New Arrivals
Translucents
Tip! Glass mastered CD, printed inner and outer sleeves with gloss varnish + 16-page suite of photographs and an essay by the composer. Inquiring after the ephemeral experiences of sound phenomena, Shelter Press presents Translucents, its first collaboration with American artist and composer Byron Westbrook. Comprising a single, 41 minute work divided into a series of interconnected vignettes that explore sonority’s relationship to time and memory, Translucents represents arguably the most defin…
Town Hall 1972
Tip! *2024 stock* If Anthony Braxton were to be judged on the basis of his oeuvre alone, he would stand completely apart from any modern composer, bar none. He has an enormous body of work, written for every conceivable permutation and combination of ensemble, from two to over a hundred and also for practically all the modern instruments known to musicians. As a reeds and winds player, he has a staggering technique, but not only this: he dives deep into the soul to extract the most subtle emotio…
Solo
*2024 stock* Cecil Taylor's masterwork is captured on this Japanese CD (reissue of the eponymous album released on LP in 1973) that dates back to his zenith of performance, when he was pushing the envelope of improvisational music to unprecedented heights of intensity and precision. While Taylor's work in the 1960s was impressive, his performance in the 1970s, and this particular track in particular, is absolutely breathtaking. With a style that may appear chaotic upon initial listen, Cecil's f…
Payan
*2024 stock* Lovely 1972 solo work by one of the most influential European avant-garde pianists of the last half-century; a player whose improvisational flexibility puts him in the same league as Cecil Taylor, but whose ability to concentrate at moments and knowledge of jazz history make him much more remarkable! One of Alexander Von Schlippenbach's finest albums; it's beautiful all the way through, with an unfaltering inventiveness that occasionally leads to Monkish moments or Herbie Nichols wh…
Long Play (Book)
The photographic volume 'Long Play' by Arme Reimer, which has long been out of print at the publisher, is an insightful photo book about the era of the long-playing record. Over the past ten years, photographer Arne Reimer has visited old record stores and also record collectors in Europe and the USA. His contemporary portraits as well as his interior shots are carefully dedicated to the past. 'The vinyl record was once the dominant medium,' writes Ulf Erdmann Ziegler in his essay on this subjec…
Good Night Good Morning (Book)
A comprehensive retrospective of work from one of the foremost performance artists to emerge from the 1970s. Since her earliest performances in the late 1960s, Joan Jonas has concerned herself with animation and moving images, asking what it means to move images, or to be moved by them. The artist constantly returns to her ever-expanding archive of images, sounds, gestures, ideas and places, reworking materials into new forms across the decades. Published in conjunction with the artist’s most co…
Auto Erotica (Book)
The first book of its kind – a car book like no other – offering a deeply nostalgic look at beautiful vintage cars through the superb literature, leaflets and pamphlets that sold them to us. Auto Erotica covers the gamut of motoring in Britain during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. These rare ephemeral booklets are full of unusual graphic ideas and concepts. Their fabulous photography, dazzling colour charts, daring typography, strange fold outs and inspiring styles symbolise the automobile aspirati…
In Europe
2024 reissue This is Texas-born tenor sax giant Billy Harper captured on tour in Europe in 1979. Mr Harper's gorgeous tone drives a highly energetic quintet featuring a young Fred Hersch on piano, Everett Hollins on trumpet, Louie "Mbiki" Spears on bass and Horace Arnold on drums. Billy Harper's seminal masterpiece, which gained more widespread recognition in the 70s, is a scorching and powerful record that exudes righteousness from start to finish. At this stage of his career, Billy has develop…
Black Saint
Billy Harper is one of the great tenor saxophonists in the post-Coltrane mold. Originally from Houston, TX and with a degree from the venerable University of North Texas College of Music, Harper emerged on the New York City jazz scene in the late 1960s performing with Art Blakey, Max Roach, Lee Morgan and others. Known for his soulful and propulsive tone, Harper was already a highly regarded and prolific session man before the release of his debut album as a leader on the cult favorite Strata-Ea…
Som Desorganizado 2021
