Best of 2025
Club Moral
Club Moral emerged on January 1st, 1981, in Antwerp, Belgium, as both a collective and a challenge. Founded by artists Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven (AMVK) and Danny Devos (DDV), it operated as an industrial band, a performance platform, and a venue that became a magnet for Europe's most uncompromising voices. Between 1981 and 1987, the Antwerp space hosted exhibitions, happenings and live shows featuring Produktion, Boyd Rice, John Duncan, Coupe de Grace and others—turning the city into a crucial out…
Opera
The experimental landmark Opera by FNTC returns in a remastered CD edition, nearly forty years after its original cassette release on Staalplaat in 1987. A striking document of Europe's late 80s cassette underground, Opera captures the collective at their most adventurous - merging spontaneous composition, sound collage and performance art into a single immersive experience. As a member of the Fluxus movement, Willem de Ridder brought his conceptual sensibility to the project, pushing the bounda…
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.
Even The Dog Knows
All Night Flight Records proudly presents Even The Dog Knows, a mesmerizing collection of home recordings by South London duo Jemima, marking the seventh release on the label's carefully curated roster. This haunting vinyl release transforms domestic spaces into portals for spectral folk music that recalls the intimate experimentalism of Brannten Schnüre and the lo-fi mysticism of early Grouper. Even The Dog Knows emerges from a world of found sounds and fragmented memories, where wobbly loops o…
Zerkelus
*150 copies limited edition* Richard Youngs is neither a stranger to Fourth Dimension Records or creating music from a disparate array of sources that then fall somewhere near that space where immersive drones converge with something altogether more frayed, ravaged or disquiet. 'Zerkelus', named after an imaginary Babylonian king, comprises two lengthy side-long parts, with the first being akin to something of an extended orchestral tune-up utilising voice, oboe and indiscernible sources to crea…
Paese Sotto Inchiesta
Edition of 400. In the twilight of the 1960s, as Italian cinema reached new creative heights, a parallel universe of musical experimentation was quietly flourishing in the studios of Rome and Milan. The production of soundtracks for both major and minor Italian films had given birth to another business venture - one that proved less profitable but infinitely more creative and liberated from client constraints: the composition of music libraries. Now, Musica Per Immagini presents the first reissu…
Now Jazz Now 100 Essential Free Jazz & Improvisation Recordings 1960-80 (Book)
277 pages. 196 x 268 mm. Open NOW JAZZ NOW and you're not just looking at a book - you're entering the minds of three lifelong obsessives. Byron Coley (music writer and critic), Mats Gustafsson (saxophonist, The Thing, Fire!), and Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth founder, solo artist) have spent decades accumulating, discussing, debating, and above all listening to free jazz and free improvisation. This book is the result of that shared mania. What they've created isn't a conventional history or a ra…
Magnetism
Super Tip! Kali Malone and Drew McDowall have orbited each other's work for over a decade, their individual explorations of sustained tones and harmonic space suggesting an inevitable collaboration. When they finally entered McDowall's Brooklyn studio together, what emerged on Magnetism transcends mere musical compatibility. Malone has spent recent years extending the legacy of Éliane Radigue, redefining what electronic minimalism can accomplish through pipe organ and synthesizer. Her compositio…
When I sing, I slip into the microphone. Into that void, I bring comrade "prayers", then, turning to face the outside, together we explode
Like on the early solo Haino album that shares the group’s name (released on P.S.F. in 1993), the instrumentation swims in reverb (the use of which Akiyama recalls as ‘a kind of point of the band’), often obscuring the instrumental sources. On the short opening piece, a distant reed instrument arcs long buzzing melodies over a bed of cymbals and gongs, like a psychedelic take on Tibetan music. The epic second part, occupying almost 50 minutes, begins as a splayed, near-formless cloud of electric…
Faust IV
Faust left Wümme's anarchic freedom for The Manor's professional constraints. Virgin wanted a hit. Faust IV was the answer: their most paradoxical album, accessible yet destabilizing, part studio work, part salvage. The sessions stretched, the budget vanished, the result endures—uneven, restless, compelling. Fifty years later: still mid-sentence, still profound, gloriously incomplete.
