Best of 2018
O Yama O
O YAMA O explores a certain domestic and democratic quality of everyday life, born through associations to folk music of Japan and a folding of myth, tradition, and routine; the non-spectacular and the sublime. Formed of musician and artist Rie Nakajima and Cafe OTO co-founder Keiko Yamamoto, the group has performed since 2014 at venues and festivals such as noshowspace, Ikon Gallery, Wysing Arts Centre, Supernormal, Borealis Festival, Mayhem, and allEars Festival.Nakajima’s performance often fo…
Latinoamérica
Sole release by this Colombian band that surfaces briefly after the Speakers, Young Beats, Ampex and Time Machine era comes to an end. The band boasts an Italian jazz-rock drummer Roberto Fiorilli and legendary Genesis Bassist Humberto Monroy. The record consists of one theme divided into two long experimental progressive ventures (Viaje I and Viaje II) of fierce, fluid and free collective improvisation with spacey feels and a rich texture of Hammond organ, guitar, bass, tenor sax, percussion an…
Celestial Railroads
Emotional Response and Ocean Moon come together for a special collaborative release, where Seahawks take the music of Woo on a journey to the inner sanctum. Immersive, psychoactive and phased to perfection. For those who know not the music of WOO, prepare to behold a rare and magical incarnation of transcendent beauty.
Perhaps Seahawks most spaced out voyage since Vision Quest One: Spaceships Over Topanga Canyon, ‘Celestial Railroads’ is a psychedelic odyssey that goes way beyond the norm. Like …
Bastet
Collaboration piece between two major players in the contemporary Italian electro-acoustic music scene. Alberto Boccardi has studied composition and music theory at Milan's Music Civic Academy and has frequently collaborated with Lawrence English, Nicola Ratti, or Maurizio Abate among others while Stefano Pilia is a prolific guitarist and electro-acoustic theorist with a massive body of work and compositions. He has collaborated with Mike Watt, Nico Vascellari, David Tibet or Valerio Tricoli to …
Musica Intuitiva
**Available in vinyl for the first time, edition of 200** Born in Lisbon (1932), Armando Santiago studied singing, piano and cello at the National Conservatory of Lisbon. In Italy he studied conducting with Hans Münch and Franco Ferrara, and in Paris he studied with Pierre Schaeffer at the ORTF Research Service. Fellow of the Governments of Portugal and Italy, he worked in Rome with Boris Porena and followed the course of Goffredo Petrassi in the Academy of Santa Cecília, obtaining the diploma o…
I Saw You
I Saw You is the distillation of Right Belief and Right Action, heretofore unknown, privately issue cassettes from 1986 and 1987 by Peter Thomas Kardas. A student of guitar craft and accredited member of The League of Crafty Guitarists, Kardas drew inspiration from Robert Fripp's loop-based Frippertronics, but the expansive, introspective washes of synths and repeated phrases and vocalizations are utterly their own thing, conjuring the independence, awe, and isolation of the remote Northern Cali…
Binsy
Outstanding archival work from Cabiria Records here, presented in the form of an album of gloomy electronic stylings and haunting musical landscapes by Miryam Bordoni, one of few Italian female artists working in the field of experimental and library musics, and also associated with Egisto Macchi and Ennio Morricone of Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza. Originally released in a miniscule private edition, these undercover electronic studio sessions made under her experimental alter ego B…
An Island In The Moon
**Special version with extra DVD, edition of 100 only** An Island In The Moon is the perfectly conceived minimal ambient project from Italian composers Pier Luigi Andreoni (Doubling Riders, ATROX) and Silvio Linardi. Andreolina being a mix of the names of the two musicians who were both deeply involved with the label Auf Dem Nil on which the album was originally released in 1990. The duo stick to a disciplined and simple palette using only two synthesizers and a Roland S50 sampler. They are join…
J. Jasmine: My New Music (Songbook)
Original printing of the 1978 J. Jasmine Songbook, which has scores, lyrics and images for all the songs on the "J. Jasmine: My New Music" LP. Printed but never distributed because of the book distribution house going out of business, this is a must-have item for fans of Humber and Rosenboom
