★Black Sweat Records
Musica Per Insiemi
Tip! If it were possible to relate images with Giovanni Di Domenico's music, the most plausible would be those of forms painted with perfect balance and purity. Absolutely versatile and eclectic, the Italian composer has long accustomed us to sounds full of ecstatic tension, but pervaded with a refined and cyclical harmony of the parts. Musica Per Insiemi is the result of three recordings with three different ensembles, two more varied in terms of orchestral tones, one for organ only and female …
French Archives Vol. II / French Archives
This special bundle collects the two Ariel Kalma box-sets issued by Black Sweat:French Archives Vol. II 1974-1985 (4LP Box, 2021)French Archives 1977-80 (4LP Box, 2017)French Archives Vol. II 1974-1985 (4LP Box, 2021)The life and work of Ariel Kalma is a remarkable journey in sound - an emblem of the singular thinking that makes great art. Kalma was born in Paris, beginning to play the saxophone during his early years. His musical career was kickstarted with tours and collaborations with Salvato…
French Archives Vol. II 1974-1985
An absolutely astounding accomplishment, Black Sweat's second 4 LP Box set of previously unreleased material by Ariel Kalma - French Archives Vol. II - is a mind-melting immersion into the composer and saxophonist's radical experiments and stunning ambient harmonics made between 1974 and 1985. Venturing far beyond the territories for which he is most well-known, the collection takes great strides to accurately framing ambient and New Age musics as rightful extensions of the avant-garde, and is e…
Panamor
More than simply being a band, Addict Ameba is a wide Italian collective that makes brotherhood the weapon to live music together crossing all cultural boundaries. The driving force lies in the heterogeneous background of its members and the relative familiarity with different folkloric areas. The original and ambitious arrangements make the result a delicious soup! In this first work, their personal Afro-latin-beat reveals a sincere meeting between African and Central American traditions… for t…
Anadyomene
The eclectic sensitivity of the composer Roberto Laneri (Prima Materia) looks unparalleled in the Italian avant-garde context. Anadyomene, published for the first time in 1987, shows the myth of Venus in a dystopian and dreamlike world. Laneri conceives a sound poem that opens up to the archetypal dimension of the water creation, through the symbol of bivalve conch, the myth of the feminine power is narrated thanks to the verses of the renaissance poet Angelo Poliziano. Creating a daring connect…
Suoni Immaginari
**CD version** "Before his prolific activity in the field of music therapy, Agostino Nirodh Fortini also embarked on his own path in electronic music. In the early eighties he was a close collaborator of Walter Maioli and Fred Gales, at the time of the pioneering label Sound Reporters.Suoni Immaginari, released only privately on cassette in 1988, contains a wide range of keyboards and lots of ethnic field recordings assembled with an absolutely modern praxis ahead of its time. Nirodh imagines hi…
Som Folk Är Mest
"An organism of shredded memories, connections and relations. Existing because of mixtures, collages, escapism and rescues. Behind Goose there are two of the currently most forward thinking and exciting young swedish musicians: The piano player Johan Graden (one of Sweden’s most talented and critically praised jazz musician) and DIY studio wizard Daniel Ögren. Sounding like nothing else. This album is a witchy brew of fevery nights and melancholic dreams. Co-production with Sing A Song Fighters.
Live 1975 (Expanded Version) - CD
**Digipack CD edition** Reissue with unreleased tracks from the only one tour of this super group assembled in 1975 by Franco Battiato, Lino Capra Vaccina, Juri Camisasca, Mino Di Martino, Roberto Mazza, Terra Di Benedetto. Presenting a remarkable range of his country’s visionary musical minds. The album encounters Battiato at the height of his powers and in the midst of crucial juncture in his career - the transition between his early experimental rock efforts from the first half of the 70’s, …
Live 1975 (Expanded Version)
**Small repress available, with new cover** Reissue with unreleased tracks from the only one tour of this super group assembled in 1975 by Franco Battiato, Lino Capra Vaccina, Juri Camisasca, Mino Di Martino, Roberto Mazza, Terra Di Benedetto. Presenting a remarkable range of his country’s visionary musical minds. The album encounters Battiato at the height of his powers and in the midst of crucial juncture in his career - the transition between his early experimental rock efforts from the firs…
Moon On The Water
**CD version** A mysterious sound aurora on the magical paths of the infinite universe of percussion, originally released in 1985 and then almost completley lost. Moon On The Water were a trio of percussionists based in Italy - David Searcy and Jonathan Scully, both American tympani players in the Scala Philarmonic Orchestra, with the legendary Italian jazz drummer Tiziano Tononi, who worked with everyone from Roberto Musci, to Muhal Richard Abrams, Pierre Favre (who later joined the group), And…
Positive Force
