Best of 2017
Sotto Il Segno Dello Scorpione
Quartet Records and Gruppo Sugar present the world-premiere release of Vittorio Gelmetti's experimental score for the cult movie Sotto il segno dello scorpione (also known as Under the Sign of Scorpio).
Directed by Vittorio and Paolo Taviani, the film takes place in a kind of fantastic prehistoric time when volcanos ravage and wipe entire civilizations off the face of the earth. When an island gets buried under lava and ash, a group of survivors manages to get away and reach a nearby islan…
Metrodora
Digitally remastered for the first time at 192 khz and 24 bit. From the original master tapes, 1st time rpressed on LP. Mere words can’t describe the impact of an album where the only instrument is the voice of Demetrio Stratos (actually, there are few synthesizer inserts played by Paolo Tofani). Originally released in 1976: a unique work where Demetrio Stratos makes any kind of experiments and sounds with his voice, reaching and going over the limit of human capabilities. "Demetrio Strato…
13 Thirteen
Keith Rowe and Michael Pisaro: 13 Thirteen | On this two-and-a-half hour, semi-improvised opus, the two guitarists and composers approach finely wrought detail and vast empty space in ways that can warp one’s perception of time itself. On this two-and-a-half hour, semi-improvised opus, the two guitarists and composers approach finely wrought detail and vast empty space in ways that can warp one’s perception of time itself."On this two-and-a-half hour, semi-improvised opus, the two guitarists and…
Propellers In Love
Arnold Dreyblatt has been called "the most rock 'n' roll of all the composers to emerge from New York's downtown scene in the 1970s." Arnold Dreyblatt founded the Orchestra Of Excited Strings in 1979, harnessing unusual tuning intervals to an exuberant performance style. Propellers In Love, the Orchestra's second album – originally released in 1986 on the Stasch imprint, in conjunction with the contemporary art space Künstlerhaus Bethanien – develops Dreyblatt's rhythmically exacting exploration…
Solo Guitar Volume 1
**small repress available**Honest Jon's Records present Solo Guitar Volume 1, a reissue of Derek Bailey's Solo Guitar release on Incus in 1971, with additional tracks included on previous reissues and a performance at York University in 1972. Kicking off a series of collaborations between Honest Jon's Records and Incus: three double-LPs of the legendary free-improvising guitarist Derek Bailey, solo and in duos with Anthony Braxton (HJR 201LP) and Han Bennink (HJR 202LP), augmenting the original …
Trans-Millenia Music
Since launching six years ago, the ReRVNG series - a curatorial effort by the New York based imprint RVNG, has carved a singular place in the cultural landscape. Dedicated to highlighting remarkable, but overlooked gestures in sonic expression, its effect has been so wide sweeping that the names found within its catalog - Harald Grosskopf, Craig Leon, K. Leimer, Ariel Kalma, Anna Homler, etc, have emerged from the shadows, becoming familiar to most. After a year hiatus, much of which has been sp…
French Archives 1977-80
** Small repress available ** It’s an incredible moment in the history of recorded music. At SoundOhm we’re lucky enough to hear it all. Within such a stunning landscape, it’s impossible to pick favourites, but Milan based imprint Black Sweat always comes out at the top. And they return with what may be their most ambitious effort yet, a stunning four LP box set of previously unreleased archival recordings by Ariel Kalma. The life and work of Ariel Kalma is a remarkable journey in sound - an emb…
Time Out of Mind
“Time Out of Mind” represents a most important chapter in the recordings of Ora, during the years 1986-1994 and here almost all entirely unheard before. They represent unreleased studio pieces, field recordings and sketches, significantly made to portable recorder. This working method would become the basis of future and more elaborate studio pieces and in itself clarifies an important formative stage of the work of Ora, of often using outdoor performances and location sound in an entirely spont…
Studio Umiliani
Four Flies Records strikes again, releasing their first archive compilation of Piero Umiliani’s work and the first compilation focussing on the Maestro’s legacy in years. “Studio Umiliani” is a collection of sunken treasures and hidden beauties yet to be re-released, and of stunning unpublished works surprisingly unknown for quite some time. The project, born from the initial effort of Andrea Fabrizi, who has far and wide been exploring Umiliani's soundtracks before anyone else, led Four Flies …
Discaholics!
