New Arrivals
Stupor
Nairobi-born Berlin-based sound artist Joseph Kamaru, aka KMRU, shares his new work Stupor on the new Helsinki-based label Other Power. Commissioned by the Helsinki curatorial and commissioning agency Publics, Stupor is comprised of three original long form tracks. The tracks on the album are speculative notes to social architectures and environments the artist has traversed.“A musical alchemist, KMRU places his listeners’ ear into a sonic-spatial matrix in which he transmutes his trans-local ex…
Angel Tape
Islaja presents her new album ”Angel Tape”, the first release on the new Helsinki-based label Other Power. Drawing inspiration from childhood epiphanies while listening to an alleged recording of angels singing, Islaja has crafted an album that stands out as a major work in her expansive and celebrated catalogue, which includes previous releases on labels such as Ecstatic Peace!, Fonal and Svart. Islaja, aka Finnish artist Merja Kokkonen, describes her new album as a “counterwork” to her most re…
Grief In The Kitchen And Mirth In The Hall
From our now-venerable, but ever thistle-sharp, Scots singer of new songs and old, comes a fifth full-length collection of traditional songs. Reaching down the centuries to unpack these numbers anew, Alasdair finds a set of eternal melodies – and with them, an unsettling number of surreal images that parallel the madness of our modern times.
Spirit Spirit
*2023 stock* Spirit Spirit is an improvised suite in nine parts and epilogue by the Scandinavian trio featuring the renowned saxophone player Torben Snekkestad, pianist Søren Kjærgaard, and double bass player Tomo Jacobson. The suite was carefully composed from almost 3 hours of spontaneously improvised studio recordings by the trio. The outcome is a focused, minimal, dark, dynamic, enigmatic 38 minutes of music that unfolds like a ghostly tale. The trio was formed in 2016.
Variations On No Particular Theme - Part 2
*2023 stock* Lo and behold, the second and final part of the diptych from the unusual free improvising quartet featuring two New York-based viola players Mat Maneri & Tanya Kalmanovitch, and Copenhageners Tomo Jacobson on double bass & Kresten Osgood on drums, is finally here! This time, we enter into a darker, fiercer, seemingly telepathic exchange - a powerful finale to an unprecedented musical journey.
Variations On No Particular Theme - Part 1
Perhaps for the first time in the history of music, here is two violas, double bass, and drums quartet featuring the New York-based Mat Maneri & Tanya Kalmanovitch, and Copenhageners Tomo Jacobson & Kresten Osgood. Calling their music chamber free improv gives some clues about the sound world you are entering, but it also falls very short in the face of the multitudes presented here. ‘Variations On No Particular Theme’ is a pregnant name in which we can look for the key to this album. Of course,…
Tales From The Skinny Apartment
*2023 stock* Tales from the Skinny Apartment is somewhere around the 20th or so Painted Faces release...Drucker has long lost count. He runs/curates gigs (and records at) the Skinny Apartment, his dwelling place in Ridgewood Queens, which some folks have called the "realest DIY zone in NYC." He also rips in Dead River Company, Big Hiatus, Shecky, Canyon River Blues and countless other unknown subterranean improv zoner outfits. "Ripping" involves keeping it freaky and weird and ripping sets where…
At Zeenath Parallel Heavens
Over the course of 20 years, German artist Black To Comm aka Marc Richter has pushed the limits of and merged the aesthetics of art, conceptual installations and music, coming in a wave of innovation alongside his peers Pita, Fennesz, Felicia Atkinson and later Sarah Davachi to name a few. His list of collaborations and commissions is long and impressive. Through it all Richter as Black to Comm has challenged assumptions, explored identity and confronted the concept of authorship itself. Black t…
Mons Clepsydra
Scott Monteith comes out from behind his Deadbeat moniker for the first time in 20 years to inaugurate a new project with Italian singer Letizia Trussi under the name Ark Welders Guild. Their first salvo, Mons Clepsydra, is a 1 hour durational ambient piece in four parts. Peaceful and severe, contemplative and grave, the track takes its inspiration from the mountain element and reflects on the relativity of our time - rock and hourglass; it delves into the concept of the sublime, intended in its…
Love, Emily
Originally released in a long sold-out edition of 50 cassette tapes, Love, Emily (Acte 3) was the third and final album of Michel Henritzi’s industrial label AKT Production. Recorded in a Paris studio in 1987, this 25-minute collage of spoken word and noise saturations intersects two radical voices from literature and experimental music of the time: American author Kathy Acker reading excerpts from her book My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Nox, mainstay of the French noise and indust…
