Best of 2025
A Grammar for Listening
2008. Paris and Glasgow. Eric La Casa recording sounds for Luke Fowler's 16mm triptych. Not compositions but investigations into the infra-ordinary - that space-time at low intensity where background noise meets the inaudible. How to create a meaningful dialogue between looking and listening? This question drove Fowler's film cycle. La Casa's answer: find a listening point in relation to everything taking place. The microphones amplify all living substances in motion - from the interior of the b…
Defiant Jazz: a Joe McPhee Taster
From the viral Severance TV dance party to spiritual jazz explorations, this vinyl compilation spans five decades of the Poughkeepsie legend's most electrifying moments. Funky grooves, cosmic transcendence, and raw improvisation collide.
Errant Ear
The legendary electroacoustic composer presents her most intimate work yet, weaving five decades of sonic memories into a profound meditation on time, perception, and the treasures of lived experience
Early Works
Bill Fontana investigates the physics of perception itself. Side A: tape collages where sound becomes both material and force. Side B: Wave Spiral for 5 Rin Gongs - a sidelong, 21-minute centerpiece where pure sine waves create interference patterns, frequency made sculptural. Sound spiraling through space, dissolving boundaries between observer and phenomenon.
Traveling Light
From out of the dark, the crackle of feed back birdsong signals a return to the land of sound environments exclusive to the music of Rafael Toral. A year and a half after his epochal electric guitar album, Spectral Evolution, Traveling Light finds him sharpening his focus, moving boldly from abstract forms to concrete compositions in the form of a set of jazz standards. Based on Toral’s discography, this may seem an unlikely endeavor, but happily, Traveling Light transpires to be one of the majo…
Min Bul
VERY LAST COPIES - Gold Vinyl, edition of 100. We are pleased to announce the upcoming reissue of “Min Bul”, a milestone of Norwegian rock and jazz, included in the renowned Nurse With Wound list, from the band whose leader was a young Terje Rypdal. Recorded in the Rosenborg studio in September 1970, with Egil Eide as engineer, “Min Bul” is a highly experimental work for its time that grew out of the Samklang projects at the Henie-Onstad Art Center, where director Ole Henrik Moe encouraged adven…
Continuation
A cascading piano improvisation by Xiu Xiu's Hyunhye Seo, recorded live during a Nam June Paik exhibition in Turin. On Side B, Japanese avant-garde pioneer Phew reinterprets Seo's performance into a new electronic landscape. Music as surrender, dialogue between performer, space and the present moment.
Trabant Bundle
** Special Discounted Bundle ** The complete archival collection of Hungary's legendary underground collective Trabant (1980-1987), preserved by Purge in two essential volumes. Active behind the Iron Curtain during the harshest years of authoritarian communism, this loose collective of songwriters and filmmakers - including Mihály Víg, János Vető, György Kozma, and Marietta Méhes - created hundreds of DIY recordings that were hand-traded on cassettes within the Hungarian underground.
Described a…
A Question of Silence / Broken Mirrors
Purge.xxx unveils hidden gems of Dutch experimental cinema with the first ever release of Lodewijk de Boer & Martijn Hasebos' synthesiser soundtracks that have remained hidden in the vaults for over four decades. The centerpiece of this historic release is the collaborative score between Lodewijk de Boer (longtime collaborator of avant-garde filmmaker Frans Zwartjes) and Martijn Hasebos for Marleen Gorris' explosive 1982 debut film “A Question of Silence”, alongside de Boer's solo score for Gorr…
Che mi Guardi Attraverso Una Fiamma
Tip! A dream within a dream - Innocent and whimsical song-craft from a vibrant pocket of the contemporary Italian underground via Naples-born Lucia Sole aka La Festa Delle Rane. New split release between ANF and Tokyo friends Conatala.
