Best of 2023

This is a masterpiece album released in 1993 on Alchemy Records by Masonna, a solo project of Mazo Yamazaki who is acclaimed as one of the leading artists of Japanoise along with Merzbow and Emergency Staircase. It is finally being revived on vinyl! Cascades of electronic noise, a psychedelic touch and vocal belching mixed together constitute the ingredients of Mademoiselle Anne Sanglante Ou Notre Nymphomanie Auréolé, the double-barreled name for Masonna. Maso Yamazaki founded his project in 198…

Julien Sénélas, Jérôme Vassereau and Soia present a new version of "In C", Terry Riley's seminal work: a musical interpretation with two modular synthesizers (11 oscillators) and a graphic interpretation of the original score.

* Deluxe edition of 200 copies, comes with an insert * This is a project by Bruno Dorella (Ovo, Ronin, Sigillum S) and Stefano Ghittoni (The Dining Rooms, Le Petit). Inspired by the mythological character, both male and female, fortune-teller and fugitive, that has lived multiple lives, Tiresia is also the name of one of the main character in the movie “I Cannibali” (1970) by director Liliana Cavani.Played by Pierre Clementi, he is a sort of mystic that speaks an obscure language trying to rise …

**Edition of 350 copies, 16 page book. Previously unreleased! ** Less than a decade ago, the legacy of the Danish multi-disciplinary artist and composer, Henning Christiansen (1932 - 2008), had fallen into obscurity and remained almost entirely out of view. Outside of a small but dedicated following of sound-art fans and scholars, he ranked among the most obscure figures in experimantal music. Thankfully, over the years since, due to the devotion of a small number of labels, his work, in the for…

"A puzzlingly great album. Ah, the halcyon days of bungled Kurt Weill renditions, overactive splicing hands and tape-loops lasting only a few seconds before being smudged by hyper fast-forwarding, like a random, operatic battle of thermopylae as re-created by members of NWW. Faced with omnipresent latter-day refined-aesthetic cognescenti, whose duty it is to remind one of the gravity of modern music, I find myself defending such gut-level joyous stupidity and its gung-ho determination to vertigi…

*230 copies limited edition* Ahti & Ahti is the duo of Finnish sound artists Marja Ahti and Niko-Matti Ahti. Operating on the fringes of the musique concrète tradition, their work combines recordings of spaces and events, beings and objects, carefully aligned in an associative way. Nokivesi (soot-water) embraces sound montage and cut up conversations alongside instrumental and electronic sound, combining the complexity of the field-recorded sounds and compositional sensitivity. Originally create…

** Special edition of 300 copies on Transparent/black marbled vinyl housed in reverseboard printed sleave with printed inner sleave. Comes with lyric booklet, poster and postcard inserts  ** Formed in 1968, The Plastic People Of The Universe – named after a Mothers of Invention song and heavily influenced by Frank Zappa and The Velvet Underground – were iconic figureheads of the Prague Underground, a loose collective of Czech poets, philosophers and artists considered a threat by the Communist g…

*Edition of 200*  Ginevra Bompiani is most likely unknown for fans of experiential music. In Italian literature and thinking, however, she is highly regarded writer, editor, translator, essayist, and academic, whose fiction, particularly, is informed by linguistics, feminism, and literary theory, and verges on the surreal and the fantastic, making her interdisciplinary effort, ‘Il Calore Animale’, collaborating with two of the most singular voices in contemporary experimental music - Caterina Ba…

*Edition of 200* First emerging during the mid 2000s in the field of experimental electronics, the Italian born, Berlin based artist, Francesco Cavaliere captivated us back in 2021 with ‘Viridescens’, his brilliant duo with Tomoko Sauvage issued by Marionette. With a handful of noteworthy releases having appeared since, he now returns with ‘Zoomachia Disc 1’, a remarkable fable bridging the territories of spoken word and electronic and electroacoustic composition. For the better part of the last…

** Jeanne Lee's-Conspiracy in CD, housed in reverse board printed gatefold card sleeve. Initial copies come with complimentery poster designed by Shabaka Hutchings ** Jeanne Lee (1939-2000) was an African-American vocalist, poet, composer, improvisor, activist and educator. In her 40 year career she performed with Archie Shep, Marion Brown, Gunter Hampel, Frank Lowe, William Parker, Andrew Cyrille, Anthony Braxton, Ran Blake, Billy Bang, Cecil Taylor, John Cage, Rashsaan Roland Kirk, Pauline Oli…

