Best of 2026
Alina
It's unlikely that many will have missed the fact that ECM - an unparalleled home for groundbreaking music, whose catalog has predominantly been restricted to the CD format since the 1980s - has begun releasing stunning, beautifully produced audiophile vinyl pressings of a select number of their most in-demand releases. Among the most requested to receive this treatment, Arvo Pärt's 1999 full-length, Alina, has long topped their list. Finally, such a dream has come to be with its multiple render…
Yoshinotsune
* Edition of 199 copies * Between 1999 and 2000. By the early 2000s, Merzbow had entered a markedly new phase. The tape collages, junk electronics, and analogue chains that had defined his work across the 1980s and 1990s gave way to a digital practice built around laptop, software processing, and a rigorously composed approach to harsh noise. Across releases such as Merzbeat (2002), Animal Magnetism (2003), and the present album, Masami Akita reorganised his vocabulary around dense, sculpted str…
The Human Race Was Restored To Life Repeatedly
* Edition of 199 copies * Government Alpha, the project of Yasutoshi Yoshida, is one of the central figures in Japanese harsh noise, emerging from Tokyo's early 1990s underground scene. Through his Xerxes label, he developed a style that is both extreme and meticulously constructed, balancing ferocity and precision with remarkable control. Even at its most chaotic, every sonic eruption feels carefully placed.
Originally released on cassette in 1994, The Human Race Was Restored To Life Repeatedly…
ryūhyō
To mark the UN’s International Year of Glaciers' Preservation, sound artist Yoichi Kamimura presents “ryūhyō,” a rich sonic portrait of Japan’s drifting sea ice. Blending underwater and aerial recordings, the album reveals the melting voices and fragile ecology of Ryūhyō’s vanishing world.
Ste Cy
Ste Cy, the latest studio offering from the trio of Jac Berrocal, Vincent Epplay, and Timo van Luijk, ripens like a forbidden fruit—born of an improvised instrumental session captured in the secluded hush of Kulta Saha by Timo van Luijk.These raw recordings were later reshaped into 12 songs by Vincent Epplay at Studio Villejuif in Paris. And over it all drifts the poetry of Jac Berrocal - sensual and incendiary, seeping into the music like spice into flesh.
LP includes recto/verso insert with ly…
Colori
Quartet Records, in collaboration with GDM and EMI General Music, presents a CD reissue of Ennio Morricone’s iconic album Colori, celebrating its 55th anniversary. In the summer of 1971, Morricone entered the legendary Orthophonic Studios in Rome alongside his longtime collaborators Bruno Nicolai, Alessandro Alessandroni and Edda Dell’Orso, and recorded a selection of ten tracks drawn from some of his recent film scores, many of which had not yet been released. He remixed some cues and re-record…
A Distracted God
For more than six decades, Beatriz Ferreyra has been building worlds out of sound. Born in Córdoba in 1937 and based in France since the early 1960s, the Argentine composer entered the GRM at the invitation of Pierre Schaeffer in 1963, contributing alongside him to the foundational texts and recordings that would define an entire discipline of listening, among them the Solfège de l'Objet Sonore. From 1970 onward she has worked independently, composing in absolute fidelity to her own ear. Issued …
Material (LP)
* Special embossed, die-cut sleeve with 56-page booklet - 200 copies on black vinyl * Aude Van Wyller (aka Oï les Ox, aka AI les Axes) joins forces with acclaimed poet Lucy Van, author of The Open (2021) and Australian Women's Historical Photography (2024). This debut collaboration weaves together Van Wyller's ambient mutations with Van's incisive, luminous words.
In Material, words reach for the image, sounds reach for the word, and one thing becomes another. The result is an intimate, tactile …
Acustica
Composed between 1968 and 1970 and originally issued by Deutsche Grammophon in 1972, there are arguably few works within the canon of 20th Century experimental music as beloved and sought after as the Argentine composer Mauricio Kagel’s Acustica. Created for “experimental sound-producers and loudspeakers”, comprising electroacoustic material assembled on 4-track tape in 1969 at Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in Cologne, and acoustic material for 2 to 5 musicians, scored over roughly 200 filing-ca…
Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts (LP, Coloured)
Huge Tip! *White vinyl with obi strip* Twenty years into their singular journey, Valence-based trio France have become one of Europe's most hypnotic live forces - a hurdy-gurdy-powered engine generating waves of kraut, psych, folk and drone that blur the boundaries between physical experience and altered consciousness.
Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts captures the band in full flight during their very first English tour, recorded at The state51 Factory in East London. Until this tour, UK audiences ha…
Dalbergia Retusa
Extraordinary double LP of solo guitar music by Hans Reichel (1949-2011), curated by Oren Ambarchi. Twenty-three pieces from 1973-1988 documenting Reichel's radical instrumental rethinking: custom-built guitars with additional strings, moveable pickups, special capos. Sounds simultaneously strange and beautiful, from romantic lyricism to alien sonorities. Essential.
A sad song for A.
Tip! *300 copies limited edition* «The project “a sad song for A.” was born from an insight Stefano Gentile had, driven by his moods and, in particular, a regret he had experienced in the past. It all began almost by chance, one evening, during an informal conversation. Stefano suggested that I narrate what I was experiencing most intensely at that moment: anxiety. After thoroughly analyzing this emotional state, he asked me to translate it into words, to write texts that could give voice to the…
Avantgarde (4LP Bundle)
Special discounted Bundle. Audiophile edition. Pure analogue mastering & cutting from the original master tapes. Representing three of the most essential and sought-after works within the canon of 20th Century avant-garde composition, this bundle brings together Luc Ferrari's Presque Rien No.1 / Société II, Mauricio Kagel's Acustica, and Tōru Takemitsu's Quatrain / A Flock Descends Into The Pentagonal Garden in a single offering. Originally issued by Deutsche Grammophon between 1970 and 1980, ou…
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…
Standing On A Hummingbird
*300 copies limited edition* "Originally released on Ezekiel Honig's Anticipate label in 2007, Standing on a Hummingbird is the debut album by Canadian sound artist Mark Templeton, now appearing for the first time on vinyl, newly remastered by Giuseppe Ielasi and cut by Lupo. Working at the intersection of post-glitch, electroacoustic ambient, and textural minimalism, Templeton composes through restraint and erosion, building patient and richly tactile pieces primarily from acoustic sources - fi…
Entrega / Batelages
Two cassette releases by Mexico City experimentalist Rolando Chia, heard by almost no one on their original release, now appear on vinyl for the first time. Batelages and Entrega - sound collage, concrete texture, extended guitar - two lost chapters of the Latin American underground.
Intervalli (1950-56)
Huge Tip! * Edition of 200 copies, comes with an insert * Giuseppe Chiari's Intervalli, composed between 1950 and 1956 and now recorded in complete form for the first time, is one of the most significant and least heard compositions of the European post-war avant-garde. A twelve-part work for solo piano, it sidesteps the dominant Serialism of its moment entirely - arriving instead at a form of radical restraint that prefigures Minimalism, systems-based music, and conceptualism by more than a dec…
2.25
Composed and recorded during tough times in 2025. Using compressed air, percussion instruments, piano and samples, Alessandro Brivio explores varied and extreme approaches to sound processing, diffusion, recording and re-composition, as a tribute to a lost friend.
Border Soundscapes II
* Limited Deluxe Edition - 200 signed copies - Heavyweight black vinyl, insert, 3,60m long leporello (accordion-style) Photo book, silkscreened cover. * Building upon their recent, incredible immersions into the contemporary landscape of experimental sound, Die Schachtel returns with one of their most striking releases to date, Border Soundscapes II, distilling their longstanding efforts at the borders of interdisciplinary practice with a profound sense of accomplishment and grace. Instigated an…
Unfurling
*200 copies limited edition* Pefkin is the alter ego of Gayle Brogan, a Sheffield-based creator of slowly-unfolding, ritualistic hymnals that draw deeply on landscape, nature, and the histories that bind them. Her sound is built from a mesmerising layering of voice, viola, analogue synths, harmonium, melodica, zither and field recordings manipulated with a kaleidoscopic array of effects. Hereby she blurs the boundaries between folk, psychedelia, and experimental music. Over the years her work ha…