Best of 2019
Petra
CD Edition. The first time Maryanne Amacher's music has ever been available on vinyl. Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009) was a composer of large-scale fixed-duration sound installations and a highly original thinker in the areas of perception, sound spatialization, creative intelligence, and aural architecture. She is frequently cited as a pioneer of what has come to be called "sound art", although her thought and creative practice consistently challenge key assumptions about the capacities and limita…
Glass Bead Games
**180 gram LP x 2 gatefold sleeve Hi Res remastring** Fifth part of the Strata-East Dolphy Series, Glass Bead Games is arguably the crown jewel of the Strata East movement, an amorphous genre that treads an unusual path between post-bop, 70’s avant-garde and spiritual jazz, with a groove. Glass Bead Games is full of revelations at many levels. First, the decade of the 1970s did produce genuinely creative, "human" new music flowing from the jazz mainstream; second, Bill Lee was more than Spike's…
Rock (Bande Originale Du Film, 1982) Lp
2019 Small Repress. The first release by Transversales, a French label based in Paris founded by Sebastien Rosat and Jonathan Fitoussi, is the original soundtrack of the film Rock, composed in 1982 by Bernard Parmegiani (1927-2013). Parmegiani was a major figure of electro acoustic music and member of the historic GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) where he composed an important work of concert, among which is the masterpiece: De Natura Sonorum (REGRM 009LP). The work of Parmegiani, a virtuoso…
Wire Recorded Pieces
**Audiophile transparent clear vinyl; Includes CD** Subtitled 'Precocious Noise and Early Electronica Pt. 2' it's an astonishing compilation with fully remastered soud, for those who are not familiar with the fascinating world of primal electronica, noise, sound design, industrial, avant-garde, tape-music, etc. Features Johanna M. Beyer, Bengt Hambraeus, Franco Evangelisti, Remi Gassmanny, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Halim El-Dabh, Pierre Henry, Else Marie Pade, Herbert Eimert, The Blue Men, György Li…
A New World
** Edition of 300 copies ** We consider ourselves extremely fortunate having met Hüseyin Ęrtunc during his terrestrial transit. After we reissued his wonderful album Musikî (privately released on Intex Sound in 1974) and a few collaborative albums with the Konstrukt collective, in 2017 we finally managed to invite him, Doğan Doğusel, Cem Tan and Umut Çağlar to play some shows in Italy as a quartet. Things got really complicated when their visas got rejected - only one week before their plane was…
Womens Work
**in process of restock** Originally published in the mid-1970s, Womens Work was a magazine that sought to highlight the overlooked work of female artists working at the cusp of the visual arts, music, and performance. The magazine was edited by Alison Knowles and Annea Lockwood and featured text-based and instructional performance scores by the following 25 artists, composers, and choreographers:Beth Anderon, Ruth Anderson, Jacki Apple, Barbara Benary, Sari Dienes, Nye Ffarrabas (participating …
Scanning
A pioneer of electronic, computer, and instrumental avant-garde music, for the majority of his life, the German composer Roland Kayn remained one of the great unheralded figures in the landscape of 20th century sound - a founding member of Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, who delved into singular territories entirely his own. Fortunately, in the last few years, in part due to the release of his monumental work, A Little Electronic Milky Way of Sound, by Frozen Reeds in 2017, and Die S…
Montparnasse
**Small repress soon available** First reissue of this enigmatic and sought-after Japanese rarity from the 80's, originally released on the cultish Unbalance label (run by Naoto Hayashi and Jojo Hiroshige of Hijokaidan fame). Comprised of cut-up and collaged recordings from various unspecified French movies intertwined with the occasional spoken word segments ~ all seemingly recorded using a cheap-o cassette player making for quite the lo-fi work. A walk in Paris somewhere between the 30's and t…
Selections from 100 Models of Hegikan Roku
** Astonishing 1976 recordings of drone works inspired by La Monte Young and the Theatre of Eternal Music ** A co-edition with Empty Editions. Selections from 100 Models of Hegikan Roku is the second in an ongoing series of archival records of the unheard music of Swedish composer, philosopher, poet, mathematician, and visual artist Catherine Christer Hennix, co-released by Blank Forms Editions and Empty Editions. It follows last year’s Selected Early Keyboard Works and anticipates Blank Forms’ …
Franvarande
Frånvarande acts as both the prelude and epilogue to Mattias Gustafsson’s 2017 record Nattmusik, forming a temporal cradle around his B.A.A.D.M. debut. Side A was recorded back in 2012 and originally released under his Ornaments alias, manifesting as the withered, rain-eroded memory of a majestic orchestral lament, with bowed cymbals singing through layers of rust and the sound of children floating in through an open window. It was this 20-minute piece that inspired us to present Gustafsson with…
Live Without Fear
