New Arrivals

Huge Tip! 250 copies. A sinopia is an ancient preparatory sketch technique for a fresco. If you scrape the final work off the wall, the sketch remains; simplified and powerful in it’s starkness. Alessandra Novaga, an experimental guitarist/composer based in Milan, Italy found this historic technique resonated with an album she recently recorded with NYC-based drummer Kid Millions (aka John Colpitts of Oneida, Man Forever and many other projects). Italy’s cultural past is the often transcendent a…

*300 copies limited edition* "I’ve released various materials over the years under other names, Aiko has been materialized in 2022 through self-published music and with IIKKI it's the first official release that I am very proud of. Despite this, Aiko has been publishing in other forms since 2020, but always within the sphere of ambient music." "This album was born as a long-lasting sound continuum. It was then cut, stitched together and reassembled to give shape and restore unity from the fragme…

Tip! Surface World is pleased to share David Lee Myers (aka Arcane Device) and Toshimaru Nakamura’s Elements, a remote collection written and assembled in tandem at the suggestion of the label. Sharing an idiosyncratic approach to feedback-based sound generation and a commitment to their signature instruments (respectively, the Feedback Machine and the No-Input Mixing Board), the pairing lands during an especially fruitful period in their individual discographies. Harmonically dense, energetic a…

False Walls releases a solo album from Glasgow-born and London-based guitarist Kevin Daniel Cahill. Consisting of two long tracks, the album traces a steady progression as it moves through different environments — initially ambient and isolationist in tone, the work ultimately reaches a form of transcendence. Rooted in Kevin’s guitar-playing, though not immediately identifiable as such due to the deployment of tape loops and effects, the album foregrounds feeling and atmosphere, and its duration…

Tip! Gene Coleman is a composer, musician and video director, who has created over 70 works for various instrumentation and media. Central to his work is the inventive use of sound, image and time, and the desire to create experiences that expand our understanding of the world. Since 2001 he has explored the global transformation of culture and music’s relationship with video, science and architecture. Gene has been developing a series of works around concepts of Neuro Music and Transcultural Mu…

*300 copies limited edition* Film and media composer Lyonel Bauchet is best known in the electronic music world for his mastery of the Buchla modular synthesiser. Indeed this is the instrument that was in the foreground for his previous two DiN releases, The Secret Society (DiNDDL11) and The Diver (DiN68). However for his third album on the DiN imprint he has eschewed this familiar territory and instead focused on a collection of analogue gear from Soma Laboratory. Their most famous instrument, …

*300 copies limited edition* Stephen James Buckley aka Polypores returns for his second full album on the DiN imprint following on from his 2022 debut “Hyperincandescent” (DiN71). Though we’ve come to know a wide range of sounds from Polypores, it’s here on “Multizonal Mindscramble” that we get plunged into the outer reaches of the inner psyche. Flickering insectoid transmissions are laid atop slowly shifting walls of drifting oscillators, barely discernible chirps and static-encrusted filter sw…

Tone Science sub-label, from DiN records, continues to explore the world of modular synth music.

Arbitrary presents Terrain Vague – the debut of Danish group Mesmer. The album is a series of (deconstructed) live-recordings taken from three live concerts. The sounds on this record are taken from two years’ worth of sound research and creative outbursts with inspiration from field trips to the outskirts of Copenhagen. Intrigued by the auditive landscapes of places where nature and culture meet and challenge each other. Listening to the field-recordings led Mesmer to interpret the moods, music…

Other Minds is proud to present Jepson Prairie, a new album of recent work by Bay Area composer Tom Bickley. Jepson Prairie continues Other Minds’s tradition of presenting work by under-recorded yet notable composers. Bickley has long been a presence in American New Music as evidenced by his long-standing Deep Listening work and affiliation with the Cornelius Cardew Choir, among others. Despite his many years of composing and performing, Jepson Prairie is Bickley’s debut commercial release as a …

Established by members of the British brass-rock outfit IF with the former Osibisa percussionist Loughty Amao, Zzebra was a forward-thinking hybrid mixing jazz, rock, and world music. Chief songwriter/saxophonist Dave Quincy keeps the arrangements complex and Loughty injects the African element, former Elastic Band keyboardist Gus Yeadon and guitarist John Terry adding layers of melodic inventiveness. Yielding a progressive jazz style that roped in funk, blues, and west African rhythms, this ent…

