New Arrivals
Commissions: 1977-2000
Makoto Inoue and Yasushi Yamashita’s Inoyama Land project spans nearly four decades, still active to this day. A portmanteau of their family names, the “Land” of Inoyama hovers between imagined mythical space and concrete reality, extending beyond physical releases into installations, site-specific sound design and theatre scores.
After their famed Haruomi Hosono-produced 1983 release Danzindan-Pojidon, the duo became involved in the budding environmental music business that was taking shape in …
I'll Remember
LP version. Tip-on sleeve. For every celebrated name in jazz, soul and related music, there are probably another 1000 musicians who had all the talent and potential but for whom widespread recognition remained elusive. Roscoe Weathers is one such figure, a jazzman who earned his chops the hard way, a sideman in smoky clubs from Memphis to Seattle, before finally settling in LA. He recorded a significant amount of music through the 1960s, but never found the slightest modicum of commercial acclai…
Return To Monster Planet
A sequel to the cult 1975 Australian space rock album Monster Planet. In 2013 The Roundtable curated a dedicated program redocumenting the music of Australia’s legendary space rock band Cybotron. A new generation of electronic music enthusiasts and krautrock fans alike had been introduced or had perhaps been reconnected to the unlikely yet incredible sounds of Australia’s unique brand of ‘kosmische musik’. This archival series included Steve Maxwell Von Braund’s groundbreaking solo album Monster…
Overgrowth
* Edition of 200 * Overgrowth: We consider technology as a tool at our disposal, while it has become the environment around us and takes only care of efficiency.
So, nowadays, the technical apparatus became more important than men and their needs.
It has no purpose, or a vision for a better mankind future. It only "works".
In Between
* Edition of 200 * The shaman, the witch and the artist are three different figures, united by the desire for transcendence. Overcoming the material contingencies of one's context through the magic-creative gesture, which makes the will real, is their ultimate goal. The shaman, inducing the trance, seeks contact with the higher entities.
Through the ritual, the witch intends to bend nature to man. The artist, through his work, creates allusions, images, hints of worlds hidden outside and inside …
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 …
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…
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…
Yes Yes No No Yes No Yes
Officer! was founded by Londoner Mick Hobbs. His roots were in the Rock In Opposition scene of the late 70s and early 80s. Initially he worked as guitarist in The Work, subsequently he became closely associated with This Heat and their Cold Storage Studio in Brixton, working with artists like FamilyFodder, Catherine Jauniaux or Zeena Parkins.
The band's first album "8 New Songs By Mick Hobbs" came out in 1982 on casette only. It was followed by the second album, "Ossification". The third album, …
S.O.T.A.
*Limited edition of 100 hand-numbered copies, issued in a digipack.* Non Toxique Lost are one of the most important and equally most underrated bands from Berlin's 1980s Industrlal scene. Sprung aus den Wolken, Einstürzende Neubauten, Die Tödliche Doris and also Non Toxique Lost were the core of the movement in the divided city. In the old days, most of their albums came out on cassette only, later they were collected onto vinyls and CDs.
After the tragic loss of long-time member Steffen Schütze…
Khamu (She Sleep Walks)
Second installment in a reissue programme for this excellent UK band. C Cat Trance were formed by multi instrumentalist John Rees Lewis after his departure from Medium Medium, taking the band's drummer Nigel Kingston Stone with him. The band are seen as members of the post-punk movement, but that's not all that is to say about their sound.
C Cat Trance incorporated ethnic music into their compositions before world music became a popular genre. Their influences come mainly from Northern Africa an…
Antiphonen
Sainkho Namtchylak is a singer originally from Tuva, an autonomous republic in the Russian Federation just north of Mongolia. She is known for her Tuvan throat singing or Khöömei. Her music encompasses avant-jazz, electronica, modern composition and Tuvan influences. Once the Soviet Union had collapsed, she moved to Vienna, making it her base, although she traveled widely, working in any number of shifting groups and recording a number of discs that revolved around free improvisation. Amongst th…
Das Testament
Amazing remix album by the Czech Opening Performance Orchestra. Opening Performance Orchestra using the very noisy Das Testament from 1983 by M.B. are able to make an even more abrasive and challenging work than the original. Possibly one of the best M.B. remix album we have listened to in a long time. Very Recommended! Edition of 200 copies in digipack with 8 pages booklet with text in Italian, Czech and English.
Nothing but the Music
The sounds of late '70s and '80s east coast avant-garde jazz, soul, and punk rock are well documented, but in Nothing but the Music Thulani Davis gives us something beyond, delivering a collection of synesthetic, transportive documentary poems that breathe anecdotal and impressionistic life into a sonic-social history about which most can only speculate. Davis' verse takes free flight with its muses, scatting and leaping off the page and the shoulders of the musicians, nightclubs, and choreograp…
Streichquartette V
Ruedi Häusermann 5th release of strinquartets from his music Theatre productions. CD with digipak and 8-page booklet. Born in 1948 and residing in the medieval Swiss town of Lenzburg, and virtually unknown outside of the German-speaking world, Häusermann is a multi-instrumentalist and enormously prolific composer who works primarily in the medium of absurdist music-theater. A virtuoso wind player and free improviser who also composes for traditional classical instrumentation, his work is charact…
Kave
New quartet by Samuel Rohrer, Max Loderbauer, Stian Westerhus, and Tobias Freund. In the present era of media saturation, the artist's dilemma has shifted away from the question whether to fuse disparate stylistic elements, towards the decision of which energies to draw upon: a situation most rewarding for those who listen to musicians navigating this limitless terrain. One such journey, the captivating full-length release from Samuel Rohrer's new Kave quartet, is bringing together players who a…
1975
**Edition of 200** Over the many years we've known each other, Joe Carducci had several times mentioned his brother Mark had a cool band back in the pre-punk '70s. Then a couple of years ago, he added that tapes of this project were around, and asked if might we be interested in hearing them. Midknight 1975 is the result. Two different line-ups of the band are documented here -- a quintet studio session recorded on location at the Hippie House, and a live one with a different drummer and one les…
Operating Manual for Floating in Space
**200 copies** Operating Manual for Floating in Space is a project by Mylan Hoezen, researching the ecstasy of our existence through manually operating a sequence of bodily movements. A gorgeous, ambient and ecstatic sort of thing to listen to. Transmitted in wobbly synth, streaks of bright lights stream past my ears like I’m moving at speed. Something is building. There is a drumbeat, or stomping. People are clapping and then they’re not. Space-shuttle cupboards are being opened and closed and …
A Place to Hide
Much needed vinylization of an amazing live set, previously issued as a CDR in an edition of 100 by the fine Borley Rectory label. Finally, for the good of all mankind, the music from this great night, opening for Robyn Hitchcock at London's Betsey Trotwood in October 2018, is turntable ready. A Place to Hide begins with the album's one new original tune 'My Reflection Once Was Me.' The song brims with harmonium-iced vocals that cannot fail to bring a certain German-born chanteuse to mind. Built…
Ouate
A little bit of Baroque, a little bit of Zwölftonmusik, a little bit of electronica, that's Robert Lepenik