Best of 2026
Live at Widney High December 26th, 1971
* Art Edition issued with different art work and sleeve design. * 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, previo…
This Heat
"There's an irony inherent in the term 'postpunk.' Many of the groups that define the genre (think Pere Ubu or Cabaret Voltaire) existed for several years before punk. But these outfits had little hope of finding an audience until punk stirred up an appetite for the extreme, while also spawning a new breed of independent labels that could support challenging music. " This Heat are a prime example. Formed in early 1976 by drummer Charles Hayward, guitarist Charles Bullen and 'non-musician' Garet…
Jeita ou Murmure des Eaux
A cornerstone of the acousmatic tradition, finally on vinyl. François Bayle's Jeîta ou Murmure des Eaux arrives as a limited LP via Recollection GRM and Shelter Press - one of the composer's most singular and spatially ambitious works, composed in the wake of a concert given at the Jeita Grotto in Lebanon in 1969, where Bayle had traveled to mark the opening of the cave's newly discovered upper gallery. Bayle joined the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in 1960, studying under Pierre Schaeffer and …
World Rhythms
"In late 1975, Annea Lockwood realised her composition World Rhythms. It represents one of the first creative works exploring the potentials of field recordings in a multichannel setting. It is a landmark work and a composition that, on its 50th anniversary, has gently carried forward over the decades, but arguably now is only starting to come into true focus, and be understood for exactly how revolutionary it was. World Rhythms was a work concerned with a practice of sustained listening into th…
My Shadow
One of the most striking and enigmatic works to appear on Discreet Music in recent years. There is a long tradition of artists who have tried to set scripture to music and failed magnificently - the failure itself becoming the subject, the wound becoming the work. Carrie DeCunzo Mirande's debut album belongs to this lineage. In the twenty-four days before Christmas 2024, she read the twenty-four chapters of the Book of Luke and attempted to respond in sound. Two piano pieces emerged - one inspir…
Observations
On Observations, eRikm and Pierre Bastien stage a tightly focused encounter between hacked turntables and mechanical orchestra, sculpting trance‑like, Dubuffet‑dirty rhythms and razor‑sharp details from one hyper‑attentive night in Brussels.
The Horizon is a Razor
An all-aluminum guitar, 100-watt amplifiers pushed to blowout, two sides charting alternate trajectories through sludge, drone, and ferocious free improvisation.
Habibi Funk Print 001 (Magazine)
Tip! Tip! Tip! After carrying the idea around for a while, the team at Habibi Funk finally brings their vision of a print music magazine to life. Spotlights gathers research from their own releases alongside stories that reach beyond the label's catalog - 88 pages, A4 format.
The cover features the inimitable Sun Ra performing in Cairo in 1971, at the apartment of Cairo Jazz Band co-founder Hartmut Geerken. Inside, a comprehensive final conversation with the late Geerken, recorded at his home in…
Live at Issue Project Room
On Live at ISSUE Project Room, Loren Connors and Alessandra Novaga turn the guitar into a nearly weightless medium, tracing an improvised, slow‑burn dialogue of tremors, silences and ghost‑melodies that feels less like a concert than a séance for two.
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.
Soundsphere
Akio Suzuki has always been an artist in search of unexpected sound, and curiosity has been his guiding principle. Whether that be curiosity for objects, spaces or places, his work has been guided by a porousness and pliability which has allowed him to explore an enormous sonic terrain. This freedom has also allowed him to develop a language in sound that remains utterly his own. Nowhere is this more evident than in his approach to instrument creation. During the 1970s Akio Suzuki devised a seri…
Truly, Slightly, Overflowing, Whereabout of Good Will
On Truly, Slightly, Overflowing, Whereabout of Good Will, Keiji Haino and Reinhold Friedl strip everything down to voice and piano interior: incantatory howls, whispered fractures and scraped strings tracing a stark ritual of tension, silence and imploding song.
Dogon A.D.
One of the most important jazz albums of the 1970s - finally on vinyl in its definitive edition. Julius Hemphill's Dogon A.D. is the missing link between the avant-garde and the blues, between the cotton fields and outer space. Recorded on a freezing February day in 1972 at Oliver Sain's Archway Studios in St. Louis - no heat, malfunctioning equipment, some musicians didn't even show up - and yet what emerged was nothing short of a masterpiece. An "almost accidental classic" that has haunted col…
Bill Nace Plays the 2 String Taishogoto
Bill Nace turns a traditional two‑string instrument into a focused sound laboratory, contrasting a feedback‑touched, spiralling first side with a pared‑back, bodily repetition that slowly blooms into vast harmonic space.
Let the Spirit Out/Live at 'Mu' London
Big tip! This is it! Chicago spiritual jazz master Kahil El'Zabar delivers one of the most powerful live recordings in recent memory! Captured over two unforgettable nights at "mu" in London - July 15th & 16th, 2024 - this is music as ancient ritual, as communion, as healing force. El'Zabar created new material specifically for these performances, alongside reimagined arrangements of classics like Wayne Shorter's "Footprints", Gershwin's "Summertime", and Duke Ellington & Juan Tizol's "Caravan".…
On the Edge of the Outside
Vasopressin presents On The Edge Of The Outside, collecting four works by Nurse With Wound — three composed in response to texts by Kafka, Tzara, and Forneret, one previously unreleased — on vinyl for the first time. Electroacoustic abstraction, minimalist drones, and grimy ambience, in a limited edition of 300 black and 100 clear vinyl copies.
Breath Vessels
On Breath Vessels, Liz Allbee braids horns, tuning forks, sine waves and voice into a kind of speculative folk ritual, imagining a future orchestra of bodies and resonant objects sharing breath, charge and memory when the grid has finally gone dark.
A Portal to Here
One of the best kept secrets in contemporary British Jazz, Leeds based collective Work Money Death returns to ATA Records with a towering gesture of free improvisation. Born from the loss of guitarist Chris Earl Dawkins, A Portal to Here draws on a deep well of Spiritual Jazz to soar toward new heights of sonic transcendence. Music as testament, tribute, healing and remembrance.
La Donna del Lago
This Is A Big One. ** Edition of 100. Beautifully designed sleeve by Bruno Stucchi/Dinamomilano. ** Die Schachtel's latest follows naturally from the sonic territory explored within the label's Decay Music series, while pushing well beyond. La Donna del Lago is the debut release from the geography-spanning trio of the Italian bassist and composer, Massimo Pupillo; the Canadian soprano singer and conductor, Barbara Hannigan; and the French composer, sound engineer and musician David Chalmin. An i…
The Black Ark + Dogon A.D.
Special discounted Bundle. Two of the greatest free jazz records ever laid to tape, back where they belong. Superior Viaduct reissues Noah Howard's The Black Ark and Julius Hemphill's Dogon A.D. — both from 1972, both inexplicably scarce for decades, both essential.
The Black Ark finds Howard backed by a towering ensemble — Norris Jones (Sirone), Arthur Doyle, Leslie Waldron, Earl Cross, Juma Sultan, Mohammed Ali — in four tracks that move from hard-blown spiritual fire to lyrical catharsis. Des…