Best of 2018
Machine Gun
Cien Fuegos present a reissue of the Peter Brötzmann Octet's Machine Gun, originally released in 1968. One of the most important albums of European free jazz, finally in the Cien Fuegos series. Recorded May 1968 at "Lila Eule", Bremen. Recorded with a whiff of revolution in the air back in May '68, this landmark Brotzmann LP taps into the spirit of its time with a robust garage rock sensibility, lending a considerable urgency to the session, with the highest volume passages taking up far more ai…
The Sixth Ear
**strictly limited edition of 500 copies** 1972 saw the release of The Sixth Ear (Narco NR666), this time credited to Nik Pascal. A more complex work than Beyond The End..., it adds consistent rhythmic patterns to the mix with the addition of bongoes and also explores some interesting chord progressions. Besides his musical explorations, Nik was also an interesting painter. His paintings are auctioned from time to time, and are consciousness expanding works influenced by abstract cubism and surr…
Numbers
If you check the credits of The Rolling Stones' Goats Head Soup LP from 1973 you'll find a certain "Pascal" listed on the percussion section. That is none other than Los Angeles based artist Nicolas Pascal Raicevik (1933-1994), aka 107-34-8933, aka Head, aka Nik Pascal, aka Nik Raicevic. Besides his hitting the bongoes on the Stones album, Nik was a great artist on his own, both as a painter and as a musician. As a musician, he was a pioneer in the use of synthesizers, preceeding the Berlin scho…
Moebius 256 301
Again under the influence of both first and second generation of Berlin school musicians the LP will appeal to fans of Klaus Schulze or Tangerine Dream, but they will also find a big deal of Zanov's own personal sound on it, since as the musician himself reckons he had little contact with other peers of his generation, so besides a general love for the electronic gear used and the sounds you could make out of them the creative ideas behind his works were all his own. On his second album a richer…
Sleep/Spiracle
The soundtrack to Pipilotti Rist‘s ‘4th Floor to Mildness‘, the mesmerising and meditative installation showing at Strange Days. Edition of 500. Pipilotti Rist’s (b.1962) mesmerising works envelop viewers in vibrantly coloured kaleidoscopic projections that fuse the natural world with the technological sublime. Referring to her art as a ‘glorification of the wonder of evolution,” Rist maintains a deep sense of curiosity that pervades her explorations of physical and psychological experiences. He…
Ambient 1 (Music For Airports)
Brian Eno's Ambient album from 1982. Standard 1 LP version.. Though not the earliest entry in the genre (which Eno makes no claim to have invented), ‘Ambient 1 (Music For Airports)’ was the first album ever to be explicitly labelled ‘ambient music’. Eno had previously created similarly quiet, unobtrusive music on albums ‘Evening Star’, ‘Discreet Music’, and Harold Budd's ‘The Pavilion of Dreams’ (which he produced), but this was the first album to give it precedence as a cohesive concept. He gav…
Ambient 4: On Land
Brian Eno's masterwork album from 1982. Standard 1 LP version. On ‘Ambient 4 (On Land)’ – the final edition in Eno's ambient series – his palate shifted from electro-mechanical and acoustic instruments towards “non-instruments” like pieces of chain, sticks and stones. “One of the big freedoms of music had been that it didn't have to relate to anything – nobody listened to a piece of music and said, ‘What's that supposed to be, then?’, the way they would if they were looking at an abstract painti…
Discreet Music
Brian Eno's pioneering Ambient album from 1975 re-pressed for 2018. Standard 1 LP version. While his earlier work with Robert Fripp on ‘No Pussyfooting’ and several selections from his own ‘Another Green World’ feature similar ideas, ‘Discreet Music’ marked a clear step toward the ambient aesthetic Eno would later codify with 1978's ‘Ambient 1: Music for Airports.’The inspiration for this album began when Eno was hospitalised after an accident. Whilst bed-ridden and listening to a record of eigh…
Colored Music
CD Edition. At the dawn of the 1980’s, a few years before her now legendary LP, Through The Looking Glass, took form, a young percussionist playing with the Berlin Philharmonic, Midori Takada, found her creative ambitions looking further afield. Her ideas brought her home to Japan, then peculating with new notions of what avant-garde and experimental music could be, to form The Mkwaju Ensemble with fellow percussionist Junko Arase and Yoji Sadanari. The project quickly recorded two astounding LP…
Le manteau d'etoiles
2018 small repress. 'Le manteau d’étoiles' collects ten airy instrumental spheres glowing and evaporating in a universal infinity like any moment in the panorama of everyday life. Throughout the whole album, there's a refined sense of reductionism and that achingly poetic melancholy which drips from every sustained note and hushed passage, through the sparse, non-linear interplay of guitar, bass, gongs, flutes, clarinet, percussion, and electronics, Timo Van Lujik and Andrew Chalk, here expandin…
