Sub Rosa Sale
Ethiopian Musics 1971
Taking a slight deviation from the widely celebrated path through experimental sounds that has largely defined their efforts over the years, the venerable Sub Rosa returns with rare and essential dive into the world of ethnomusicology with ‘Ethiopian Musics 1971’, their third release dedicated to the recordings of Ragnar Johnson and the second devoted to the groundbreaking recordings he made in Ethiopia with Ralph Harrisson during the summer of 1971. Belonging to a larger body of recordings dedi…
Crawling Wind
First vinyl reissue of Univers Zero's 1981 EP, originally on Japan's Chaos International. Three pieces move from Bulgarian-tinged folk to an Andy Kirk ambient composition to a live improvisation haunted by a stray radio signal. Once voted one of the greatest Belgian albums ever. Redesigned cover by Thierry Moreau. LP.
Uzed
The fourth Univers Zero album (1984) and a turning point: the Belgian chamber-rock group plug in, adding synthesizer, electric cello and a heavier, almost rock-leaning attack to their dark instrumental world. Composed and arranged by founder Daniel Denis, remastered in 2024 for greater depth and dynamics.
Miao Mouthorgans & other rare instruments in Guizhou, Sichuan, China
Rare field recordings by Laurent Jeanneau among minority communities in southern China: mouth organs of every size, the Gelao gupiaoqin and elders' canon singing. Recorded with honesty about ethnic tourism, seeking music that is lived rather than staged. A precious snapshot of traditions under pressure
Keep Together - Fluxus & Neofluxus Part II
The second volume of Sub Rosa's Fluxus edition, built around a broken piano now left to decay in the open air in Prague. New and old works, scores and improvisations from a Fluxus who's who (Knizak, La Monte Young, Cage, Paik, Ono, Brecht and more), with booklets of essays and photographs. Double LP
War Milk
Debut by Pangea de Futura, a Montreal octet led by Eric Quach with members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and more. Three drummers, brass and electronics build massive textural shapes and droning, tribal post-rock that rises out of flux toward entropy. For the Constellation faithful. Purple vinyl.
Spectra Ex Machina / A Sound Anthology of Occult Phenomena 1920-2017 Vol.2
Volume two of Philippe Baudouin's occult anthology turns to musician mediums who claimed to channel music from beyond: Rosemary Brown, a Leslie Flint seance with Chopin, Joe Meek, Uri Geller, Crowley and LaVey's Satanic Mass. A sound history of the will to reach the wholly other. CD.
Spectra Ex Machina: A Sound Anthology of Occult Phenomena
Philippe Baudouin's anthology of rare occult recordings, most from little-known archives. Volume one explores spiritualism and haunted houses: seances, spectral voices and poltergeist cases, with Arthur Conan Doyle and Houdini's final seance. A cabinet of sound curiosities revived in the listening. CD.
Moonshine
Maurice Louca and his Elephantine Band commit a live, raw, collective sound to record. One of Egypt's most adventurous experimental figures pulls cosmic jazz, African and global musics and modal traditions into long stretches of hard-grooving, hypnotic intensity and avant-jazz abandon. Red and black vinyl mix.
Choreological Exchanges
British Dadaists Hastings of Malawi, with roots in the Nurse With Wound circle, continue their inquiry into communication itself. Recorded in the pandemic, side one is built from the sound of old mechanical telephone exchanges and their engineers' voices, a "dance within the wires"
Majestic Noise Made in Beautiful Rotten Iran
It's an all electronic affair, harmonically maximalist, predominantly symphonic synthetic, requiring active listening. Some pieces function as challengers of musical structural habits, provoking the short attention span culture, others present
a problem-solution scenario, collectively via
a neoteric noise aesthetic and detailed melodic weaving. Ultimately, the objective was to engineer an assortment of works full of sound, euphonic and vivid in nature.
Kajang
Four previously unreleased pieces (2015-2020) by Otto Sidharta, pioneer of Indonesian electronic music. Built from environmental sound and a deep love of sealed-off traditional musics, the album takes its name from a closed community in Sulawesi and works as a contemplation of the self, made "with no calculation". White vinyl.
Alterations
Never-before-released 1981 live recordings by Alterations, the great British free-improv quartet of David Toop, Peter Cusack, Steve Beresford and Terry Day. Hundreds of instruments cover the floor; the music reacts to room, noise and audience alike. Playful and rigorous at once. From Sub Rosa's SubLogos series. LP.
Broken Music
Milan Knizak 1979's masterpiece never re-released before. Presented as a gatefold with the original design. Before everyone else - Christian Marclay, Philip Jeck, eRikm, Martin Tétreault, Otomo Yoshihide - there was Milan Knizak. In 1964, Milan Knizak, a member of Fluxus from behind the Iron Curtain, sat down on a sidewalk near the Charles Bridge in Prague, laid down a paper carpet right into the street, and starts tearing pages out of books and burning them. Around the same time, he began to cr…
First Time Out
**Limited edition 350 copies clear vinyl** Kosmose were a Belgian cosmic collective formed in Charleroi and active across the 1970s, a loose and more or less leaderless group of local players anchored around multi-instrumentalist Alain Neffe (later of Insane Music and the Belgian wave underground) and bassist Francis Pourcel, with the young Guy Marc Hinant, later a co-founder of Sub Rosa, among their number. First Time Out captures a session recorded and mixed in March 1975, entirely unreleased…
Live at Cafe Oto
Uneven Eleven is an improvising power trio that should not, on paper, work as well as it does: Charles Hayward on drums (This Heat, Massacre), Kawabata Makoto on guitar (Acid Mothers Temple, Gong) and Guy Segers on bass (Univers Zero, X-Legged Sally). Three players from three different corners of the avant-garde, captured in full flight at Cafe OTO in London on 24 May 2013, in one of those rare meetings where the chemistry is immediate and combustible.
Live At Cafe OTO spreads four long collecti…
Coucou Bazar
All the music for Jean Dubuffet's "animated painting" spectacle Coucou Bazar. Disc one is Ilhan Mimaroglu's 1973 electronic score for the Guggenheim staging (originally on Finnadar); disc two is Dubuffet's own 1978 Turin soundtrack, long buried in a rare catalogue. Digipak with 40-page booklet. 2CD.
Colofon & Compendium 1991-1994
500 Copies. Gatefold double LP version. Telephone terrorism tactics and voyeuristic ambience from the Scanner archive 1991-1994. Exclusive unreleased material. An eavesdropper's delight. Scanner is Robin Rimbaud, the British artist who took his name from the most notorious tool of his early practice: the radio scanner he used to intercept private mobile phone conversations and fold them, uninvited, into his music. Colofon & Compendium 1991-1994 gathers the raw material of exactly that period, dr…