**Small repress available** Swedish saxophone player/improviser/ composer/music archivist Mats Gustafsson has worked in the outer regions of jazz, avant-garde, experimental rock and free improvisation for more than 35 years. Gustafsson is also a passionate record collector who strongly believes that actively nurturing the urge to seek for rare and obscure vinyl is a gateway to higher musical knowledge – a knowledge that it is a musician’s duty to share. He has coined the term Discaholism – and o…
Divine Music
3CD version. History can be a motherfucker - its authors vindictive and deeply unfair. Though Jazz - long heralded as the great American art form, got its due, buried within its canon are the legacies of systemic neglect. Its narrative is a mere shadow of the truth. Robert Northern is a lost giant - a name that almost no one has heard - a prodigy once recruited by Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Roland Kirk, Donald Byrd, Charlie Haden, Don Cherry, Freddie Hubbard, Eric Dolphy, and S…
Time Machines
“4 Tones to facilitate travel through time.” So begins the listeners’ journey into what has become one of the most treasured and revered pieces of Coil history ever released. Each of the four pieces on Time Machines is named after the chemical compound of the hallucinogenic drug that they were composed for, and the album was meticulously crafted to enable what John Balance referred to as "temporal slips" in time and space, allowing both the artist and audience to figuratively "dissolve tim…
Saivo
**last copies** Out of the twilight emerges this debut offering by Ilta Hämärä, the duo of Bart De Paepe (Sylvester Anfang II, Bokrijk, Charles Vögele) and Timo van Luijk (Af Ursin, Elodie, La Poupee Vivante). An imaginary source that combines Bart’s hazy psychedelic antics and Timo’s subtle and abstract sound manipulations in otherworldly spheres of cosmic dimensions, like a spectral veil covering an odoriferous botanical garden. The gates are open to golden clouds… Limited to 300 copies.
...E Il Pavone Parlo' Alla Luna
Originally released in 1980 (and privately issued only in 1987) Arturo Stalteri’s …E Il Pavone Parlo’ Alla Luna falls among the last artifacts of Italy’s great wave of musical Minimalism. Like the movement to which it belongs, rigorously resistant to categorizations and definition, this overlooked marvel sculpts a startling singularity. A radical and democratic vision in sound, blending elements of New Age, the avant-garde, and Prog, with Western and Indian Classical musics. Long oversha…
Olympic Signals
Limited clear vinyl, edition of 100. Giovanni Venosta’s Olympic Signals, is one of the great lost documents of the Italian avant-garde - the first solo outing from one of the movement’s seminal voices, most recognised for his collaborative work with Roberto Musci. In a sea of unjustly neglected works, Venosta’s debut rises from the tide time as a towering gesture of sonic creativity. A shimmering, complex wonder of overwhelming Minimalistic beauty. One of the great records of the 1980’s, that al…
Strumming Music
The classic minimal music album, available again on vinyl for the first time since the '70s. Primed with a glass of cognac, Charlemagne Palestine sits at the keyboard of a Bösendorfer Imperial grand piano. One foot firmly holds down the sustain pedal while both hands perform an insistent strum-like alternation on the keys. Soon Palestine and his Bösendorfer are enveloped in sound and bathed in a shimmering haze of multi-colored overtones. For 45 minutes, this rich pulsating music swells and…
Vang Circular
Vang Circular is the first outing from Timo van Luijk (La Scie Dorée / Af Ursin, Elodie) and Mark Harwood (Penultimate Press / Astor). Employing vibes, mellotron, natural reader, an iron ant, synth, metal pipes, slide guitar and a double bass these audacious souls conjure a wonky musical vision that gently peels away the familiar The results are a surprising synthesis of two individual and somewhat oppositional aesthetics. From the farthest reaches of the galaxy to the highest celestial p…
Tiger Balm / Amazonia Dreaming / Immersion
Black Truffle presents a new issue of Annea Lockwood's classic 1970 tape piece "Tiger Balm", unavailable on vinyl for over thirty years, accompanied by two exquisite unreleased works for percussion and voice. "Created while Lockwood was living in the UK, the side-long 'Tiger Balm' is a singular work within the cannon of tape music. Inspired by research into the ritual function of music, the piece explores the possibility of evoking ancient communal memories through sound. Breaking entirely with …
Raft
Mike Cooper's output of the past half century has been described as "post-everything". It's a fitting phrase really when you consider he has been at the beating heart of so many critical musical moments; from the development of the blues touring circuit in the UK, through the growth of the folk scene and into the explosion of free improvisation that came to define a generation of UK musicians. Amidst it all, working at stitching these disparate forms into some kind of de-territorialized z…
Musique Hydromantique
LP version. Reverse board-printed inner and outer sleeve; Edition of 500. Musique Hydromantique is the second solo album by Tomoko Sauvage archiving many years of her performance-based practice on the waterbowls -- the natural synthesizer of her invention, composed with porcelain bowls filled with water and amplified via hydrophones (underwater microphones). While her first album Ombrophilia (2009) was studio-recorded/composed work, Musique Hydromantique is about experimentation and improvisatio…