synthesis, physical modelling and impressionistic sound‑painting converge into abstract figures that ripple through an unstable yet welcoming landscape, like sentient currents moving beneath a calm surface.

*300 copies limited edition* For the Raven was due to be the next release after Ligeliahorn on the Nekrophile Rekords label. Sadly the project fell through and, even more sadly, it coincided with a number of the celebrants being rounded up to enjoy a short holiday at Her Majesty's Pleasure, expense and, indeed, insistence. By the time our intrepid Disciples Of Doom re emerged the momentum had been lost and For the Raven was consigned to the Metgumbnervaults to, until recently, only make an occas…

Songs about the river are a common trope in the history of music. Psalms of being cleansed, being baptized, being redeemed. There are ballads of murder, lost love, jealousy, and all sorts of rank human emotion reflected in the surface of the water. Respect, praise, and worship of the river are other themes often channeled through music as well. Even in the realm of ambient music, digital mimesis of the aquatic is commonplace. Fossil Aerosol Mining Project, in their ongoing archaeological approac…

Audion 87 arrives like a lovingly overstuffed mixtape passed between devotees, its 44 A4 pages packed with rabbit holes for anyone who still hears “progressive” as a verb, not a museum tag. At its core sit two major anchor features. The first is a deep excavation of choice German label classics, taking April and Schneeball as portals into a republic of small imprints, marginal bands and radical self‑organisation. Rather than recycling the usual Krautrock canon, the piece digs into catalogue corn…

This is the first in the series of releases drawn from Finnish electronic and experimental music pioneer Pekka Airaksinen’s vast archives of unheard music to be released by Other Power. The playful yet deep Hevajra, from 1985, will be released on 23rd October on LP and digital formats. Pekka Airaksinen (1945–2019) was a versatile artist known particularly as a pioneer of electronic music and a significant figure in Finnish avant-garde. Born in Helsinki, Airaksinen was a painter, musician, compos…

In October 1984, Frans de Waard started his Korm Plastics label and his music project Kapotte Muziek. Shortly after, a fellow student, Christian Nijs, joined him as a musical partner. They quickly released a few cassettes and contributed to international compilations, and Nijs started a short-lived label, Disabuse Transmissions. In the summer of 1985, they published the first issue of Nul Nul, a fanzine, to promote their projects and to support the industrial music scene in The Netherlands and B…

Massive edition, 580 pages, hardcover. Frans de Waard published Vital, a fanzine for electronic and electroacoustic music, from 1987 to 1995. It was a low-budget, Xeroxed publication, bearing the revolutionary instruction: ‘No Copyright Publication. Reprint Now!’ It featured interviews with Asmus Tietchens, O Yuki Conjugate, Merzbow, P16.D4, Pierre Henry, Jim O’Rourke, Brume, Döc Wor Mirran and many others, hosted discussions on copyright, plagiarism and plunderphonics, house music, ambient musi…

From 1984 to 1988 Anthony Blokdijk frequently visited Threshold House in London and corresponded with John Balance of Coil about playing live, releasing music and personal affairs. This book collects scans of Balance's original letters, including idiosyncratic decorative flourishes and provides insight into his colourful world. Also included two articles on Coil from Blokdijk's Abrahadabra magazine, and an interview with Coil he conducted for the Dutch magazine Opscene. Translations included. Fo…

In 1992, Frans de Waard (of Kapotte Muziek, Beequeen and the Korm Plastics label) was asked to work for Staalplaat, then one of the biggest independent labels for experimental and electronic music. Staalplaat was the home for bands like Muslimgauze, :zoviet*france:, Rapoon, O Yuki Conjugate as well as Jaap Blonk, Normally Invisible and Kingdom Scum. With an average of three new releases every month, Staalplaat remained a major player for the next eleven years. Hired to set-up a database and to s…

Corbett vs. Dempsey is thrilled to announce the release of ‘Reason’, the second album from international free music quartet The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.

