New Arrivals
Justice
*In process of stocking. 16 page booklet with Digipack.* ENDON (Blacksmoker, Daymare, Hydra Head, Thrill Jockey)'s frontman Taichi Nagura, a shamisen player of traditional Japanese nagauta music, and a guitarist known as one of the best noise players in the contemporary Tokyo underground Gojiro Sakamoto, an artist as known as creating and presenting their works in various places and forms based on screenprints, including paint on the walls of Shibuya's PARCO, Yuichiro Tamaki. These three-person …
Magazine
*200 copies limited edition* Magazine is a new work for solo cowbell by Sean Meehan. It began with the serendipitous purchase of a small cowbell from the bric-a-brac section of a charity shop, and was composed initially on walks in the city and country, as the bell was an easy companion. As the piece was beginning to take form Meehan was visiting Governors Island, off of the southern tip of Manhattan. There he happened upon the powder magazine of Fort Jay and began finishing the piece over retur…
Scylla
This fourth record by the long-standing improvising ensemble Rempis/Abrams/Ra, and the third featuring now-regular band member Jim Baker, was recorded in a watershed moment for these musicians during a pandemic that had gutted lives across the planet. After 15 months of being closed to the public, the band's home base Elastic Arts had re-opened for live events. And Rempis decided to relaunch his weekly Thursday-night concert series, a hub of the Chicago scene since 2002, with a performance by th…
Liguria Transatlantica / Bossa Figgeu
Compiled by Ma Nu in partnership with Denis Longhi. "South American Jazz & Bossanova flavours from 60s & 70s in Liguria, north west Italy. Melody sounds really close to Brazilian Portuguese and instrumental tracks smells of South American Jazz. Nonetheless, the sound landscape clearly reflects the Italian Library Music of the time. This mingling was made possible by the commercial and cultural interconnections during the discovery of the New World: the local Ligurian language was influenced by …
Translucence
"As such, the music succeeds in maintaining a balance between cohesion and surprise, occasionally coming close to the jazz tradition, but always on its own terms. It gives the album a refreshingly unconventional approach, a counterpoint of ideas that consistently marches to the beat of a different drummer. " - Guy Peters
Vistas
"The most striking thing about it all is how these four people with four different nationalities (Kroatian, Swiss, Portuguese, Dutch) and backgrounds turn VISTAS into something wholly convincing. It is a rich, bold and rewarding statement that not only betrays a healthy disregard for genre conventions, but also creates a strikingly refreshing balancing act, and as such also offers a new shade to the steadily expanding New Wave Of Jazz-catalog, where improvisation, minimalism and various other st…
Twofold
*In process of stocking* "Onno Govaert. Now here is a guy who deserves to be in the spotlights. Verhoeven and Govaert form a beautiful musical partnership that thrives on abundant dynamics and colourful interaction. Whether it is the subtle ripostes or the unanimous cadences that develop throughout their improvisations, there is always a crisp and natural affinity at the core of their partnership. With Dirk Serries, Govaert alters his approach. The combination with the amplified acoustic guitar…
Today And All The Tomorrows
"Today and all the tomorrows is one of those releases that sounds like cinema for the ears, despite the fact that the ‘song’ order might seem random and that it might be hard to find a general arc. Verhoeven firmly stands at the center of this music, flanked by two guitarists that get caught up in six three-way conversations. There is no agreed method or set of expectations and fixed ideas, but listen carefully, and you will notice how each piece has its own characteristics and turns the combina…
Some Time
Tip! *In process of stocking.* Adrianne Munden-Dixon and Leo Chang’s “Some Time” presents stuttering physical exchanges between Munden-Dixon’s violin and electronics and Chang’s amplified piri. These pieces are tense and tightly-woven, yet constantly unraveling and reforming. Chang’s “ampiri” is a Korean double reed instrument running through electronics and played in unconventional and non-traditional ways. Recontextualising the instrument “quasi-autodidactically” aligns with Chang’s approach t…
Archives Of Performa
*Limited edition of 100 copies.* Recorded in a place of contemporary art on June 15th, 2019 (les drapiers Liège, Belgium). Pierre Gerard's project, thanks to Pierre and Antonin for agreeing.
As An Obscure Stain Under The Curve Of A Bridge
*In process of stocking. Limited edition of 100 copies on clear vinyl.* New self-released album of Bertrand De Lamalle (sax alto) & Pierre Gerard (cello) Recorded & improvised under a bridge 2020.
