Jazz /
Mast Year
The first song cycle collaboration by this new partnership is a highly adventurous and ambitious work, and one which explores a journey through dark places expressed in an improvisation-based language of strange sounds and textures, plus some unexpected left turns into electronic and choral music, before emerging from the woodland and into the morning light. I make a lot of records. In fact most years I release more albums than I make live performances. But this one is special to me in many ways…
The Black Ark + Dogon A.D.
Special discounted Bundle. Two of the greatest free jazz records ever laid to tape, back where they belong. Superior Viaduct reissues Noah Howard's The Black Ark and Julius Hemphill's Dogon A.D. — both from 1972, both inexplicably scarce for decades, both essential.
The Black Ark finds Howard backed by a towering ensemble — Norris Jones (Sirone), Arthur Doyle, Leslie Waldron, Earl Cross, Juma Sultan, Mohammed Ali — in four tracks that move from hard-blown spiritual fire to lyrical catharsis. Des…
The Forward Process
*200 copies limited edition* "In a somewhat inconspicuous passage in Ursula K. Le Guin’s sci-fi classic The Dispossessed, its main character — the brilliant physicist Shevek — meets a composer who has translated Shevek’s revolutionary theories into music: ‘I’m writing a piece of chamber music. Thought I might call it The Simultaneity Principle. [Several] instruments each playing an independent cyclic theme; no melodic causality; the forward process entirely in the relationship of the parts. It m…
Groundspeed
*300 copies limited edition* In October 2024, g a b b r o travels from Brussels to the mysterious village of Gabbro in Italy. Together with drumming virtuoso Casper Van De Velde, Hanne De Backer invites musical friends along the way to record in places that have personal significance for them. The quest to Gabbro takes them through five countries in seven days: Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Switzerland and Italy. The diverse landscapes and numerous encounters leave a deep impression. The pace of …
Zmiany / Schimbări
Błoto has never cared much for dominant aesthetics. Instead, the band has consistently chosen paths less travelled, unexplored territories and uncharted routes where experimentation is not so much a conscious decision as a natural state of being. After years of a rather hermetic approach to recording their albums, the time for change has come. A trip to Bucharest and the opportunity to collaborate with the community of musicians associated with the underground label Future Nuggets, led by Ion D,…
Miles '54 (The Prestige Recordings)
Released to celebrate the 70th anniversary of these sessions and the 75th anniversary of Prestige Records, "Miles '54" brings together 20 tracks recorded by the trumpet legend in 1954. Including cuts from albums released that year, it features Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Horace Silver, Art Blakey, Thelonious Monk and more. Included are new liner notes by GRAMMY Award-winning music historian Ashley Kahn and session notes by Dan Morgenstern, with mastering by Paul Blakemore. 4 LP set on 180g bl…
Sketch Of My Life
The first-ever reissue on Studio Mule of the debut album by Japanese jazz legend and bassist Yoshio Ikeda. Having performed with such illustrious figures as Sadao Watanabe, Masabumi Kikuchi, and Terumasa Hino, Ikeda’s first album as a leader features pianist and vocalist Ichiko Hashimoto—also known for her involvement with YMO—Berlin-based jazz pianist Aki Takase, and leading Japanese drummer Motohiko Hino.
Avant-garde yet imbued with a distinctly Japanese sense of melancholy, this is a work tha…
Bête noire
*100 copies limited edition* Trombe's fourth album, 'Bête Noire' (2026), is a tribute to all those wild boars that tear up the countryside, slaughter sheep, and are chased and killed by bizarrely clad figures in orange vests, armed with rifles... Beware of the line of cars parked in a herd along country roads, because they're there, prowling. Don't meet their gaze, or you'll be petrified... In fact, I know some people who had to change their mode of transport after a collision with the beast... …
Your Head You Know
2026 stock The telepathy and intuition that flows between these three musicians is one that has developed over many years of playing together in different combinations, and on a permanent regular basis at NYC's Nublu, searching and creating together in the moment. What they have come up with has evolved steadily over that time and its current form can be heard to brilliant effect on their new EP "Your Head You. Know". The exploratory instrumental space-jazz these gentlemen purvey has many antece…
Heavy Axe
Legendary producer David Axelrod’s solo album Heavy Axe is one of the finest outputs of the jazz-rock wave, which was the preeminent sound of the mid ’70s. With a little help from legendary players like Johnny “Guitar” Watson, Cannonball Adderley, and George Duke, Heavy Axe crisscrosses between lush funk sounds and full, round low end and majestic orchestral flourishes that made Axelrod’s sonic realm a goldmine for sample-hungry hip-hop beatmakers from the ’90s until today.