A Cordes et a Cris
In the continuity of the two previous albums "Amir" and "Varech", Henri Texier records in 1979 the album : "A Cordes et à Cris" but with some guest for some titles musicians such as pianist Gordon Beck and violinist Didier Lockwood. While A Cordes et à Cris represents the third element in the trilogy of albums begun by Amir and Varech, it is was his first working with JMS, making it all that much more noteworthy as it reemerges in the imprint’s hands today. Recorded and released in 1979, it enc…
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…
One Man Sessions Volume 2 // Unprepared Piano
After the oneiric journey through synthesizers on Volume 1, entitled Synthesis (2018), Massimo Martellotta (founding member of Calibro 35) returns with the second volume of One Man Sessions
exploring the tonal possibilities of the classical instrument par
excellence: the piano. The instrument is at the center of the scene, and
the prepared piano in the manner of John Cage is here
decontextualized and freely "In/Prepared" and reinvented in a very
personal way, placing objects of common use o…
A Dance with Fred Astaire
A Dance with Fred Astaire is an extraordinary collection of anecdotes and rare ephemera from the life of legendary artist, filmmaker and bon vivant Jonas Mekas, featuring a dizzying cast of cultural icons both underground and mainstream. Memories, diary entries, conversations, and insights into his work sit alongside collages of beautifully reproduced postcards, newspaper cuttings, film negatives, lists, posters and photographs, envelopes and letters, book covers, telegrams, cartoons and doodles…
The South of the East
The South of the East is the debut album from Tenggara Trio, comprising of improvisors from Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. Like previous Lao Ban Records releases it has Yong Yandsen gargling, screeching, skronking and more on the tenor saxophone, but unlike previous releases, "The South of the East" is the most rocking (read: loud, aggressive, driving) release from Lao Ban Records hitherto. The other two members, Ikbal S. Lubys and Dharma both play electric guitar (with efx and objects), but…
Standing Waters
The Italian guitarist Maurizio Abate is a rare breed - an experimental musician from Europe working within, and expanding the American tradition of Guitar Soli, an idiom first pioneered by John Fahey. Abate initially emerged within a diverse series of collaborative released over a decade ago, but, as the years passed, a love for his instrument, with inspiration provided by Fahey’s indication of its potential for application as a one man orchestra, prompted to him to embark on a pursuit of solo …
Spirit of 76: London Punk Eyewitness
When punk first broke in the UK in 1976, music journalist John Ingham was on hand to document the very heart of the scene. Struck by the music, fashion and sheer iconoclasm of a little-known outfit called the Sex Pistols, Ingham conducted the first interview with the band, partied with its members and even bailed Sid Vicious out of jail; he also witnessed and documented the group’s evolution at legendary gigs shared with other pioneering punk bands in their earliest days, including the Damned, t…
Imaginary Concerts
Artist Peter Coffin began his work with the iconic designs of LA’s Colby Poster Printing Company in 2008. Over the years, he solicited friends to contribute their dream concerts—invented lineups for impossible gigs—and combined them with the print shop’s famously eye-popping poster backgrounds, resulting in Imaginary Concerts: a stirring, two-volume celebration of music’s vast conceptual universe. Featuring 160 concert lineups from a roster of artists, authors and daydreamers including Yoko Ono,…
Arcanum 17
"Reidemeister Move's Arcanum 17 is a sound novella recorded in 2012 in remote Eastern Quebec. Reidemeister Move is Christopher Williams, a composer and contrabass player who worked with Ben Patterson (amongst an army of other mentors) and Robin Hayward, a microtonal tubist and composer who has performed music written for him by Christian Wolff and Alvin Lucier. Arcanum 17, based on the André Breton novel (1945) of the same name, was co-written by Williams and Charlie Morrow (one may recall that …