New Arrivals
Pymp World
**250 copies** Frank Hurricane’s legend is such that many have heard his name years before hearing his music. Hurricane Frank, if you will, is the kind of character that can spin an audience into a psychedelic vortex that will have you yelping HOLY PYMP BREW repeatedly as you zigzag your way back home. His music possesses a nagging quality: a dizzying mix of scruffy rap, Casio tones and raw dictaphone poetry that sounds like it always existed in that quattro formaggi part of your mind. Originall…
How Deep Is Our Love?
** 525 copies ** Paul Régimbeau, aka Mondkopf, joins the Hands in the Dark ranks with a new album, "How Deep Is Our Love?". For more than a decade now the prolific Parisian producer hasn’t ceased to surprise us with his compositions, constantly treading new ground with artistic bravery and curiosity. At times extreme, at other times méditative and always complex, his music is never easy-access. In recent years his work has taken a clear turn towards a more ambient, intimate, less abrasive style.…
Phil Ranelin Collected Works 2003-2019
Phil Ranelin's "Collected Works 2003-2019" features songs with Pharoah Sanders, Kamasi Washington, Donald 'Duck' Bailey, Henry Franklin, Big Black, Calvin Keys, Roger Glenn and many, many more. Phil founded cult label Tribe Records in 1973 then went on to perform with artists such as Max Roach, Gary Bartz, Freddie Hubbard, the Temptations and even the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Here in this collection of 16 years of Phil's work, his 'Tribe' spiritual root continues to grow into greatness and he is a…
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…
Wolf Rayet
Noise Poetry is a beautiful example of a concrete attitude of improvisors more concerned with collectively constructing a sonic complexity than gestural free expression. All three of them plunge into a universe akin to that of a Japanese garden – where the space between the stones is more important than the stones themselves – inventing an acoustic synthesis in a development of stratified objects that act like a giant mobile. David Chiesa: double bassDidier Lasserre: drumsMathias Pontevia: horiz…
Object Shape Description
**Limited and numbered to 150 copies** "Object Shape Description" is the debut recording by Brussels based Italian artist Marco Lampis. Lampis works between the visual and auditory disciplines, creating installations both with and without sound, in which discrete sensory perceptions become entangled. How might we understand sound through sight or be able hear by looking? This collection of recordings is inspired by the rhetorical figure of Ekphrasis in which a visual artwork is described verball…
Voice Damage
Edition of 100 hand-numbered copies. Hypnagogic raga drone electronics and mutating, distorted rhythms from L.A.-based experimental musician Byron Westbrook, yielding two compatible improvisations that have stood the test of time in his archive. RIYL David Behrman, M Geddes Gengras, Matt Carlson. Nearly all of my recorded music is pieced together from organized edits of various improvisations of some sort, via a composition process that generally involves cut/paste and superimposing those to a p…
Cloud Atlas/Vertical Study
Cloud Atlas is a collection of ten short pieces composed by Toshi Ichiyanagi between 1985 to 1999. Vertical Study gathers rare pieces composed by Claude Ledoux. Both are performed by Japanese pianist Kaoru Tashiro. "Kaoru
produces serene, yet rich sound texture; the fluctuation of beat and
the perspective of the motif are ingenious. I hope many more people will
taste this joy of finding a grain of gold with your own eyes and ears,
from her commercialism-unrelated, sincere and an experimental…
Nouvelle Ambiance: Wolf Muller Meets The Nile Project
In January 2016 arts and music organisation Santuri East Africa invited guest producer Jan Schulte to join the Nile Project gathering in Aswan, Egypt -- an intensive two-week musical experiment featuring musicians drawn from all around the Nile Basin that functioned as both a creative cauldron for cross-border collaboration, and a forum for artists and cultural activists to discuss the issues affecting the Nile river. Wolf Muller aka Jan Schulte has been a resident of Dusseldorf's era-defining S…
Shawnee, Ohio
Shawnee, Ohio, the first album by sonic ethnographer Brian Harnetty
on Karlrecords, is an intriguing blend of archive recordings of
interviews with residents of that small town and melancholic
chamber-folk, performed by his ensemble which features, amongst others, Anna Roberts-Gevalt (Anna And Elizabeth) and Paul De Jong (The Books).
