Best of 2023
Stay On It
In 1973, avant-garde ensemble Creative Associates goes on a tour of Europe with Eastman’s brand new piece in their repertoire, and in short: “Stay on It” turns the coordinates of avant-garde music on its head. It is minimal, but unashamedly groovy; it is open to improvisation, grants performers all the freedom they could need, but it isn’t jazz and never slips into the non-committal. It is open to theatrical and performative elements, but also to the poetic and lyrical. It is strict and demands …
Symphony No. 107 - The Bard
Black Truffle is pleased to announce Symphony No. 107 –The Bard, a previously unheard archival recording of the legendary improvising ensemble MEV (Musica Elettronica Viva), captured in concert at Bard College, New York in 2012. Formed by a group of American expat composers in Rome in 1966, the MEV ensemble played an important role in the development of free improvisation, bridging the live electronics tradition begun by John Cage and David Tudor and the high-energy squall of free jazz. Early re…
Graphème Vol.3 (Book)
We are proud to present to you the third edition of Graphème: another series of graphic and experimental music scores by composers from a variety of backgrounds and experience. Each composer offers a rigorous conceptual framework and provides an often sensual dialog between composer, performer, sound and space in spirit of collaborative creativity.
The pieces here represent imaginative and inventive ways to notate a musical vision, making use of innovative approaches – photographic representatio…
Innocent Canon
** 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…
Future Perfect
First ever release of pioneering radiophonic / experimental / electronic / radiophonics & soundtracks pioneer Elizabeth Parker
Woodwind Multiples
Biggest Tip! Mary Jane Leach is a composer focussed on the physicality of sound, its acoustic properties and how they interact with space. She has played an instrumental role in NYC’s pioneering Downtown scene alongside Arthur Russell, Ellen Fullman, Peter Zummo, Philip Corner and Arnold Dreyblatt, as well as devoting years to the preservation and reappraisal of Julius Eastman’s work since his death in 1990, compiling the ‘Unjust Malaise’ 3CD set in 2005 and editing the 2015 book ‘Gay Guerrilla:…
Fluxus Anthology 60 Years Anniversary, 1962-2022
** Last copies ** In (heavy and over-sized) wooden box of 80 copies, hand numbered. Ten audiotapes with interviews/statements, tape collages, electronic music, interview, live events with new and some old material. By Charlotte Moorman, David Tudor, Fernad Kriwet, Joe Jones, Robert Filliou, Carolee Schneemann, Allan Kaprow, Richard Maxfield, Emmett Williams, and many more.
What is Fluxus? Fluxus was launched in 1962 as an interdisciplinary, neo-avant-garde artist collective, whose organized act…
Out of the Grid – Italian Zine 1978-2006
Huge Tip! Large format, 400 pages Out of the Grid presents a critical selection of 100 Italian zines from 1978 to 2006 that display a broad spectrum of social, political, aesthetic, and technological changes in the use of language and communication strategies across the territory of self publishing.
