Best of 2022
Toshi Ichiyanagi, A Pianist
Limited 80 copies. V.A “Toshi Ichiyanagi, A Pianist” (special edition) CD+CDR
1_Table tennis performance at Katsumi Asaba Exhibition / 2009 / 13’57”Influenced by Asaba, who even coached a Japanese national team player, Ichiyanagi is also known as a very good table tennis player. A ping-pong table was also brought to the event and a demonstration was held before Ichiyanagi's performance. A contact microphone was attached to the ping-pong table where audience members, as well as Ichiyanagi, played…
Kofu II
* Glass-mastered CD housed in a die-cut customised debossed outer case (14.5 x 14.5cm) with rounded obi, 16pp inserts with words in Japanese and English from Meitei. Offset printed, full colour on premium matt paper. * Meitei’s 2020 album Kofū was the bold bookend to an expedition, where sounds were first navigated and then subverted in 2018’s Kwaidan and 2019’s Komachi. All three albums were Meitei’s attempt at immersive storytelling, reimagining moments of Japanese history he felt were being w…
Hydration
Following the release of his album trilogy (Kwaidan, Komachi and Kofū), Meitei has established himself as a defining voice in contemporary Japanese music. By sharing intricate sonic stories and impressions of his nation's rich culture, he has built an aural world around his notion of the ‘lost Japanese mood’. His latest project, under the new moniker Tenka, aims to work without the boundaries of theme, storytelling or audience expectations. Spending many hours in the mountain forests that he li…
Trois Mémoires Discrètes
*300 copies * 'Another fantastic Af Ursin release. Af Ursin is Timo van Luijk’s solo project. The first piece, Sylphide, is a side-long wonder. Long drawn out brass tones with some other accompaniment. I could listen to this music all day. The closest parallel I can think of is Davide Mosconi’s divine LP of foghorn recordings. But Sylphide has a bit more of a musical element. This will be my go-to last side of the night for my (rare these days) late night Salons. The second side features two tra…
Vålnad Av Fornskog
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…
Tracks and Traces
* Much-needed 2022 repress **A true Krautrock classic from the archives. In 1976 Brian Eno visited Harmonia's studio in the Weserbergland region of northern Germany to create what would become one of the most cherished artifacts of the genre on 'Tracks and Traces'. Harmonia comprised of multi instrumentalists Hans Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Mobius (also known as Cluster) with former Kraftwerk and Neu member, Michael Rother, and together with the like-minded synth maestro Eno they created twelv…
Concert à Luz 2009
From Jean-Marc Foussat own Fou Records, comes one of the most striking archival releases of the year, “Concert 2009”, capturing a meeting between the French electroacoustic free improv trio, Marteau Rouge, and Japanese noise giant Keiji Haino. Pushing far beyond expectations of free improvisation, the group weaves blistering passages that incorporate touchstones from prog, punk, metal, noise, and drone, into more intricate movements of dystopian avant-gardism, culminating as a strikingly forward…
Trio for Strings
Few copies back in stock. Limited deluxe edition. This vinyl box set is the first-ever official release of La Monte Young’s Trio for Strings (1958), recorded live from the Dream House, a legendary sound-and-light installation by Young, Marian Zazeela, and Jung Hee Choi, and performed by The Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble led by Charles Curtis and featuring Curtis, cello; Reynard Rott, cello; Erik Carlson, violin, viola; and Christopher Otto, violin, viola, at Dia:Chelsea in 2015. Featu…
Alterations
Never released before recordings from Logos Foundation live sessions at Logos Foundation, Gent, Belgium on January 3, 1981. "The music is free-improvisation -- that is we make our music co-operatively while playing: by listening, reacting, throwing in new ideas, not by following preplanned schemes. At its simplest the group's intention can be said to be to play together as well as possible and to enjoy ourselves while doing so. We are very interested in the result and intend that the audience is…
Organum for Stefano
