Best of 2018
Plant
**Screen printed edition of 300 hand-numbered copies. Edition comes packed in inner cardboard disco sleeve, high-quality open screen printed sleeve, and heavy outer screen printed PVC sleeve.** Working the sweet spot where noise communication decisively rubs up against textural experimentation are the verdant improvisations that make up Plant, the new LP from Rimouski-based electric bassist Éric Normand and Australian alto saxophonist and bass flautist Jim Denley. Don’t be fooled by the title, t…
Ingaza
Staalplaat presents a double LP reissue of Muslimgauze's Ingaza, originally released in 1999 (the year of his death) as part of the Box Of Silk And Dogs set. Those not familiar with Bryn Jones's style will listen slack-jawed at the sheer anticipatory nature of his sound collages. He was a cult artist, politically motivated for the Arab-Palestinian cause and a seminal experimenter with ethnic samples' and minimal and electronic rhythms. The atmospheres retain their original charm, full and gloomy…
All Of The Time
**Special Edition of 30 with original signed Jean Dupuy drawing** All Of The Time is the first comprehensive album of Jean Dupuy's sound works, collecting recordings from 1969-2017. Dupuy started his artistic career as a painter but shifted his practice when he moved from France to New York in 1967. Dupuy experimented with new technologies, and soon became a prominent figure in the Art and Technology movement. In 1968 he participated with an inventive sound, light and color installation, Heart B…
Hippie Gospel Songs 1969-70
Postmodern artist, dancer, choreographer, and writer Simone Forti originally wrote the Hippie Gospel Songs in 1969/70, around the time of the Woodstock Festival. She explains: "before coming to California where I started working and performing with Charlemagne Palestine and studying Tai Chi at the California Institute of the Arts, I had spent a year in Woodstock, New York, stoned in the woods. Now with Charlemagne at the piano I ran in circles and figure eights." The seven songs on the record we…
Music for Films
Brian Eno's pioneering Ambient album from 1978. Standard 1 LP version. “Arguably the most quietly influential of all his works” according to the BBC, this conceptual record was intended as a soundtrack for imaginary films, with excerpts later featuring in movies by directors including John Woo and Derek Jarman.The album is a loose compilation of material, composed of short tracks ranging from one-and-a-half minutes to just over four, making it the antithesis of the long, ambient pieces he later …
4 Espaces Sonores
Transversales Disques present a reissue of Bernard Baschet and Michel Deneuve's 4 Espaces Sonores, originally released in 1982. Rare 1979 recording of Bernard Baschet performing on his Sound Sculptures. The Baschet brothers are known worldwide as creators of Sound Sculptures, fantastic shapes of molded metal and glass, which combine the visual arts with music. François Baschet had always been fascinated by acoustics, by the relationships between the shape and material of an instrument and the be…
Trespassing / Marilli
The latest release on Canada's Seance Centre label focuses on the work of long-serving Dutch experimentalist Michel Banabila, gathering together examples of his "excursions into otherworldly and imagined realms". The first record boasts tracks recorded between 1987 and 2017, shuffling between humid, percussion-led workouts, exotic ambience, dark and creepy soundscapes and sticky electronic/acoustic fusion. The second record (clips of which are not featured here) replicates the track list of the …
Zamaan Ya Sukkar: Exotic Love Songs and Instrumentals from
Zamaan Ya Sukkar is a rich musical portrait from the time when Cairo was the vibrant cultural heart of the Middle East and the grandeur of the leading orchestras was incomparable. Unearthed Latin and jazz-tinged tracks will let your mind drift off to the glamorous nightlife of '60s Cairo. Meet some forgotten souls of the Egyptian music scene and cinema world. Sensual voices and Bollywood-like orchestra sounds inflame the senses of the body with an intangible exotic twist! All music is remastered…
Redrum
** Limited edition of 250 copies ** Merzbow, Nyantora and Duenn’s 3 Rensa trio churn up Grade A+ improvisations for Entr’acte with the first vinyl edition of their ‘Redrum’ recordings. Leading on from Nyantora & Duenn’s collaboration on the ‘086-087 Area’ CD for Entr’acte in 2017, on ‘Redrum’ introduces Merzbow as a vital, variable catalyst in their next venture for Antwerp’s finest. Recorded at Red BullStudios in Tokyo on 3rd August 2017 over the course of three hours, the results are edited f…
Romance And Drama
Transversales Disques present the first reissue of Romance & Drama, an essential LP by Italian pioneer and Ennio Morricone cohort, Alessandro Alessandroni. Originally released on Munich based experimental, progressive library label Coloursound. Alessandroni at his best: very refined Italian cinematic sound, tense 12-string guitar themes, synth sequences, beautiful sound of chamber classical music mixed with psych choir. You can feel Alessandroni's magical touch for melodies and arrangements on n…
Folio