Widely mapping Italian society, particularly youth culture—over an extended period that can be symbolically defined as the "post-movement" and "pre-internet3.0"—, this outpouring of creativity gave v…
Quartz Mirliton Cassettes
Biggest Tip! Quartz-Mirliton Cassettes has been among the most obscure of 1970s experimental music labels. This forthcoming VOD release, presented in two boxes, throws light on this mysterious cassette venture, its context and associated recordings. Closely associated with the London Musicians Collective, Quarzwas launched by Paul Burwell and David Toop in 1977. Produced in tiny editions with handmade covers, the cassettes largely documented live sessions and field recordings made by a close net…
ae³o & h³ae
* * Much-needed 2023 Reissue * * Drone: as with anything else that rarely changes, it's necessary to latch onto subtleties. What minimal suggestion put forth by a drone is so easily applied to pretty much any impression you might have that, predictably, describing one often leads to vague subjectivities bordering on bad poetry. And as much as I'd love to go around proclaiming my love for "deeply resonant, holy abysses" (not), I wish there were an easier way to communicate the real power of the t…
Puna
Huge Tip! Oiro Pena is a Finnish jazz collective helmed by prolific composer Antti Vauhkonen. Their last album, Puna, recorded in bedrooms, studios and other salubrious locations around Helsinki during 2022, is a mix of lo-fi spiritual jazz, experimental, and avant-garde music forms. It includes four vocal tracks recorded with Merikukka Kiviharju, which feature both original lyrics and those sourced from traditional Finnish folk songs. Vauhkonen first attracted attention as saxophonist in the gr…
Frans Zwartjes (2LP)
This special discounted bundle includes the latest Purge releases, the Mykolaiv Singers's LP, previously unreleased in any form - spare a few tapes distributed in the Mykolaiv region - these are old, old songs (of winter, weddings, war, sex, bread) predominantly sung by groups of women, and all from the villages of Mykolaiv, Ukrain. And the Frans Zwartjes's largely synthesiser-based improvisations for films either unmade or unfinished, played and recorded by Zwartjes between the late 1960s, thro…
Vida
Mega Tip! ** 290 Copies only. LP In gimmick poster fold-out sleeve ** Susana Baron Supervielle was born in Buenos Aires in 1910, but she lived in Brazil most of her life. Creation with electroacoustic means represented one more step in her search for renewal and a new articulation of her triple cultural horizon articulated between São Paulo, Buenos Aires and Paris. The results open a new dimension in the interstices of the sound montage. Susana had been a follower of Pierre Schaffer and his pee…
Dance Of The Spheres
Rainbow Generator are Australia’s first true experimental electronic music group. Consisting of David Labuschagne aka Mojo, and Rob Greaves aka Ras. Starting in the mid-70’s, the pair took it upon themselves to begin exploring the possibilities of the sonic dimension and with an ‘open mind’ began investigating the interface between psyche and sound. In 1976 David established the ‘Lectric Loo’ studio in Woolloomooloo, Sydney. Known to the ‘heads’ as simply the “Loo”, the 3-story building was owne…
Kwaidan
** 5th Anniversary Edition, CD housed in a 140x140x 6mm customised case, obi, 8pp insert, offset printed, full colour on premium matt paper. Includes 2 previously unreleased bonus tracks. ** Meitei (冥丁) is a Japanese artist from Hiroshima, who started out as a freelance composer, making various kinds of music across genres. Having done it for eight years, his goal was to eventually release his own original music as an artist. Living in Kyoto for the past two years has deeply influenced his curre…
Sphæra
A 16-channel piece inspired by astrophysics, the mystery of the pre-Big Bang era and some of the uncanny motions of the unconscious mind, where strangeness meets the ordinary.
Superlike
Edition of 300 copies. Giovanni Di Domenico has now achieved a personal and unmistakable style within contemporary minimalism. His music always expresses a state of concentration, of recollection and contemplation toward a focal node. Repetition is experienced as alchemical state, as truth contained in the small nuances of change, in a crescendo that never reaches a climax. The atmosphere is intuition and is made up of a few compositional touches. To compose is to make synthesis, to unearth puri…
Jazz Al Folkstudio + I Tarantolati
Huge Tip! **300 copies, comes with a printed insert** Back in 2021, we bore witness to the reissue, by Dialogo, of the Rome based ensemble Spirale’s lone 1974 self-titled LP, a towering obscurity of 1970s Italian jazz. Made of up Gaetano Delfini (wind instruments, vocals, percussion), Giancarlo Maurino (saxophone, flute, percussion), Corrado Nofri (piano, marimba, mbira, siren, Jew’s harp), Giuseppe Caporello (contrabass, guitar, percussion) and Giampaolo Ascolese (drums), the band ranks among t…
Kou
New project by Apolline Schöser (half of Nina Harker) & Thomas Coquelet. Apolline & Thomas have been performing since 2022 under the Kou guise with 24 electronic harmoniums. Producing dense layers of tones & overtones. On their debut album Kou steers in another direction. The harmonium appears occasionally, but more prominent are delicate guitar pluckings, distant vocal effects, synths, flutes, piano strokes, a touch of musical magic and Apolline’s jazz not jazz vocals. As soon as the needle dro…
Conspiracy
** 100 copies limited edition cassette with j-card (with ltd edition poster by Shabaka Hutchins) ** 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 Oliveros, Reggie Workman, and many others.
"Jazz is a music that comb…