New Arrivals
Placelessness
'Placelessness' by the trio of Oren Ambarchi on guitar, Chris Abrahams of the Necks on piano, and Robbie Avenaim on drums is a tribute to their seamless chemistry and has a free-flowing flood of sound
Spirit Cry Flutes And Bamboo Jews Harps From Papua New Guinea : Eastern Highlands And Madang
Double LP version, Gatefold sleeve, 8pp booklet. The third part of Ideologic Organ Music’s trilogy of field recordings of sacred flute music from Papua New Guinea, recorded by Ragnar Johnson and Jessica Mayer in the 1970s. A book titled »A Papua New Guinea Journey« consisting of Ragnar Johnson’s account of the circumstances behind the recordings will be published simultaneously with this music release.
»The recording of a male initiation ceremony with sacred flutes, bullroarers and ‘crying bab…
Non Band
2023 repress, edition of 300 copies, double-sided insert w/ liner notes of this Japanese no wave gem from 1982. With extended liner notes and interviews with band members about the recordings of the album, as well as unpublished photographs from 1981 by Jibiki Yuichi.
'The Japanese punk rock movement known as Tokyo Rockers began in the summer of 1978. It incubated an independent music culture as well as a host of fascinating, individualistic musicians. One of the more striking units was the male…
Sirens
Eight years after its original release in 2015, and sold out upon release, Umor Rex finally presents a vinyl repress of Sirens, by Kara-Lis Coverdale and LXV. This new edition is limited to 500 copies and comes with revised artwork.
Inspired by the link between seduction and violence, Sirens comprises a series of timbrally vast anamorphic pieces that poise the voice as a newly imagined tool of multiplicity. Processes of sample manipulation, signal processing, routing, and source design inform in…
Crashin' From Passion
In the 1970s, Betty Davis defied genre and gender by pushing her voice to extremes and embracing the erotic. She articulated a kind of pre-punk, funk-blues fusion that had yet to be normalized in mainstream music – a style that few musicians have come close to replicating. As one of the first Black women to write, arrange, and produce her own albums, Betty was a visionary who disregarded industry boundaries and constraints. Raw, unapologetic and in full control, Betty paved the way for generatio…
They Say I'm Different
Bomb! Orange Vinyl Edition. One can hardly imagine the genre-busting, culture-crossing musical magic of Outkast, Prince, Erykah Badu, Rick James, The Roots, or even the early Red Hot Chili Peppers without the influence of R&B pioneer Betty Davis. Her style of raw and revelatory punk-funk defies any notions that women can’t be visionaries in the worlds of rock and pop. In recent years, rappers from Ice Cube to Talib Kweli to Ludacris have rhymed over her intensely strong but sensual music.
There …
Is It Love Or Desire
Gold Vinyl. Betty Davis was a musical maverick with vision. Image, substance, sex, and grit combined with a badass band that could deliver the funk bed backbone to the sultry music between the sheets. After cutting two notorious discs for the Just Sunshine label (Betty Davis, and They Say I’m Different), and Nasty Gal for Island Records, Davis went to work on her most personal and expressive record yet. After capturing 10 hard-hitting tracks in 1976 at the remote Studio In The Country (Louisiana…
Journey To The Moon And Beyond
Black vinyl. Like a perennial that returns with each new spring, the Mort Garson archives (Plantasia, Ataraxia, Lucifer) have brought to bear yet another awe-inspiring bloom. Journey to the Moon and Beyond finds even more new facets to the man’s sound. There’s the soundtrack to the 1974 blaxploitation film Black Eye (starring Fred Williamson), some previously unreleased and newly unearthed music for advertising. Just as regal is “Zoos of the World,” where Garson soundtracks the wild, preening, s…
Le Mariage Collectif
Unissued anywhere else before, and now available for the first time ever, Born Bad Records presents a lost soundtrack found in a Parisian garbage dump. In our modern world, everything ends up -- or will end up -- in the garbage dump or in a museum. Occasionally, objects make it to the museum by way of the dump. The record you are holding is one of those objects. With the exception of two songs that already came out on a 45, the material on this disk was destined to remain in the trash. In 1971, …
The Hidden Tapes
A compilation of Minimal Wave from Around the World ‘79-‘85. The Hidden Tapes features rare, unreleased, and licensed tracks from as far as Japan and the former Yugoslavia. Most of the bands on this compilation recorded on 4-track tape in their bedroom studios while two of them went further to collaborate by sending tapes through the mail. The sounds on this record range from raw proto-industrial to naive danceable Belgradian new wave, to filmic synthesizer music to more complex, vocal-driven me…
Deeds, Not Words
