New Arrivals
What Else Is There
In late winter of 2021, four improvisers convened in a Chicago studio. This rare event united UK pianist Alexander Hawkins, midwestern bassist Tatsu Aoki, stalwart drummer Michael Zerang, and me, sleepless Oakland guitarist Karl Evangelista (who had arrived in O'Hare mere hours before downbeat). During breaks, the conversation turned to music and family, two threads that seemed to dominate the waking lives of the musicians involved. Pondering this notion, Aoki asked, "What else is there?". "What…
For The People Of The Open Heart
Three masters in their respective instrumental fields. Wybithy trombonist Steve Swell, one of Germany's most active percussionists Klaus Kugel and Mark Tokar, a Ukrainian double bassist who swapped his double bass for a rifle for the duration of the war with Russia. They are not a working band, but when they stand on stage together you get the feeling that they have been playing together forever and understand each other in half a word and create music of great power and momentum. All the music …
Openness
Let's move to Montreal in 2006, when Francois Carrier's ensemble performed on the La Chapelle festival stage with an unusual and astonishing line-up.
The leader recalls that time: "In late 2005, I was putting together my annual series of concerts with both local and international artists and musicians. Two of these nights were dedicated to special guests. At the time, I had just heard of Tomasz Stanko from his beautiful album, Matka Joanna. Instantly, I knew I had to do something with him. I lis…
Kaleiding (music for a performance by Lily&Janick)
Kaleiding is the debut show of the contemporary circus company Lily&Janick. It's a play between light, reflections and new perspectives onto partner acrobatics. With a long mirror that lays on the floor, images are getting created that hypnotize – like watching an everyday life situation through a kaleidoscope. This distorted reality invites into a decelerated world where up is down and down is up. Kaleiding is a movement based show working on the border between dance, circus and visual arts.
Incorporeal
Burnt down utopias and urban paranoia, Hidden Horse are back with their second album. “Incorporeal” is the follow-up to 2022’s “Opala” and the band’s first release on vinyl. Composed by João Kyron (keyboards/electronics) and Tony Watts (drums), long-time friends and collaborators on different projects, the most prominent one being the exotic and dreamy Beautify Junkyards (Ghost Box). As a duo they’re a totally different game.
Playing live regularly after the release of “Opala” offered them the p…
For Franz
*150 copies limited edition* "It starts very simply. March 1988. The birth of an elephant. Basically, not exactly. Hair and teeth, we were told, it’s like that, it happens more often than you think. He was hungry and he was dirty. There he sucks the vacuum cleaner. We couldn’t stop laughing ! There he purrs. Time flies so fast and he has grown. «Aggression, like love», he used to say, «is first projected onto an individual who then introject them». In the introjective phases, identification with…
Sin Comentarios
*150 copies limited edition* This fateful meeting with a tree makes this collaborative album with Anla Courtis take one a more serious aspect that first intended, as it was the last project Perrot completed before his untimely meeting with the tree in the Forêt de Fontainebleau forest, the master completed just two days before the accident. Courtis was of course shocked by his collaborator’s sudden death, the two had never met in person, but he wanted this LP to be a fitting tribute to his late …
Mirrors
*150 copies limited edition* For their first collaboration as a duo, rather than succumb to the devastating fury that is the hallmark of so-called 'noise' music, Michael Morley (electric guitar) and Michel Henritzi (lapsteel) have opted for the open sea, and the interior landscapes with the ghostly strangeness that is usually associated with them. The emergence of embryonic melodies under their fingers never frightens them. On the contrary, it allows them to delve deeply into the contemplative a…
Sfinge
Following the 40th anniversary edition of Barbara e altri Carella - the classic and hard to find Funk / AOR masterpiece by Enzo Carella - in September, it's now time for a due re-issue of Sfinge, its follow-up released in 1981 whose original edition usually sells on the second-hand market for prices even crazier than those of Barbara... Carella was an Italian singer-songwriter who is best remembered for his 1979 major hit Barbara, which won second prize at the Sanremo Festival. Once again, all t…
Indium
“Too often we describe music using classifications; genres like “jazz,” “experimental,” “avant-garde” are an easy shorthand to relay the rough parameters of the music to another person who may not have heard it. But these words are useful because they’re so vague, and they are most often used when the impression the music makes is equally vague. But when a group makes sounds that move the listener, these terms don’t hold up.
