The Final Fumes From The Soup Bowls
Brain liquification from the secret agents residing at Chocolate Monk headquarters. The last installment of their recent "soup" trilogy, these final fumes waft into your ears in precise yet frenetic fashion. Jarring cuts, unexpected sounds, and surreal atmospheres abound. Music to confound and delight.
en concert
*2025 stock* This CD is the re-edition of an LP made by Music Gallery Editions in 1978. It is (still) dedicated to the composer Mario Bertoncini who was the band main inspiration at the start for Sonde, a Quebec band active from 1976 to 1986. For most of the tracks in this recording the band was Andrew Culver, Keith Daniel, Charles de Mestral, Pierre Dostie, Chris Howard and Linda Pavelka. The notes on the back of the original cover mentioned: 'Live concert improvisations. Some of the pieces are…
Modesty of the Magic Thing
Composer, harpist, improviser, and educator Zeena Parkins has been a mainstay of the Downtown scene since 1984, performing with Fred Frith, John Zorn, Bjork, Ikue Mori, Yoko Ono, Pauline Oliveros, and countless others. Her newest project, years in the making, pays tribute to the fearless American visual artist Jay DeFeo. Zeena captures DeFeo’s bold experimentalism and love of beauty with a lush, exotic extended work for harp and percussion. Performing with her on a unique instrument built by leg…
Tenshi No Gijinka
Keiji Haino's ritualistic 1995 album features nine untitled pieces of voice and percussion. The Japanese avant-garde master creates meditative spaces through drones, cymbal crashes, and gargled vocals, building esoteric rituals that explore the inner sounds of existence on Tzadik.
The Shamanic Principles
Teiji Ito's The Shamanic Principles explores spiritual dimensions of sound - fourth Tzadik release documenting composer's journey into sacred music and ritual performance
Portals/Rope
Jana Irmert Portals: Produced entirely from sounds recorded in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and Colombia, Portals evokes the hidden world of sounds that lie beyond our perception. Whether concealed in ultra-sonic frequency registers or in the depths of the aquatic medium, these sounds bear witness to an unsuspected and teeming animal activity. Insects, frogs, bats and freshwater dolphins move about, hiding from our eyes and ears. Revealing this palette of sounds, in particular through transpo…
Juvenile Rock
Once whispered about in underground circles, Juvenile Rock—a crucial artifact from Japan’s vibrant 1980s post-punk scene—returns in definitive form. Originally circulated only as a CD-R and later on cassette, this rare collection of unreleased material from Dendo Marionette is now finally available on double vinyl, bringing new life to a body of work that until now was largely inaccessible outside of dedicated collectors. Juvenile Rock presents an expansive portrait of the band at their most dar…
Dendö Marionette
At the dawn of the 1980s, Osaka’s Dendo Marionette stood at the forefront of Japan’s first great Synth-Wave explosion—an underground movement where icy electronics collided with the raw urgency of Post-Punk. Their sound was both futuristic and deeply atmospheric, channeling a restless creative energy that mirrored the global wave of experimentation while remaining distinctly Japanese.
This definitive double LP brings together the band’s complete studio legacy, finally giving shape to a story t…
Paradise Mambo
Formed in Hakata before relocating to Tokyo in 1984, Akebonojirushi quickly established themselves as one of the most adventurous acts in Japan’s underground music scene. The six-piece band defied easy categorization, blending sharp-edged New Wave textures with the groove and freedom of Funk-Jazz, then distilling it all into daring, unpredictable Pop songs.