BOH - de Komplete Uitgaven van de Binnenlandse Ontwikkelingshulp
*In process of stocking. by various authors, 280 pages, hardcover, 17x24 cm, and written only in Dutch. 'BOH - De Komplete Uitgaven' is an off-shoot of 'I'm sure' and the previously published 'Abrahadrabra Letters' by Anthony Blokdijk (still available). Blokdijk was a member of a short-lived fanzine from Den Haag, BOH - short for Binnenlandse Ontwikkelings Hulp. The editors were active in various bands, and the fanzine published one compilation, 'Boh Sampler'. The fanzine is all in Dutch, and …
Negro Humor
Running counter to the monopoly of white representation in music, Radio Diaspora translates the African diaspora through free jazz experimentalism and free improvisation. The musicians in the duo, Romulo Alexis and Wagner Ramos, reverberate the signs of blackness through zones of sonorous intensity, giving new meanings to the Afro-descendant musical experience. In ‘Negro Humor’, their tenth album, the duo investigates the dichotomy of humor to again reverberate their struggle through music again…
Monochromes
*In process of stocking* “Tolimieri makes a universe of micro-nuance audible, with each piece consisting of hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of points of contact. Each point is just a little different from its predecessor. One by one, the points carry the music outwards, until the sound canvas is radiantly filled with the sensation of a particular touch.
The succession of Monochromes on these discs has a beautiful logic. I hear it as an attempt to “begin again”, to rediscover the pi…
drift nowhere past / the adventure of sleep
Rotterdam-based composer/pianist Reinier van Houdt created six pieces from March 22 to August 22, 2020 for a monthly 'quarantine' series of the online festival AMPLIFY 2020: quarantine, commissioned by Jon Abbey. Each of the six pieces on 'drift nowhere past' was recorded on the 22nd of each month (#18, #75, #128, #155, #194, #211). "I've made these pieces from what I played, listened to, recorded, played back, read, watched, heard, or imagined, each during one specific day in the quarantine of …
Easter Monday Music
*In process of stocking. 200 copies limited release, CDr format* On Easter Monday of 2019, friends and colleagues reunited at London’s iconic improvisational space Café Oto. The four, Ken Ikeda (Synthesizer), Massimo Magee (Electronics, Saxophone), Joshua Weitzel (Shamisen), Eddie Prévost (Percussion) had met and played together many times in the years prior—usually in the context of Eddie Prévost’s London Improvisation Workshop—but had never performed a public concert together. The group's avan…
Motions Vol. 1
*In process of stocking* In Motions, Vol. 1, Francisco Mela and Shinya Lin create an album of improvised textures and thrilling exploratory sounds. Using drum sets and prepared piano, they create a lush soundscape of textures, imagining a scene reminiscent of a jungle, full of life, resources, and possibility. “It was a huge pleasure to have Mela’s presence and his mentorship was amazing, free of selves, the music came out just naturally from our souls,” says Shinya about their first collaborati…
LeAutoRoiOgraphy
'Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) spoke the truth (and the truth under his tongue was sometimes a hammer, sometimes an anvil, sometimes a sickle, sometimes just a breath or a blast). Baraka had no tongue in cheek. Sometimes he drew his language (his thought) and in the barrel of his language (his thought), there was the cartridge of criticism, the cartridge of ranting, the cartridge of analysis, the cartridge of sedition, the cartridge of poetry, the cartridge of music. Heroes Are Gang Leaders have th…
The Uproar in Bursts of Sound and Silence
'The Uproar in Bursts of Sound and Silence is a sort of emergent collage that came together over four years of composition, improvisation, and production. The foundations for this album were initially recorded in 2018 by producer/engineer Jack Endino (Nirvana, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, Skinyard) at Soundhouse in Seattle, WA with myself (Evan Strauss, electric bass and upright bass), 5-Track (Guitar) and Sheridan Riley (Drums). The initial foundations of this music consisted of my long-form graphica…
O Life, O Light Vol. 1
Originally from Kingsport, Tennessee, New York-based Zoh Amba is a notable rising star in the avant-garde music scene. Growing up in the Appalachian mountains, Amba practiced saxophone to the forest that surrounded her home before she later traveled to study with David Murray in New York, and also at the San Francisco Conservatory Of Music & New England Conservatory in Boston. Today, her music is full of folk melodies, mesmerizing refrains, repeated incantations and powerfully executed Free Jazz…