Purdie Good!
In between being one of the most recorded studio drummers of all time, the beat-maestro extraordinaire Bernard Purdie squeezed in a few sessions of his own. Purdie Good! was recorded early in 1971 by legendary engineer and audio obsessive Rudy Van Gelder, at his bespoke studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, and has all the quality hallmarks of that esteemed locale. Three Purdie-penned originals are balanced by three covers of hits-du-jour, utmost among them a blazing romp through James Brown’s…
Genie Of The Keys: The Best Of Korla Pandit
2026 stock Genie Of The Keys: The Best of Korla Pandit collects 16 choice cuts from this era—all featuring Pandit’s inspired blend of Eastern, Latin, and South Pacific musical traditions. Among the artist’s original compositions is his famous “Magnetic Theme,” which opened Korla Pandit’s Adventures in Music. Genie of the Keys also includes a variety of pop covers, including “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” “Polka Dots and Moon Beams” and “Speak to Me of Love.” This collection—which not only celebra…
Golden Brown / Walking On The Moon
The Take Vibe E.P. is the breakout 7" release from musician Laurence Mason, born from an unexpected lockdown experiment that quickly captured global attention. Fusing the iconic keyboard-driven melody of Golden Brown with the laid-back sophistication of classic jazz, Mason created a version that resonated instantly—amassing over a million views online and sparking overwhelming demand for a physical release.
Released by Jazz Room Records, the EP pairs its headline track with a smooth, late-night …
Quartet
Hatka performed at Telakka Jazz on the first Friday night of January 2025. The following Sunday the trio visited the studio to record a session - music captured in the festival afterglow, fuelled by a shared commitment to free expression. The album is titled Quartet for a reason. A fourth voice, saxophonist Jone Takamäki, was originally meant to join the group for both the live performance and the studio recording. Quartet is what was planned and what remains. Jone couldn’t make it, so he never …
Wave
*Back in print!* By the time this album was released, Antonio Carlos Jobim was already an international superstar. Having recently won a Grammy (1965) for "The Girl From Ipanema", by 1967 all the big name stars from up north were breaking down his door to work with the new "Gershwin of Brazil." In fact, Jobim had just finished working on an album with Frank Sinatra when he went into the studio to record this album. Recorded in 1967, Wave is actually one of the lesser known masterpieces of Brazil…
In 2
Roscoe Mitchell and Michele Rabbia are made for each other, because they've always made everything audible in their respective music and improvisations. The materials their instruments are made of; the bodies, gestures and movements that breathe life into them; the ideas and visions that guide them or lead them astray; the systems of play and thought they freely use; their imaginations. You can hear everything on the percussion of one, the slightest contact, the slightest clash, the slightest im…
The Tokyo Sessions
The Tokyo Sessions, the dazzling new album project by Dutch alt sax icon Benjamin Herman, oozes a deep affinity for the Land of the Rising Sun. In 2024 and 2025, Herman – along with bassist Thomas Pol and drummer and The Tokyo Sessions album producer Jimmi Jo Hueting – found themselves knee-deep in Tokyo’s hyper-eclectic musical underbelly – districts like Shimokitazawa and Koenji where underground scenes in the city continue to flourish. Minds were ceaselessly and consistently blown: noise art…
Devotional Fade
Matt Gold and Dustin Laurenzi present Devotional Fade, a collaborative record of electroacoustic rhythmic improvisations – equal parts meditation and dance, released on We Jazz Records, 24th April. Laurenzi and Gold, key collaborators in the Chicago creative scene and with genre spanning artists such as Bill Callahan and Makaya McCraven, step forward here with a major artistic statement, a product of extended improv sessions capturing the duo's hypnotic interplay. This is the sound of two of Chi…
Actionreaction 2
On Actionreaction 2, Pippo Lionni, Sergio Corbini and Stefano Franceschini turn the studio into a single, improvising organism, where spackle knives and rollers become percussion, free‑jazz piano and sax tangle with electronics, and each canvas is written twice – in sound and in paint.
II
"These are not musicians trading licks or showing off individual virtuosity - they are six voices engaged in genuine conversation, responding to each other with the kind of intuitive understanding that only comes from years of shared musical history. The music breathes, shifts, transforms. Moments of delicate interplay give way to passages of ferocious intensity; dense textures dissolve into sudden clarity. Nothing is predictable, yet everything feels inevitable." - Mark T., Third Millennium