Best of 2025
SOVT
'SOVT' is an album containing one 55-minute piece, written for piano by Sarah Hennies in 2017. SOVT stands for Semi-Occluded Vocal Tract which refers to vocal exercises that strengthens the voice by helping the vocal cords vibrate more efficiently. One may practice SOVT exercises by singing with a straw in the mouth which regulates air pressure and reduces strain on the vocal folds. Hennies encountered these exercises in a class on so-called “voice feminization” for transgender women which also …
Gatha
*200 copies limited edition* Laden with abstraction - one foot in the ethereal, mysterious, and ancient past, the other arching into unknown futures yet to be seen - “Gatha” is a total world, imagistically rising through sound. Saz, tanpura, sarangi, autoharp, synths, bells, flute, percussion and numerous other acoustic sound sources, intertwine in a droning, delicately percussive tapestry, amounting to a brilliant musical hybrid, the depths of which few have realised since the days of La Monte …
Blue Veil
Black vinyl. Edition of 700. The first release to document the solo cello work of musician and composer Lucy Railton, the 40-minute composition Blue Veil recorded at Église du Saint-Esprit in Paris invites listeners into the realm of precision-tuned states of resonance: states made manifest through Railton’s careful traversal of her cello's most subtle acoustic characteristics as they harmonically interlock with mind’s embodied modalities of attention and imagination. Blue Veil arises out of, is…
Sing and Play For the Guru
100 copies limited edition. Housed in high quality card stock with art silk screened by Alan Sherry at SIWA Printing * From their early '90s inception to the latter years of the 21st century's first decade, No Neck Blues Band appeared (to distant observers, anyway), to be something of the Platonic ideal for the "improvisational collective," in turn confounding ideas of authorship, recognition, and fame. A fragile symbiosis at best, the scrim of anonymity began to fray sometime around the turn of…
Songs of Eliphas Levi Zahed
Tip! 100 copies limited edition. Housed in high quality card stock with art silk screened by Alan Sherry at SIWA Printing * Tom Carter & Pat Murano - two adepts of improvisation again alight their paths with esoteric flame. The emotional tenor of their masterful double LP release 4 Infernal Rivers is maintained: frightful urgency blends with a kind of poised resolve, the auditory version of a thousand yard stare from an aloof predator. The guitar based sonics in evidence here on Songs of Éliphas…
Equinox / Solstitium (2 LP in bundle)
Among our favourite reissue labels working today, the venerable Dialogo returns in 2025 with an incredible deep dive into the glorious shadows of Italian library music with the first ever vinyl reissue of Gianni Marchetti’s 1977-78 LPs “Equinox” and “Solstitium”, among the rarest and most mysterious artefacts of the field. An immersive, joyous listen, marked by a rare sense of artistry - so imaginative that it almost becomes a film unto itself - these absolute stunners, fully remastered and issu…
Shitsurai / 室礼
* White Vinyl * Meitei / 冥丁 is the moniker of Japanese producer, composer, and musician Daisuke Fujita. The project stemmed from a preoccupation with the customs and rituals of his country’s past, and a desire to cast light on an era and aesthetic that he noted was drifting out of the collective Japanese consciousness with each passing generation, what he calls “the lost Japanese mood”. First came “Kwaidan”, a study into the lost art of Japanese ghost story-telling, followed by “Komachi”, an att…
The Island of Bouncy Memories, NigmaEnigma (2LP Bundle)
Drawing upon deep pools of meaning, woven into poetic states of abstract, electroacoustic sonority, Hundebiss returns with two stunning new LPs: “NigmaEnigma أنيجم النَجم”, the debut solo offering by the Egyptian composer, multi-instrumentalist, writer, and singer, Abdullah Miniawy, and “The Island of Bouncy Memories”, the latest offering from the Italian enigma Ciro Vitiello. Each of them is a freestanding world, rooted in deeply personal and culturally specific creative explorations, issued in…
Vestigial Gamelan
Tip! *100 copies limited edition* This album is the third in a series of experiments exploring the magnification of the insignificant sounds. The chaotic but inherently repetitive patterns created by the interaction between the objects has been realised through a minimum of gestural action by way of a number of distancing strategies, such as the use of hand drills, film winders and motorised drills/screwdrivers. Astasie-abasie is a project of Ian Andrews which evolved out of a long running perfo…
Opera Poesia
Gatefold LP, w/ 52 pages book including scans of Tomaso Binga's original poem scores from 1976 to 2023. Italian and English. Offset printing. Limited edition of 350 copies. Opera Poesia is the first comprehensive audio collection of Tomaso Binga's poems performed by the artist. The practice of Tomaso Binga (Bianca Pucciarelli Menna, b. 1931) is embedded in the language of visual and sound poetry, aimed at observing and questioning the idea of gender. Her practice explores the rights, social role…
