New Arrivals
Models of Duration
*Limited edition of 400 copies.* The latest from the uncompromising John McCowen is a split release between Dinzu Artefacts and Astral Spirits. Models of Duration follows the same trajectory as McCowen's other amazing solo releases - Solo Contra (International Anthem, 2017), 4 Chairs in 3 Dimensons (Astral Spirits, 2018), Mundanas I - V (Editions Wandelweiser, 2018) but is also a whole world beyond those. McCowen continues to focus on extended possibilities of the clarinet family as well as acou…
New Hope Jazz Mass
The definitive Jazz Mass! Never before heard second day takes, includes alternate version of Duke & Trane!
Second day take of the acclaimed 1978 New Hope Jazz Mass recording from Helsinki Finland, newly remastered and never before released, features different soloist and a performance believed to be better than the original release. Featuring Heikki Sarmanto, Seppo Paakkunainen, Pekka Pöyry, Esko Rosnell, Pekka Sarmanto, Maija Hapuoja, Gregg Smith Vocal Quartet and Long Island Symphonic Choral A…
Trending
*2022 stock.* Sofa Music is proud to welcome a new project on board. It’s Propan, a duo comprising the two Norwegian vocalists; Natali Garner and Ina Sagstuen. On their second album Propan continues its research within the frameworks of the song form and presents a psychedelic, and more delirious landscape than on its first, somewhat more electroacoustic album, Baby. The duo explores the meeting point between improvised music and studio production, and builds the album around Propan's well-estab…
Strapazen und Genesung
Geier aus Stahl is one of the many artistic guises of Leonard Prochazka. No superfluous elements take away from the core experience of his sound. Somewhere a statement from David Byrne crossed our path, able to highlight something of the essence of Leonard's art: “No matter how alienated the subject or the singer might appear, the groove and its connection to the body would provide solace and grounding. But the edgy, uncomfortable stuff was still on the foreground”. The debut album 'Strapazen un…
It Changes
*2022 stock.* It Changes is a new album by Ailie Ormston and Tim Fraser. It incorporates samples of collaborative session material, automated MIDI instrumentation, and adhoc field recordings. Music from this album was first presented in 2019 as a larger audio-visual work which debuted at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow as part of Counterflows festival. The recordings were then completed in 2020 during the first lockdown using voice notes, and by running a 7.5m headphone cable between…
Transparent Waves
*2022 stock.* When does our experience of sound become "music"? In the tradition of John Cage and Morton Feldman, in which sounds – and silences – can just be themselves, Thomas DeLio plays with the spaces between your ears as much as the sounds he puts there. In short, be advised this album is replete with clicks, silences, and brief sound events. Stripped bare, it plays with time and space and the minimum conditions for music. It gives the term ‘experimental music’ meaning. DeLio’s approach to…
Apophany
If you were to connect seemingly unrelated things – Heavy Metal and the symphony orchestra, for example – you might be guilty of apophenia. That friction between opposites has never been a problem for Nick Vasallo, though – his music is equally at home in both worlds. Melding Xenakis, Varese, Extreme Metal, and Dark Ambient with gothic charm, Vasallo conjures up a muscular sonic battle that leads you on an inexorable musical journey to a conclusion where surrender is your best option. Catharsis …
Orchard
*2022 Stock.* “I was born and raised in Kentucky, and for many generations my direct ancestors and extended family have been farmers. So, creating music that is ‘about’ soil, plant life, and the natural world, is my way of honoring that legacy.” Composer Tyler Kline’s tools, though, are not the plow – and vegetables are not the crop – in this collection of brief piano pieces commissioned by and for over a dozen pianists. Instead, Orchard is a celebration of fruit. Each sketch draws on a specific…
Transmutation of Things
There is a venerable history of popular songs used as the starting point for elaborate classical compositions, but 500 years ago Josquin and Dufay never imagined using a gargantuan digital orchestra with up to 300 layered tracks pushing architectural proportion and human perception to the max. And yet, that is exactly what composer, MC Maguire, does in his Toronto studio. It’s daunting, it’s overwhelming, and it has to be heard (preferably loud) to be believed. Dubbed “the most irritating and sp…
Signals
Lawson & Merrill are not financial advisors. But if electroacoustic bliss is what you seek, you would do well to make an appointment with them. They – David Margolin Lawson and David Merrill – met a number of years ago while engineering sessions at the revered CityVox Studios in New York City. They discovered they both had a love for “mid century” electronic music and composers like Morton Subotnick, Eliane Radigue, Edgard Varèse, Ilhan Mimaroğlu, and Steve Reich. It wasn’t until recently, thoug…
Intervals 2
*In process of stocking.* “Well, isn’t it always now?” Joel Futterman’s audible smile, in response to my simple query about the time during a phone conversation, bespeaks and accentuates the deeper truths embodied in his creativity. Grounded, sometimes adrift, forced to live in the world of duality, we capitulate too willingly to the whims and whiles of intervals, to their capricious grip on our intersecting realities, to their encapsulation of alternating mood and ebb-and-flow vitality. Doors o…
Widoki
*In process of stocking.* Three very young men in their CD debut. The leader is Artur Małecki 20-year-old drummer and composer who creat music with his musical friends: Michał Aftyka on double bass and bass guitar and Przemysław Chmiel on soprano and tenor saxophones. On Widoki you have a chance to listen to the most promising and youngest generation of the Polish jazz scene.
