Best of 2018
Paris to Calcutta: Men and Music on the Desert Road
Deben Bhattacharya (1921-2001) was a field recordist, poet, filmmaker, musicologist, and amateur ethnomusicologist, based in Calcutta and Paris. Highly influential, it would not be too bold a stretch to say that his work shaped how we listen to the world: he produced a vast number of LPs, CDs, videos, and radio shows of traditional music from India, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe from 1953 until his death in 2001. Never before published, Paris to Calcutta: Men and Music on the Desert …
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…
Agneta Nilsson (Heldon IV)
LP version. Bureau B present a reissue of Heldon's fourth album Agneta Nilsson, originally released on Urus Records in 1976. Agneta Nilsson opens with a mind-paralyzing track that proves stillness can have a pulse. "Perspective I" spends ten minutes poring through tectonic layers of heavy sound, piling everything so thick that the song becomes like quicksand for your brain. It's one of the most daunting works in the Heldon catalog, made all the more impressive by how simple it is. It's just soun…
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…
Maroon
*2024 repress* 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…
Levende Opjekten Sjooo
Limited color vinyl, edition of 100. Once more the Netherlands proves to be fertile ground for adventurous sonic explorations defiantly untainted from outside influences. The Levende Opjekten Sjooo (L.O.S.) was developed by Artist Hans Frisch, who had made a name for himself as a painter by dripping black car paint on white formica panels, calling this: Clean Art. His next project involved a set with moving statues and music. The statues were actually naked dancers hidden between layers of linne…
Les Soleils De L'ile De Paques La Brulure De Mille Soleils
Few copies back in stock, reduced price **sold-out at source, few copies available** Double LP version. 140 gram vinyl. Gatefold sleeve. Includes liner notes (French and English). Wrwtfww Records announce the release of two never-released-before soundtracks by French award-winning composer, audio experimenter, electroacoustic, and musique concrète magician, and all-around sound visionary Bernard Parmegiani, sourced from the original reels, and with English and French liner notes. Les Soleils De …
Shozyg Music For Invented Instruments
Last Copies ** Limited Edition of 200 copies. This is the first album in BeJazz reissue series of long-lost classics from the legendary vaults of FMP Records, presented in restored original packaging and newly remastered for optimal sound ** Working with his own, specially crafted electronic instruments, Hugh Davies generates soundscapes that are at times whimsical, ritualistic and profoundly playful. Shozyg, a performance and improvisational instrument, first created in 1968, consists of fretsa…
Zero Gravity
**strictly limited edition of 500 copies** Nik's last album, Zero Gravity (Narco NR123) came under the Nik Pascal name and had a fantastic side long piece on the title track which reminisces of the works of Cluster. B side features four tracks that also bear some Conrad Schnitzler reminiscences. This was to be Nik's last LP before he would sell all his synths to ex car racer and future electronic/ambient music star Steve Roach. Besides his musical explorations, Nik was also an interesting painte…
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…
Great White Light 1971
**Great White Light is a spellbinding archival discovery documenting a 1971 performance by one of the missing links in experimental electronic and sound art figure: Seiji Onishi. Onishi was one of the background players in the formative Japanese electronic music scene of the early 1970's, and this LP documents a section of recording which captured the performance held at the Kishi Memorial Hall in Shibuya, Tokyo, on February 13, 1971 with Taj Mahal Travellers members as guest performers. It's t…
Double Negative
Double Negative follows the path that Robert Schwarz has pursued with The Scale of Things. Field recordings render the core and compositional starting points around which modular synthesizers are built to complex structures that resemble nature’s contingency as their inner logic. Nature and electronics merge to compositions that reveal uncanniness and strangeness in the heart of the world as well as in ourselves. However, where The Scale of Things provoked existential threats and feelings of bei…
Reidarin Sähköiset Kuvat
Black vinyl, 500 copies. With liner notes by renowned musicologist and sound researcher Petri Kuljuntausta. Love Records (of Sperm fame) owner Otto Donner saw the commissioned work by electro-acoustic musicians Åke Andersson and Antero Honkanen, who in their daily life were sound technicians at the Finnish Broadcasting Corporation, and immediately wanted to produce an album of the project. The 1977 album, which has ended up a very costly collector’s item, hasn’t been reissued in any format until…
Inexplicable Hours
Inexplicable Hours is the sequel of the successful Kevin Drumm 6CD box 'Elapsed Time' also released by Sonoris last year. The first record documents a new direction in his music, with some of his last electroacoustic experimentations with audio generators, field recordings and various electronic devices. The second one explores the same ambient/drone territories as the boxset, but less static and more complex than it appears after a superficial listening. And as always with recent KD's music, a …
Electronique Guerilla (Heldon I)
50th Anniversary Edition: hand numbered, limited edition blue vinyl, 500 copies available. Bureau B present a reissue of Heldon's debut album Electronique Guerilla, originally released on Disjuncta in 1974. In 1973, 22-year old Richard Pinhas was well on his way to becoming a full-time philosopher. He had almost finished his PhD and begun teaching at the University of Paris. But he also had a hobby: writing music and recording it himself. When he submitted a few tracks to British label E.G. (hom…
Your Own Self
Garrett List’s work for Opus One, in 1972, was a remarkable creative effort, conceived like a celebration of a higher self-consciousness. The context is avant-garde minimalism, but the music is enriched by a deep spiritualism; it echoes the most meditative jazz of the age, taking also advantage from the mystic lesson of La Monte Young. Everything is solved in a free, moderate and brilliant language, pure and elegant. It’s quintessential, in these rare moments of beauty, the instrumentation of th…
Cluster & Eno
The first of two milestones in ambient music recorded by Germany's legendary electronic pioneers Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius together with Britains music eccentric Brian Eno.
Harmonium
Just Asked whether he would describe his music as “Sound for the sake of sound,” James Tenney (1934–2006) replied, “It’s sound for the sake of perceptual insight—some kind of perceptual revelation.” This release aptly demonstrates Tenney’s deep exploratory fascination with the nature and potentialities of aural perception. His attraction to these topics was simultaneously intellectual and sensuous, and its musical products at once invite both sustained reflection and the most immediate of corpor…
Long String Installations
After two LPs in 2014 and 2017, Edition Telemark now turns to the group of works that is probably the most well-known within the vast oeuvre of Dutch sound and visual artist Paul Panhuysen (1934-2015), his long string installations. Using this term, he referred to all of his works involving strings and sounds. They were realized all around the world between 1982 and 2012 - until 1991 mostly together with Johan Goedhart -, each installation made specifically for the site where it was displayed.Un…
Green Ray
Under the alias of Zanov we find the works of French electronic pioneer Pierre Salkazanov, who had started playing guitar in the 1960s in a Shadows styled band, Les Ambassadors. Instrumental rock was not enough for Salkazanov, he was always looking for evolution, so when a meeting with French synth player Serge Ramses (of "Secret" fame) got him into the world of synthesizers he just dived deep into the bourgeoning world of electronic music. He got himself his first syths and started producing wo…