Established by members of the British brass-rock outfit IF with the former Osibisa percussionist Loughty Amao, Zzebra was a forward-thinking hybrid mixing jazz, rock, and world music. Chief songwriter/saxophonist Dave Quincy keeps the arrangements complex and Loughty injects the African element, former Elastic Band keyboardist Gus Yeadon and guitarist John Terry adding layers of melodic inventiveness. Yielding a progressive jazz style that roped in funk, blues, and west African rhythms, this ent…

Further explorations into the dark past by Tholos Gateway. After the their first Aegean trip documented in their debut album, the trio formed by Colin Marston, Àlex Reviriego and Vasco Trilla returns with the second volume of the Tholos Gateway saga. The dark and ominous atmosphere of the previous album is still here, soaking the ritualistic bells, savage bass drones and dreamy synths in a mysterious fog.This time they count with the collaboration of Yoshiko Ohara (Bloody Panda) and Mick Barr (K…

*2023 stock* Other Days represents Nate Young's most labyrinthine incursion into the nether zone between waking life and nightmarish, cryptographic noise. The recordings stem from an exhibition of lathe-cut etchings and paintings by Young and his wife, Alivia Zivich, installed at Tokyo's Haus Gallery. The process involved designing original images for 22 8" x 8" pieces of acrylic, which in turn inspired 22 audio compositions which were then lathe-cut into the acrylic. The process of lathe-cuttin…

*2023 stock* Nice Music is pleased to announce the return of cult electronica duo Pretty Boy Crossover with their first new material in 15 years, 'Echoes In The Sound Mirror'. Cailan Burns and Jason Sweeney first made an impact in 2000 with their acclaimed 'The Building and Formation' full length on Ian Hamilton, James Reid and Tim Koch's Surgery label, which introduced much of Adelaide's coy and abstract rhythms to the global audience of that era. Since the 1990s they have toiled endlessly with…

Nice Music presents 'Misting' the first solo full length from MP Hopkins since 2016 and his debut release for the label. Hopkins' solo work to date via the likes of Regional Bears, Penultimate Press and Thalamos fitfully caresses tape collage, found sound, speaker feedback and electroacoustic techniques. 7 years on from 'Blue-Lit Half Breath', 'Misting' immediately arrests with vibrant frequency and fidelity, yet no less fidgety or labyrinthine in its crypticised patterns of non-literal investig…

"These recordings are an attempt to process many long hours spent in isolation and many late nights spent both welcoming and dreading the following days." CD reissue of a one sided C90 released on Veil Tapes in 2022. Bleak, moist, subterranean noise that evokes a peaceful fearfulness. One of the best things I've heard from a relative newcomer in the past few years, it felt only right to do a CD version to spread it further.

*2023 stock. 250 copies limited edition* On March 17, 2021, Tetuzi Akiyama, Ayako Kataoka and Kiyomitsu Odai gave a concert at Ftarri in Suidobashi, Tokyo. This CD is a complete recording of the two sets they performed that day (25 and 34 minutes respectively). Akiyama played electric guitar; Kataoka used turntable, electronics and voice; and Odai performed on computer. Internationally renowned improviser/guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama lives in Tokyo and performs frequently both in Japan and overseas.…

Underpinning the foundation of “M21” are some incredible low frequency drones created by amplifying the hum from portable record players. Ugly contact sounds from touching the arms, noise and scratches: all kinds of sounds fly past, warped into a tough, tenacious sound world. "So this is how you push turntables into revolt! Divorcing them entirely from their original purpose, into a repeating infinite amplification of motors (rotation) and cartridges (contact). Essential!" - Otomo Yoshihide

Bruce Brubaker is one of the most exciting pianists in the contemporary American classical scene, according to Pitchfork. He is back with a follow-up to his 11th album Glass Piano an audacious reprise of compositions by his contemporary Philip Glass. Brubaker’s new album, Eno Piano, is a stunning reinterpretation of selected tracks from Brian Eno’s ambient masterpiece, Music for Airports, as well as three original tracks. Brubaker carefully dissects, rearranges and reconstructs the iconic compos…