So Far
CD Digipack. Wümme, Lower Saxony. 1972. A converted schoolhouse. Inside: a tangle of cables, reel-to-reel machines, custom electronics soldered together by hands that refused manuals. This was not a professional recording studio. This was Faust's laboratory—and So Far was the experiment that proved you could rewire rock music's circuitry without killing the patient. Six months earlier, Faust had released their self-titled debut—a savage dismantling of what a rock album could be. Tape edits slice…
Composer, alone
Composer, alone by Jürg Frey (performed by Reinier van Houdt) is a luminous retrospective stretching across three discs and 35 years. Twelve solo piano pieces—fragile yet substantial—trace Frey's evolution, distilling time and silence into crystalline musical objects. Van Houdt’s touch brings warmth and clarity, illuminating the invisible architecture within Frey’s sensitive landscapes.
Trabant II
With less than a year having passed since their incredible and widely celebrated, first-ever collection dedicated to the 1980s, Hungarian countercultural music collective Trabant, purge.xxx builds upon the momentum and its intoxicating highs with ‘Trabant II’, their second deep dive into clandestine, previously unissued recordings by the band. Meticulously culled from the collectively’s vast archive of DIY cassettes — capturing politically urgent expressions at the junctures of post-punk, synth …
Aste
Essential Re-issue of this stone cold classic .First released in 2006 Written and produced by Mika Vainio in Turku 1992-1993.
Mastered at Dubplates & Mastering by Rashad Becker.
Live at Widney High December 26th, 1971
On a Sunday in the early 70s in South LA, you could easily find yourself standing in a high school auditorium, watching Horace Tapscott conduct the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra as they poured out music like a benediction. No tickets, no VIP list—just the community, gathered. This was music as civic duty, as spiritual practice, as revolution by other means. Live at Widney High December 26th, 1971 captures one such afternoon, previously unreleased and now arriving like a dispatch from a parallel u…
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 …
Sama'a - Audition
Known for their exhilarating live-to-record albums such as last year's critically acclaimed Wood Blues and Giant Beauty, سماع [Sama'a] (Audition) is the first of two releases that will surface after [Ahmed]’s first studio recording sessions at North London’s The Fish Factory in early 2025. Since 2014, [Ahmed] أحمد have excavated and re-imagined the music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik, in an ever ongoing search for future music. Over a decade on, the group were given the opportunity to set up in the studi…
Ideal Secret Circle (11CD Bundle)
Mega tip! *80 copies limited edition bundle.* Ideal Secret Circle It's an 11 CD limited-edition set of albums packaged in digi packs designed by Philip Marshall. The series is curated by Joachim Nordwall.1. Sins For Beginners - We Don’T Need No Music (For Pita)2. Susana Santos Silva - The Fabrication Of Time 3. Merzbow - Gareki No Niwa4. Jim O’Rourke - Subtracted5. Spykes - Memoirs Of Pogonophores Vol. 2.6. A. Bolus - Evil Moisture Plays Music In The Style Of Organ Of Corti7. Eternities - Foreve…
Veruschka
Veruschka, composed by Ennio Morricone and performed by Edda Dell'Orso, is a landmark in Italian soundtrack tradition. The album, first released on CD in 1995 with 14 tracks and later expanded, encapsulates lounge moods, ambient textures, and avant-garde fragments, capturing the ephemeral world of fashion and introspection with atmospheric precision. Double transparent blue vinyl edition of 500.
Antigone
Big tip! Antigone is Eiko Ishibashi’s latest musical masterwork, one rife with chilling speculations for the future calling from inside her own head. Out March 28th, it marks Eiko’s first “traditional” songcraft album — that is, with lyrics and singing — since 2018’s acclaimed The Dream My Bones Dream, arriving on the heels of her celebrated soundtracks for Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s films. Within Antigone, Eiko teases out images from a dystopia not unlike the one we’ve already got. Hers is suffused wi…