Best of 2019
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…
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…
Memória das Águas
Selva Discos returns to the LP reissue game with a bang – by giving a new life to the stunning and very sought-after Memória das Águas album by Fernando Falcão. Originally recorded in 1979 in Paris but only released independently in Brazil in 1981, the album comes complete with genre-hopping explorations that swirl around ambient soundscapes, lively jazz, experimental-leanings, Afro-rhythms and a unique blend of Latin grooves and French pop with a Brazilian accent, but it also comes with a story…
Polynesia
The rarest of all exotic LPs, like Eden Ahbez but with extra added death. This bizarre, rarely heard masterpiece brings together jazz, ancient manuscripts, and a convicted murderer... Issued originally in 1959 it originates from Phoenix, Arizona. The concept behind the recording was unusual -- to bring together two unconnected worlds: the jazz genius of Buddy Collette with the academic oriental studies and translations of A.I Groeg. Little can be found of A.I. Groeg, but before the LP was record…
Ikiru Or The Wanderer
Samll repress finally available. We welcome Louise Landes Levi to the Oaken Palace Records family and invite you to join her on a musical journey through the life and fate of the Monarch butterfly. Ikiru, which is Japanese for "to grow", starts with "Butterfly Graveyard", a musical assessment of the current state of the Monarch butterfly, whose population has declined by over 80% over the past 20 years. On "Butterfly Brain", this worrying development is contrasted with the bravery and wonder of …
Conversations With the Anthony Burgess Cassette Archives
Double CD 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 …
Extract From Field Recording Archive
Japanese sound artist Toshiya Tsunoda is a master of the art of field recording who discovers the hidden properties of sound and vibrations in the material world, from road surfaces to the sea. Through acute mic placement, field recordist Toshiya Tsunoda captures the unusual vibrations of everyday spaces. The recordings contained in this amazing box open up an expansive soundfield of subtle modulating frequencies and dramatic suspensions of time and space. Sounds such as these would be the envy …
Dome 4
With the demise of the group Wire in 1980, founder members Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis joined forces to create Dome. With the assistance of engineer Eric Radcliffe and his Blackwing Studio Dome took the ethic of "using the studio as a compositional tool" and recorded and released three Dome albums on their own label in the space of 12 months: Dome (July, 1980), Dome 2 (October, 1980), and Dome 3 (October 1981). A final fourth album, Will You Speak This Word: Dome 4 was released on the Norwegi…
Dream Character
**300 only, this is stunning** Matt Jencik is back on Hands in the Dark with his new album, 'Dream Character', the follow up to his first solo record 'Weird Times' back in 2017. Whilst all the songs on his debut album were created using the same sampling method on the same instrument, this time the Chicago artist’s approach is slightly different. Using a combination of 4 track cassette, digital recording & sampling, he added live improvisations and a wider selection of instruments including gui…
Awake In TH' Red Desert
**The first vinyl reissue of the zoner masterpiece, originally released in 1968. Edition of 500** "For the first release in Feeding Tube's Unknown Province series -- a run of records dedicated to exploring little known nooks of the Canadian underground, curated by Alex Moskos -- we are delighted to bring you the first vinyl reissue of the 1968 zoner masterpiece by poet bill bissett and his fellow Vancouver freaks. We have always been shocked this LP was not included on the NWW list, but Canadian…
Mort Aux Vaches
**2LP Limited Edition 125 copies. Transparent Blue Vinyl.** First time on vinyl, brand new mastering, and new cover design (a 1974 drawing by Charlemagne Palestine). This is the first release in the 'GodBear' series, a project consisting in the re-issue of existing works and production of unreleased material by Charlemagne. In partnership with the Charlemagne Palestine Foundation. It’s hard to believe now, but until the mid-1990s, many of the most important figures American musical minimalism - …
Wind
2019 super limited repress. Italian electronic musician Gigi Masin's much sought-after 1986 first album, Wind, restored and remastered from the original tapes. Never commercially released, the LP was only given away at a number of small concerts, with many of the remaining copies destroyed during floods in the Venice-based musician's house. Quickly gaining recognition as something of a landmark ambient album in recent years, Wind is now lovingly presented again in its entirety. True to its origi…
Moto Perpetuo
This is killer. Marionette starts off 2019 with an extremely special collaboration record by Kilchhofer and Anklin, titled Moto Perpetuo. Michael Anklin is a drummer and percussionist based in Switzerland. He’s involved in various bands, collaborations and interdisciplinary projects. Anklin has previously appeared on a few recordings from Kilchhofer's Album The Book Room. Kilchhofer uses his main instrument the modular synth in a more electroacoustic manner, where he derives and processes voltag…
Chemical Flowers
Luke Younger yields his most engrossing work as Helm with the sorely romantic dynamics of ‘Chemical Flowers’, his follow-up to 2015’s ‘Olympic Mess’. Bolstered by J.G. Thirlwell’s rich string arrangements, it’s a hugely ambitious work that extends from whirling, panoramic vistas to insular, pulsing dynamics, somewhere between Earth, Oren Ambarchi, Keiji Haino and Actress. Recorded in long, sustained sessions in the Essex countryside, giving him breathing room from the choke of London, ‘Chemica…
Barracas Barrocas
Selva Discos fulfills its duty of giving a new life to Fernando Falcão's long lost LPs with the reissue of his album Barracas Barrocas, originally released through Egberto Gismonti's cult record label Carmo in 1987. Somehow, an original copy of this album is even more elusive than its predecessor Memória das Águas and it is a pity that such a stunning piece of music was kept apart from listeners worldwide for so long.The follow-up to Memória das Águas was recorded in São Paulo after Fernando Fal…
Occam Ocean Vol. 2
There’s little argument that Éliane Radigue is among the most important composers working today. She a titan of the avant-garde, forever pushing into the unknown, bending the very notion of what music is, with the depths it can penetrate, into a singular territory, entirely her own. Until the early 2000s, Radigue’s deeply meditative works sprang almost entirely from an intimate relationship with her ARP 2500, but, over the years since, she has turned her focus to a remarkably collaborate way of …
Abies Firma
**Last copies! Edition of 1000. 20-page pamphlet holding program notes, scores, & a new essay on American Gamelan by Jay Arms Complimentary CD version with additional 20-minute suite** The second album by the American Gamelan composer and instrument builder, Daniel Schmidt, following In My Arms, Many Flowers, his majestic debut on Recital. Abies Firma lies next chronologically, collecting works from 1976 to 1991, considered the second phase of his compositional form. “We were like children pla…