New Arrivals
Tissue of Lies
Mannequin Records celebrates 40 years of Nocturnal Emissions a reissue their first album, Tissue Of Lies, released on the band's own Sterile Records label in 1980. Tissue Of Lies shows you Nocturnal Emissions' industrial roots, from noisy collages to classic power noise, reminding the early Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, Faust (Tapes period) or Conrad Schitzler's Schwarz. The Nocturnal Emissions project, masterminded by Nigel Ayers, has been on the cutting edge of new music since the 19…
The Unasked Answer
In 1908, Charles Ives wrote a work called “The Unanswered Question”. It was for the unusual instrumentation of offstage string ensemble, woodwind quartet and, most significant for our purposes here, solo trumpet. Though it was inspired, we think, by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem “The Sphinx”, Ives provided his own explanatory text. The trumpet asks “The Perennial Question of Existence” seven times, to which the woodwinds provide only six increasingly disordered answers, while the strings, heard at …
L'Herbe Qui Rend Amoureux
ince their debut concert at the legendary Grande Festo in 2018, a magic summer gathering and tennis tournament held on a honey & walnut farm deep in the Ardèche mountains, southern France, La Fureur De Vouivre boggle your mind with their medieval inspired rhythms and snake charmer style flute deliriums. This album is a trip, an adventure quest in search for the grass that makes you fall in love. The duo of Pauline Marx and Julien Groboz shake up their fizzling tunes and miniatures out of a barn …
Hipólito
Tulips is a percussionist and improviser from Cologne. Hipólito is a selection of recordings from 2019 and 2020.
Creepy Crawly
Somewhere between the buzzing Cyborg bugs and the whistling of extinct birds. Welcome to the hybrid zoo built on the ruins of the biotic crisis. You can explore the chirping, singing and trilling of birds and insects, which you know from pictures of cryptozoological encyclopedias or go straight to synthetic ornithology, where you can listen to mutated biorhythms. Everyone knows Mockingjay call, but who heard the voice of the Double-headed emu or the rustle of invisible community living in the cr…
Natursymphony No.1 - Spring Music
The overlap between the organic and the synthetic is Vlad Dobrovolski’s stomping ground. Digitally organised sounds melt into squalling melodies that grow and stretch over and under each other like the fractal leaves of a fern, spiraling inwards and outwards into a tesseract of connective tissue. “The more carefully you listen, the more you hear,” explains the Russian-born sound artist. “No two moments are exactly alike in nature. The song is always changing. I find myself listening in ways I ne…
Lamunan
** Edition of 90 copies** Forged alone in a cave on the island of Java, and recorded in a fortress in Poland, Antonina Nowacka’s “Lamunan” is an intimate exploration of a mysterious darkness and the earliest of musical forms. Nowacka has co-created raw electronics and audiovisuals as half of WIDT and the enigmatic Mentos Gulgendo, but her solo practice focuses solely on the voice’s inherent connection to mental states, its ability to speak wordlessly, and the apparatus of speech itself – leading…
America Lament
**Edition of 300. It comes with a 20-page booklet, with program notes, scores, and an interview between Morrow & McCann** America Lament is a panoramic musical survey of legendary experimental composer/event-maker Charlie Morrow’s eclectic works. At just over 40-minutes, America Lament is mysterious, beguiling, and jubilant, comprised of pieces employing everything from hand-made electronics to Irish lap pipes, ecstatic jazz to Schubert recompositions, ambient flutes, and a string quartet.
Charl…
De Ossibus 20
**Limited edition of 100. Includes 12-page booklet** De ossibus 20 is the debut LP by sound artist and poet Kiera Mulhern (b.1992). Bridging classic sound poetry elements with micro studies of the artist’s body and environment. Burying a microphone in a book, this LP picks up fragments of words and memories, humming the rustles of parchment. It reminds me of Henri Chopin at times, busy mouth clusters bang against the air. Kiera made this album as a means of organizing loss after her mother’s…
Freedom Power
**small repress soon available** Outstanding and legendary Italian Library originally released in 1976 on the glorious Cometa label on a very limited run. A totally killer album with tones of mental Jazz-Funk and Psychedelic beats. The listener is constantly catched by the incredible music that swings between Psychedelic Funk, Esoteric Jazz and Cinematic/Love themes. Tracks like Love For Sale, Privacy, Metropolis Notte and Dopping 2000 are simply timeless, with a stunning sound that perfectly pl…
U.F.O.
*2020 stock* In March 1975, Jim Sullivan mysteriously disappeared outside Santa Rosa, New Mexico. His VW bug was found abandoned, his motel room untouched. Some think he got lost in the desert. Some think he fell foul of a local family with alleged mafia ties. Some think he was abducted by aliens.