Limited edition of 100 copies Som Desorganizado is an anual meeting on sound that takes place at Sonoscopia, in Porto, Portugal. In each edition there are several talks, concerts, sound installations and an artist doing real time illustrations of of conceptual contents of this event. Each edition is also celebrated with a special physical release, that tries to resume many of the issues debated in the meetings. For 2021, 100 classical records were silk printed in order to create loops, rhythms a…
Panarea
2024 stock, rare private press LP. Plaintive and imbued with the Mediterranean-inspired air, wide-ranging, and undeniably erratic. Ramuntcho Matta could employ African tribal rhythms, discordant progressive jazz, pretty folky melodies, throat-stretching vocals, spoken poetry, channeling the sounds of improv jazz and numerous traditions across the globe, its experimental approaches stitch an emotive world that brims with tension and life
Flores para Verene / Cantos para Caramina
"27-year-old Tomin Perea-Chamblee is a brass- and reed-centered multi-instrumentalist, the composer and arranger of pieces with excellently thorny harmonies, an at-times reluctant musicker and enthusiastic Brooklynite (born and raised, so his admiration primarily concerns the borough’s pre-gentralification qualities), who, by day works as a bioinformatician. If you're in New York, there’s an ok chance that you’ve heard him play before, with young (jazz-adjacent) bands and musicians of some renow…
Harpsichords
Tip! "Three harpsichords in various states of disrepair were kindly offered to me by Leeds Conservatoire. I accepted, and a memorandum of understanding was swiftly drawn up. The offer was made under the condition that I might make some music from them, given my penchant for infirm instruments, and their conventional worthlessness to anyone wishing to use them for their intended purpose. There seemed to be an auspiciousness surrounding these harpsichords, the stories they might reveal, and more i…
Metaphysical Swatting
After emerging from a red shag-carpeted basement in Baltimore in 2012, Comfort Link produced a series of skewed concrete muzak albums knitted together with wobbly tape loops of found and recycled sounds, gradually shifting toward a darker post-industrial sound collage style on more recent releases. On Metaphysical Swatting, battered reel-to-reel tape machines and portable cassette recorders scramble up the primary sound sources of voice and organ - ancient reels of tape with loose oxide are over…
The Movers Brought Rainbows
Long-running Jersey outfit Human Adult Band come to us after dropping a sickening array of no-fi noise rock and damaged art punk tapes and records upon the public. And yet, The Movers Brought Rainbows is probably their most abstract and alien work to date. While the guitar/bass/drums/voice formation is still the genesis of these recordings, at its core feedback and reverb are the star players here. Source sessions recorded at various locations are unapologetically run through the ringer, subject…
Sintered
Tim Olive lives in and operates out of Kobe, Japan, where he has built an impressive discography of solo and collaborative recordings using magnetic pickups as a primary instrument. Sintered was created with several of these magnetic pickups, along with metal objects, radios, and spring reverb. Working with such temperamental technology, it’s clear that Olive’s intuition and timing are assets put to good use here, sharpened from decades of collaboration and improvisation, from his early work as …
Blue Piccolo
*2024 stock* A trumpeter who played in the Charles Mingus Group and other groups. This album is somewhat unique in the Whynot catalog, which is lined with works overflowing with blackness. The bop style is orthodox, but the one-horn style of playing original compositions is truly poignant. Cecil Mcbee and drummer Steve McCall join the band.
Morning Prayer
*2024 stock* Chico Freeman wrote all the originals and arranged it for the septet. The music is an excellent documentation of what was going on in Chicago during the avant-garde period. The tunes and performances make challenging and rewarding listening. It is now thirty three years since this important, pioneering recording was made and it a testament to it's value that the music has matured so well and to this day remains vital, challenging and fresh. Chico Freeman - tenor & soprano saxophone,…
Shirasagi
*2024 stock* "I think we've created something that can be called 'Japanese jazz.' I want to take it to the world." With these words, Oki Itaru left Japan in 1974. This album is a live recording of a concert he held just before leaving for France. The sound, which is filled with the achievements he had made up to that point and his determination for the future, is still vivid when listened to today. This album captures one of Oki's peaks.
Revolutionary Ensemble
*2024 stock* Recorded live in Australia in 1977 by the Revolutionary Ensemble, the famous loft jazz unit formed by violinist Leroy Jenkins, bassist Sirone, and drummer Jerome Cooper. This is the only Enya disc by these three exciting and unique members of the New York loft scene!