"'DDD' is a field recording album recorded by Daisuke Suzuki and was originally released by Texas based IDEA in 2001 in an edition of 300 copies on LP. Sometimes field recordings can be appreciated in relation to the conceptual art form, or as an on-site sound study and documentation of a very specific phenomena. Daisuke had no concept of the idea of ​​building sonic panoramas and was specifically only Concerned with gathering lots of intriguing sound matter for his personal listening. 'DDD' was…

*2023 stock. 100 copies limited edition* Mesfin’s recording career, captured in nearly two dozen 7” singles and numerous reel-to-reel tapes, shows the strata of the most fertile decade in Ethiopia’s 20th century recording industry, when records were pressed constantly by both independent upstarts and corporate behemoths, even if they were only distributed within the confines of this East African nation. Though Mesfin was forced underground by the Derg regime that took control of Ethiopia in 1974…

*2023 stock. 300 copies limited release* And / In is the Amsterdam/Berlin-based duo of Heather Frasch and Koen Nutters creating music with objects, text, and vibrations. Shadows and light, audible and inaudible movement, air, liquids, and solids. They conduct musical investigations of objects, bodies, agents, sounds, actions, text and silence. Objects and/in silence. Text and/in sound. Reading and/in actions. A spatio-vibrational theater workshop approaching the meaning and the life of objects a…

La preuve is a rearguard action. Most of the people who inspired it are dead or retired. Old teenagers flay their former loves. They bear witness to a bygone era, but happily embraced, digested and spat out. Everything was still possible. Or possible at last. Psychedelia opened the doors of perception. Romanticism wasn't relegated to a dull formatting, a cheese without a rind. The group Poudingue, which started out ten years ago, has some fine leftovers. These are the crumbs from purgatory. The …

*Limited edition of 100 copies.* “Vowel” was recorded live by Jeton Hoxha at Braka Miladinov culture center of Struga, Macedonia, in June 2018. Previously published as only digital release on Eighth Tower Records, it was remastered and it's now available on cd. This recording is now part of the ZeroK black programs facility.

*125 copies limited edition* The abandoned railway section Castellaneta - Gioia del Colle in Puglia represents one of those places that meet the definition of 'undecided spaces', heterogeneous and dispersed realities which, precisely because of their nature of uncontrolled spaces, constitute a refuge for diversity, a product of the rational organization of the territory. A 'subnature' that lies between the natural world and the artificiality of industrial and urbanization processes. A six-hour w…

*2023 stock* In this first interpretive narrative of the life and work of Christian Wolff, Michael Hicks and Christian Asplund trace the influences and sensibilities of a contemporary composer's atypical career path and restless imagination. Written in full cooperation with Wolff, including access to his papers, this volume is a much-needed introduction to a leading avant-garde composer still living, writing music, and speaking about his own work. Wolff has pioneered various compositional and no…

The 1970 album For Children by Eero Koivistoinen was originally released by the book publishing company, Otava, which was responsible for his earlier two albums as well. Jazzpuu/Sähkö Recordings  reissued For Children in 2006 as did we in 2016, yet both of these releases have been hard to find ever since. This time around Svart brings this important piece of Koivistoinen's career, a successful amalgam of acoustic jazz and funky fusion back on the market on a limited Svart exclusive blue vinyl ed…

Odysseus, Eero Koivistoinen's first proper jazz album, gets its title from the wandering spirit of its songs, traveling from one mood to another. Performed by the Eero Koivistoinen Quintet & Sextet, because Koivistoinen wanted to extend his standard quartet (Koivistoinen-Sarmanto-Laine-Hietanen) to a quintet and invited trumpetist Bertil Lövgren to join. Also Juhani Aaltonen is questing on two tracks. Odysseus is an excellent, youthful package of forward-thinking jazz played by ambitious young j…

*125 copies limited edition* Recording of Pavel Milyakov’s live performance for the closing night of Cyprien Gaillard’s Dumpty exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris on January 8th 2023. The automaton sculpture, Le Défenseur du Temps was being activated live during the performance. Its mechanical movements can be heard on the recording. All profits go to Livyj Bereh — volunteer group based in Kyїv and working in regions affected by the war.

