Best of 2022

The first album by the most extreme noise project to ever come out of Osaka, now in a second deluxe edition that borders on insanity: natural birch wooden box, hand-numbered to 99 copies, color print lid reproducing the iconic cover art by manga master Hideshi Hino. Inside: the LP, a 40-page book of raw concert photos, a cassette of six rare studio tracks from April and June 1980 - Hijokaidan's primal first breaths - four postcards, a massive poster, a live photo book, liner notes by Jojo Hirosh…

Masayuki Takayanagi was one of the truly iconoclastic musicians to emerge from Japan, or anywhere else, in the 20th Century. Though he won acclaim in the 1950s and '60s as a master of the electric guitar and jazz improvisation, Takayanagi was a restless spirit, deeply engaged with the era's new movements in contemporary art, music, literature, and philosophy. His work, beginning in the late 1960s placed him on the leading edge of these developments; he began expanding on the most radical element…

Limited edition reissue of 1000 copies. Pressed on black vinyl for better sound quality. Includes an insert. Reissue of this rare and unusually dreamy electronic ambient new age album. Originally created and released in a small edition in Japan back in 1987 by the mysterious musician / magician Shiho. The Body Is A Message Of The Universe features floating shimmering synthesizer textures. The Body Is A Message Of The Universe features floating shimmering synthesizer textures. It’s unique and ext…

Otoroku is proud to present the first vinyl reissue of "Blue Notes for Johnny" - a defining statement by one of the greatest ensembles in the history of jazz. Recorded in mid-1987 by Blue Notes - then reduced to the trio of Dudu Pukwana on alto sax, Louis Moholo-Moholo on drums and Chris McGregor on piano - it encounters the band 25 years after their founding embarking on an inward meditation through collective music making dedicated to Johnny Dyani, their former bandmate and friend.  Blue Notes…

Otoroku is proud to present the first vinyl reissue of "Blue Notes for Mongezi", one of the most passionate celebrations of a life in music ever laid to tape. Recorded in late 1975 by Blue Notes, then reduced to a quartet - Dudu Pukwana on  alto sax, whistle, percussion, and vocals; Johnny Dyani on bass, bells, and vocals; Louis Moholo-Moholo on drums, percussion, and vocals; and Chris McGregor on piano, and percussion - and issued the following year by Ogun, the album is a kairos; the first com…

Full recording of one of the most engaging and beguiling Late Junction live sessions we’ve ever heard - the one off first meeting between Korean multi-instrumentalist Park Jiha and writer and performer Roy Claire Potter.  Park Jiha plays the saenghwang, a Korean mouth organ which she blows in long multiphonics to set pace for Potter’s words. Together they unfurl a scene slowly in front of you, rich and focused, shifting your field of vision and drawing you in, elsewhere. It’s impossible not to f…

2022 Repress expected to ship early November -  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 …

Tip! On the outskirts of late 1970s Olympia, Washington, something stirs, sings, and breathes. Cheri Knight, a music composition student at the Evergreen State College, is developing her practice in a quaint but adequately equipped campus recording studio, amalgamating with the sonic timbre of the surrounding time, space, and place, while devoting to her own inner maxims. At once performative and meditative, electronic and organic, collaborative and self-contained, Cheri’s early compositions are…

Psychic Ills and Gibby Haynes’ Nowhere in the Night arrives from somewhere sometime ago, a document of sound bending, twisting, and stretching with the joy of collaboration and untethered aspiration. Psychic Ills, then the trio Tres Warren, Elizabeth Hart, and Brian Tamborello, first intersected musically with Gibby Haynes, then and forever the founding member of Butthole Surfers, when the two groups with Texas roots toured extensively in 2009, and next when the Ills invited Haynes to contribute…

Saved from the dust of time, here is a truly rare and obscure piece of vinyl by one of the most enigmatic bands in the whole history of British Progressive Jazz. Originally released in 200 copies in 1973 and reissued here for the first time, Quincicasm's only release stands as a brilliant document of the 70's British underground electric jazz scene. Somewhere at the crossing of open form jazz and art rock explorations. Ken Eley - saxophone, Dick Pearce - flugelhorn, Julian Marshall -vibraphone. …

** Edition of 400 copies ** Xing presents the artist record Il Terzo Reich by Romeo Castellucci and Scott Gibbons, fourth release in the XONG series, accompanied by an insert that collects on a long strip of black paper an extract from the flow of words screened in the homonymous stage work. Il Terzo Reich is the image and sound of an inculcated communication. The nouns of the Italian language flash on a black screen, about fourteen thousand words. Here, a language-machine devours entire spheres…