Forms of Paper
In a worthy tribute to the life and legacy of one of the great artists of our time, the always fantastic, Monterrey, Mexico, based imprint, Aurora Central, returns with a stunning reissue of Steve Roden's seminal 2001 full length “Forms of Paper”. A landmark in the history of Lowercase music - the idiom that Roden helped pioneer - unfurling like an alien, microscopic landscape, it's one of the true marvels of post-millennial sound practices that remains as effective and radical nearly two and ha…
Low Fidelity
*300 copies limited edition* ‘Low Fidelity’ brings us up to speed with Mats Lindström’s actions of the past dozen years in a range of seven works spanning live recordings and studio commissions, all sharing a certain bloody-minded, uncompromising focus on atonality and arrhythmic structures. Definitely one for harder-nosed noise and avant garde fiends, the set fits very neatly within iDEAL’s roster of brutalists, with whom Lindström shares a taste for sounds, spaces, and rationales that test the…
Haut les Vaches
*150 copies* Haut la vache is a record of sound exploration, a testimony to twilight contemplation, and by the way, the second field recording album by collectif_sin~. After Tour de Transmission (2016), a recording of celestial flutes created by the wind rushing through a metal structure at the top of a Pyrenean peak, we now head to Switzerland, where the tinkling of cowbells forms infinite landscapes for the ears, a metallic wave swaying over the green grass that you can listen to on side A, wh…
Snowblind
The intrepid composer and field recordist Jacob Kirkegaard is no stranger to perilous and hostile regions of the world. His 4 Rooms invoked the radioactive decay through the amplification of architectural resonance in Chernobyl, Ukraine; and he has ventured to the arctic environments of Greenland on a number of occasions to document that barren, icy territory. His recurrent use of shadow and mystery through his work both as metaphor and as extended sonic technique reflects the complex, existenti…
Lacinia
Returning to Die Schachtel with his forth full-length with the label, the Genoa born, Bologna based, guitarist and electroacoustic composer, Stefano Pilia, delivers “Lacinia”, a new, immersive cycle of compositions, delving deeper into the realm of metaphysical, spiritual, and divine meaning, weaving astounding arrangements of sonority from a palette of synths, strings, brass, organ, various electroacoustic instruments, and percussion. Resting at a refined intersection of the acoustic and electr…
Solstitium
** Ltd. 300 copies, remastered edition, audiophile pressing. Perfect replica of the original packaging, newly remastered for optimal sound. ** The first-ever reissue of Gianni Marchetti's 1978 LP "Solstitium", released as part of RCA's venerable "Original Cast" series in a handful of promo copies only, sits among the most rare and enigmatic artifacts of Italian library music, it is heralded by collectors as one of the greatest free-standing gestures in the entire genre.Long coveted by diggers, s…
Banshee / Basse Brevis
Limited split LP, black vinyl in poly-lined inner sleeve. Co-commissioned by Radio France and INA grm, Basse Brevis by Canadian composer Sarah Davachi was premiered at the Présences 2024 festival, which was dedicated to Steve Reich. Drawing on her own minimalist approach, Sarah Davachi explores, with extreme care, the weavings and complex relationships between the timbral, spatial and durational components of music. Using developments that can be appreciated over time, the composer manages to cr…
NigmaEnigma أنيجم النَجم
Abdullah Miniawy is talented singer, songwriter, musician, and poet hails from Egypt, captivating audiences with his rich blend of poetry and sound. Leveraging the fusion of traditional Egyptian themes and modern electronic influences. Growing up in the vibrant atmosphere of revolutionary Egypt, Abdullah's formative years were colored by the socio-political climate, deeply impacting his connection to music. His initial encounters with different musical instruments and poetry laid the foundation…
The Island of Bouncy Memories
Big Tip! Memories are, to say the least, complex. They can weigh us down like stones or be treasured in their unresolved ambivalence. In Ciro Vitiello’s debut album, they take on a dynamic and elusive nature, both bouncy and tricky, moving away when approached and dipping into the haze of the subconscious. Dreams, in turn, find their shape through memory itself. The Island Of Bouncy Memories is, for Vitiello, a place populated by reveries and hypnagogic impressions, interwoven with the imprints …
Redux
Few available, sold out at source. Offset printed covers, gloss varnish. Stamped labels. Released October 2024 in co-production with Desastre. Tanz Mein Herz’s latest, 'Redux', out via Standard In-Fi, encounters the French collective pushing at the boundaries of folk tinged experimentalism, psych, and drone. Sprawling across two long tracks, it’s an absolute burner of throbbing, hypnotic sound and stunning creative interplay.Les Adieux is a send off, a tale of energy, death, bliss, cosmic yearni…