Reissues
One Arm Bandits
"One Arm Bandits is an hour-long piece in four parts, scored for four cellists. The cellists play only open strings, thus using only their right arms, never fingering the strings with the left hand. Recorded in Alvin Lucier's dining room, this work features cellists Tyler J. Borden, Laura Cetilia, Charles Curtis and Judith Hamann. Lucier oversaw and produced the recording, and approved the final takes. One Arm Bandits was an important project for Alvin Lucier. The idea for the piece goes back to…
Solo For Tamburium
With Solo for Tamburium, Hennix plays and manipulates recordings of her precisely tuned and continuously sustained tamburas through a keyboard interface, fusing tones into psychoacoustic textures in the style of her early modal works
Harmonie Solaire
*100 copies on transparent yellow vinyl* Mutant Embryo Records proudly presents for the first time the release of Archaïa's eerie 2nd album!! Following their homonymous 1977 debut LP, 'Harmonie Solaire' is the last ever recordings the band made in 2013 with the authentic line-up of Michel Munier & Pierrick Le Bras. Obscure myths & legends with enigmatic symbols from the past versus an unpredictable future, a trip to occult sessions, weird creatures, robots from a parallel universe through the 's…
Universal Synthesizer Interface Volume Two
In 2019, Vancouver artist Kristen Roos came across a floppy disk for sale on eBay containing the Commodore Amiga version of Laurie Spiegel's 'Music Mouse'. This was one of the first intelligent instruments for personal computers, created by Spiegel in 1985 as an interactive and playable MIDI sequencer for the 68k era of Macintosh computers. Curious, he bid on the item and ended up winning it for a few dollars. Upon investigation, the simple and intuitive nature of its interface appealed to him, …
Snooze
American pianist and composer Joanne Brackeen has been called the "Picasso of jazz piano" for her unique style and complex improvisations. Her work is at the forefront of what avant-garde jazz can be and she has long been one of the giants of modal, post-pop piano.
Snooze from 1975 is Brackeen's extraordinary debut album. Featuring four outstanding Brackeen compositions, along with her take on Wayne Shorter's "Nefertiti," Miles Davis' "Circles," and the standard "Old Devil Moon."
A child prodigy…
Love’s Lesson
Fifth vinyl album (there have been four cassettes as well) by this Baltimore-based duo with international roots. Zomes began as a solo project by Asa Osbourne (ex-Lungfish, The Pupils), and recorded mostly solo drone-based instrumentals for several years. While performing at a festival in Stockholm, Asa met vocalist Hanna Olivegren, who shared his musical conceptions. Zomes's first record as a duo was 2013's Time Was (Thrill Jockey), and they have remained a two-piece ever since. The music on Lo…
Il Segreto
Quartet Records, in collaboration with GDM and EMI General Music, presents a completely revised and remastered edition of Ennio Morricone’s classic score for the 1974 French polar directed by Robert Enrico and starring Jean-Louis Trintignant, Marlène Jobert and Philippe Noiret.
As the United States was brewing its own Watergate scandal, American filmmakers reflected on corrupt politics with the cultivation of the paranoia thriller—movies where singular protagonists come up against vast governmen…
Contrebasses
Guy Pedersen, French jazz-soul-funk double-bass player extraordinaire, recorded Contrebasses in 1970 for Tele Music. It's one of the most outstanding -- yet puzzlingly slept-on -- releases in the library's catalogue. Forget library, this is basically a sublime, straight-up moody jazz record with monster breaks. It's brimming with sensational psychedelic/jazzy bass-heavy moments throughout. "Indian Pop Bass" contains a deep, abstract breakbeat that intersects with a bassline that loops as if it s…
The Infinite
2023 much-need repress. Nat Birchall continues apace with his “one-semble” recording projects, this album being the fourth one to feature only Nat himself playing all the instruments. The Infinite presents seven original compositions loosely based around various mystical aspects of the universe. The recording demonstrates Nat’s belief in the music having its own life outside of any human input, and also that it has its own laws and innate sense of balance and form, as does the universe itself. A…
Crashin' From Passion
Red Vinyl Edition. In the 1970s, Betty Davis defied genre and gender by pushing her voice to extremes and embracing the erotic. She articulated a kind of pre-punk, funk-blues fusion that had yet to be normalized in mainstream music – a style that few musicians have come close to replicating. As one of the first Black women to write, arrange, and produce her own albums, Betty was a visionary who disregarded industry boundaries and constraints. Raw, unapologetic and in full control, Betty paved th…
Is It Love Or Desire
