Reissues
Advent
Recorded when Johnny Walker was touring Worldwide with Veteran Jazz Star Lionel Hampton in 1982 and originally released on his own Private Press label: Walk On Productions. This neglected underground classic LP has been off the radar since then except for the appearance of "Dipping" on the Kev Beadle – Private Collection (Independent Jazz Sounds From The Seventies And Eighties) compilation on BBE Records. Almost unknown and unjustly negected, it's a funk drenched jazz journey with some crunchy …
Ndikho Xaba And The Natives
*50th Anniversary Remaster* Outstanding!! Matsuli Music presents soul, spirituality and avant-garde jazz from South African political exile Ndikho Xaba. Its rarity has until now served to obscure both its beauty and its historical significance. Making profound links between the struggle against apartheid and the Black Power movement in the USA Ndikho Xaba and the Natives is arguably the most complete and complex South African jazz LP recorded in the USA. It stands out as a critical document in t…
Con '84
LP version. Composer and conceptual artist Conrad Schnitzler (1937-2011) was one of the most influential figures of the electronic avant-garde in Germany. In 1967/68, the Joseph Beuys student founded the Zodiak Free Arts Lab, which became a playground for Berlin subculture. In addition to many other musical stations, bustling Schnitzler was a member of the kraut-electronic formations Tangerine Dream and Kluster. Numerous solo releases complete his extensive oeuvre. One of them is Con 84, probabl…
Consequenz II
Composer and conceptual artist Conrad Schnitzler (1937-2011) was one of the most influential figures of the electronic avant-garde in Germany. In 1967/68, the Joseph Beuys student founded the Zodiak Free Arts Lab, which became a playground for Berlin subculture. In addition to numerous solo releases Schnitzler was also involved in various band formations not least Tangerine Dream and Kluster. Representing another of his musical landmarks are the ‘Consequenz’ releases. 'Consequenz II’ emerged fro…
Reflections In The Sea Of Nurnen
"Originally planned for issue on Strata-East, Hammond took his collaboration with Durrah to Detroit and issued his masterpiece. Lacquered by Bernie Grundman. Now-Again presents the definitive Tribe Records reissues. Deep, spiritual jazz of the highest order. The Tribe label, one of the brightest lights of America's 1970s jazz underground, receives the Now-Again reissue treatment. This is your chance to indulge in the music and story of one of the most meaningful, local movements of the 20th Cent…
Out of the blue
* 2022 Repress* First-ever LP reissue. “Blue” Gene Tyranny’s debut album Out of the Blue — newly remastered with original cover art — which was among the first to releases on Lovely Music in 1978 alongside Robert Ashley Private Parts, David Behrman On the Other Ocean, Jon Hassell Vernal Equinox, Meredith Monk Key, and Peter Gordon Star Jaws. Disarmingly direct, funky, and profound, Out of the Blue is an equanimous, wide-open exploration of Tyranny’s musical world: equal parts song cycle, tone p…
Canti Del Capricorno
*2022 stock* Michiko Hirayama inspired Giacinto Scelsi to write his twenty-part cycle "Canti del Capricorno" between 1962 and 1972. To this day the Japanese singer (b. 1923) is a unique performer of this spiritual yet energy-filled work for solo voice, with instrumental accompaniment for certain songs: Scelsi’s notes in his own hand in the score; that is her treasure, when she comes to Ulm in May 2006 to give a concert in the series neue musik im stadthaus. Michiko Hirayama is a vocal power stat…
Nothing Is Real ...
