New Arrivals
Stillness in their isolation
low volume listening highly encouraged.
for a while now, i've been fascinated in the sensory threshold, the moment in between sensing or not, like when doing a hearing test; at one point you hear a sound and next you don't, but you're not quite sure. do you hear the beeps, something from outside or maybe something from inside yourself?
for this project, i wanted to try and recontextualize loud traffic and constant hum of air conditioning units into a quiet, nearly inaudible form as the hustle an…
Pas de la Demi-Lune
"Halfway between the Summer Solstice and Autumn Equinox falls the pagan Lughnasadh festival marking the beginning of the harvest season in Ireland. Pas de la Demi-Lune was originally composed and performed for this festival in a celebration event organized by Phelim Ó Laoghaire. For that occasion, Dylan performed the piece in the river crossing leading to the Brennanstown Dolmen in Co. Dublin, a megalith portal tomb estimated to have been erected sometime in 4000-2500 BC. They chose to record in…
Lights shimmered like whispers in the depths of the trees
Textures of belonging, relentlessly woven into the epigenetics, layer upon layer, building palimpsests of human existence that are both fragile and resilient, with nothing but a wobbly strand of DNA. The way our grandparents' experiences spill across our systems, the way their grandparents’ experiences formed them in the first place, like a busy cityscape humming in the background, keeping the flow, making things operate, and despite their physical peril, hearts still flicker and divulge poetry …
anabasis (1)
anabasis (1) is a composition in 72 parts for five musicians, based on four kinds of materials: Sand, Wind, Tone and Wave; these materials are arranged and intertwined with a fifth ‘Interludes’ strand that interacts with the four materials. All of these are then ‘unbound’ over the course of the piece by changing continuity in a variety of ways outlined in the score. This interpretation of the score is a live performance that features prepared reed organ, electromagnetic pick-ups, sand, pedals, D…
A Fine Chance for Permanence
*100 copies limited edition* A Fine Chance for Permanence captures a pivotal moment in contemporary improvisation, where a new generation of musicians reshapes the language of spontaneous music in response to an increasingly fragmented, hyper-connected world. Drawing from decades of experimental traditions—from 1960s free music to the reductionist movements of the early 2000s—the album proposes a fluid, “both/and” aesthetic that resists fixed ideologies in favor of multiplicity, dialogue, and sh…
Kite
*200 copies limited edition* Mysterious lycanthrope and sound-explorer from Gothenburg, Sweden and surrounding forests - behind the name Ratvader is the composer Oscar Sidoff Rydelius. Discreet Music crossed paths with Oscar for the first time during 2025, a chance meeting that resulted in the enchanting 14-track album Kite now released on Gustaf Dickssons in-house imprint Frihetens Förlag. Evocative and strangely moving soundtrack-style compositions that at times feels like the medieval bastard…
Live at Somewhere
"I call it ‘the Shadow Pattern Vignette’. A fragmentary and pleasingly non-discriminatory exercise in audio capture which, when sequenced, compiled or arranged alongside other such vignettes, leads to the finished work of Nate Ivanco’s Shadow Pattern. You can reach into the hermetic depths of his Hamilton Tapes micro label, recent transatlantic appearances via Infant Tree, Chocolate Monk or adhuman, or indeed, this new LP ‘Live at Somewhere’ and find the Shadow Pattern Vignette. Forever in evide…
Everybody Else's Life Too
Were you to tap the lifeblood of Chicago music, you would find Josh Berman flowing liberally through its veins. Active on the scene for more than a quarter century, the cornetist, bandleader, and composer has helped retain the unique flavor of the city's soundscape, with particular attention to the music of its jazz past – groups like the Austin High Gang and the Oliver-Armstrong lineage and Freddie Keppard, as well as more recent figures from Lester Bowie to Wadada Leo Smith.
But Berman is more…
The Dream Island of Birds
Mike Cooper returns to Discrepant with »The Dream Island of Birds«. Neither documentary nor abstraction, »The Dream Island of Birds« sits between field recording, memory, and invention — an island heard through time and circuitry.
