Best of 2018

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…

Black vinyl, edition of 400. 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 linnen and pl…

Music from the future, created in 1986 (!) Musique Plastique (Visible Cloaks, Pedro) rescue a nearly lost soundtrack to a Belgian avant-theatrical work from the 80s. For fans of Nuno Canavarro, Roberto Musci and Vito Ricci.  Like the wings Daedalus crafted for his son Icarus, John Gilbert Colman’s score for sampler, voice and chamber orchestra almost melted away completely, disappearing into the tides of time. The album originally served as the score to an avant-garde production of the Greek myt…

Recorded in 2012, Musik Der 135. Aktion, Kuba captures the controversial performance from Herman Nitsch's Orgien Mysterien Theater ("Orgies Mysteries Theater") as part of the Havana Biennial art exhibition. For more than fifty years Nitsch has been an influential and striking figure of Austrian art ("Vienna Actionism"). In his Orgien Mysterien Theater Nitsch uses actors, blood, animal bodies and entrails, fruits, symbolic crucifixion, music, processions, and ritualistic gestures to enact a new f…

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…

Edition of 500. The 'European Jazz Sounds' series, that started around 1960 with legendary albums by the Michael Naura Quintet, Tubby Hayes and Max Greger, sees a welcome revival! This first volume presents the early recordings of the renowned Joki Freund Quintet from the late 1950s. German saxophonist and arranger Joki Freund played with Jutta Hipp in the mid-'50s, before forming his own Joki Freund Quintet. During the late '50s they played various European festivals, together with visiting Ame…

2022 Stock. In the mid-80’s, an original form of music was discovered on the midi-capable little planet of Austin, Texas. At the age of 32, Charles Ditto would release his first solo album applying cutting edge computers and synthesizers of the era (Roland DX7, Roland MKS-20, Roland MKS-80, Sequential Circuits Profit 2000 along with a Macintosh SE), creating a unique and detailed world that was inspired by Cluster, Eno & The Residents. In Human Terms bridges the gab between contemporary classica…

s, never before released on vinyl from Peter Brötzmann Octet's Machine Gun (1968). As Brötzmann has said: 'It was the feeling, the very naive feeling that we could take a little part in changing the world.' Adopting its title from Don Cherry's nickname for Brötzmann, 'Machine Gun' drew on the huge horn section of Lionel Hampton's 'Flying Home' for inspiration, translating the hilarious saxophonic power of the jump blues and Illinois Jacquet's booting and hollering into an abstraction painted wit…

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

Privately pressed to LP in 1978 under the name J. Jasmine and made especially for the Ann Arbor Film Festival, with artistic collaboration from the festival’s founder and Once Group artist, George Manupelli, My New Music is the debut album by Jacqueline Humbert and David Rosenboom. Featuring a cast of Mills College personalities like David Behrman and Sam Ashley on backup vocal duties, this song cycle is at every turn boundary-pushing and gender-busting, yet still hilarious, sweet, and ge…

Sonor Music Editions present a reissue of Enzo Scoppa and Cicci Santucci's Mirage, originally released in 1971. Absolute mythical Italian library LP out of the New Tape micro-label vaults. Mirage is an album signed by Scoen, aka Enzo Scoppa, and actually composed and arranged by Francesco Cicci Santucci, originally released in 1971 in an edition of 100 copies only. Dreamy collectors' item and super obscure gem, this outstanding LP is another must-have jewel from the unlimited Italian music l…

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…

The Expanding Universe is the 1980 debut album by composer and computer music pioneer Laurie Spiegel. The original album is reissued here as a massively expanded 3LP or 2CD set, containing all four original album tracks plus an additional 15 tracks from the same period, nearly all previously unreleased and many making their first appearance on vinyl in this brand new 2018 edition. Since this album’s first reissue in 2012, it has gone on to be widely established as a classic of electronic, ambien…

Souffle Continu presents Camizole + Lard Free, unreleased 1978 recordings from both groups performing as a collaborative. The ranks of Camizole included some of the most essential personalities of the French underground, notably Dominique Grimaud (Vidéo-Aventures), Chris Chanet (Etron Fou Leloublan), and Bernard Filipetti (Art & Technique). Their idea of music, if we look further than the pair Dominique Grimaud and Bernard Filipetti, and a style of music influenced by Klaus Schulze, is inspired …

Restocked, reduced price. LP version. Comes as a limited edition 12" + 7" vinyl album; High glossy gatefold; Includes an exclusive Shadok drawing by Robert Cohen-Solal. WRWTFWW Records announce the release of the complete soundtrack of cult French animated TV series Les Shadoks (1968-1974) by Robert Cohen-Solal, available for the first time ever in its entirety. It's the right in time to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Jacques Rouxel and René Borg's legendary television cartoon. Electro-acoust…

Intimate, minimalist, classic piano album. Sylvain Chauveau on Pianisme: "Piano always had a central role in my discography and this selection of short pieces showcases what might be my musical signature: quietness, slow pace, long resonances, a close as possible to silence. Music to be played at night."Pianisme is a collection of unreleased and out-of-print piano works composed and recorded since 2004. Most of them are part of soundtracks for feature films by French director Sébastien Bet…