A little while back, with the release of German composer and musician Stephan Mathieu’s sprawling 12 CD box set, Radiance, we predictably touched on the overwhelming ambition of such a thing - especially being as good it was. It was hard to imagine we’d be hearing from him again so soon. But here he is before us, issuing another incredible body of work - 8 CDs in total, under the title Folio, on his own Schwebung imprint in an edition of 250. Our minds are bent. His ambitious heights never seem …
Hör!-Spiel / Nekrologlog 1961 / Fantasmata 1960
The Greek avant-garde composer Anestis Logothetis was noted for his pioneering tape techniques as well as developing his own notation system for composition that incorporated visual symbols meant to be interpreted by the performers. "Hör!-spiel" / Nekrologlog 1961 / Fantasmata 1960"collects 3 of his most famous works, realized in Vienna where he spent much of the 1940s-1960s. After completing studies at the music academy there, in the 1950s Logothetis became enamored of 20th century composers li…
Epitaph für Aikichi Kuboyama / Sechs Studien
Herbert Eimert was a German music renaissance man, with his expertise ranging from theory to composition, editing, radio production, and criticism. He wrote numerous books on music theory, worked for years at the British occupational forces run Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk. It was there in 1951 that he established a studio for electronic music that he ran until 1961, which hosted recordings from Stockhausen, Xenakis, and Cornelius Cardew, among others. This brilliant work begins on side A with 'Ep…
Prélude Au Sommeil
**small repress available, clear vinyl edition** Fantome Phonographique present a reissue of Jean-Jacques Perrey's Prélude Au Sommeil, originally released in 1958. Jean-Jacques Perrey was one of the earliest innovators in electronic music, creating a body of work spanning decades that has influenced everyone from Brian Eno to The Beastie Boys. One of the pioneers of musique concrète and electronic tape manipulation, Prélude Au Sommeil ("Prelude to Sleep") is Perrey's debut recording but shows a …
Resin, Parched, Chthonic
Last copies, don't sleep. It's a new year. What better way to to kick it off than with some incredible sounds from a not too distant past, via Fern Recordings. Since launching during the middle 2000s, the Paris based imprint has shown an incredible dedication to under-celebrated efforts of underground sound, offering particular focus to works of field recording, experimentalism, and drone. Their latest release, a long overdue reissue of Small Cruel Party's legendary Resin, Parched, Chthonic, ori…
Daughters Of Time
Blue Chemise documents the hermetic sound world of Australia's Mark Gomes. Daughters Of Time follows 2017's brilliant full-length Influence On Dusk, released in micro-edition on Gomes's own Greedy Ventilator imprint. It is an elegiac set of vignettes recorded straight to dictaphone with minimal post-production. These pieces function in a manner akin to Loren Connor's evocative "airs", conjuring poignant, intangible senses of longing and nostalgia then disappearing well before overstaying their w…
Before Nightfall One
Sofa is proud to present this new collaboration with the labels own Ingar Zach together with the critically acclaimed contemporary ensemble Speak Percussion from Melbourne, Australia. Eugene Ughetti and Matthias Schack-Arnott in Speak Percussion invited Ingar Zach for the first concert in their series named Before Nightfall One. The idea behind this concert series is to experience and document the result of one single day of collaboration, culminating in a concert in a carefully chosen space in …
Improvisations
G.I. Gurdjieff was an Armenian and Greek philosopher, spiritual teacher, and musician, whose teachings of The Fourth Way influenced thousands worldwide and created communities that still exist to this day. His goal was to teach humans to reach a higher consciousness out of the "waking sleep" he considered most to be living in. Music was an important part of his teachings and these brilliant harmonium improvisations were recorded in 1949 in Paris, just a short time before his death. Droning and e…
La Journee
**50 copies copies, wood engraved hand assembled tape box + wood engraved set of
12 cards** All music, recordings, mixing by Guilhem Lacroux. Concrète and Electroacoustic Experiments circa 1995. The diversity of media (digital, analog, high and low definition), techniques (morphing, cut-up, sequence-play) and writing engines (serendipity, madrigalism) make La Journée the exemplum of an era in full gestural, sensitive and temporal metamorphosis
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Edition of 300. When it comes to music, time and geography can have a strange effect. Divisions form and dissolve. Things which were heard are can be forgotten. Things which were not are often remembered. As many of us know, this is increasingly the effect of the reissue market, with its radical reappraisals for history, pulling the lost and obscure from the shadows - musical objects now given the ability to travel and gain the attention they deserve. One of the more fascinating and important te…