In the early 1990s, Cooper met illustrator and writer Charles van Sandwyk while walking on a small island in Fiji. Van Sandwyk was living there quietly, working from a modest bamboo house near the beach. Years later, Cooper learned that following a serious car accident…
Movie
*150 copies limited edition* Filmmaking and music-making share a common element of worldbuilding. Whole cloth, environments are raised in which a perspective can be placed; the viewer, the listener, is taken on a ride into the unknown for a time. Movie, the newest album by DMV-based duo Lifted, is like a film shot with microphones rather than cameras, using the pacing, spatialization, and semiotics of cinematic sound design to lead us through a surreal soundworld that draws as much from Foley ar…
Fragments of Soaring Vessels
The tracks that make up Fragments of Soaring Vessels are conceived as “sensitive vehicles.” Although they seem quite different at first listen, closer listening reveals multiple points of intersection—often overlapping, sometimes paradoxical. The Inexpressible Feeling of Dereliction approaches an attempt at a sonic transposition of a feeling of emptiness and rupture that may arise in an extreme situation, in which a pious person is confronted with a moment of absolute disillusionment regarding t…
Electronic Music 1994-2021
*2026 stock* For this album I have assembled a collection of contrasting works from the archives. Some have previously been released, others not. Three pieces: Sculptor, Touche pas, and Bubble chamber are based on the microsound techniques of granular synthesis and micro-montage. By contrast, Modulude, Clang-tint, and Still life were conceived before my microsound period. For any given piece, my compositional practice usually takes years. For example, Modulude was initially conceived in 1998 and…
Ça commence par la marche
With Ça commence par la marche (It Begins with the Walk), Jérémie Ternoy presents an immersive work in which repetition becomes movement and movement becomes sonic architecture. Building on a career shaped by major collaborations — notably with Magma — as well as his own projects (Organik Orkeztra, his trio, and TOC), he delivers here a fully realized synthesis of his artistic explorations.
The album makes walking its founding principle: moving forward slowly, perceiving the world in its finest …
Elektronic für alle
*50 copies limited edition* Electronic songs composed, performed and produced by Benjamin Adams in Cologne 2024/2025. Mastered by Marcus Zilz at Mount Wobble Studio. Song 1, 7 and 8 originally composed for the performance on miraculous things heard by Constantin Leonhard. Song 8 includes samples of the Ringing Rocks of Montana, recorded and provided by Kevin Stahl.
Alina
A long awaited day for those who have followed the ECM New Series catalogue. Originally issued on CD in 1999, Arvo Pärt's Alina arrives on vinyl for the very first time, more than a quarter century after its first appearance and over three decades after the sessions it preserves. For years, it has sat near the top of the list of ECM New Series titles most frequently asked after on vinyl, both by Pärt's listeners and by those who follow the imprint's contemporary classical line in its most author…
1984 (A Happening 2)
Limited Edition of 300 copies with handmade covers. A document of singular rarity. Issued by United Dairies in March 2026 in a hand-made, heavy-gauge black vinyl edition limited to 300 copies, 1984 - A Happening recovers the second ever public performance of Nurse With Wound, captured on tape in 1984 and held in Steven Stapleton's archive across the four decades since.
The history is nearly mythological. Across the years 1984 to 1986, NWW operated briefly and reluctantly as a live band, performi…
Requiem For George Maciunas
A vital tape work returning to circulation thirty-six years after its private cassette debut. Mieko Shiomi's 1990 memorial for George Maciunas, self-released that year on a privately circulated cassette and unheard in proper edition since, now receives a first ever CD reissue, mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. In accordance with the composer's wishes, this edition presents the work's two sides spliced together into a single continuous piece.
By 1990 Shiomi had already lived several musical lives. A f…
Robert Morris: Carnatic String Quartet
The interesting thing about Robert Morris’s (b. 1943) remarkable career as a composer (and a theorist) is how free he is to move from composing works of great rigor with intricate integrity in his use of pitch-class design, to works of sonic beauty to be performed in a natural outdoor environment, to imaginative electronic/computer music, to the music of acculturation. Among the latter, his monumental Carnatic String Quartet is an outstanding example. In his own words: “Carnatic String Quartet (…
Faint Light Blackens
*200 copies limited edition* On his fourth solo album, and debut work for the Psychic Liberation imprint, Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø presents Faint Light Blackens, a negotiation between the atomized instrumentation of the solo trombone is pushed towards a “full range wall of sound” over the concise sprawl of seven distinct acts on two sides of a vinyl record. The seven acts that make up the album were developed specifically for recording within Emanuel Vigeland’s “Tomba Emmanuelle”. The fresco with…
At The Emerald Pool
Netherlands-based artists Tomo Katsurada (Ex-Kikagaku Moyo / Future Days Radio) and Jonny Nash (Melody As Truth) combine forces for an exploration into the sonic potential of the guitar duo, rooted in their experiences performing together over the last 12 months. Friends and admirers of each other’s work for a decade, their musical collaboration began in 2024 with Katsurada asking Nash to contribute guitar to his debut EP ‘Dream Of The Egg’. Sensing the need to explore this further, they spent t…