Best of 2018
Hi-Fi Is Sweeping the Country
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 …
Sound Mind Sound Body (30th Anniversary Edition)
**30th Anniversary Edition. Remastered reissue, first on vinyl** Released in 1994 ‘Sound Mind Sound Body’ decrees the massive impact of discreet gestures; slow-moving tones and spacious orchestral resonances, drifting and droning with glacial majesty, hardly recognizable as guitar much of the time In 1987, Rafael Toral began making his own compositions and solo recordings. 30 years later, these recordings sound remarkably prescient and perfectly timeless - almost fresher today than when they wer…
Oryantal
** 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…
Pass The Distance
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…
Archipel
Souffle Continu Records present the first ever reissue of Dharma's Archipel, originally released in 1973. "Do your own music!" was Albert Ayler's advice, received loud and clear in France. Cohelmec Ensemble, Workshop de Lyon, and the Dharma Quintet, three groups close in spirit, which would each illustrate, in their own way, a local principle: to get some distance from American free jazz. As far as Dharma is concerned, the community-based approach was put in place to escape from any academism. T…
Nu jungle dances
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 …
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…
Venus in Cancer
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…
Unburdened Light
**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 …
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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…
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…
Ajatuslapsi
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…
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…
Canaxis 5
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…
Music For The Gift
**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…
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…
Happy Trails
**Pure pleasure limited edition version in 180g vinyl - high fidelity sound, audiophile pressing** Without question, this follow-up to Quicksilver Messenger Service's self-titled debut release is the most accurate in portraying the band on vinyl in the same light as the group's critically and enthusiastically acclaimed live performances. The album is essentially centered around the extended reworkings of Bo Diddley's "Who Do You Love?" and "Mona," as well as the lesser lauded -- yet no less inte…
First Impressions
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. This is no exception. Who is Shamek Farrah? Who knows? Who cares? It's the music that's important. This is the standard spiritually intense new jazz one learns to expect from the label, soaked in some Eastern infl…
Aa Sschmmettrroossppecctivve
**Very last copies** Composer, musician, visual artist, and performer, Charlemagne Palestine is a legendary figure in the New York underground scene. At the piano or on his electronic oscillators, this outsider of skillful music experiments with the principles of resonance and repetition in a quest for the "golden sound": the ultimate harmonic vibration. Based in Brussels for 20 years now, his iconic work consisting of teddy bears, divinities, and other enchanting encounters is exhibited in Boza…
The Nazgul
Lost-in-time kosmische/kraut/avant-garde artifact produced by Toby Robinson, aka The Mad Twiddler, circa 1975 for his private Pyramid label. From the moment they emerged during the mid 90’s, mystery has swirled around Psi-Fi’s six Krautrock gems. Each, the label claimed, had been recorded for the long lost Pyramid label, based in Cologne during the 1970’s. Embraced and loved by many, others cried hoax. Some ventured further, implicating the perpetrator - the voice behind this assembly of drifti…