Reissues
Fläche & Figur (14 Duos Für Akkordeon Und Drumsets)
Rüdiger Carl and Sven-Åke Johansson are two fellow travelers on the path of experimental music who have worked together since the late 1960s in many formations, most notably as the wild-card Fluxus pranksters on Peter Brötzmann’s legendary 1969 recording Machine Gun, and on many more recordings and stagings of sonic interventions over the decades. In the words of Peter Margasak writing in the Chicago Reader in 2012: “Where to begin with percussionist and polymath Sven-Åke Johansson: Is he a beb…
Super record
A truly iconic acid folk manifesto, interspersed with intense moments of pure psych rock. A sonic journey into imaginary lands
Trio (LP)
Back in print by popular demand ! The expressive English pianist Mike Taylor recorded a couple of excellent albums in the mid-1960s, at the request of Denis Preston of Lansdowne Studios, before drug use got the better of him, resulting in a long period of homelessness and a tragically early death from drowning at the age of 30, in 1970. Trio, the only album Taylor cut with the jazz trio he fronted, has strikingly original renditions of jazz standards such as “Stella By Starlight” and “The End Of…
Killing Time
*2023 Repress * Spittle Records present an expanded reissue of Massacre's Killing Time, originally released in 1981. Following the breakup of Cambridge's avant-rock legends, Henry Cow, guitarist Fred Frith moved to NYC in 1979, and soon found himself deep in the heart of the city's robust post-punk and free-jazz scenes. He performed with Bill Laswell and Fred Maher, from the group Material, as a power trio of sorts under the moniker of Massacre. The group quickly garnered a reputation around tow…
Afro-Harping
The jazz-funk metamorphosis of harpist Dorothy Ashby completed on her 1968 album released on Chess records subsidiary Cadet. The cycle was literally completed when the album – recorded on February of the same year in Chicago – hit the stores. With arrangements by Richard Evans and a killer (unknown) line-up the record is full of samples galore, from "Soul Vibrations" and "Come Live With Me", plus a version of "Little Sunflower" by Freddie Hubbard.
Il Suono delle Api / La Vibrazione del Cosmo
An absolutely stunning effort from one of the great journeymen of Italian experimentalism, Walter Maioli's 'Il Suono delle Api / La Vibrazione del Cosmo', issued by Villa Lontana Records, is electroacoustic music at its absolute, vibrant best. Pressed in two extremely limited editions on black and transparent vinyl and laden with rich tonalities, deep drones, and hypnotic arpeggiations, it's a truly mind-melting, free-standing sonic world that encounters Maioli at the top of his game.
Behind The Buddha’s Mask (Book + Tape Bundle)
** Tape + Artist book containing a cycle of mythical poems written while in covid-exile in Japan. A sumi-e drawing by Kawabata Makoto is included in the text. Gold on purple cover, including a full colour insert, pure beauty. ** Limited to 60 copies only and released by Counter Culture Chronicle, the “Behind the Buddha's Mask” cassette is a stunning effort, largely built around the unique recordings made by Christophe Albertijn at the Middelheim Museum in May 2021. While the pandemic forced poe…
Sound Anthology (LP)
From the celebrated imprint, Recorthings & Zona Archives, comes “Sound Anthology”, the first ever full length dedicated to the output of Maurizio Nannucci. Gathering sixteen pieces created between 1966 and 2013, the collection is an absolute revelation, blurring the boundaries between musique concrète and noise and unveiling one of Italy’s great journeymen of experimental sound practice lingering in our midst.
Frans Zwartjes (2LP)
** Numbered + handmade in an edition of 300 copies only; 180gr 2xLP vinyl in custom-made screen-printed outer ** Frans Zwartjes’ studio remains untouched since his passing in 2017. In early 2023, we returned to the studio and discovered a trunk of unlabelled 3/4 inch tapes, containing completely unheard music by Zwartjes. These works, largely synthesiser-based improvisations for films either unmade or unfinished, were played and recorded by Frans Zwartjes between the late 1960s, through his most…
Winter Songs, Wedding Songs
Biggest Tip! ** 250 copies. Deluxe LP comes complete with a 20pp booklet * The long-anticipated LP of folk songs from Ukraine’s Mykolaiv region — one of the worst affected by Russia’s invasion. - The Black Sea folklore of Mykolaiv is a women’s history in song: neglected by folklorists and ethnologists for the area’s late settlement and mixed ethnic composition. This LP corrects that oversight.
