BBE Music presents the fourth release in their acclaimed J Jazz Masterclass Series: Topology by Makoto Terashita and Harold Land. Originally released in 1984 on the cult Aketa’s Disk label, Topology captures a surprising yet fascinating and engaging collaboration between a young Japanese jazz pianist and an elder American statesman of jazz.Reissued by BBE Music for the first time since original release 36 years ago, Topology showcases the extraordinary compositional and playing skill of Makoto T…
"Following the sell-out success of our landmark compilation, J Jazz: Deep Modern Jazz From Japan 1969-1984, BBE Records is thrilled to present another exploration into the very finest Japanese modern jazz.J Jazz Volume 2 builds on the solid foundation of the first compilation and sees co-compilers Tony Higgins and Mike Peden once again pick choice sections from their own record collections. They present a deep dive into an intoxicating and beguiling range of styles: from cinematic roaring big-ba…
Founder of London record shop IF Music and vinyl hunter extraordinaire, Jean-Claude drops the third glorious volume of his compilation series A Journey Into Deep Jazz on BBE Music. True to the album’s You Need This tagline, Jean-Claude has once again dug deep in his personal collection, emerging with an eclectic yet coherent selection of jazz sounds. Skimming the list of featured artists, such as James Brown’s former trombonist and musical director Tyrone Jefferson, Hungary’s all-time great jazz…
The fifth release in the BBE Music J Jazz Masterclass Series has the perfect combination of rarity and exceptional musicality that inspires seasoned collectors to break out in a sweat. Animals Garden by Miyasaka + 5 was originally issued in 1979 on the cult private Japanese label ALM and is reissued for the first time in a 180Gram 2LP edition.Animals Garden was a one-off project led by master drummer Takashi ‘Bear’ Miyasaka and features a powerful and progressive jazz group including saxophonist…
** Expanded and revised edition, published on the occasion of the Whitechapel Gallery exhibition 2019-2020 ** "Keeping the rebellious nature of its wicked subject intact, Sense Sound Sound Sense nevertheless provides an impeccably researched, crystal-clear narrative of Fluxus's true revolutionary spirit." The Wire)Truly necessary catalogue accompanying an extensive exhibition dedicated to art works and musical scores and their relationship with Fluxus, an interdisciplinary movement of internatio…
Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) is the first of four operas about the "American" consciousness. The tetralogy, including Foreign Experiences, eL/Aficionado and Now Eleanor's Idea, is based on the notion of a sequence of events seen from four, different points of view. The operas share principal characters and vocal techniques (including the relationship of the voice to instrumental settings). The singers are used interchangeably as soloists and members of a chorus. The immediacy of choral respons…
**299 copies** It’s a great moment for reissues of ambitious, historical gestures of the noise from Japan. One after the other, these artifacts have emerged from the shadows, entirely rewriting what so many of us thought we knew. Now, at long last, before us rest another piece in the puzzle - the first ever vinyl reissue of one of the most sought after artifacts from the 80s noise scene - Incapacitants' Project Pallo '85, originally issued in 1985 by Pariah Tapes, and now reemerging in a new edi…
Maggi Payne's musical imagination is vivid: she is interested in the surreal, the inward, the micro, and the accumulation of physical and psychological tension. Periods of silence gently evolve into flowing drones of complex resonances. Oozing drones evolve into dense and powerful peaks of short duration. On one cut, multi-tracked voices shift in and out of phase, creating alternately shimmering and percussive patterns; on another, digital delay and 32 separate flute tracks create a rain forest …
**2019 small repress on Kranky** The tools Liz Harris uses to make music as Grouper tend to be pretty basic: piano, guitar, synths, drones, hiss, and lots of reverb. If you've been following along with the twists and turns of noisy ambient music these last few years, this collection of elements may sound familiar, possibly bordering on cliché. But it's all in how you fit the pieces together. Despite sharing characteristics with a lot of other current music, Harris' has a distinctive sound that s…
'This sound / synapse transposition is as haunting as it is beautiful -- surely Grouper's best.' --Tiny Mix Tapes. 'If past Grouper releases have inhabited abyssal trenches and damp backwoods, here Liz Harris takes us journeying across constellations and stars. Two of the most beguiling albums of the year, exquisitely realized and singularly evocative.' --The Quietus. 'This music feels both spacey and expansive and also oddly intimate and grounded, the work of someone who has mastered her tools …