“A vinyl-based 'plane of consistency' able to fold, deform, and compress time and space so deftly that one has the impression of hearing echoes of distant worlds and times – 'everything everywhere all at once.'”

Tense from the first note and decisively uncompromising ‘GHSTING’ is the debut collaboration by Polish artists Alex Freiheit and Aleksandra Słyż, an incredibly unique piece of work that mixes fiction, spoken word poetry, theatrical antics, dense synthesis, acoustic ensemble and dark landscapes all set within the backdrop of a sinister Eastern Europe hotel. The resulting sound is menacing, humorous, harmonious, tumultuous, and at times quietly erotic. Alex Freiheit, a poet and vocalist, is widely…

*100 copies limited edition* "The pedal steel is an oddity among instruments. Invented in the early 1950s, it soon became a standard bearer for American country-western music. It is an instrument with enormous potential, which has been tied at the hip, even among its best players, to country music with little tolerance for innovation. Among the very few who stretch themusical and artistic boundaries of this difficult-to-play instrument is the British pedal steel guitarist Gary Peters whose new a…

Vocalized electronics & intellectual kicks. Cervicals are shaking, neurons are chatting. Hello and thank you experimental France. The Americans envy us for having them. Decadent improvisations & raw virtuosity since 2006. 1803 concerts to their credit. 732,715 kilometers of road covered. A buttock forever and ever in the underground charts. Another one shamelessly coveting the MTV Music Award 2037. That's all, yeah.France Sauvage was banned from playing even before starting in the basement of th…

Ignacio Cordoba, an improviser and composer from Madrid based in Copenhagen, and Agata Ciurkot, a Polish pianist, improviser and composer residing in Berlin, first met in the fall of 2017 at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen. Both navigating across jazz, free-improv, and contemporary composition, Agata was drawn to Ignacio's mastery of the sound produced by his machines and effects. In the summer of 2018, Ignacio travelled to Berlin to visit Agata, and they recorded “Ethereal, Basal”…

The Kiyosato Museum of Contemporary Art was located in Kiyosato, Yamanashi prefecture from 1990 to 2014. It was a private art museum with a permanent exhibit based on a collection of unrivalled scale. The museum also collected and mounted exhibitions on the work of radical contemporary composers, including John Cage. The museum’s primary informant on music was sound designer Yutaka Hirose, one of the pioneers of Japan’s environmental music (kankyō ongaku) movement in the 1980s. In 1992, the muse…

*In process of stocking* Mauricio Takara and Carla Boregas have long been key players in the experimental and underground music scene in São Paulo, Brazil and have recently relocated in Berlin. Grande Massa D'Agua (Great Body of Water) is their second album as a duo and it sees them continue to explore themes related to water as they dive into uncharted musical depths. In discussing the duo's relationship with water, Mauricio said: “...In the beginning of the pandemic we decided to take a turn a…

"Garden Variety" explores interdependence and intimacy through the emergent behavior of percussion instruments. Inspired by Anne Carson’s concept of Eros, the series blurs sonic identities, creating a composite instrument from motion. Amplification invites listeners into a tactile, resonant sound world.

*300 copies limited edition* Drawing from field recordings collected during a trip to Japan, boring tables saturates sonic vignettes in sentimental key, replaying familiar traces of lived experience into something more abstract. The seven tracks on mathematical model 0010, Luca Quartarone's debut album, trail through evolving tonal expanses that envelop the environment in a perpetually expanding haze of serenity. Though sonic fragments hail from the everyday, the compositions themselves inevitab…

With centuries of history, traditional instruments carry physical vibrations shaped by human breath and touch. In contrast, electronic music generates vibrations through inorganic principles such as electrical signals and circuits. When the subtle tremors of traditional instruments resonate with the intricate tones of electronic sounds in an improvised dialogue, performers from distinct realms expand each other’s languages, creating a new sensory experience. The project album Ancient Moment mar…

On Sielun Kuilu, Abysse Des Âmes distil their dark noir avantgarde into an even thicker, slow‑moving venom: electro‑acoustic shards and brittle surfaces drift in a black ether where every gesture feels weighted and terminal.