**CD version** From Milan, Italy, Al Doum and The Faryds return with a brand new LP of immaculate beauty. Fusing together free jazz, psych, eastern and Indian influences Al Doum and The Faryds create a mesmerizing mixture: the continuous, fluid sound of "Positiva Force" perfectly succeeds in expressing the parallel influences of ecstatic eastern/african sound and of the contemporary free, energetic, spirited sound, with a nice jagged, if not toxic guitar phrasing. Limited to 200 copies only“This…
Cucoma Combo
**CD version** Cucoma Combo. Above all, the new boiling energy of pan-rhythmic music, the awakening dance of joy, the experimental space for ambitious arrangements and free-improvised parts of colorful horns. From Black Africa to South America, we travel on paths of Congolese soukuss and Amazonian carimbò, between accents of Colombian cumbia, kalimba vibes and tribal voices. We find seeded traces of space-funk and afrobeat, with amazing acid keyboards and an enchanting female voice. The power of…
Live in Frankfurt 82
2019 small repress. First of all, Bengt Berger -- a pioneer of the Swedish underground of the '70s and historical member of bands such as Archimedes Badkar and Arbete Och Fritid -- is a versatile drummer-percussionist and well-educated ethnomusicologist with several research sojourns in India and Ghana. Deeply influenced by Hindustani, Carnatic, and West Africa music, he founded the Bitter Funeral Beer Band in 1980, an ensemble of 12 elements, basing his ideas on the traditional funeral music of…
Het Jakoba Prieel
**CD edition** While the Sound Reporters imprint, which ran intermittently between the early 80s and 90s - specializing in the sounds of anthropology, ethnomusicology, religion, travel and history, hailed from Amsterdam, those aware of this obscure cassette label will probably only be the most developed fans of Italian avant-garde. It was Sound Reporters that issued the incredible collaboration between Pit Piccinelli, Fred Gales, and Walter Maioli, Amazonia 6891, reissued by Black Sweat in 2016,…
Ethnoelectronics
CD Edition. Ethnoelectronics, issued on cassette by Sound Reporters in 1986, exists beyond the realm of easy definition. Very little information about the album exists, other than the fact that it involved the contributions of a remarkable group of sonic explorers - Walter Maioli, Nirodh Fortini, Fred Gales, Raffaele Serra, John Zandijk and the sculptor Edward Luyken, and was conceptualised as the soundtrack for an obscure science-fiction saga. Or was it?The title makes clear allusion to the ide…
Taraxacum
**CD version** Incredible 1986 lost recordings, an amazing adventure of a musicological and botanical research on the psychoacoustic qualities of the green world. It's the investigation of an organic symbiosis, real and mysterious at the same time, between the pharmacological properties of the plant and the sound emitted by the same material essence. From the single natural element comes the vibration permeating the whole universe; an indissoluble binomial for which "everything that makes up exi…
In Fa
In Fa is an enchanting meeting of phantasmagorical improvisation, a dialogue between two generations that makes every expressive boundary overcome. Riccardo Sinigaglia (Futuro Antico) remains faithful to the idea of a collective work, where musicians are only instruments crossed by musical energy. He provides his pioneering experience, with excellent control of electronic sounds, realized with the eternal cosmic Farfisa and the synths (Moog Sonic Six, Synthi EMS). Their lysergic fluidity support…
Venndiagram
Back in 2017, Black Sweat produced a lovely reissue of DSR Lines Spoel. It was easily one of our favorite records of that year. Continuing their dedication to its creator, the label now brings us yet another stunner - a reissue of a little heard tape only release from 2013, Venndiagram. Like its predecessor, we can already tell that this one is going to top our year end lists. DSR Lines is the moniker of David Edren, an artist based in Antwerp, who, since coming into view during the late 90’s, …
Five Dramas For Swollen Emotions
The histrionic Swedish artist Isak Sundström (Pascal and Skriet) embraces the fascinating sound world of the "spoken word", infusing new expressive perspectives to this genre with original sensitivity. These five vocal dramas are based on the subtitles of some films by Douglas Kirk, texts that describe the sound effects and events that occur outside the screen. But the result is rather that of a new dissolved narrative, of another space that explores the boundaries of emotional imagination. In t…
Attica / Coming Together / Les Moutons De Panurge
This milestone of the avant-garde music, published in 1974 by the historic Opus One, was a very significant political awareness. With Coming Together and Attica, Frederic Rzewski celebrates in music the famous revolt of the American prison in 1971. The texts of Sam Melville and Richard X. Clark make pulsating and alive the invocations of the prisoners; full of pathos, these fragments of life oscillate between a confessional tone and the hymn to freedom, in a touching emblem of compassion. The fi…