A pioneer of bebop, Max Roach went on to work on many other styles of music and is generally considered alongside the most important drummers in history having worked with such musicians as Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Stan Getz and more! A seminal set, stretching out towards the directions Max would explore fully on the Candid, Impulse, and Fantasy labels in the 60s. Group members include Booker Little on trumpet, George Coleman on tenor, Ray Dr…
Free Form
Reissue, originally released in 1961. The West Indian-born alto saxophonist Joe Harriott was one of the most convincing boppers outside of the USA, though by the end of the 1950s he was exploring freer musical pastures, and the quintet with which he undertook the exploration was an outgrowth of the hard bop band with which he'd made a name on the British scene. Often in the past the group's music, in which trumpet and flugelhorn player Shake Keane figured alongside Harriott in the front line, ha…
Live I Kungsten
New album from Blod recorded during the second half of 2022 by Gustaf Dicksson. Där Ska Barnet Vara is a continuation of the themes explored on Pilgrimssånger and contains nine more songs dealing with faith in different forms, with a strong presence of death. Compared to Pilgrimssånger, the sound is slightly more lo-fi and fucked up and the approach is somewhat looser and more desperate, but here are some of the strongest and most fragile and heartfelt Blod songs to date. Additional players on t…
Leo
Meandering, autobiographical solo works from Aki Tsuyuko, tracking her 30 year relationship with her beloved Kawai Dreamatone organ. As so touchingly explained in the release notes, Aki’s relationship began with her instrument of choice after her Dad (who worked as a salesman for the Kawai corporation) brought one home for her. From here, she started to explore the vast combinations of tones and colours the half digital / half analogue organ can produce, regularly retreating away to practice a…
Lineaments
Sofa is proud to release a new solo album from Fredrik Rasten, following his fantastic Six Moving Guitars (released on Sofa in 2019). Lineaments consists of two long-form solo pieces performed by Rasten, for an extended instrumentarium of guitars, voice and sine waves. Lineament I and II proceed from two different plucking patterns played on one acoustic and one electric guitar, both sharing a specific tuning from where the two pieces explore diverging tempos and structures. Humming voice, sine …
Trending
*2022 stock.* Sofa Music is proud to welcome a new project on board. It’s Propan, a duo comprising the two Norwegian vocalists; Natali Garner and Ina Sagstuen. On their second album Propan continues its research within the frameworks of the song form and presents a psychedelic, and more delirious landscape than on its first, somewhat more electroacoustic album, Baby. The duo explores the meeting point between improvised music and studio production, and builds the album around Propan's well-estab…
Renaissance
Modern and grounded in the 1960s hard-bop sensibility, the American pianist and composer Albert Dailey (1939 – 1984) had perfect control over his instrument. Since an early age he played with cutting-edge musicians of the likes of Art Blakey, Sarah Vaughan, Stan Getz, Charles Mingus, and Lee Konitz, only to name a few. But despite that, he was an underrated artist during his lifetime, receiving the deserved recognition only after his death. Renaissance 2 November 1977 is his second album, played…
The Wheel
Moon Bros. is more or less the solo project of guitarist 'Fred' Schneider and was brought to our attention by the Queen of Colorado herself (aka Josephine Foster). Fred appears on Foster's No Harm Done album, and she returns the favor by singing on one of the tunes here. Many of Fred's earliest recording efforts were done with a variety of Chicago-based post-rock/jazz-flecked combos (The Exciting Trio, HIM, etc.) But for the past few years, he has used Moon Bros. to explore contours of more rura…
Performances
A follow-up to the duo's LP, CCTK Music (2021, Gilgongo Records), Performances features three sets from James Fella and Gabriella Isaac, from Gilgongo Records' 15th Year Anniversary celebration in Phoenix, AZ -- December 2019. Like the event, the record starts with a recreation of the second side of CCTK Music, using six reference lacquers of CCTK's A-side as source material to make a live collage. Following this are solo sets from Isaac (using her laptop as a feedback loop/sound source/physical…
Through Mazes Running
Edition of 100. Crystal-clear vinyl. Tip-on jacket. The second collaborative album by Drew Daniel (Matmos, The Soft Pink Truth) and John Wiese (Sissy Spacek), "Through Mazes Running" builds turbulent complexity from a real time cage match of no-holds-barred signal processing. Cross-multiplying tape manipulation and software, each processing the other into a writhing feedback loop, creating a volatile ouroboros of sound. Cut at 45 RPM for maximum fidelity.