When we talk about Tullio de Piscopo (Naples, 1946) we’re talking of a living legend of drums, whose career dates back to 1969. In 1971, tired of commuting from Naples to Milan, he moved to Milan for good where he joined as a drummer the group of Gianni Basso and Oscar Valdambrini. Shortly after, he recorded his very first single on a 45 under the moniker of Jujuy, for Aldo Pagani’s label Analogy, with cat. number 'TRE 0'.Recorded in 1971, but only published in 1973, Fastness and Coagulation are…
Hospital Productions present a reissue of Smell & Quim's Cosmic Bandage, originally released in 1995 on their notorious Stinky Horse Fuck imprint. Cosmic Bondage stands as a monument to the universal perversion inside us all. Birthed into the world with an auto-asphyxiated doll complete with toy packaging and overgrown pubic hair in an edition of 100, despite its limitation the material within has become a staple of the groups live performances to this day. The dark humor enforced by truly maste…
Hospital Productions present a reissue of Masonna's first full-length CD from 1990, Shinsen Na Clitoris, originally on Vanilla Records. The supreme voice of Japanese noise here on vinyl for the first time with audio preparation by Kris Lapke. What would become an inimitable explosion of energy and vision from Japan heralded in the glory days of '90s alternative rock, death metal, and psychedelic synth music, Masonna surpassed all extremes with a full frequency violence that was as fast as it was…
**350 copies** Hospital Productions present a reissue of Incapacitants' Stupid Is Stupid, originally released in 1993. In 1993, founding fathers of Japan noise T. Mikawa and F. Kosokai revealed Stupid Is Stupid, one of the most classic titles to emerge from the criminally underrated and revered Incapacitants. A seminal document already over a decade into the duo's unrelenting path of pure chaos after their formation in 1981, Stupid Is Stupid was released as a double cassette on the equally influ…
**Edition limited to 200 numbered copies, printed in one-colour Risograph**Eleven environments released over eleven years, starting with the ocean surf in 1969 and ending with a blizzard in 1979. This was the first record series to successfully market ambient sound recordings to a broad audience in the United States, with the purpose of being used as a mood enhancer and stress reliever. This publication brings together all the liner notes to the albums (from the 'The Music Of The Future / The Ma…
Quiet Music is a collection of pieces created by Steve Roach between 1983 and 1986 in respect for silence. The gentle electronics of Roach's synthesizers mix with flute, electric piano and nature sounds flow like breath, enveloping the listener in a sustained, delicate and translucent atmosphere. Quiet Music was originally released as a three tape cassette series in 1986 on Fortuna Records and is now being issued as a complete series on vinyl for the first time ever.After Structures From Silence…
Quiet Music is a collection of pieces created by Steve Roach between 1983 and 1986 in respect for silence. The gentle electronics of Roach's synthesizers mix with flute, electric piano and nature sounds flow like breath, enveloping the listener in a sustained, delicate and translucent atmosphere. Quiet Music was originally released as a three tape cassette series in 1986 on Fortuna Records and is now being issued as a complete series on vinyl for the first time ever.After Structures From Silence…
Quiet Music is a collection of pieces created by Steve Roach between 1983 and 1986 in respect for silence. The gentle electronics of Roach's synthesizers mix with flute, electric piano and nature sounds flow like breath, enveloping the listener in a sustained, delicate and translucent atmosphere. Quiet Music was originally released as a three tape cassette series in 1986 on Fortuna Records and is now being issued as a complete series on vinyl for the first time ever.After Structures From Silence…
Primarily utilizing Tibetan bells, and singing bowls, Karma Moffett crafted sounds that led the listener on an inward journey. 1982's Sitting Still Within / Sitting Still Without is Karma Moffett's earliest triumph. "Sound has the ability to heal. This is the primary tenet that has been driving Karma Moffett for over 35 years. Pure tones, resonant harmonics, the sounds of the earth. At the dawn of the 80's, as the burgeoning movement of privately-issued New Age was taking hold, Karma Moffett was…
CD version. WRWTFWW Records present the reissue of impossible-to-find cult album Lady Maid by Japanese outfit Normal Brain. Originally released in 1981 as a limited vinyl pressing of 300 copies on Agi Yuzuru's fabled experimental label Vanity Records (R.N.A. Organism, Dada, Sympathy Nervous, Tolerance), Lady Maid is a testament to the creativity of the early '80s Japanese electronic and experimental scene, encapsulating a prolific era when audio gear became affordable for musicians to explore so…