It’s impossible not to be totally captivated by this. Lucia’s explorative, imperfect song-writing leans into a sense of cranky, domesticated nostalgia and soft melancholy - songs (you can just about call them that) are just about held together by a loose thread …
The Ancients
Bomb! The debut recording by The Ancients, the intergenerational coalition of Isaiah Collier, William Hooker and William Parker formed by Parker to play concerts in conjunction with the Milford Graves' “A Mind-Body Deal” exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and now a working group. Across 2LPs of side-length long-form improvised sets recorded at 2220 Arts & Archives in LA and The Chapel in San Francisco, The Ancients bring the free jazz trio languages first explored by t…
415 Steppsss to DingggDonggg Paradise
Huuuuge Tip! Edition of 200. Where the bells begin, everything else follows. Long before Charlemagne Palestine discovered the thick molasses sonority of the Bösendorfer piano, before the strumming technique that would define his maximalist-minimalist vision, there were bells. Colossal carillon bells in the tower of St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue in New York, where a teenage Palestine hammered hymns into the Manhattan sky before spending hours lost in spectral improvisations that drew Moondog,…
Live At Teater Tribunalen
Huge Tip! ** Edition of 300.** The long overdue first proper jazz album on Discreet Music! After years of releasing experimental electronics, drone, and avant-garde sound art, the Swedish label finally documents what's been happening in their own backyard: ferocious, life-elevating free jazz performed by three of Sweden's leading improvisers. Niklas Persson Trio - saxophonist Niklas Persson, double bassist Patric Thorman, and drummer Raymond Strid - started ten years ago on Thorman's initiative.…
Lapsikuninkaan Fanfaari
Juho Toivonen's third album navigates memory's fluid terrain through off-key piano, tape loops, and spectral melodies. Featuring Ramo Sinnemäki's trumpet, this Nordic ambient masterwork recalls Basinski while exploring childhood fragments and imagined futures. Pure Scandinavian melancholy—essential contemporary ambient.
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…
Ash Ra Tempel
MG.ART presents the first official reissue of Ash Ra Tempel (1971) since its original pressing. This 50th Anniversary edition features restored audio overseen by Manuel Göttsching, exact reproduction of the original OHR packaging, and comprehensive archival materials documenting this seminal work in German experimental rock.
Disillusioned!
Mitar Subotić Suba (Rex Ilusivii) was one of the most prominent ex-Yugoslav producers and sound artists. His work encompassed not only successful production on some of the cult ex-Yugoslav records, but also works in the field of music for theatre, experimental electronic music, and installations. After moving to Brazil in the 1990s, he further explored his interest in local culture and released his essential work "São Paulo Confessions". Almost at the same time, he produced "Tanto Tempo", a semi…
しずくたち / Shizukutachi
Big tip! From the 1950s, Masaaki Takano (1927-2007) worked as a freelance "sound planner," mainly creating sound effects for stage productions. In the mid-1980s he began performances called "Sound Play" where he would perform on his own self-created sound instruments and his collection of ethnic instruments. Growing out of his work with sound effects, he became obsessed with the recording of natural sounds from the 1970s onwards, and this album "Shizukutachi" is a record of a high-quality record…
Låt Oss Vada Genom All Ängslan Tillsammans
Enhet for Fri Musik's “Låt Oss Vada Genom All Ängslan Tillsammans” stands as one of their most evocative works, weaving delicate melodies, tape hiss, spoken word, and dreamlike atmospheres into a truly unique listening experience. This is a perfect opportunity to immerse yourself in their singular universe and own an essential piece of modern experimental music history.
Nuits De La Fondation Maeght
Hugest tip! "Originally released across two edited volumes by Shandar in 1971, the concerts are now being reissued by Strut in a stunning expanded 6 LP vinyl box set for Record Store Day 2025. The set is housed in a hardboard box and features a reprint of the original festival programme, a 12-page over-sized booklet featuring liner notes by Daniel Caux, Jacqueline Caux and Paul Griffiths and stunning restored photos of the festival by Philippe Gras.
Sun Ra’s Nuits de la Fondation Maeght recordin…