Best of 2025
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…
Graphème Vol.4 (Book)
Welcome to the fourth edition of Graphème: a collection of scores by composers and artists intent on sharing and collaborating with performers in the realisation of adventurous and creative sonic experiences. The pieces presented in this edition range from simple to complex. Some are more open to freedom of interpretation and some are more specific, but all are offered in the spirit of collaboration with the performer who interprets the work. In This Issue twelve previously unpublished works by:…
Dioramas
*350 copies limited edition* On Andrew Chalk's 2025 album for An'archives, 'Dioramas,' he returns to the art of the miniaturist, after the long-form exploration of 2024's 'Songs Of The Sea.' It's an appropriate mode of address given the title - each of these fifteen pieces indeed feels like a replica of a specific scene, rendered in miniature. As with much of Chalk's music, they set out to explore humble terrain, a thread of melody in slow motion, or a weave of texture, sometimes in aquatic repo…
Upon Oanda's Wing
★ First reissue ★ With obi ★ Gary Marks, a folky jazz singer-songwriter with a career spanning 50 years, has left behind a long list of works, and the second album in his highly acclaimed trilogy released in the 1970s is finally being reissued for the first time on LP!
Gary Marks is a folky jazz singer-songwriter with a unique musical style. Born in New York in 1950, he moved to the West Coast in 1976 after releasing his first album, where he worked with Art Rande and Oregon member Paul McCandle…
The Days of the Week / Chinese Wisdom
** Edition of 150 copies ** Pak Yan Lau: dismantled toy pianos, wind up toys, popping candy, bow, toy spring reverb, Buddha Machine, Tamayura bell, Japanese iron wind chimes, electronics, voice. Recorded and mixed at Outlau’d Studio, Brussels, in August 2020. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Cover illustration by Eleusi.
About Transformations (Book)
Following on from 2023’s “Ruinous Spirituality”, and its predecessor, “Three Essays on Spirituality and Art”, the publisher, João Simões, returns with “About Transformations”, the third in their series of deep dives into the wild and radical mind of Henry Flynt. A beautifully produced, limited edition hardbound volume, across the length of this extensive essay Flynt returns to where so much began: his 1961 work “Transformations”, originally published in “An Anthology of Chance Operations” in 196…
Northern Michigan Snowstorms
"Northern Michigan Snowstorms" is an auditory journey that captures the serene beauty and introspective magic of stormy winters nights in the countryside. Each track transports listeneres to cozy cottages nesteld in tall pines. Music that mirrors the serene solitude of a snowy evening, where time slows, allowing the listener to be enveloped in a cocoon of sonic wonder. Ambient layers mimic the gentle wishpering of the wind through snow covered branches. Eight tracks of blurry loops, soft pads, a…
Nozhet El Nofous
Includes an 8-page booklet with lyrics in English and Arabic. Nancy Mounir’s debut album, Nozhet El Nofous, is a remarkable communion with ghosts. Moody, hypnotic, and sneakily catchy, the album - whose title means “Promenade of the Souls'' in Arabic - explores microtonality, non-metered rhythms, and bold vulnerability through a musical dialogue between Mounir’s own arrangements and the sounds of archival recordings of once-famed singers from Egypt at the turn of the 20th century. Adding her own…
Meets the World
“Embryo meets the world” is a new compilation with previously unreleased Embryo's Ethno Jazz from 1979/80, recorded on the German band`s trip to Asia and recently discovered in the archives. It includes seven unknown studio sessions from Kabul, Essaouira, Cairo and Athens, produced with members of the Kabul Radio Orchestra or oud players and singers from Eritrea, Syria and Iraq. Eastern meet Western musicians, improvising with an astonishing deepness over wonderful traditional melodies from Afgh…
Aesthesis
Tip! Thorn Wych is a musical instrument maker and musician based in the Lancashire town of Bacup, specialising in work made from tree branches. Particular to her interest are UK native trees; so far Wych Elm, Lime, Wild Cherry, Oak, and Yew. With these unique instruments, crafted in her backyard workshop, she creates music that evokes memories of an unknown world—out of sync with time and place and beyond the boundaries of the material realm.
Her pieces consist mainly of bowed string instrument…
Live at IUCC 2/25/79 - Series Subscription 2-11 (10 CD Set)
**333 copies, one-time pressing** The Los Angeles based pianist, band leader, and composer, Horace Tapscott, always stood apart from the pack. A true visionary who was fiercely principled and independent, across the 1960s, '70s, '80s, and '90s, leading his legendary Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, he produced a tour de force of sound, seeded by social, political, and community-based action. For the entirety of their run together, Tapscott and his Arkestra, which continues to this day, were among t…
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.
Nightclouds
Inspired by minimalistic icon La Monte Young and guitarist Allan Holdsworth, Nightclouds is a powerful collection of jazz pieces for solo pipe organ. Over long improvisation and shorter compositions, Swedish composer and installation artist Ellen Arkbro employs her usually epic chord structures and adds in a more self-reflective tone than previously.
How Do I Know If My Cat Likes Me
Inspired by minimalistic icon La Monte Young and guitarist Allan Holdsworth, Nightclouds is a powerful collection of jazz pieces for solo pipe organ. Over long improvisation and shorter compositions, Swedish composer and installation artist Ellen Arkbro employs her usually epic chord structures and adds in a more self-reflective tone than previously.
Electric Element
Lost for a decade, John Surman and Karin Krog's “Electric Element” emerges from a failed theatre project as a “wonderfully weird vocal and electronic experiments”. On the album the duo abandon traditional jazz for visceral explorations featuring wind synth, processed vocals, and granular synthesis. An “enigmatic time slip” bridging Kosmische, Industrial, and futuristic electronics.
Riddles of the Sphinx
Lost 1977 electronic score by Soft Machine's Mike Ratledge, crafted with enigmatic Denys Irving on modified Moog/ARP synthesizers delivering ten hypnotic sequences of minimalist repetition. Transferred from BFI archives after master tapes vanished, this new 300-copy reissue follows the long out-of-print 2016 edition. Essential Riddles Of The Sphinx finally unearthed.
Decay Music 10: And I Entered Into Sleep
*250 copies limited edition*