Mega Tip! **Sourced from the master tapes. First-time vinyl reissue ** By the early '70s, Milford Graves had more or less stopped gigging. Having learned his lesson the hard way in multiple-night runs like a legendary Slugs' residency with Albert Ayler, he knew that the level of energy that he put out during a performance would be difficult to sustain over the long haul. A concert was a kind of absolute ritual for him, after which he would be totally spent, emotionally and physically. Graves rar…

Saltern presents a thrilling new live recording of Naldjorlak for solo cello, composer Éliane Radigue’s first piece for an acoustic instrument, paired with a remastered version of the long out-of-print, original 2006 recording. Composed in 2005 in close collaboration with cellist Charles Curtis, Naldjorlak marked a striking shift in the music of Radigue, who has since composed exclusively for instrumentalists with her celebrated Occam series. This album brings together two complete performances …

Much-Needed repress * Limited edition. Gatefold Cover, quality vinyl pressed at RTI. Includes a four-page insert with liner notes by La Monte Young, Charles Curtis, Anthony Burr, and Tashi Wada * Saltern's latest offering marks the first-ever release of "lost minimalist" Terry Jennings' visionary 1960 composition, Piece for Cello and Saxophone, as arranged in just intonation by legendary composer La Monte Young for renowned cellist Charles Curtis. Born in Los Angeles in 1940, Jennings was a clos…

Huge Tip! 400 pages, 387 Images. The story of the legendary Swedish psych rock band Träd, Gräs och Stenar is also a defining story of alternative culture. Across multiple incarnations, the musicians of this iconic group (whose name translates to “Trees, Grass and Stones”) have drawn on their roots in jazz and the avant-garde, the iconoclastic art and theater of the 1960s, and the back-to-the-land “green wave” movement to blaze a pioneering trail across fifty years of endlessly improvisational, r…

** Coloured Vinyl edition **  Original masters licensed by King Records Japan. Includes OBI and insert. 'Innocent Canon' is one of the hopelessly obscure Japanese underground albums that few people know about. It is a kind of unreleased delirious groovadelic soundtrack played by an acid-soaked Japanese big band with powerful drumming, heavy jazz fumes and delirious organ/guitar lines and luminary narration.Inomata was a well-known jazz musician at the time, but like many of his contemporaries, h…

** Limited edition of 150 hand-numbered copies in printed box with silkscreened covers and printed insert. ** A hazy, claustrophobic bridge between minimalism, drone, creative conceptualism, ambient music, and noise, we’re thrilled to offer the first ever vinyl reissue of Nord’s “Psycotron - 1” - one of the greatest and most sought-after holy grails of early Japanese Noise. Recorded by Hiroshi Oikawa only a handful of years before his complete disappearance and originally issued in 1984 as a ca…

Tip! Recorded a month after Outspan No 1, this album offers up four more sonic delights from the core trio of Brötzmann, Van Hove, and Bennink. Rarely has free jazz/Euro improv/circus music/[your identifier here] sounded so unfettered and delightful -- adventurous without seeming self-serious, silly yet not without gravity. A must for any fan of these three maestros.

Tip! It's hard to imagine how this record -- and it's mate, Outspan No 2 -- managed to remain more or less out of circulation from the CD era onward. Outspan No 1 is nothing less than an ideal distillation of the broad approach to sound creation utilized by the three-ring circus that is Brötzmann, Van Hove, and Bennink, here with the added bonus of Mangelsdorff. Two short numbers, two long, too perfect.

Folk songs from Ukraine's Mykolaiv region, collected over the last decade by a young ethnographer: women's polyphonic songs of winter, weddings, war and work, passed between villages on cassette and never further.

Edition of 250 copies. Two pieces written by Éliane Radigue at the same period (2014-2018), one instrumental (recorded at the Philharmonie de Paris by Ensemble Dedalus) and the other for analog synthesizer (performed by Ryoko Akama). In Eliane Radigue's work, we oppose electronic works (composed until the early 2000s) to those written for acoustic instruments. From 2002, the artist began a series of compositions, Occam, orally transmitted living music. In her own words, she fully realized what s…