* Restocked, reduced price, last copies * Limited edition of 500. Realized in collaboration with Michael Snow** Subtitled Unique Last Recordings of the Music of Ancient Cultures Michael Snow’s The Last LP is an extraordinary collection of tracks “of rare music derived from threatened, obsolete, or now-extinct cultures from around the world” that although the claiming of being field recordings of ancient musical experiences - purported to be a documentary disc of the dying gasps of ethnic musical…

CD in a Digipak. 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 rece…

Small repress available, in process of stocking. Includes a facsimile of the original lyric sheet, liner notes, a letterpresses bookmark and an instant download.Buchla synth supremo Todd Barton’s hyperstitious soundtrack to Always Coming Home, an ‘80s American sci-fi novel by author Ursula K. Le Guin, is yet another ingenious recording dug out for reappraisal by Pete Swanson and Jed Middleman’s Freedom to Spend label - a division of RVNG Intl. Expect alien folk songs in made-up language, set to …

2018 Release. Meticulously structured studio recordings from Thomas Bonvalet exploring various forms of object amplification and emancipated banjo. Thomas Bonvalet has evolved his solitary project, L'Ocelle Mare since 2005, searching relentlessly through sound, in between great constraints and beautiful escapes. Guitarist in the duo Cheval de Frise, until 2004, he began his solo project by dissecting this instrument, then moved away from it, widening his horizons, gradually developing an instrum…

All the recent Wah Wah LPs by Nicolas “Nik Pascal” Raicevic and originally on his Narco Records and Tapes label - rumored to be one of the first truly independent labels, with Raicevic simply walking into an L.A. pressing plant & placing orders for stock - between 1969 and 1975. The music is nothing short of genius; a fine beaded mist of exceedingly lo-fi - tape drop-outs are prevalent, entire frequency ranges completely excised from certain tracks ... not to mention the piss-poor quality of the…

Black Truffle present a reissue of a landmark UK release, Max Eastley, Steve Beresford, Paul Burwell, and David Toop's Whirled Music, originally released on Quartz in 1980. Remastered and cut at 45RPM by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering Berlin. Includes a 24-page booklet with archival materials and notes from David Toop, alongside contemporary reviews, flyers, notes on the instruments and performance documentation; Gatefold sleeve."[Whirled Music is] one of the key documents of the inventi…

The Art Ensemble of Chicago and Associated Ensembles is a 21-CD limited and numbered edition issued as the standard-bearers of Great Black Music prepare to celebrate their 50th anniversary. Both the Art Ensemble of Chicago and ECM Records were founded in 1969, and there have been many shared experiences. As Roscoe Mitchell says, “It has been amazing to have taken this journey together.”With their first ECM album, the widely-acclaimed Nice Guys, the Art Ensemble’s revolutionary and polystylistic …

Capra Black remains one of the seminal recordings of jazz's black consciousness movement. A profoundly spiritual effort that channels both the intellectual complexity of the avant-garde as well as the emotional potency of gospel, its focus and assurance belie Billy Harper's inexperience as a leader. Backed by an all-star supporting unit including trombonist Julian Priester and drummer Billy Cobham, Harper's tenor summons the brute force and mystical resolve of John Coltrane but transcends its in…

There is no figure in Italian music, nor within the country’s shimmering, expansive avant-garde, who demands the respect and awe offered to Franco Battiato. He is the beginning and the end. An artist whose output, stretching across six decades, is so diverse and singular, that it defies any concrete definition - darting from psychedelic Prog, definitive gestures in the history of Minimalism, to the heights of explicit Pop. Like many of his contemporaries, Battiato’s journey toward avant-garde an…

This year has been an incredible period for avant-garde, Minimalist, New Age, ambient, and electronic reissues. One after another, many of the most coveted and rare LPs from these movements have emerged from the shadows. While each of these movements had a tendency to avoid easy categorization, the reissue market has largely veered toward those whose location can be easily understood, offering less attention to those members whose work fell into the spaces between. With their fourth release sinc…

Incredible lost recordings by Philip Glass from 1975, released at ORTF Sextet at La Maison de la Radio, Paris. The sextet is comprised of a stellar cast of musicians with Philip Glass, Jon Gibson, Dickie Landry, Michael Riesman, Joan La Barbara and Richard Peck. Music in Twelve Parts is a set of twelve pieces written between 1971 and 1974. This performance in France includes part 1, 2, 3, 11 and 12 on a double LP.Also included a very rare Philip Glass interview from 1974 in his NYC loft during t…

For a label that wasn't around long, Strata East achieved the same sort of label recognition that Impulse! or Blue Note managed to build. In other words, you knew what you were getting when you bought a record on the label, even if you didn't know the names on the outside of the cover. "Don't Look Back" is an album led by American saxophonist Harold Vick recorded in 1974 and released in the wake of Harold Vick's recovery from a heart attack, which may partially explain the passion with which he …