Double CD version. Includes color insert. Double LP/CD curated by Alan Dunn in collaboration with the International Anthony Burgess Foundation and Sub Rosa. Anthony Burgess's second wife Liana carried a cassette recorder with her at all times to capture her life with the author and their son Andrew. This extraordinarily intimate audio archive of over 1,000 cassettes now sits with the International Anthony Burgess Foundation and artist Alan Dunn has been granted access to select excerpts from it …
CD version. Available for the first time outside Japan, and on LP and CD, Phosphorescent Dreams is another epic album of symphonic schizophrenic avant-rock from Univers Zero, originally released in 2014 -- only on CD -- on the Japanese label Arcàngelo. Phosphorescent Dreams presents at the same time, in the same track, even on a single moment, the complex musical schemes and ways of Univers Zero, ranging from maximalism to minimalism, classical avant-garde with a 2020 vibe in a constant flux. In…
**Limited edition LP on marbled vinyl, includes printed inner sleeve and poster.** Edited and mixed between Montreal and Paris, From Somewhere Invisible summons the fever of experimentation and the powerful sound of the game coming together in the service of a luxuriant and psychedelic drift. Synthetic brass meets hammered rhythms, string electrics with cracked electronics, saxophone cries and laughter at a pulsing and seminal bass. Created in 2012 by multi-instrumentalists Frédéric D. Oberland …
**Small repress available** Following the Anthology of Contemporary Music From the African Continent, this new collection released by Unexplained Sounds Group, focuses on experimental and alternative music from the Middle East and includes artists from Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iran, Israel, Iraq, Palestine, Jordan, Afghanistan, Cyprus. A kaleidoscope of sounds by artists rooted in their traditions, but at the same time projected towards the new frontiers of music. The minimal mel…
With the demise of the group Wire in 1980, founder members Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis joined forces to create Dome. With the assistance of engineer Eric Radcliffe and his Blackwing Studio Dome took the ethic of "using the studio as a compositional tool" and recorded and released three Dome albums on their own label in the space of 12 months: Dome (July, 1980), Dome 2 (October, 1980), and Dome 3 (October 1981). A final fourth album, Will You Speak This Word: Dome 4 was released on the Norwegi…
**1.000 copies, 2019 stock** Born in Brooklyn, Alan Vega was reared on the rock'n'roll sound of Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison, but originally struck out on a career as a visual artist and light sculptor, making pieces out of electronic debris. Seeing Iggy Pop fronting the Stooges at the New York State Pavilion in 1969 was an epiphany for him: "It showed me you didn't have to do static artworks, you could create situations. That show was the first time in my life when the audience and the stage m…
**1.000 copies, 2019 stock** Born in Brooklyn, Alan Vega was reared on the rock'n'roll sound of Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison, but originally struck out on a career as a visual artist and light sculptor, making pieces out of electronic debris. Seeing Iggy Pop fronting the Stooges at the New York State Pavilion in 1969 was an epiphany for him: "It showed me you didn't have to do static artworks, you could create situations. That show was the first time in my life when the audience and the stage m…
**1.000 copies, 2019 stock** Born in Brooklyn, Alan Vega was reared on the rock'n'roll sound of Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison, but originally struck out on a career as a visual artist and light sculptor, making pieces out of electronic debris. Seeing Iggy Pop fronting the Stooges at the New York State Pavilion in 1969 was an epiphany for him: "It showed me you didn't have to do static artworks, you could create situations. That show was the first time in my life when the audience and the stage m…
**1.000 copies, 2019 stock** Born in Brooklyn, Alan Vega was reared on the rock'n'roll sound of Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison, but originally struck out on a career as a visual artist and light sculptor, making pieces out of electronic debris. Seeing Iggy Pop fronting the Stooges at the New York State Pavilion in 1969 was an epiphany for him: "It showed me you didn't have to do static artworks, you could create situations. That show was the first time in my life when the audience and the stage m…
**1.000 copies, 2019 stock** Born in Brooklyn, Alan Vega was reared on the rock'n'roll sound of Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison, but originally struck out on a career as a visual artist and light sculptor, making pieces out of electronic debris. Seeing Iggy Pop fronting the Stooges at the New York State Pavilion in 1969 was an epiphany for him: "It showed me you didn't have to do static artworks, you could create situations. That show was the first time in my life when the audience and