Hyper Tip! This incredible box, released in a deluxe wooden edition with digital printing on the lid limited to 300 copies, contains the first album “Cosmos from Diode Ladder Filter” released on CD on Alchemy Records , “2” released on Midi Creative , “3” released on double LP on Tiliqua Records and the four CD EPs released on P-Tapes, California based label run by Damion Romero, reissued for the first in a complete box, accompanied by a square pin and a series of photos of the impressive equipme…

*300 copies limited edition* Over the last decade, Rome-born, Brussels-based eclectic composer Giovanni Di Domenico has been ranging through a diverse number of fields within experimental music. Now, in the midst of a close series of astounding releases, Di Domenico adds another superb piece to his prolific discography as proof of an ever more enduring state of grace. The first of his works ever to feature voice and language as foregrounding elements, the five truly visionary pieces making up Po…

Tip! * 300 copies. In process of stocking * Hoof Stand is the third vinyl output by Primorje, the collaborative project between Giovanni Donadini (Ottaven, Canedicoda) and Matteo Castro (Mercury Hall, Lettera 22, also founder of Second Sleep label). Keeping their focus on a minimal yet disruptive 4-track recorders-based set-up, in the nine tracks making up this 12" the duo sew up rough textures of oblique tape loops intertwined with dub echoes and slowed down tempos, giving shape to what appears…

Transversales Disques is very glad to announce the release of Solitude Transit, unpublished archives by electroacoustic music pioneer Luc Ferrari. Music composed for contemporary dance, choregraphed by Anne-Marie Reynaud. Affiliated with French Radio's Groupe de Musique Concrète, co-founder of the GRM with Pierre Schaeffer in 1958, Luc Ferrari (1929-2005), a major figure of musique concrète and electroacoustic music broke away to pave his own path of individualistic expressions of minimalist mus…

Tip! * Gloss laminated sleeve with double-sided insert.* Coming full circle, Vålnad Av Fornskog is the fourth and final part in Arv & Miljö's suite of seasonal ambient albums initiated with Svensk Sommar I Stilla Frid (Omlott, 2018) and continued with Himmelsvind (Discreet Music, 2020) and Ensam Är Nattens Rymd Över Vita Vägar (Discreet Music, 2021). Heavily inspired by the Swedish countryside autumns of the 80's, the album starts just at the tail end of the summer. Fragmentary memories of thing…

** 365 copies, remastered edition ** Awesome Alga Marghen re-release presenting "Illuminations", or Charlemagne Palestine and Simone Forti duo interactions, illuminated with dim red lights. In early 1970 Morton Subotnick asked Charlemagne Palestine to join his soon to be created Media Department at the new “Dream School of the Future” endowed by the Disneys to be called the California Institute of the Arts. Charlemagne and Simone Forti met there in 1970, when La Monte Young asked them to arrange…

*Limited edition of 300 copies* Beautiful, haunting and sombre, this 2LP presents the entire recording from Henning Christiansen’s Heinrich von Kleist tribute at Rene Block’s Rosenfest festival, Berlin, 1984. The Reality is a Ghost in My Mind (LP1) is a work that unfolds patiently with a mix of field recordings; wind, bird song and the sound of snow being crushed underfoot all unite in a foreboding atmosphere. IN Penthesilea Höhle (LP2) features electronic treatments to the original field record…

** CDs come in a 6-panel Digipak with booklet and poster. Booklet includes besides the Layout credit only credits as given on first editions. CD2 are bonus tracks from Danny Hyde's Archive. Artwork licensed from the estate of Ian Johnstone. Made in EU Tracklisting given for CD 2 on artwork is mixed up, corrected above. ** Deeply emotional and uniquely rewarding album, reminiscent of Coil's mid-1980s classic “Horse Rotorvator”. Fully remastered and enhanced 3LP/2CD supervised by Danny Hyde. Inclu…

"Back in 2009 I had a small exhibition and a collaboration show with Yasutoshi Yoshida (one of my favorite noise artists ever, by the way) at Flying Teapot in Tokyo. I was also supposed to go to his place and record something but I got drunk and lost like an asshole. 13 years later our collaboration mayhem is out." Mastered by Ivan Fu for extra damage. Manuel's (Narcolepsia) words: "Yasutoshi Yoshida and Nicola Vinciguerra have both carved their own corner in underground, being consistent throug…