Dry Speed has released a record that is, at turns, futuristic and organ…
Villa Graps
*2023 stock* Released by Apartment Records (aparec028) on 6 January 2010 as an LP pressed on 180 gram vinyl and packaged in a silk screened sleeve with fluorescent artwork. 1st edition of 100 copies on black vinyl; 10-15 with orange lettering on the sleeve, the rest with red lettering. 2nd edition of 100 copies on transparent red vinyl; 47 copies with blue lettering on the sleeve, the rest with blood red lettering.
Recorded Summer 2006.Performed by Kjell Runar Jenssen, Per Gisle Galåen, Lasse Ma…
Blackbox Life Recorder 21f / In A Room7 F760
With his first widely available new material in 5 years, Aphex Twin returns with an intricate and melodic addition to his discography. The machines co-opted in production are as complex as the Weirdcore artwork, layering signature sombre ambient chords with intricate drum programming. ‘Blackbox Life Recorder 21f’ marks Aphex Twin’s official and celebrated return to augment our current reality.
Fae Transit
*200 copies limited release* Fae Transit is an expedition into a realm of faerie music Sam McLoughlin introduced us to in his contribution to Folklore Tapes’ Swifter than the Moon’s Sphere. If Green and Brown was a sighting of a faerie parade, Fae Transit is a full abduction, a journey through a woodland inhabited by spirits and haunted by the living.
The album is written entirely for harmonium, nylon guitar, hand percussion and dictaphone, with harmonium and finger-plucked guitar continually ex…
La Sorcière de Rochefort-en-Terre
*300 copies limited release* Folklore Tapes first foray into overseas finds them in a rural Breton village known as Rochefort-en-Terre. Once inhabited by the renowned witch Naia, who along with her ‘spirit stick’ familiar ‘Gnami’ cured ills, cursed locals, split in two and crushed hot coals into dust! Naia is a collaboration with Brittany arts group Le Bon Acceuil and features two distinct sonic explorations into the infamous witch, largely based around the article and photography of Charles Gén…
Oto No Hajimari Wo Motomete 4: Shigeru Sato Work
*2023 repress!!* Long out of print the 4th issue of archive series of NHK electronic music studio. Originally, Kosugi's “Catch Wave '71” was included in this issue, but, by a problem between composer and publisher, the CD was cancelled after several days of selling! Eventually, instead of Kosugi, Ranta's “Kagakuhenka” was up for renewed issue.
1. “Divertimento” Keitaro Miho This is a live performance of live percussion instruments and electronically produced percussion instruments. Until the…
Rot
** 500 copies. Limited 50th Anniversary Edition: embossed, reverse board, hand numbered, limited edition red vinyl ** There was a particular type of artist who could only have emerged in the legendary early 1970s. Few musicians fit the bill better than Conrad Schnitzler. Revolution, pop art and Fluxus created a climate which engendered unbridled artistic and social development. Radical utopias, excessive experimentation with drugs, and ruthless (in a positive way) transgression of aesthetic fron…
Kip Of The Serenes
*2023 stock* Ireland's answer to the Incredible String Band, Dr. Strangely Strange engaged in the same type of psychedelic acoustic music with folksy arrangements. With traditional instruments like penny whistle, fiddle, harmonium, and mandolin, Dr. Strangely Strange was more solidly rooted in melody and structure than the group's flaky Scottish counterparts. Produced by British modern folk guru Joe Boyd, Kip of the Serenes is built around simple and repetitious melodies occasionally interrupted…
First
*2023 stock* German proto heavy metal and proto doom metal has always been more of an underground topic due to the fact that most bands only reached a regional level in every aspect. Dies Irae are certainly something of an exception to the rule when it comes to the quality. What you get here is a heavy and dark music with open song structures that leave much room for experimentation. Despite the fact that the simmering fuzz guitar cuts through your burning soul like a chainsaw there are still ma…
Larks' Tongues In Aspic
Larks' Tongues In Aspic is the fifth in a series of audiophile King Crimson vinyl reissues. Newly cut from masters approved by Robert Fripp, this super-heavyweight 200gm vinyl re-issue is housed in a reprint of the original sleeve. With its raw tone, inspired improvisations and hard hitting odd-metered rhythms, the album marked a radical departure for this most forward thinking of groups and was the first to include Bill Bruford and John Wetton as band members. King Crimson reborn yet again -- t…
McDonald And Giles
Following the meltdown of the original King Crimson lineup, Ian McDonald and Michael Giles brought brother Peter Giles back, which helps to account, in some ways, for the resemblance of this album to the 1968 Giles, Giles & Fripp recordings -- though the songs here tend to go on at some length, combining prog rock's traits of length and multiple sections with some of the lighter feel of the GG&F days. The 20-minute "Birdman" tends toward self-indulgence, while "Tomorrow's People - The Children o…