Best of 2019
Cushion
**Screen printed edition of 300 hand-numbered copies. High-quality open screen printed sleeve, and heavy outer screen printed PVC sleeve. Comes with a bonus CD** For their third album Jukwaa expands to a quintet : 1 piano, 2 double-basses, 2 drums. This exceptional instrumentation led to an exploration and investigation of the instruments themselves, their roles and their timbral range. «Jukwaa embodies a central paradox of today’s modern music: the double bass is a bass and not a bass, the drum…
King of Noise
**500 copies only, remastered & the first vinyl reissue EVER of this legendary Japanoise LP. Pressed on 180 gram vinyl. Wow!** On King of Noise Hijokaidan is pared down to the duo of Jojo Hiroshige (on electric guitar) and Toshiji Mikawa (on drums, electronics, and voice.) In it’s early years, Hijokaidan saw as many as 19 members, but whether it be 19 or just two, Hijokaidan creates the same sheer wall of noise that gives them their apt title, King of Noise! On the opening track The Wreck of a O…
Signals Bulletin
Faitiche releases a new collaboration between the Japanese sound artist Asuna and Jan Jelinek: the album Signals Bulletin brings together joint improvisations and compositions made over a period of three years in Berlin, Kyoto and Kanazawa. Asuna’s meandering organ drones merge with Jelinek’s pulsating synthesizer and field recording loops to create dense superclusters that span broad harmonic arcs."Watching the Japanese sound artist Asuna playing the organ, some people might be surprised. Asuna…
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…
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…
Vampir-Cuadecuc
**130 copies. Art Edition** Carles Santos was a multi-disciplinary artist, perhaps best known outside of Spain as a composer of scores for his lifelong collaborator, radical Catalan filmmaker Pere Portabella. Made in 1970 during the final years of Franco’s dictatorship, Vampir-Cuadecuc is an astonishingly creative assault on the regime and, arguably, Portabella’s most influential work. Filmed behind the scenes during the production of Jesús Franco’s Count Dracula (1970), Vampir-Cuadecuc is a hig…
Inside
The saxophone is most often associated with jazz, a lead instrument that’s strong on melody and a potent vehicle for improvisation. Urban Sax puts all those ideas to bed. For those unfamiliar, Urban Sax is the creative outlet of composer Gilbert Artman, who started the group back in the mid-70s, and composes and arranges all of the group’s material. The “group” in this case is over 75 performers, consisting mostly of saxophones (the entire family from sopranino to bass), but also including clari…
Scenes From the South Island
Expanded reissue of New Zealand guitar pioneer Roy Montgomery's rare and revered full-length debut, Scenes From The South Island, originally released in 1995 by West Coast experimental / space rock label Drunken Fish. Recorded on both coasts on a pair of Tascam 4-tracks, the album is alternately wistful, windswept, skeletal, shredded, and strange. Solo guitar figures flow and fray through echo and empty space, evoking loss, long roads, and low-lit landscapes.Montgomery's own memories of this era…
Geelriandre / Arthesis
**Edition of 1000 copies**Eliane Radigue's Geelriandre / Arthesis is named for the pieces that fill its two sides. Geelriandre, realized on an ARP 2500 synthesizer in 1972, features Gérard Fremy on prepared piano. Arthesis, realized using the University of Iowa's Moog in 1973, comprises the full duration of side B. Eliane Radigue has received much deserved praise for her transcendent composiitions for tape, synthesizers, and acoustic instruments. Her work is deep, slowly changing, and timelessly…
Death And Spring
We live in a musical era defined by historical reappraisal - a noble moment which has rescued a near countless number of incredible albums from lingering neglect and loss. As wonderful and exciting as this is, it has come with an unexpected, but increasingly acknowledged consequence. With so many eyes on what was, we risk allowing history to repeat, subjecting today’s artists to the same forms neglect which plagued the past. It’s becoming increasingly rare to encounter record labels which entire…
Plains
**Limited to 100 copies only**Two Plains & A Fancy, the third film by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn, was hailed by The New Yorker as “the most imaginative and visionary” Western of recent years and is now receiving a theatrical release. Central to the film’s atmosphere is its arid yet spacious score, a collaboration between Talya Cooper (previously of Household) and John Atkinson (of Aa), whose soundtrack for Asasin in Lege was the inaugural Florabelle release. As an LP, Plains grows out of elemen…
Balaklava
A record that virtually defies categorization, Pearls Before Swine's 1968 epic Balaklava is the near-brilliant follow-up to One Nation Underground — and second masterpiece from Tom Rapp's merry band. This quasi-historical mystery album featuring a lisping songwriter who was recording 78 RPM cylinders and talking about Florence Nightingale existed, if not in the middle, then somewhere over there. It was fitting that the album had a home on ESP Records then—and now it has one on Drag City. A host …
Baroo
"I have always been searching for a way to articulate the intangible area between the recognizable and the unfathomable, a feeling perhaps informed by some long-abandoned experiments with psychedelics. This has been a continued pursuit starting with my tape experiments in the 1970’s until the present, with technological evolution driving new ways of expression.With the exception of Xé May, which is performed on an Elektron Octatrack, these pieces were constructed for live performance using a lap…
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, …
The Book Of Sounds
Last Copies. Edition of 500 copies. "This work, a masterpiece of restraint, reflects the musical imagination of someone who has spent long periods in the quiet recesses of the mind." (Terry Riley) Beacon Sound present a reissue of Hans Otte's The Book Of Sounds (Das Buch Der Klänge) originally released in 1984. Hans Otte (1926-2007) was a multifaceted artist, poet, pianist, composer, and promoter who synthesized the strands of minimalism, Eastern spirituality, and radical art into his own unique…
Architettura Sussurrante
Clear vinyl, edition of 300 copies. 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 …
Neighborhoods
Ernest Hood’s Neighborhoods was released some two decades after the Portland, Oregon born and raised musician’s first forays into field recordings. These very recordings, and those captured over intervening years, define the universal sound and aural images of childhood, a theme memorialized by Hood’s privately-pressed opus of 1975.Sprawling through a haze of zither, synthesizer melodies, and foraged pedestrian sound, Neighborhoods is both a score and documentary composed and directed by Hood to…
Next Of Kin
Praised by Quentin Tarantino as one of the greatest films from Australian New Wave cinema, Next Of Kin (1982) was a highly stylised psychological thriller in the bloody tradition of European art-Horror. Scored by none other than ex-Tangerine Dream/Ash Ra Tempel drummer and German electronic music pioneer Klaus Schulze, the music featured in the film was a unique hybrid of pulsing Giallo-moods and hypnotic Berlin-School electronica. Due to the limited availability of the film over the years, rumo…
Psycorama
If conceivable, imagine a collaboration between Brian Eno and Aphex Twin, both in their ambient periods, recording stock music for an Italian Library music label. If so, then behold Psycorama!, a collection of experimental music used to soundtrack a series of films and documentaries produced by the Italian filmmaker Roberto Rossellini.Composed by Mario Nascimbene, a name synonymous with the golden age of Italian film music, a composer whose grandiose scores of the 1950s and 60s defined the very …
Gruppo d'Improvvisazione "Nuova Consonanza"
**400 copies, pressed on 180g black vinyl housed in its faithfully restored original packaging and newly remastered from the original reel-to-reel tapes.** First ever vinyl re-issue of the incredibly rare Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza 1975's album, which comes in a fully remastered version with new sequence / structure as per recently discovered original tapes. Copies purchased from Soundohm also include an exclusive 30x30cm 12-page booklet with never seen before pictures and essays…