Reissues
Mirror
Paradigm Discs present a reissue of Amnon Raviv's Mirror, originally released in Israel in 1983 and only available in a handmade edition of just 50 copies. As such, this edition is the first widely available issue of this LP, giving it a chance to reach an audience beyond the 50 hardened collectors who got to hear this strange experimental record back in the '80s. There's nothing else quite like it from that era, let alone from Israel, although it does have some parallels with earlier avant-gard…
Whistling Jigs To The Moon
LP version. Includes insert with lyrics, liner notes, and photos. Sommor Records present a reissue of Flibbertigibbet's Whistling Jigs To The Moon, originally released in South Africa in 1978. Whistling Jigs To The Moon is not only a very rare and sought-after album but also a wonderful collection of traditional and original folk tunes with a strong Celtic influence. Featuring Alison O'Donnell and David Williams from psych-folk legends Mellow Candle. In 1974, following the break-up of Mellow Can…
An Avant Garde of Our Own: Disconnected Works 1980-2018 (8CDBox)
Saxophonist/guitarist/composer/music historian/ provocateur Allen Lowe spans the history of jazz in his music in a way that few besides Jaki Byard, Beaver Harris, Steven Bernstein, and Air have ever done, intertwining blues, early jazz, bebop, and the avant-garde. A prolific composer who was incorporating American roots music into his jazz decades before it was hip, he has led project bands featuring a broad array of jazz greats ranging from Doc Cheatham, Randy Sandke, Joe Albany, Don Byron, Ken…
Het Jakoba Prieel
**CD edition** While the Sound Reporters imprint, which ran intermittently between the early 80s and 90s - specializing in the sounds of anthropology, ethnomusicology, religion, travel and history, hailed from Amsterdam, those aware of this obscure cassette label will probably only be the most developed fans of Italian avant-garde. It was Sound Reporters that issued the incredible collaboration between Pit Piccinelli, Fred Gales, and Walter Maioli, Amazonia 6891, reissued by Black Sweat in 2016,…
Ethnoelectronics
CD Edition. Ethnoelectronics, issued on cassette by Sound Reporters in 1986, exists beyond the realm of easy definition. Very little information about the album exists, other than the fact that it involved the contributions of a remarkable group of sonic explorers - Walter Maioli, Nirodh Fortini, Fred Gales, Raffaele Serra, John Zandijk and the sculptor Edward Luyken, and was conceptualised as the soundtrack for an obscure science-fiction saga. Or was it?The title makes clear allusion to the ide…
Top Sensation
From the original soundtrack of Top Sensation, also known as The Seducers. A late sixties erotic cult movie starring a young Edwige Fenech, along with Rosalba Neri, in a Freudian Eros and Thanatos driven drama, complete with corrupt bourgeois, and an exotic locale. Both ‘”Aldo and Ulla” and “Beat del Panfilo” are two prime examples of late 1960s shake compositions by Sante Maria Romitelli, one of Italy’s most underrated film music heroes who specialized in horror, thriller, and giallo. Hammond g…
Corruzione al Palazzo di Giustizia
Born Giuseppe Donaggio in Venice, Italy, on October 24, 1941, he was the product of a family of musicians, and began studying violin at the ageof ten; during the second half of the '50s and all of the following decade, he wrote songs both for other performers and for his solo records, even participating to various editions of the Sanremo Festival. He started writing scores for films in 1973 with "Don't Look Now" ("A Venezia... un dicembre rosso shocking", already released as VMLP210 for the Reco…
Mars Archives Volume Three: N.N. End
** 500 copies ** "Barring some miraculous discovery (never out of the question!), "Mars Archives Volume Three: N.N. End" is the final LP in our series of LPs documenting the music of New York's most amazing combo of the No Wave era, Mars. From their more-quotidian beginnings as China, whose sound was influenced by The Velvet Underground and Television, Mars mutated and grew in a variety of nearly unchartable directions. "N.N. End" documents the latter, immaculate stages of the band's destruction…
Sechs
** 500 copies** Die Tödliche Doris was born out of West Berlin’s lively post-punk community in the early ‘80s. Along with Einstürzende Neubauten, Malaria, Sprung Aus Den Wolken and Frieder Butzmann, Die Tödliche Doris ranks amongst the Geniale Dilletanten – which roughly translates as “ingenious dilettantes” – who sought to democratize cultural productions beyond the grip of both Western capitalism and GDR socialism. The Geniale Dilletanten became synonymous with a free-for-all approach to music…
Saint-Exupery
Fantôme Phonographique present a reissue of Luc Estang and Pierre Henry's Saint-Exupéry, originally released as a 10" in 1959. During his long and illustrious career, the French composer and musique concrète pioneer Pierre Henry created a large amount of incidental music to accompany literary texts, both on record and for the stage, from Jules Verne to Victor Hugo, from Lautréamont to Antonin Artaud. This incredibly rare LP from 1959 is a radio play about the life of French pilot and writer Anto…
D.D.T.