Originally released in 1987 on the influential DIW label, Paradise Mambo captured the energy of a vibrant era when Japanese musicians were…
Trap
Originally released in 1985 on Japan Records, "Trap" marks the second solo venture from pioneering Japanese musician Chiko Hige. Delving deep into the raw energy of the No-Wave movement, Hige crafts a powerful, hypnotic sonic journey brimming with hyper-kinetic grooves, jagged guitar textures, and contorted saxophone lines. "Trap" stands as a snapshot of controlled chaos—its blend of frenetic rhythms and edgy soundscapes continues to resonate with fresh relevance, captivating new listeners and l…
Harafuri
If punk culture and aesthetics ever had a poet, it would undoubtedly be Kō Machida. Best known as the visionary frontman of the pioneering punk band INU and later acclaimed as a novelist, essayist, and professor, Machida has built a career at the intersection of raw musical energy and razor-sharp literary craftsmanship. Eleven years after the groundbreaking 1981 masterpiece INU – Meshi Kuuna!, Machida returned with a new creative chapter: the album *Harafuri*. This record marked a significant ev…
Dance Till You Die
Dance Till You Die is more than just a track title—it’s a loud and clear order, a warning, and a timeless statement from one of the most uncompromising Japanese post-punk outfits of the early 1980s.
Emerging from Japan’s underground scene, Daisuck & Prostitute forged a raw yet magnetic sound that blended the abrasive edges of No Wave with an almost ritualistic sense of groove. Dance Till You Die stands as a rare testament to their uncompromising vision: esoteric and challenging, yet undeniably…
Quelques idées d'un vert incolore dorment furieusement
For more than fifteen years, Toc – the Lille-based trio of Jérémie Ternoy (Fender Rhodes, Piano Bass), Ivann Cruz (guitar) and Peter Orins (drums) – has been pursuing a singular sonic quest where the energies of experimental rock, the unpredictability of improvised music, and a constant drive toward excess converge. On stage as on record, Toc invents a telluric and ever-shifting music, built from flows, ruptures, and accumulations, where hypnosis and chaos feed off one another.
For this new albu…
Learning
‘Learning’ - Sophie Agnel’s first solo LP, feels like the dark, physical inversion of her excellent ‘Song’ which came out on Relative Pitch earlier this year. Sinking her unique sound into vinyl for the first time, the LP arrives as Agnel recovers from a brain tumour - a shocking discovery that will require Agnel to start again with the piano. It’s a terrifying prospect, but Agnel has been here before, having reorientated herself almost entirely away from her early classical training over the la…
Traveling Light
From out of the dark, the crackle of feed back birdsong signals a return to the land of sound environments exclusive to the music of Rafael Toral. A year and a half after his epochal electric guitar album, Spectral Evolution, Traveling Light finds him sharpening his focus, moving boldly from abstract forms to concrete compositions in the form of a set of jazz standards. Based on Toral’s discography, this may seem an unlikely endeavor, but happily, Traveling Light transpires to be one of the majo…
Àlbum
Urpa i musell feel very fortunate to announce the reissue of Àlbum by Joan Saura (1954-2012), originally released on compact disc by Nova Era – Música Secreta in 1998.
Kōri no ryokō / Jäämatkailu
Water can retain or wash away memory; flowing or freezing. It gives life and shapes earth, while frozen imprints of an ancient past are waiting to melt – back into sound or fluid motion, or simply to dissipate and disappear. For their split release, Yoichi Kamimura and Olli Aarni offer two distinct reinterpretations of a performance recorded live at the Temppeliaukio Kirkko – a church in Helsinki built directly into solid rock and bathed in natural light – meditating on glacial landscapes and wa…
Two Lonely Space Pilots
There's a moment, early in Two Lonely Space Pilots, when time seems to stop. Not pause - stop. The saxophone sustains a note that hovers somewhere between breath and pure tone, while scattered percussion marks territory in the emptiness like footprints on an unexplored planet. This isn't background music. This is Hekura - a Barcelona-based duo who've spent years learning how to make silence speak and stillness move. Ernest Pipó and Edu Pons met during their jazz studies at Taller de Músics in Ba…
One Another
“The body’s relation to the social is inseparable from, and of the same relation to the world, not a relation of objectification but a carnal intertwining prior to any reflective judgement.” -Rosalyn Diprose