Collected over the last decade by the young musician and ethnographer, Tetiano Chukno, these recording…
French Archives Vol. III 1964-1989
An absolutely astounding accomplishment, Black Sweat's 4 LP Box set of previously unreleased material by Ariel Kalma - French Archives Vol. III - is a mind-melting immersion into the composer and saxophonist's radical experiments and stunning ambient harmonics made between 1974 and 1985. Venturing far beyond the territories for which he is most well-known, the collection takes great strides to accurately framing ambient and New Age musics as rightful extensions of the avant-garde, and is easily …
Lettera Cosmica
Huge Tip! Since the 1970s Mario De Leo works as a musician and visual artist. His mechanical paintings are hybrid works that reveal the cosmic spiritualism hidden in the meanders of electronics. With Riccardo Sinigaglia (Futuro Antico, Correnti Magnetiche, Doubling Riders) De Leo consolidates an artistic and human partnership with Lettera Cosmica, a work unpublished to date, produced and recorded in 1981. In a wacky electronic vision of the succession of time, the tracks trace the four seasons i…
From Concrete to Liquid to Spoken Worlds to the Word (Book)
From Concrete to Liquid to Spoken Worlds to the Word explores the emancipation of language through historical and contemporary positions, from the earliest typographic and sound works of concrete poets to poetic experiments in the digital era, revealing the porosity between art and poetry.Six years after the exhibition From Concrete to Liquid to Spoken Worlds to the Word, and after a disastrous pandemic, the Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève presents the catalogue for this complex, ambitious proj…
File Under Popular: Theoretical and Critical Writings on Music (Book)
This substantial book was written in 1984/85, soon after the band broke up and while memories were still fresh. It was written very much from the perspective of the time – that’s more important than it may sound in such a project: hindsight has its own value, but it loses the essence of the moment, the context, the freshness; the feel of unfamiliarity. Originally written as a master’s degree thesis, it was updated and published in book form in 2000 by the Norwegian University of Science and Tech…
Henry Cow : an Analysis of Avant Garde Rock (Book)
Theoretical and critical writings on Music. 200pp. Illustrated with woodcuts and Photographs. Chapters on Sun Ra, The Residents, Phil Ochs and Elvis Presley, What Is Popular Music?, Progressive Music in the UK, Necessity and Choice in Musical Forms, Henry Cow, Rock in Opposition etc.L
Glastonbury And Elsewhere
A further collection of missing pieces uncovered since the release of the 18 CD Henry Cow Box that fills in parts of the story still undocumented - even on the bootleg circuit. Contents: 1: The earliest and only known stage recording of the band as it was in June 1972 (Martin Ditcham, Fred Frith, John Greaves and Tim Hodgkinson) at the first Glastonbury Fayre. The recording is quite clean, though the mix heavily favours bass and guitar but, in a way, this makes it of special interest, both music…
Chris Cutler in a Box
These 10 CDs (and DVD) collect together solo work, compositions and collaborations made between 1972 and 2022 by percussionist and lyricist Chris Cutler and include as well as three previously released solo CDs ('solo', 'twice around the earth' and 'there and back again'), more than five hours of unreleased materials, as well as a double CD collection of tracks culled from official recordings featuring Henry Cow, Art Bears, Cassiber, News From Babel, Aqsak Mabou, Duck and Cover, Peter Blegvad, R…
Sounds From Dangerous Places
Two CDs and a 90 page hardback book with photos, info and interviews from audio documenter and experimenter Peter Cusak, recording in Chernobyl, The Caspian Oilfields, and various dangerous locations in the UK. The Chernobyl disaster of 26th April 1986, was the realization of all our fears of the nuclear industry, leading many countries to suspend their nuclear power programmes. Two and a half decades later, nuclear power is again reasserting itself, presented by governments and the industry as …
The Necks Box
8CD Box. A career-spanning box set dedicated to the Australian music icon..." One of the greatest bands in the world, said the New York Times; A post-jazz, post-rock, post-everything sonic experience that has few parallels or rivals, according to The Guardian; Fifty years after Kind of Blue, the new music I would find it hardest to do without is that produced by The Necks, circumlocutes Richard Williams. No one has so far even attempted to copy them since, what they do is so unique, anyone ventu…
the Art Box
The Art Box is a six-CD box set by English avant-rock group Art Bears. It contains all Art Bears album and single releases, plus new material, including live and unreleased Art Bears tracks, and unreleased remixes and reworkings of Art Bears material by other musicians. The box set also contains a book of photographs, artwork, articles, interviews and commentary on the CD tracks, the work process, the band and their tour of Europe in 1979. The Art Bears material was recorded between 1978 and 198…