the stage m…
**1.000 copies, 2019 stock** Born in Brooklyn, Alan Vega was reared on the rock'n'roll sound of Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison, but originally struck out on a career as a visual artist and light sculptor, making pieces out of electronic debris. Seeing Iggy Pop fronting the Stooges at the New York State Pavilion in 1969 was an epiphany for him: "It showed me you didn't have to do static artworks, you could create situations. That show was the first time in my life when the audience and the stage m…
**475 copies ** The rare and sought-after third album by Venezualan keyboard legend Vytas Brenner, first released in 1975 under the band name Ofrenda, stands as arguably his crowning achievement in a career in which he successfully managed to build a bridge between his homeland's traditional music, jazz fusion of a distinctly Weather Report / Return To Forever stripe, and a generous helping of kosmische stargazing. The result is a groove-driven, exotic and richly psychedelic confection that has …
"Occasionally, a work of art falls into your hands with such a bizarre backstory, you just have to run with it. The implausible origins of Nick Garrie’s folk-pop album The Nightmare of J.B. Stanislas require just such a leap of faith. The Englishman recorded his masterpiece in France at the tender age of nineteen. The year was 1968 and Garrie felt ill at ease with the lavish arrangements accompanying his songs (beautiful as they may sound to our ears today). Worse still, the label owner committe…
**Red vinyl, gatefold sleeve** Exotic jazz guitar mastery! Gabor Szabo’s singular style and authentic sound is on full display across a set of originals and choice covers highlighted by unusual instrumentation and ingenious arrangements. From the sitar-starring adaptation of Paint It Black to the Latin rhythms and bossa nova beats, Szabo’s savvy jazz guitar innovations shine throughout."Gabor Szabo was one of the most original guitarists to emerge in the 1960s; mixing his Hungarian folk music he…
**350 copies** "We’re stoked to announce the release of I Cannibali (aka "The Cannibals" / "The Year of the Cannibals"), score to the dystopic 1970’s movie by Liliana Cavani, composed and orchestrated by Maestro Ennio Morricone and conducted by Bruno Nicolai.Available for the first time ever on vinyl, the opus features vocal apprerances of Don Powell and Audrey Nohra Stainton as well as the glorious choir I Cantori Moderni di Alessandro Alessandroni, also including alternate takes and previously…
2011 repress, originally released in 2005. This double LP compilation presents insights into the outstanding artistic means of expression of late '70s/ early '80s Berlin, which left their mark on subsequent generations of artists and bands alike, bringing the walled-in city's special attitude back to life. 16 groundbreaking tracks that speak across the Germanic spectrum, from performance art / noise to post-punk / new wave, post-industrial, post-prog electronic, etc., from artists such as: Mona …
**1.000 copies** "The Black and Latin American space programme of the late '70s and early '80s was born on dancefloors and took more bodies into orbit than NASA ever did. Space Funk: Afro Futurist Electro Funk In Space 1976-84 charts a major phase shift between boogie-disco and electro-funk that came about as African American and Latin American artists really embraced the potential of computers and synths to express their ideas about alienation and utopian escapism. Taking cues from science fict…
**1.000 copies** Soul Jazz Records release flautist Lloyd McNeill’s album Treasures (1976). Originally issued on the artists’ own private press Baobab label in New York, the album is a serious collectors’ piece, a heavyweight and fascinating fusion of deep and spiritual jazz sensibilities blended with Brazilian and Latin rhythms and melodies."Lloyd McNeill is a cultural polymath - a multi-disciplinarian flautist, painter, academic, poet, and photographer - who as a musician has worked with every…
Alternative Fox present a reissue of Pete Brown & Piblokto!'s Thousands On a Raft, originally released in 1970. London-based poet Pete Brown made a name for himself after joining Mike Horovitz's New Departures art group in the early 1960s, leading to a residency at The Marquee and a 1965 appearance at the Royal Albert Hall. Brown began co-writing lyrics for Cream the following year after a request from drummer Ginger Baker, yielding tremendous hits such as Sunshine of Your Love, White Room, and …
The "Nightingale of the Andes", the voice of birds and earthquakes, the Peruvian soprano Yma Sumac was the most singular and vivacious of recording artists. Her other-worldly vocal gymnastics, a freakish four octave range delivered with sensitivity and power, were without peer in her day and still sound like nothing on Earth. Her natural versatility was such that the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla advised her to sing spontaneously and to avoid formal music teaching at all costs.The Quintessenc…