Starting with an artist residency Tasos Stamou visited the Greek island over the course of three summers, collecting field recordings, performing with local musicians, producing electronic compositions and gathering old records and tapes of traditional music of the region. The project resulted in the assembling of a unique sound collage which reflects his personal experience as a music visitor to this part of the Mediterranean. Tasos Stamou is an electroacoustic music composer, performer, altern…

"By the time you read this Jerome Noetinger is no longer the boss/face/director of Metamkine, the French mail-order for all sorts of unusual music, music along the lines of what we write about, in case you might be wondering where to purchase any (http://www.metamkine.com/ and no we don’t get paid for this ad). After many years of making parcels Noetinger and his pals decided it was time for a new face (say hello to Franck Laplaine) and now Noetinger can work more on his music. His work has been…

Populäre Mechanik is an improvisational group from Berlin playing a unique amalgam of Fluxus-inspired garage rock, free jazz, and live electronics. It was originally founded in the early 1980s by Wolfgang Seidel who had previously been the original drummer for West-Berlin leftist rock band Ton Steine Scherben and after that became a long-time collaborator of Conrad Schnitzler with whom he played in Kluster and Eruption, as well as in duo recordings. Recently, Seidel emerged as an author and has …

** Edition of 300 copies ** Istanbul based multi-instrumentalist Umut Çağlar founded the Turkish free jazz band Konstrukt at the beginning of 2008. Since then the band went through many line-up changes and collaborated with with the likes of Peter Brötzmann, Joe McPhee, William Parker and Keiji Haino, continuosly evolving its sound. The band is currently formed by Çağlar, Korhan Futacı, Apostolos Sideris, Erdem Göymen and Berkan Tilavel and this EP - recorded at Hayyam Studio in Istanbul in 2017…

Few albums define a genre as succinctly as Simon Finn’s Pass The Distance does for psychedelic folk. Not even landmark recordings by Pearls Before Swine or Skip Spence can stand up to the sheer madness of Finn’s sole LP, originally released in 1970. After moving to London in 1967, Finn busked around town for a couple years before entering Camden’s Chalk Farm Studios, best known for producing a string of reggae hits. Pass The Distance, however, would become more than a solo-acoustic project. Back…

Souffle Continu presents a reissue of Nu Creative Methods' Nu Jungle Dances, originally released in 1978. When the second Nu Creative Methods album was released, New And Rediscovered Musical Instruments (1975) by Max Eastley and David Toop had already been available for almost three years. Without being able to say that there was a direct, real-time influence, the direction taken by the British and French duos was however the same, combining research and tradition in a quest for a new imaginary …

Though frequently overshadowed by his contemporary and Takoma Records labelmate John Fahey, the compositions and performances of Daniel R. Robinson Jr., best known by the stage name Robbie Basho, were integral in the development of the American primitive guitar style. Along with Fahey, and songwriter/composers such as Max Ochs, Leo Kottke, and others, Basho helped bring to the masses the distinct form of guitar finger-picking, which blended folk and country-blues with neo-classical composition t…

**Unreleased recordings: 2001 – 2004. Includes 8-page 9″x9″ booklet. Edition of 300** The Ivytree, as some may know, is the project of San Franciscan musician Glenn Donaldson. In the early 2000s Glenn was a founder of the Jewelled Antler Collective, forming such projects as The Blithe Sons, Thuja, and The Skygreen Leopards, among many others. The range of projects he is associated with all beautifully web together. Between 2001 and 2005 Donaldson published a handful of discs under the names The …

Edition of 200. An immersion into Classics. That kind of Classics which holds in his pantheon Pierre Henri and Pierre Schaeffer, even though I should maybe refer to Michel Chion, given the powerful dramatic intensity displayed by these two compositions.Mario De Vega has once again proved himself a master at mixing in his works all of the elements that make me love electro-acoustic music so much. The unpredictability of the sound sources, some sort of spectral musicality, and the sudden Moves; th…

Esa Kotilainen’s Ajatuslapsi was a very moderate success at the time of its release in 1977 (on Love Records label, also responsible for the Sperm releases), but over the years its cult status has become immense. Svart Records presents the first ever vinyl reissue, with the mastering and cutting of the lathe supervised by Kotilainen himself. Ajatuslapsi is quite a magical record. One of the first ambient synthesizer records ever in Finland, it is quite unlike much of the similar stuff produced e…

CD Edition. A few months after the foundation of Can, Holger Czukay recorded his first solo album ‘Canaxis’, in conjunction with producer/engineer Rolf Dammers, this album was assembled from thousands of snippets recorded from short wave radio, a long standing obsession of Czukay's which he also incorporated into some of Can's later albums. A refugee during the Second World War, Holger Czukay famously studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen in the early ‘60s. That direct exposure to the challenging a…

**Astonishing unreleased archival Terry Riley material finally available on LP, a true and rare slice of history released on wax**By the early 1960s pioneering minimalist composer Terry Riley had just completed a MA in composition from UC Berkeley, begun working at the San Francisco Tape Music Center, along with Morton Subotnick, Steve Reich, and Pauline Oliveros, among others, and had started to compose prolifically. Though his first “proper” album would not be released for several years, in 19…