Sonic Animism: The Emergence
"Sonic Animism" is a site-determined body and sound performance that investigates the state of the sentient-being on the non-human agency brought by technological sonic happenings.
The framework of the performance is an artificial environmental cycle system where each element incorporates with each other in a dynamic process. It permits micro level of properties evolve to novel integrated wholes
With this performance, Yang aims to blur the binary separation between the "objective existence" an…
A New Score For Koyaanisqatsi
** White vinyl ** Dark-folk songwriter Chantal Acda and beyond drums-percussion musician extraordinaire Eric Thielemans propose a new score for Koyaanisqatsi, re-actualizing the incredibly beautiful, raw, rhythmic, and touching images of this '80s cinematographic masterpiece. Slow deep electric waves, lonely synths in sonic desert landscapes, rhythmic pulses, transporting drums and bells, and deeply longing sounds and voices make up the audible fundamentals of this imagined, neo shamanic, ritual…
Galaxy Heart
Galaxy Heart is the companion album to Phosphenes (Nov 2021) and completes an intensive body of work that Montréal composer-violinist Jessica Moss wrote, performed and self-produced in deep isolation throughout 2020. As A Closer Listen wrote in its Top Ten Modern Composition list for 2021, "few musical voices represent so well the estrangement and intensity of our times; Moss is among the best of them." Galaxy Heart consolidates this assessment, revealing the more exploratory and extemporaneous …
Bridge Variations
On Bridge Variations, the now Stockholm-based English guitarist Jon Collin changes his guitar for a keyed fiddle. Mostly recorded to tape under different bridges around Stockholm during 2021, partly for the sound but also because of their importance to the geographical make-up of the place, the album is like a modern take on traditional Swedish folk music made by an outsider looking in. The sound is pretty much a continuation of the palette explored on 'Dream Sequence, End Of Summer', Collin's c…
Waiters On The Dance
*In process of stocking. Limited edition of 500 copies* Another unsung hero of the long lost british prog history, Julian Jay Savarin is a keyboard player and composer, poet and science fiction author, hence the association with the most epic and romantic tendencies of the genre. He was born in Dominica (an island between Martinique and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean) and moved to the UK in 1962. He debuted in 1970 with Julian's Treatment, a short-lived progressive rock band which his sole album – …
Fleeting Adventure
*In process of stocking.* Andrew Tuttle's Fleeting Adventure is a musical adventure through a reimagined journey from the Australian ambient producer and banjo player. A crew of fellow travellers - including Steve Gunn, Chuck Johnson, Luke Schneider and Balmorhea - help navigate a cosmic trip into subtropical landscapes. Golden plucks of banjo, gauzy electronics and cosmic guitar shimmer into gloriously expansive melodies that conjure peace and space, comfort and wonder.
A deepening sense of lif…
It's Nothing, But Still
*In process of stocking* Steve Fors offers deeply physical music on his Hallow Ground debut »It's nothing, but still.« Having already established himself as a composer of visceral drone and noise pieces in various Chicago- and New York-based underground projects, Fors’s first release under his given name is even more dense and evocative than his earlier work. A concept album on the subject of breath, the Siavash Amini-produced record sees the now Swiss-based composer blend field recordings with …
Selected Improvisations From Golha, Pt. II
The second part in a collection of stunning Persian-tuned piano pieces, cut from Iranian national radio broadcasts made for the Golha programmes between 1956 & 1965.