Best of 2019
Conversations With the Anthony Burgess Cassette Archives
Double LP version. Includes color insert. Double LP/CD curated by Alan Dunn in collaboration with the International Anthony Burgess Foundation and Sub Rosa. Anthony Burgess's second wife Liana carried a cassette recorder with her at all times to capture her life with the author and their son Andrew. This extraordinarily intimate audio archive of over 1,000 cassettes now sits with the International Anthony Burgess Foundation and artist Alan Dunn has been granted access to select excerpts from it …
Broken Music
**Much needed small repress avaiilable** Milan Knizak 1979's masterpiece never re-released before. Presented as a gatefold with the original design. Before everyone else - Christian Marclay, Philip Jeck, eRikm, Martin Tétreault, Otomo Yoshihide - there was Milan Knizak. In 1964, Milan Knizak, a member of Fluxus from behind the Iron Curtain, sat down on a sidewalk near the Charles Bridge in Prague, laid down a paper carpet right into the street, and starts tearing pages out of books and burning t…
Het Jakoba Prieel
**CD edition** While the Sound Reporters imprint, which ran intermittently between the early 80s and 90s - specializing in the sounds of anthropology, ethnomusicology, religion, travel and history, hailed from Amsterdam, those aware of this obscure cassette label will probably only be the most developed fans of Italian avant-garde. It was Sound Reporters that issued the incredible collaboration between Pit Piccinelli, Fred Gales, and Walter Maioli, Amazonia 6891, reissued by Black Sweat in 2016,…
The Call
** 20220 ** Available on vinyl for the first time in 40 years, Outernational Sounds is proud to present a masterpiece from the Los Angeles jazz underground – Horace Tapscott’s burning, spiritualised 1978 set, The Call. One of the unsung giants of jazz music, the composer, bandleader, arranger, pianist and community activist Horace Tapscott was the undisputed keystone in the grassroots Los Angeles jazz scene. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, his radical community arts and music formations the UGMA…
River Without Banks
Enchanting, gorgeous works for solo piano, strings, organ and Eastern percussion by preeminent composer Leo Svirsky. Seeming to unravel and weave simultaneously in mid-air, ‘River Without Banks’ is a significant new opus that taps into a rich vein somewhere between Charlemagne Palestine’s sustained ecstasies, the phasing pulses of Steve Reich, and the beatific glory of Alice Coltrane... ““How to begin? No beginning... never ending reverberation,” Antoine Beuger writes in the accompanying notes …
Institute of Sonology 1959-1969
This is a collection of electronic works composed between 1959 and 1969 at the Institute for Sonology in Utrecht, Holland. Once again, Sub Rosa offers a chance to reflect upon a rare lineage of electronic music's origins, a revolution of the fifties and sixties when an art form was emerging without a base -- ex nihilo -- a new music produced by machines designed to construct the new. Utrecht University's large complex of studios that comprised the Philips laboratories housed an extensive collect…
Architettura Sussurrante
CD Version. The peculiar and relatively unknown musical experiment by Alessandro Mendini, crafted together with a strange company that included supposedly distant outfits like Matia Bazar (chart-topping Italian pop band) and Magazzini Criminali (experimental, highbrow theater collective) and released by a major label that printed a tiny amount of copies.The opening track “Casa Mia” included random quotes from Cinismo Abitativo, a “poetic” editorial written for the design magazine MODO exactly 40…
Water Music
Nice Price! Recorded in 1985, Water Music is the first "Japanese" solo album by Mott The Hoople keyboard player Morgan Fisher, released on Satoro Takazawa aka Pneuma's label LLE. Six mesmerizing ambient tracks are played out as a multi-sensorial improvisation on a Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer plus grand piano, tape delays, bowed guitar and shell chimes. The result is an highly contemplative album that flows as a powerful yet ethereal journey through the element of water. Completely remastered …
The World of the Doubling Riders
**The definitive Doubling Riders box set with a load of previously unreleased material is finally here. Complete discography, remastered from the original tapes. 6 x CD boxset includes 1 disc of previously unreleased material, plus 24-page booklet of liner notes and never-before-seen photographs.** From its earliest days, Italian avant-garde and experimental music has always been a fascinating world of intersecting lines, unexpected meetings, and networks of conversation and collaboration. This …
Strain, Crack & Break: Music From The Nurse With Wound List
Temporary Super Offer! **A dream come true** After years of mythology, misinterpretation, and procrastination Nurse With Wound's Steven Stapleton finally chooses Finders Keepers as the ideal collaborators to release "the right tracks" from his über-legendary psych/prog/punk peculiarity shopping list known as The Nurse With Wound List, commencing with a French specific Volume One of this authentically titled Strain Crack Break series. Featuring some Finders Keepers' regulars amongst galactic Gall…