Roforofo Fight
*2023 stock* "A brilliant album from Fela Kuti – and one that shows him really coming into his own, with that tremendous new sound that would go onto influence decades of musicians! The title track – Roforofo Fight – is a side-long jam that instantly sets a new standard for African funk – skittish drums, a sweet keyboard line that snakily sets the groove, and a wonderful long alto solo that's got even more raspy soul than Fela's vocals! Those vocals are sometimes more broken up, verbally – and h…
Diagenesis
*300 copies limited edition (hand-numbered).* Russell Burden (Being) is a sound and visual artist living on the south coast of the UK. His practice develops work that explores qualities of ambient perception, most often through the lens of hydrological, geological or biological processes. He has delivered gallery exhibits in various mediums including live cymatic feed, and dark space installation. Russell was also a member of The Humble Bee & Players and last year as artist in residence for a si…
Sketches And Ballads
*2023 stock. White vinyl edition* If you know the score, you might actually think of the piece's title as a bit of an understatement. After all, it is made of 50 densely-written pages, which might cause some interpreters to lose track of sight. For Michael Wertmüller's composition Sketches And Ballads is full of seemingly unplayable rhythms, which hail from his extensive experience as a percussionist: complex 256th parts and 512th parts are no exception in Wertmüller's work. Even the visual appe…
Shakara
*50th Anniversary reissue* These percolating, horn-heavy grooves simmer while Fela Kuti lays down his trademark rants, often in deliberately skewered pidgin English....totally unstoppable in its mix of music and message. His voice, interlocking guitars and percussionist Tony Allen turn grooves that often have 1 or 2 chords into complex statements - minimalism made for dancers.
New Bodies
*2023 stock* First two tracks and Side A of New Bodies. From Los Angeles, also of Open City – first full length-- single takes, live--Intensely physical and abstract music that constantly, unpredictably shifts and evolves. Impulse, memory and intent, laid bare in real time. Post-melody, post-groove sound. Concrete, brutal, yes fun-----
Correct Me If I Am Incorrectly You
Berlin based Philipp Otterbach debuts on Offen with "Correct Me If I Am Incorrectly You". Post-music phantasmagoria for the world in which the past became more unpredictable than the future. Remember Cowboy Bob, Salaryman and Gary Floyd in that opium den in Fischeln? Deconstructed entertainment for hopeless romantics and testament to Otterbach's unique artistic language. Supersound vinyl LP, full cover inside out print.
Best Of
Underground prominent figures of the Belgian 80's scene, Alain Neffe and Nadine Bal have released and produced dozens of tapes under different monikers. Bene Gesserit is probably their most famous and iconic one due to its multiple facets. Originally a tape released in 1981 on their own Insane Music label, "Best Of" encaptures all the DIY and creative freedom of the band. From the yagé vapors of "Erg Habbiana" to synth madness of "Gloria" or "Gppm" this album summarizes the full spectrum of the…
Mehmet Aslan Presents Senza Decoro: Liebe + Anarchia / Switzerland 1980-1990
A new compilation explores the far reaches of the post-punk, experimental and electronic landscape in Switzerland on Senza Decoro: Liebe & Anarchia in Switzerland 1980-1990. Curated by producer / DJ Mehmet Aslan. During the mid-‘70s, Switzerland had embraced punk within its cities, informing the subsequent post-punk era of the 1980s as music splintered into freeform musical strands across the whole of the country. It was to become one of the most innovative periods in Switzerland’s modern day mu…
Shakuhachi: The Ballads Of The Village
*2023 stock* "A great blend of funky jazz and wooden flute – the Japanese shakuhachi reed instrument, blown by Kifu Mitsuhashi here – then mixed with some larger backings that almost have a CTI Records sort of groove! The approach is similar to some of the best 70s projects from Hozan Yamamoto – and like those, updates older Japanese styles with just the right dose of jazz – never getting in the way of the soulful lines from the lead instrument, but also really warming things up nicely with Fend…
Live In Europe 1970-1971
*2023 repress* There can be little more exciting or rewarding than listening to a band playing live and firing on all cylinders at the absolute peak of its powers, and the live performances presented here by Nucleus are no exception. They capture the group in arguably its finest incarnation right at the start of its long career, exhibiting a staggeringly high level of musical discipline matched by an equally impressive ability to improvise and solo.
Nucleus began its long jazz-rock journey in 19…