Brian Harnetty (b. 1973) is an interdisciplinary artist working between
music composition, sound, and socially engaged art. Rooted in sound
archives and the c…
Afrotheme / Percussion Blues
**Edition of 350** Two crazy rhythmic cuts by Paolo Ferrara, sourced from the super-rare library LP, “Ritmico”, on Flower Records. Afrotheme is a deep afro-jazz funky track with powerful bass lines, hot percussion, and psychedelic wah-wah guitars. Percussion Blues, on the flip side, blends African and Brazilian sounds with a unique samba groove, and a Fender Rhodes which is the icing on the cake. This is also the second of a new Four Flies 45s series, properly designed for DJs, producers, and wo…
Dogs' Ears Are Stupid
Mental Experience presents a reissue of Care Of The Cow's Dogs' Ears Are Stupid, originally released only on cassette in 1983. The album is a fascinating blend of psychedelic folk, minimal electronics and post-punk weirdness. Acid fuzz guitar, incredible vocal harmonies, drum machines, and analogue synths make it one of Chicago's best kept secrets, with a history that goes back to 1974. A trio formed by Victor Sanders, X Baczewska, and Sher Doruff, they had a very unique and eclectic sound, expe…
Frequencies
Edition of 200. This is the last release in the series of Nicolas Bernier’s worldwide
acclaimed and Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica awarded project
“frequencies”. The piece frequencies (a / archives) is a composition based on sounds
from the scientific archives of Rennes 1 University (France). This
impressive collection of antique scientific apparatus includes one of
the few remaining "Grand Diapason" built by Rudolph Koenig circa 1880.
The two gigantic forks of the Grand diapason can gen…
Feel
A trumpeter and improviser living in Mexico City, over the last ten years Jacob Wick has become known for deconstructing the instrument itself and any expectations of how it "should" be played. The explorations on Feelfocus on sound as it relates to specific spaces and in turn the subtle but profound connections they have to emotions and the body. The result is a highly personal music that is both unique and immediate, abstract yet undeniably visceral. On Feel, Wick creates two intense side-long…
Corporal Cauliflower's Mental Function
Limited official reissue of Jim Pembroke’s 1977 solo album, originally on Love Records. Gatefold jacket, black vinyl. Limited to 300 copies.
Fabric for String Noise
Michael Byron's Fabric for String Noise, Parts 1 and 2 (2018), composed for New York’s notable violin duo String Noise, is wildly virtuosic music that is unlike just about anything else ever written for two violins. This two-movement work, a tremendous (and relentless) river of complex lines, may be said to resemble a sort of universal folk music of madly driven ecstasy, a sonic canvas wherein intense continuous activity shares space with an overarching sense of motionlessness.The composer chara…
River of 1,000 Streams
Daniel Lentz's River of 1,000 Streams is a complex, slowly growing, densely textural piece for solo piano and up to 11 layers of “cascading echoes” (which are created in a live performance via a computer running a MAX patch). Each of the piece’s hundreds of “echoes” is a short moment (generally one to a few bars in length) of the piano solo that may reappear anywhere from a half-second to 25 minutes after the pianist first plays it. Floating sparsely amid the piece’s rich primary texture of trem…
Spinneret
Mandhira de Saram and Benoît Delbecq met in 2016 in Paris and soon discovered that they loved playing together. They recorded Spinneret a year later, over a day of quiet and meditative composing, at curious distance from the animated playing they are both usually drawn to in their own projects. With a natural flair for exploring the possibilities of their instruments, they weave together a delicate tapestry of sound and texture, which hangs as though stretched and suspended in the air. Spinneret…
Magic Time: The Millennium/Ballroom Sessions
An awe-inspiring three CD set! We’ve emptied the Columbia vaults of material by these late-‘60s Curt Boettcher-led groups, whose dazzling soundscapes and choral arrangements created a perfect hybrid of sunshine pop and psychedelia. Produced with the bands’ full participation, Magic Time is the definitive compendium of Millennium/Ballroom material, including the entire Begin and Ballroom albums and an additional wealth of unheard songs and alternate versions, plus interviews and rare photos! Magi…