By coincidence – or perhaps not – Jim’s 1969 debut album was titled U.F.O. Released in tiny numbers on a private label, it too was truly lost, until Seattle’s Light In The Attic Records begun a years-l…
Jim Sullivan
*2020 stock* On March 4, 1975, Jim Sullivan mysteriously disappeared outside Santa Rosa, New Mexico. His VW bug was found abandoned, his motel room untouched. Some think he got lost. Some think the mafia bumped him. Some even think he was abducted by aliens.
By coincidence–or perhaps not–Jim’s 1969 debut album was titled U.F.O. Released in tiny numbers on a private label, it too was truly lost until Light In The Attic Records began a years-long quest to re-release it–and to solve the mystery of …
Shaggs' Own Thing
*Red coloured LP* When The Shaggs’ Philosophy Of The World came out in 1969, some people couldn’t or wouldn’t understand it. But many musicians, including Frank Zappa and Kurt Cobain, cited the Shaggs as a major influence. Heck, Zappa exclaimed they were “better than the Beatles!” NRBQ’s Terry Adams and Keith Spring were such fans, and after reissuing Philosophy in 1980 on their own Red Rooster label, Adams began work on a collection of recordings the Wiggin sisters had made in the years followi…
BOW
Brussels-based string quintet BOW celebrates musical freedom. Juggling between their own written music and pure improvisation, the ensemble has worked since its creation on a personal and modern approach, digging into their instruments' capabilities and blending a large scope of influences.
Its debut eponym LP, due to be released on Sub Rosa, gathers five instantly-composed pieces that were recorded live by Christine Verschorren in the Echo Collective studio in Brussels. During the day, BOW repe…
Entry Points. Resonating Punk, Performance, and Art
*2020 stock. Edition of 200. 52 pages, Risograph printed artist book with CD* During the late 1960s and early 1970s, as members of the performance art group Exit, Penny Rimbaud and Gee Vaucher turned to creating outside of the gallery system and artistic conventions. Taking inspiration from Eastern philosophy, particularly Buddhism and Taoism, they searched for ways to push beyond the boundaries of Western art practices and rationalities.
This resonates with Redza Piyadasa and Suleiman Esa’s 19…
Imagined Commonities: Live At La Cave 12, Genève
FEN is an improvised music quartet. Comprising Otomo Yoshihide (Japan), Yuen Chee Wai (Singapore), Yan Jun (China) and Ryu Hankil (Korea), it was formed in 2008 in Marseille.
The initial intent of forming FEN was not based on a particular pursuit of any specific form of musical aesthetic, but rather to develop and deepen the improvised music networks of Asia. This desire was furthered by these 4 individuals, each with their individual endeavours to organise music-related activities and bridge co…
Trails to the Cosmic Vibrations
*2020 stock. Edition of 300, last copies. Comes with custom-made foil which transforms the special cover art by acclaimed artist Takashiro Kurashima into a kaleidoscopic trail of electric vibrations.* 1 continent, 2 bands, 42 musicians! Trails to the Cosmic Vibrations is a split LP that brings together two bands from Asia with outwardly contrasting dispositions, while sharing sympathetic resonances.
On Side A, hailing from Osaka, Japan, we have the ever exuberant postmodern psychrock legends, Ac…
Authority is Alive
Recorded live at the Playfreely Festival in Singapore, November 2019, Authority is Alive is a potent performance mixed from an intoxicating brew of poetry, philosophy and sonic alchemy. Bearing the theme “The Transparency of Turbulence”, the festival featured a strong line-up of East Asian and Southeast Asian artists and bore the ambition to be “an alternative to how we coalesce and navigate a region that is continuously torn apart by words, egos, greed and ideologies.”
“Everything... living... …
Hope
Bourbonese Qualk were an experimental music group from England who where active from 1979 until 2003. The group were always obsessively and uncompromisingly focused on controlling their work – they ran their own record label, recording studio, tour organisation and music venue (the legendary ‘Ambulance Station’) – they refused to integrate into the commercial music racket turning down publishing deals from major labels – stubbornly opting for total independence.
Bourbonese Qualk were also known …
Summing
Oscar Jan Hoogland is the sound of Amsterdam in person. He plays in the Muziekgebouw (Amsterdams main hall for modern composed music) as well as in the Bimhuis (Holland’s main jazz venue) that is literally attached to it, as in its parking garage. He is an instant composer, pianist and inventor of his own instrument by putting a clavichord, a keyboard instrument from the 17th century, on 220 Volt electricity.
As the last student of the late pianist, composer and improvisor Misha Mengelberg he te…