Akira Sakata is a legendary Japanese jazz musician active since the early 70s (Yosuke Yamashita Trio, Akira Sakata Trio) and also an ocean-biologist. Among others he has toured and recorded with The Thing, Jim O’Rourke, Bill Laswell, Merzbow, Chikamorachi, etc.On this album originally released in 1985 he teamed up with vocalist Akira Emoto to create an incredible record which is rooted in Jazz and explores an entire world of sounds. You got to listen to believe it!
Singe Tema
The return of the Zanzibara series: a Deep Taarab masterpiece from legendary singer Zuhura Swaleh, recorded in Nairobi in 1981.
Zuhura Swaleh & Party rose to fame on the Mombasa scene in the 1970s
with a new fast-paced taarab style based on local ngoma rhythms and its
melodies. The group sound was lead by an electrically amplified
tashkota (actually a Japanese instrument correctly spelled as
taishokoto), its shape best rendered as being a kind of “typewriter
banjo”—a trio of strings shorted…
Fall of Saigon
An ephemeral trio formed at the very beginning of the '80s, Fall of Saigon take a special place within French rock. A voice (Florence Berthon), an organ (Pascal Comelade) and a guitar (Thierry Den), supported by a foregrounded drumbox, suffice to maintain a minimalist and essential construction, full of class and inventiveness. More conventionally rocky than musics recorded by Comelade in those years, although subtly peculiar, the compositions show influences marked by the New York seal. Thus th…
Music as a second language
2019 Repress. Speech melodies extracted from sources as various as language instruction recordings, hypnotists and televangelists are re-synthesized and applied to digital musical instruments, becoming eerily beautiful, "the singing of voices more ancient than language." Performed by Paul DeMarinis Hidden beneath speech's words and music's melodies I hear the singing of a voice more ancient than language. Brain's secret convulsions making muscles articulate, shaking the world with a song now lo…
Mandatory Reality
Mandatory Reality, the new album by Joshua Abrams and Natural Information Society, is here. Setting aside (for the moment) the electric instrumentation of Simultonality (GB 048CD/MTE 068LP, 2017) and Magnetoception (MTE 063-64LP, 2015), Joshua Abrams conceived Mandatory Reality for an eight-piece acoustic manifestation of NIS, consisting of himself on guimbri, Lisa Alvarado on harmonium and gongs, Mikel Avery on tam-tam and gongs, Ben Boye on autoharp and piano, Hamid Drake on tabla and tar, Ben…
Voltage Controlled Broken TV Music
Edition of 100, signed and numbered. In the last 10 years Akira Matsuoka (aka Veltz) has established himself as a key figure in the next generation of Tokyo noise artists. His work covers a wide range: metal junk noise, erased tapes, field recording and audio dedications to analogue television. Analogue broadcasting in Japan was switched of in 2011, an event recorded by Matsuoka and presented at the end of this album. The collection of broken televisions he has since amassed have become his prim…
The World of the Doubling Riders
**The definitive Doubling Riders box set with a load of previously unreleased material is finally here. Complete discography, remastered from the original tapes. 6 x CD boxset includes 1 disc of previously unreleased material, plus 24-page booklet of liner notes and never-before-seen photographs.** From its earliest days, Italian avant-garde and experimental music has always been a fascinating world of intersecting lines, unexpected meetings, and networks of conversation and collaboration. This …
Piano Music
Robert Palmer (1915-2010) produced more than ninety symphonic, choral, chamber, and solo works throughout his career, earning a reputation in the mid-twentieth century as one of the country's leading, most daring, and -- at the same time -- appealing modernists. Palmer's unique musical language combined a deeply emotional impulse with complex counterpoint and rhythmic structures, drawing comparisons to Hindemith, Bartók, Lou Harrison, even Brahms. Aaron Copland famously included Palmer on his 19…
The Birthday Party
On first hearing, the piano music of Peter Garland (b. 1952) creates a feeling of dislocation, then astonishment: It is so very different from the contemporary concert music we are familiar with. The composer's intent, his emotional directness is immediate -- despite the unusual sound world and different sense of time that these pieces exhibit. The three pieces on this CD, 'The Birthday Party' (2014), 'Blessingway' (2011-12) and 'Amulet' (After Roberto Bolaño) for 4 pianos (2010), are quite diff…
Three Pieces in Polytempic Polymicrotonality
The author of these notes has spent his life explaining radical music, and the music on this disc may be the most radical I've ever written about. Peter Thoegersen (b. 1967) is not yet a name known to the music world; not for any lack of connection to other famous musicians, but because he came to composition late, and because his artistic aims are so broad and complex that they have taken years to evolve. His aesthetic is well defined, and he is upfront about having a name for it: "Polytempic P…