Mannyoka
**2026 Stock ** Japanese free/jazz sax legend, Kaoru Abe, dies at the age of only 29 in 1978, living a fast and crazy life and dieing of a drug overdose. His entire music career was only 10 years, from 1968 to 1978. In that short period, he was well recorded with around 30 releases, ten of which are solo sax efforts, duos with guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi, bassist Motoharu Yoshizawa and drummer Sabu Toyozumi. Mr. Abe also toured and recorded with Milford Graves, Derek Bailey and Toshinori Konda…
When The Shade Is Stretched
A split album is a marriage of autonomous partners. On each side of the vinyl, one artist presents a limited selection of music. Both sides relate to each other, but they do not intertwine. On Aspen’s first split, guitar brothers Ruben Machtelinckx and Frederik Leroux each contribute twenty minutes of solo performance. Both Machtelinckx and Leroux make use of the oating sounds of the banjo, but in a quite distinct way. While the former presents a determined and solid selection of music, the latt…
Glass Flowers
Repressed for the first time on LP by Le Très Jazz Club, this fantastic album comes with an insert documenting the story of The Elysian Spring and the recording of this true masterpiece. « Glass flowers », recorded in 1969, and only pressed by 500 copies at the time, is an unclassifiable album, overtaking the jazz outlines. Can words really describe music? It may be hard when music is as fantastic as on this LP. « Glass flowers » is an unclassifiable album, overtaking the jazz outlines, recorded…
Archive Box
Contains both original ZNR releases Barricades III and Traite de Mechanique Populaire, plus two extra CDs - one containing the whole of the post-ZNR LP Les Flots Bleus by Patrick Portella and Joseph Racaille as well as Joseph Racaille’s Pegase and his ReR Six Petites Chansons EP. The second CD collects early ZNR demos and lost tracks togther, appearing here for the first time. With a very substantial and definitive book of memories, histories, reflections, photographs, documents, interviews and…
Nada Canadada
**250 copies on black, embossed lettering, 16 page booklet** Comprised of the poets bpNichol, Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Paul Dutton and Steve McCaffery, all of whom are notable for their solo efforts, The Four Horsemen was Canada’s first sound poetry group, active between 1970 and the late 80s - disbanding following the untimely death of founding member, Barrie Phillip Nichol. Nada Canadada, originally issued in 1972, the album reissued before us now, is their debut recorded outing, making its hist…
Duo
Continuing the series of collaborations between Honest Jon’s and Incus. As throughout the series, the recordings are newly transferred from tape at Abbey Road, and re-mastered by Rashad Becker. And here we have this incredible duo from underrated cellist Tristan Honsinger and Derek Bailey, originally released on Incus in 1976. There are parralels between this record and fellow sometime Parisian string pkayer Joelle Leandre's Taxi, but really, Honsinger's voice is like no other - there's less rev…
Homotopy To Marie
'Homotopy To Marie' is the fifth album by Nurse With Wound, originally released on United Dairies in 1982. The album is a step on from the Dadaist rock of 'Merzbild Schwet', with much use of tape manipulation and classical avant-garde techniques, using keywords including unsettling, volatile, eerie and nocturnal to describe the feel of the album which combined tape edits with resonating gong tones and disembodied children's voices to create a sonic collage far removed from the harsh improvisatio…
Green Ways
Green Ways documents a collection of live recordings, drawn from in situ performances given in Doon, Dungarvan, Plaistow, Shoreditch, Singö and Stratford across 2018 by Graham Lambkin and Áine O'Dwyer. It celebrates the filíocht of rural and urban acoustic environments with a playful economy of means, and offers a special salute to the rich heritage of Carnahalla.Áine O’Dwyer and Graham Lambkin are multi-disciplinary artists whose work explores the nexus between music, text, illustration, theate…
Al Di La
Saltern presents Al Di Là, the first full-length collection of recordings by renowned dancer/choreographer, artist, and writer Simone Forti. Forti (born 1935, Florence, Italy) has influenced generations of artists through her innovative approaches to dance and movement. Forti is noted for her extensive work with musicians, including Charlemagne Palestine, La Monte Young, Jon Gibson, Peter Van Riper, and Z'EV, among others. With Al Di Là, we hear Forti musically in her own right through a diverse…
Maroon
Separated from both its reputation and its sleeve art, the music of Muslimgauze explores the relationship of visual sensations -- space, color, depth, illusion -- to the listening experience. The music on Maroon is dub-like inspired techno music, laidback with voices appearing randomly in the mix. The thick drums and rich found sounds that densely populate the soundscapes on Maroon give materiality to the warm presence of the synth washes. The music is so layered and textured that it ceases to b…