Werewolves On Wheels
Temporary Super Offer! B-movie junkies, gather round and prepare yourselves for what could only be described as a cinematic speedball. Take a combined hit of two of the most potent strains of toxic cinema, dress it up in ritualistic robes, and make it dance to the beat of a stoned, motoric, country commune soundtrack. Like an exploit-o double-bill where both films merge into a single feature, this directorial debut by an ex-Roger Corman protégé and future Russ Meyer art director (another heady c…
Paint A Lady
Temporary Super Offer! A mythical and misplaced masterpiece of lost soft rock and acidic folk funk by a one-hit wonderer lost in the wilderness for four decades. From the producer of Margo Guryan, writer behind Wool, Gerry Mulligan collaborator, Tarantino sound tracker, and Wendy & Bonnie confidant, Paint A Lady now emerges from folkloric obscurity. Within certain record collecting circles, especially those who gather under the umbrella that covers fragile niches like "acid folk" and "soft rock"…
Changes: 64 Studies for 6 Harps
James Tenney, for almost the entirety of his career, was one of the great, unsung giants of the American musical avant-garde - an artist’s artist, whose towering contribution and influence was everywhere - equal to Feldman and Cage, but who, like Nancarrow and Partch before him, was a maverick - radical to the core, refusing to play by the rules, and thus suffered at that fate’s all too predictable hand. Since his death in 2006, his legacy in devoted hands, recognition has slowly begun to grow, …
Phonopoetics
Edition of 300. Introduction by Henri Chopin. Serbian-Hungarian poet, actress, and visual artist Katalin Ladik has to be considered as one of the most pioneering artists alive. Educated in the former Yugoslavia, Katalin Ladik (Novi Sad, Serbia, 1942) began her career with interventions on Radio Novi Sad (1963–77) and as an actress with the avant-garde theatre group Bosch+Bosch in the city of Subotica (1977–92). Her work is bound to feminist matters in Eastern Europe and reflects the personal, so…
Three Nails Left
Cien Fuegos present a reissue of Schlippenbach Quartet's Three Nails Left, a classic mid-1970s originally released on FMP in 1975 and showing Schlippenbach is in sublime form. It features a stellar line-up, with Evan Parker - soprano and tenor saxophone; Peter Kowald - double bass and Paul Lovens - percussion. Side A was recorded live at 3rd Jazz Festival Moers June 2nd, 1974 by Michael Krause. Side B was recorded live at the Quartier Latin Berlin, February 2nd, 1975 by Jost Gebers with the FMP…
Himalaya
Following his critically acclaimed collections Electronic Music from the Seventies and Eighties and Electronic Music from the Eighties and Nineties, Carl Stone quickly follows-up Baroo with a double-LP album of recent works, including the final section of Fujiken, his epic journey through southeast Asian field recordings and street cassette culture.On all six tracks, composed between 2013 and 2019, Stone’s pan-global playground of looping synths and Asian pop culture remains as fertile as ever, …
Hamdelaneh
Another greeat release from Dark Companion Records. "Chance doesn’t exist. I met Markus Stockhausen after inviting him and his wife to “Musiche Nuove In Piacenza” festival in autumn 2018. Immediately I felt a strong empathy towards him. That doesn’t happen very often. I knew his work and had always admired it, especially the spontaneous compositions he performs and the way his unique talent blossoms in these situations.We talked at lunch and I dared propose to him to record an album for our smal…
ExpoZoom 1969
The history of music is never concrete. It’s forever changing and rewriting itself. The past becomes the present and the present reforms the past. What was lost is found, and what was known is lost. Our era, defined by the reissue and archival release, will likely be regarded as a definitive period of historical reparisal and reevaluation. Monumental figures have fallen. The obscure and unheralded have finally received their rightful due. Dark Companion’s latest LP - Ron Geesin’s ExpoZoom 1969, …
PerpetuaI Possibility
LP version. Bronze vinyl; edition of 500 (hand-numbered). Perpetual Possibility is an album that bears witness to the collaboration between Lino Capra Vaccina, living legend of Italian minimalism and the avant-noise duo Untitled Noise with an interesting album on the label Dark Companion. Perpetual Possibility is the faithful transcription of the concert held by the trio at the MA*GA Museum in Gallarate, Italy and is the first recorded live album by Lino Capra Vaccina. Untitled Noise weaves deli…
Spectre of Radiants
R Keenan Lawler & John Krausbauer's “Spectre of radiants” is a droning, everlasting buzz of strings, gently undulating and intersecting. Unconventionally played, as usual, the resonator guitars and the banjos, builds the perfect stream of sound to accompany your longest days. Fitting in the ultraminimalist/drone panorama, this acoustic gem follow the lineage draw by authours like Phill Niblock, Tony Conrad or Eliane Radigue, mixing and confonting it with the direct attitude toward sound of peopl…