Silver Vinyl Edition. Betty Davis was a musical maverick with vision. Image, substance, sex, and grit combined with a badass band that could deliver the funk bed backbone to the sultry music between the sheets. After cutting two notorious discs for the Just Sunshine label (Betty Davis, and They Say I’m Different), and Nasty Gal for Island Records, Davis went to work on her most personal and expressive record yet. After capturing 10 hard-hitting tracks in 1976 at the remote Studio In The Country …
Easy Tempo Volume 11 (The Round Trip)
Big Tip! Easy Tempo has achieved, through time, the status of legendary label. The seminal first volume of the fortunate series was released in early 1996 and it was responsible for the now huge worldwide Italian Cinematic legacy. The names of Piero Umiliani, Piero Piccioni or Gianni Ferrio, where totally unknown by the most. All the way through the 90’s Easy Tempo has released 10 Volumes (no fillers only killers) and complete soundtracks, some never previously released and most edited directly …
Musick To Play In The Dark
* 2021 Ltd. repress on black vinyl * Few groups in recent history forged as confounding and alchemical a body of work as Coil, the partnership of Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson and John Balance. From album to album and phase to phase their recordings spelunk perplexing depths of esoteric industrial, occult electronics, and drugged poetry, both embodying and alienating parallel currents of their peers. The late 1990's in particular were a fertile era for the duo, embracing chance, chaos, and colla…
Milano: Il Clan Dei Calabresi
Four Flies' 45s series continues to pay tribute to the golden age of Italian film music, this time with the first 7-inch release ever of two super-groovy themes from Gianni Marchetti's soundrack to Milano: il clan dei calabresi (known in English as The Last Desperate Hours), a 1974 poliziottesco film directed by Giorgio Stegani. "M2", on side A, is a re-versioning of a timeless classic – Quincy Jones' "Ironside" theme – where the punch of funk comes to the fore and is fused with the acid sound o…
Un Uomo Dalla Pelle Dura
Releasing Italian soundtrack gems on 7" has become a mission for Four Flies! This time the label went back to Franco Prosperi's 1972 film Un uomo dalla pelle dura (known in English as either The Boxer or Ripped-Off) and hand-picked two tracks that were included not in the (now uber-rare) original OST album released on Pegaso/RCA, but in the (even rarer) library album Meedley (sic) released by Carlo Pes a couple of years later, where, needless to say, he was accompanied by his legendary quartet …
Casanova’70 (Expanded Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Quartet Records, in collaboration with Sony EMI Music Publishing Italia and GDM, presents a greatly expanded release of an Armando Trovajoli gem from a Marcello Mastroianni comedy. Directed by Mario Monicelli in 1965, Casanova’70 tells the story of UN diplomat Andrea Rossi-Colombotti, whose globetrotting adventures leave him sexually frustrated. Women throw themselves at the handsome man, but he unfortunately has performance issues: he can only get aroused if there is some sort of chase involve…
Vedo Nudo / Dove Vai Tutta Nuda? (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Edition of 350 copies. Quartet Records, in collaboration with GDM, presents an Armando Trovajoli double-header with two infectious scores for classic Italian comedies by Dino Risi and Pasquale Festa Campanile, both released in 1969.
Vedo Nudo is a portmanteau film directed by Dino Risi and starring Nino Manfredi in seven episodes of erotically charged madness. After the opening song, “Let’s Find Out” by Isabel Bond (accompanied by a suitably Bond-inspired titles sequence), the various episodes …
Nightmares at The Sad Souls Social Club
Tip! ** Edition of 300. Limited Edition Blue Smoke Vinyl. ** Tai Chi Tommy steps out of the crypt to deliver his sultry crooner tones in a collection of Halloween themed doo-wop and garage psych songs live from the Sad Souls Social Club. drawing from the likes of Roy Orbison and The Platters, mixing lush and pleasing melodies with voodoo lure and a 50’s twang.
Love songs for Zombies, Vampires, freaks, geeks and the Strange & Unusual
Jazz Al Folkstudio
Back in 2021, we bore witness to the reissue, by Dialogo, of the Rome based ensemble Spirale’s lone 1974 self-titled LP, a towering obscurity of 1970s Italian jazz. Made of up Gaetano Delfini (wind instruments, vocals, percussion), Giancarlo Maurino (saxophone, flute, percussion), Corrado Nofri (piano, marimba, mbira, siren, Jew’s harp), Giuseppe Caporello (contrabass, guitar, percussion) and Giampaolo Ascolese (drums), the band ranks among the most sinfully neglected outfits of its moment, 1970…
I Tarantolati
Digipack CD. The second LP in Black Sweat’s latest batch, ‘I Tarantolati’ the first outing of Antonio Infantino with his band, Il Gruppo Di Tricarico, while very different in its musical approach, belongs to the same wild ferment around Folk Studio in Rome, and was issued by the Folkstudio label the year prior in 1975.
Antonio Infantino was poet and singer, who operated in circles connected to Beat literature and Italian performance and gestural music circles, alongside figures like Sylvano Buss…