This is my ode to corn in 3 parts, all featuring corn as corn himself. There are 6 pieces composed for 7 handmade instruments, made entirely out of different parts of corn, with some thread and wood glue as well. There is a cornfield recording, taken on a day they were harvesting just under a mile or so away. And there is a musique concrete type of piece featuring field recordings and the instruments. This album was made during my residency at Art Farm in Marquette, Nebraska, surrounded by infin…

Textures of belonging, relentlessly woven into the epigenetics, layer upon layer, building palimpsests of human existence that are both fragile and resilient, with nothing but a wobbly strand of DNA. The way our grandparents' experiences spill across our systems, the way their grandparents’ experiences formed them in the first place, like a busy cityscape humming in the background, keeping the flow, making things operate, and despite their physical peril, hearts still flicker and divulge poetry …

***80 copies***  The inspiration for this work came out of a tragic loss. I felt an overwhelming pull to create these two pieces following the sudden death of my father-in-law. In the tradition of the form of Zen Buddhism that I practice there is a ritual that is performed for 49 days following the death of a loved one. During this period the grieving chant the name of Ji-Jang Bosal, “the bodhisattva of transitions,” everyday for an extended time during meditation. The Buddhist mythology of this…

Recorded during a residency in Tenerife powered by Keroxen Festival and Discrepant back in 2020 - amidst the pandemic, no less -, the duo of Carlos Godinho and Mestre André return after their 'Mãe D'Água' debut on Sucata Tapes and an entry on Keroxen's Aquapelago Series through a split with tropical druids Lagoss. Mostly captured in performance through a quadraphonic system placed inside a huge disused fuel tank, with a few tracks recorded out in the open throughout the island, 'Lava Love' evoke…

The Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory (K.E.R.L.) announces the release of the third and final volume of its acclaimed anthology, a richly layered exploration of experimental sound, artistic collaboration, and the cultural phenomena orbiting the enigmatic Kiely cousins, Owen and Tom. Bringing the series to a compelling close, this volume bridges archival research, oral history, and critical reflection, tracing the roots and reverberations of a uniquely Irish avant-garde movement. The b…

Berlin-based British composer, percussionist, and instrument maker Bex Burch was invited to spend a month in the US by International Anthem in Summer 2022. Burch immersed herself in the label's creative community and listened to what it gave her, making field recordings and allowing There Is Only Love and Fear to emerge from the collaborations and environments she encountered. Sessions for the album spanned multiple non-traditional recording spaces including a storefront in Bridgeport, Chicago a…

** Edition of 300 ** I met Sugai Ken a few years ago in Tokyo, outside the Dommune radio studios. His personality and music, a very special brand, touched me. His music is a coded vision of a dream world. A trade that is progressive yet traditional - in the most positive sense of the word. Recently out of the blue, Sugai San sent me a collection of personal field recordings he made of folklore groups and public performances in Tokyo, Toyama, Kanagawa, Kyoto, Tottori, … The close listener already…

On Séance of Sleep II: La lévitation de Shéhérazade, David Wunder Brägger turns folk memory, analogue circuitry and microtonal drift into a slow‑burning dream ritual. Droning fiddles, handmade electronics, metallophones and vintage organs rise together, making an ambient record that feels at once archaic, futuristic and gently unmoored from waking time.

*50 copies limited edition* Franz Kirmann returns to Bytes for his eighth solo album, available exclusively on Bandcamp from October 29 on cassette and download (released on all platforms on November 5). The “Almadies” are long wooden boats used by Senegalese fishermen. It is also the name of the neighborhood where Franz grew up, in the suburbs of Dakar near the Atlantic Ocean. "These new compositions are the result of sound experiments conducted over the past few months and reflections on the c…