CD Edition. Number 27 in the Jazzman Holy Grail Series. With a price of well over $1000 on the few occasions the original LP has hit the market, Infinite Spirit Music's 'Live Without Fear' is a beautiful album of humble purity and peaceful spiritual jazz vibes that lives up to the hype. With the blessing of creator Soji Ade and colleague Kahil El Zabar, we're delighted to be able to finally share their music with you, 40 years since it was recorded. As so often with private pressings, few copies…
Jumping and Standing 1984
Limited edition pressing of 300 copies * Includes text insert by Akio Suzuki. Originally recorded in 1984, “Jumping and Standing” consists of a live performance at Musashino Art University by pioneering Japanese sound artist Akio Suzuki, accompanied by five toy rabbits. This long-awaited release epitomizes Suzuki’s approach to performance, imbued with a characteristic sense of humor and an organic interplay with his audiences, as evinced by uproarious laughter heard on the opening track. Now som…
The Antique Blacks
The vitality you hear on Antique Blacks is a testament to the unique energy of the community around The Foxhole Cafe in Philadelphia, as Ra honed his unique brand of Afro-Futurism through the late 60s and 70s. Cosmic theatre, spiritual chants, and experimental electronics make this record an essential document that was ahead of its time. Ancient to future! The 1970s saw change in Sun Ra's recorded output, and as far as we can tell, the content of his live performances. By the middle of the decad…
Ecstatic Computation
Caterina Barbieri is an Italian composer who explores themes related to machine intelligence and object-oriented perception in sound through a focus on minimalism. Following 2017's acclaimed double-LP Patterns Of Consciousness (IMPREC 449LP), Ecstatic Computation is the new full-length LP by Caterina Barbieri. The album revolves around the creative use of complex sequencing techniques and pattern-based operations to explore the artefacts of human perception and memory processes by ultimately ind…
Shades of Blue
Due to overwhelming demand for our 5LP boxset which sold out on the day of release, here are the first ever official individual re-issues of all five of the iconic Lansdowne recording sessions by the legendary UK jazz combo, the Don Rendell/Ian Carr Quintet.The five albums; Shades Of Blues (1965), Dusk Fire (1966), Phase III (1968), Change Is (1969) and Live (1969), have reached almost mythical status in the collector's world. Regarded as holy grail artefacts for even the seasoned aficionado, th…
Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out
One part psychologist, one part psychonaut, and one part huckster, Dr. Timothy Leary was one of the most fascinating and enigmatic figures to emerge from the '60s, and the fact that he released a soundtrack to a film that nobody ever saw fits right in with his modus operandi. Indeed, mass confusion reigns as to the origin of the tracks found on Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out. First of all, Leary had released an album by the same name a year earlier on the ESP-Disk label; that one was a spoken-word r…
A Lifetime In Oriental Jazz
CD Edition. Jazzman presents the definitive anthology of pioneering ethno-musicologist, mystical adventurer and real life jazz guru Dr Lloyd Miller. This album tells the fascinating life story of one man and his journey through Europe and the Middle East, living off nothing but his wits, talent and an open-minded attitude towards music and jazz.Master of dozens of languages and hundreds of instruments, Miller has spent fifty years immersed in the music of Europe, Asia and the Middle East.Featuri…
Sensation's Fix
A monster rarity finally reissued: this is the very first album from Sensations' Fix - and together with "Portable Madness" and "Fragments of Light" one of the three titles published in 1974, a collection of psychedelic compositions, in which glimpses of 'cosmic' music can already be noticed; those elements would soon become a trademark in the group's repertoire. The twelve compositions present here were part of demos that Franco Falsini had sold to the record company, which decided to publish …
In the past only geniuses were capable of staging...
CD Edition. Full title: In the past only geniuses were capable of staging the perfect crime (also known as a revolution) Today anybody can accomplish their aims with the push of the button. For its 50th release, Black Truffle presents the ninth album from one of the label's core ensembles, the power trio of Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke, and Oren Ambarchi. Drawn from a November 2015 performance at Tokyo's now-defunct SuperDeluxe, the record's opening piece drops us immediately into the maelstrom, ab…
Taraxacum
LP version. Incredible 1986 lost recordings, an amazing adventure of a musicological and botanical research on the psychoacoustic qualities of the green world. Black Sweat has always focused its gaze on a diverse series of genres, from an equally diverse number of geographies and eras. Equally, the label represent one of the great, focused efforts in illuminating the output of the Italian avant-garde - an endlessly exciting, but all too neglected vein within the history of recorded sound. Centra…