In Terry Riley's words "I was invited to an art gallery in Los Angeles to hear a solo String Bass recital by Stefano. I arrived late and the concert was in progress, I was walking down a series of concrete halls to reach the galley chamber where the music was taking place. In the distance I could hear the sounds of french horns, trombones, strings and brass all mixing in a beautiful modal ensemble, and at the time I thought that Stefano must be playing his bass with a chamber group. I was amazed…
Zouroku No Kibyou
* 40th anniversary vinyl edition. Pressing of 299 copies. Remastered from the original audio master. Includes all the inserts that were on the original 1982 LP * Zouroku no Kibyo is the first album by Hijokaidan, released in April 1982. It is a compilation of live recordings from 1981, when the extreme performances of Hijokaidan first attracted attention, and is a record of the chaotic inner energy of young people in their early 20s, influenced by rock, jazz, contemporary music, and avant-garde …
Il Terzo Reich
** * Edition of 25 copies only, each accompanied by an original artwork by Romeo Castellucci (a photo 210x29,7 cm with English newspaper clipping applied, then torn; signed by the artist) ** 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 …
Slowdown Records Box Sets bundle
"Merzbow's unpublished/excavated archive series by Slowdown Records began to be released in 2018, and so far 15 chapters have been published. This "35 CD Box" contains chapters 11-15 of this archival series, with the addition of "2017-2020" (5CD), a collection of five original Merzbow albums released on Slowdown Records from 2017 to 2020. These chapters are presented in chronological order of when the recordings were made, and each chapter was compiled with some concept or musical feature in min…
The Quietly Clouds And A Wild Crane
* Edition of 300 copies * This latest instalment from NoBusiness Records collaboration with the Japanese Chap Chap label under the name of Yuji Takahashi with Sabu Toyozumi constitutes a real find. A wonderfully mystic vernal episode of free improv music recorded in Tokyo, 1998. Piano and percussion album of the highest beauty, interactive on a telepathic level and execution. Yuji Takahashi is a Japanese avant-garde composer and pianist. In Japan he was by then already well established as leadin…
Space Tuning Box (3LP Box)
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…
Pulse Music
*2LP Gatefold with tipped in booklet * Presented together for the first time, American composer John McGuire’s Pulse Music series (1975-1979) blurs the popular narrative that Minimalism was a reaction against Europe’s angular, intellectual, inscrutable high-modernism. McGuire, born in California, studied at Occidental College in Los Angeles and UC Berkeley before going to Europe to study with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Gottfried Michael Koenig. His compositions lock seriali…
De Revolutionibus
Tip! * 300 copies * Other Minds Records is pleased to announce de revolutionibus: sound homage to Copernicus, a new limited edition LP release from legendary text-sound poet Enzo Minarelli. Minarelli compares the revolution of sound poetry to the revolution that Copernicus brought about with his discovery of the heliocentric nature of the solar system. Just like Copernicus put the sun at the center of the solar system, sound poets centered the human voice—and thus the sensuous nature of a text—…
Sound
Sound: An Exhibition of Sound Sculpture, Instrument Building and Acoustically Tuned Spaces opened at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art in the summer of 1979 (and was also on view later that year at PS1 in New York). Curated by Bob Wilhite and Robert Smith, the exhibition surveyed the field of sound art. The forty-four participants were painters pivoted toward performance, conceptual artists attracted to time-based mediums, self-styled creators of environments, and musicians (formally…
The Pavilion of Dreams
**Repress** For five decades, Harold Budd stood on the forefront of the West Coast avant-garde. Born in Los Angeles, he studied with Schoenberg-pupil Gerald Strang and began teaching at CalArts in 1970. While searching for his own voice, he was influenced as much by abstract expressionist painters as by John Cage and Morton Feldman. In his work, Budd brought delicate, slowing-moving melodies to the foreground – creating a new musical language based on “eternally pretty music” and smooth surfaces…
Entropic trash apotheosis
Tip! "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 t…