*2023 stock* "This is a stellar freely improvised session featuring Rodrigo Amado on tenor saxophone, Goncalo Almeida on bass and Marco Franco on drums, recorded live in Portugal in December of 2015. "Shadow" opens the album with scraping bowed bass that is recorded beautifully, giving the sound a physical immediacy and presence. After the epic bowed bass opening, Amado's raw, rending saxophone and Franco's measured percussion enter, imposing their power upon the proceedings, burning a path thro…

*2023 stock* The Audible Past explores the cultural origins of sound reproduction. It describes a distinctive sound culture that gave birth to the sound recording and the transmission devices so ubiquitous in modern life. With an ear for the unexpected, scholar and musician Jonathan Sterne uses the technological and cultural precursors of telephony, phonography, and radio as an entry point into a history of sound in its own right. Sterne studies the constantly shifting boundary between phenomena…

*2023 stock* In Soundscapes of Liberation, Celeste Day Moore traces the popularization of African American music in postwar France, where it signaled new forms of power and protest. Moore surveys a wide range of musical genres, soundscapes, and media: the US military's wartime records and radio programs; the French record industry's catalogs of blues, jazz, and R&B recordings; the translations of jazz memoirs; a provincial choir specializing in spirituals; and US State Department-produced radio …

Sax player Junji Hirose and guitarist Kazuo Imai, both Tokyo residents born in 1955, are renowned Japanese improvisers who have long propelled the country’s improvised music scene. Australian drummer Darren Moore, who is currently based in Singapore, carries on his performance activity while also teaching at Lasalle College of the Arts. Darren Moore lived in Tokyo for several years in the mid-2010s. Since then he has often visited the country and performed with Japanese musicians. In 2022 he cam…

Composer Masamichi Kinoshita, cellist Tomoki Tai, and composer/computer musician Takumi Ikeda perform on electrical equipment and electronics in the electric noise project Electric Powered Music. Kinoshita and Tai started playing sessions together around 2008 and were joined by Ikeda soon thereafter. This album includes two live improvised performances presented at Ftarri, Tokyo. The performance on track 1 (42 minutes) took place on February 26, 2023; the track 2 performance (31 minutes), on Oct…

Born in Yokohama in 1994, Kanon Aonami is an alto saxophonist and composer who plays jazz and improvised music at performance venues mainly in Tokyo and Yokohama. She is also a talented composer, and at Ftarri she often performs her own compositions in addition to improvised music. In June 2021 Aonami started appearing periodically at Ftarri; she has performed with musicians including pianist Fumi Endo, alto sax player Masahide Tokunaga, and British guitarist and Tokyo resident Sean Colum. Focus…

Tip! Something Strange In The Mountains is a new step ahead in the sound of Giron. Ambient soundscapes with hard references of the late 70s kosmiche vibe with a twist taste of modular approaches. Something Strange In The Mountains was recorded at Cosmic Electric Sector Studio during some sessions between June and November 2021. Gear used: Korg Lambda, 900ps, Electribe 2, Microsampler, Monotribe, Dreadbox Abyss, Hades, Erebus, Make Noise O-Coast, Behringer Model-D, Vermona Perfourmer mkII, Novati…

*2023 stock* Pigmy is the solo project of Vicente Maciá, founding member of 90s Spanish psych band Carrots. Highly influenced by late 60s / early 70s UK psych, folk-rock and baroque pop (think Magna Carta, Fairfield Parlour, Pete Dello, Duncan Browne, Cat Stevens, Amazing Blondel…) as well as Spanish 70s folk-pop / SSW (Solera, José y Manuel, Vainica Doble…), Pigmy surprised everyone with his previous two albums, “Miniaturas” and “Hamsterdam”, which are now cult items between psych-folk fans. Af…

*300 copies limited release* A fortunate and successful meeting “between the romantic and the analytical, the sentimental and the Pragmatic”. This double soul lives inside the ambient-electronics contained in ‘Rote Um’, the debut album by the artistic partnership between TeZ (Maurizio Martinucci, member of Clock DVA since 2010) and Saverio Rosi (aka ‘Leastupperbound’ and member of the band ‘Open to the Sea’ with Enrico Coniglio and Matteo UIggeri). Both Italian composers based in Amsterdam, TeZ …

*2023 stock. 200 copies limited edition* Masahiko Okura is a Tokyo-based reed player (clarinet, alto sax, etc.), improviser and composer. Apart from his performances on reed instruments, he is energetically engaged in performance activities with his solo project Active Recovering Music. Okura is also a member of the experimental music group Suidobashi Chamber Ensemble. In 2004, Okura released the solo album "Time Service" on the Improvised Music from Japan label. The highly original performance …