*2022 stock* The focus of the pieces by Alvin Lucier on this CD is on the phenomena of resonance – sympathetic vibration – in many variations. “Time and again I find myself having to pare away any musical gestures in a work in order to uncover the true idea in a piece,” says Alvin Lucier.The composer knows which ideas he wants to liberate. But the process of causing the environment to resound is always a collaborative, interactive project. It needs someone who is creatively engaged, even obsesse…
Ursonate Und Andere Konsequente Dichtung
*2022 stock* Kurt Schwitters’ “Sonate in Urlauten” [Sonata in Primal Sounds] is the prototypical work at the border between speech and music. The concise title of the work alone forges a suggestive link between language material and the musical form of the sonata; the "Ursonate" almost proverbially stands for sound poetry. For Schwitters, who was actively involved in promoting his sound-poetical opus magnum, even as his own interpreter, it was difficult to imagine that his work could survive wit…
James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet
*2022 stock* This work began life as a radio play in 1982, a commission from and for Klaus Schöning and Cologne’s WDR. Working on the principles of collage, Cage brought together 15 unlikely characters – Narrator, James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Vocoder, Erik Satie, Jonathan Albert, Mao Tse Tung (as a child), Henry David Thoreau, Rrose Selavy, Thorstein Veblen, Buckminster Fuller, Brigham Young, and Robert Rauschenberg – who speak together, their dialogue comprised of literal quotations, freely ada…
Mantra
'Composed in 1970, Mantra, for two pianos and ring modulation, was one of the decisive turning points in Karlheinz Stockhausen’s career. The 70-minute piece not only signalled a break with the text-based intuitive works, relying heavily on improvisation, that had come to dominate his output towards the end of the previous decade and a return to fully notated scores, but also introduced the idea of melodic formulae, the “mantra” of the title, which Stockhausen would eventually develop into the or…
Palimpsest | Épéi | Dikhthas | Akanthos
*2022 stock* 'This collection of ensemble works, six altogether, ranges across the last two decades of Iannis Xenakis's life. It includes the last two pieces he composed, Zythos, for trombone and six marimbas, and O-Mega, for percussion and ensemble, both written in 1997, four years before his death. They are striking, small-scale examples of the bareness and drastic compression of his late style, but the finest music here is a bit earlier. In Échange, from 1989, a bass clarinet painstakingly un…
Le Grand Macabre
György Ligeti’s polymorphous music, a product of the 1960s, promises no familiar idiom even today. Ligeti himself described the bizarre and exaggerated music of Le Grand Macabre to be “far removed from the territory of Wagner, Strauss and Berg.”A sense of the absurd, the unpredictable, the totally irrational, not unlike the Dadaists who made their debut in Zurich back in 1916. Le Grand Macabre is often cited as a quintessential work of a Neo-Dada genre, one as bombastic as it is exuberant.
Sonata XIII / Music For Marcel Duchamp / Song Books I-II / Empty Words III
*2022 stock* The first works of Cage are experimental and related to the future. "The Future of Music" - a Credo" is the title of his first manifesto, and this future bears the name "all-sound music".
Works For Piano, Toy Piano & Prepared Piano · Vol. III
*2022 stock* It may come as a surprise but one of the leading creators of keyboard music in the twentieth century is a composer by the name of John Cage. Cage’s reputation is so deeply associated with the avantgarde, with chance music, graphic notation, performance art, technology and Zen Buddhism that is early, conventionally-notated music for percussion ensemble and keyboards is sometimes neglected. Or was until recently. In the last few years – with the advent of performances and recordings l…
Etudes Australes
*2022 stock* 'Etudes Australes was composed specifically for Grete Sultan, so this album is among the definitive recordings. As an indeterminate piece for solo piano (okay, well, a "duet for two hands"), this sounds very similar to Music of Changes, Winter Music, etc. Here, though, Cage generates indeterminacy by turning once again to using star charts as tools of composition, as he did previously in the wonderful Atlas Eclipticalis.
In a way, I find the piano to be more suited to star charts th…
Kontakte
Kontakte is a Stockhausen classic from 1959, for electronics, percussion and piano (played here by David Tudor). One of his "moment form" compositions, which "...lead up to no climax, nor do they have prepared, and thus expected, climaxes, nor the usual introductory, intensifying, transitional, and cadential stages which are related to the curve of development in a whole work; they are rather immediately intense and -- permanently present -- endeavor to maintain the level of continued 'peaks' up…
Don't Ask Me Why/Love Supreme
*Fully remastered and licensed* One of the most sought-after italo-disco release, the combined effort of Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici and Alexander Robotnick saw the light of the day in 1986 on Fuzz Dance, Materiali Sonori sub-label ran by the wizard Giampiero Bigazzi. Florence born producer and musician Maurizio Dami, created a mysterious character, a so-called "modular structure born out of a soviet calculator and promptly runaway". His classic "Problemes D'amour" was featured on the influent…
A Souvenir Of Camber Sands
Issued in a 6-panel Digisleeve with a sticker on the shrinkwrap Throbbing Gristle announce the next phase of their reissues series with the release of ‘Part Two: The Endless Not’ / ‘TG Now’ and ‘A Souvenir Of Camber Sands’. In 2004 Chris Carter, Peter Christopherson, Genesis P- Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti reformed - 23 years after their mission was originally terminated - and between 2004 and 2007 the band released 14 new studio tracks and a live album of their appearance at ATP’s Nightmare B…
Underground Altena
Alga Marghen returns with an absolute stunner, the LP “Underground Altena”, comprising a never before heard or released series of recordings capturing Anima - the duo of Limpe Fuchs and Paul Fuchs - in 1973. Largely rendered on a striking array of instruments, invented and played by the couple, its otherworldly, visionary sounds upend nearly every perception held about underground music transpiring in Germany during this period. Wild, wonderful, truly free, and inspiring as records come.