Reissues
Journey Into Nigritia
Journey Into Nigritia, released in 1983 on Tom Albach's Nimbus West, was a declaration of arrival. Morgan assembled a quartet built for spiritual exploration: firebreathing reedsman Dadisi Komolafe on alto saxophone, Jeff Littleton on bass, Fritz Wise on drums. The rhythm section would become Morgan's anchor - Littleton and Wise appear on all three of his Nimbus recordings.
Six compositions. The album opens with "Mrafu," John Coltrane's influence immediately apparent - Komolafe gets right to wor…
Retribution, Reparation
One year after his debut Journey Into Nigritia, Nate Morgan returned to Tom Albach's Nimbus West studio with a statement so direct it left no room for ambiguity. The album's title alone - Retribution, Reparation - announced its politics. Where the first record had been a declaration of arrival, channeling Cecil Taylor's angularity and John Coltrane's spiritual seeking, this 1984 session was something else: a confident distillation of the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra's communal fire into a surgin…
The Day Of The Jackal (Music From The Motion Picture)
In the centenary year of his birth, Quartet Records unveils for the first time the complete score that Georges Delerue composed for Fred Zinnemann's masterful 1973 thriller The Day of the Jackal - a work largely unheard until now, buried beneath the weight of editorial decisions that stripped the film's second half of any musical accompaniment.
Based on Frederick Forsyth's bestselling novel, the film follows a professional assassin hired by disgruntled military veterans to eliminate President Ch…
Patterns
Hidden in a remote, forgotten corner of German library music, Peter Patzer stands as a unique figure in the landscape of 1980s functional music production. A self-taught artist and musician, Patzer founded his own personal label, Crea Music, operating in complete autonomy from his base in Bremen, northern Germany. Between 1983 and 1989 he produced eight white vinyl LPs, all featuring the same austere tricolor sleeve - red, white and blue - with title and catalog number typewritten. A minimalist …
One Step Out
2412 South Western Avenue, Los Angeles. A mansion the Arkestra members had taken over for communal living. They called it the Great House. In the late 1970s, Michael Session - the Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra's tenorist - brought a young pianist named Kaeef Ruzadun Ali through the front door. "When I walked in there," Kaeef recalled, "it was like this whole rush came over me, just from going in the front door. It was like a very, very warm feeling of love. I went and I came out with 'Flashback o…
I Want Some Water
Twenty years in a vault. That's how long I Want Some Water waited before anyone outside of a Los Angeles studio could hear it. Recorded on April 29 and May 3, 1980, at United Western in Hollywood, it wasn't released until 1999 - a small CD run that most collectors never saw. The vinyl pressing came forty years after the tapes were made.
Billie Harris was born in Laurel, Mississippi, on February 15, 1937. He picked up the saxophone at fourteen, served four years in the Air Force, and landed in Lo…
Lullaby For Linda
She kept notebooks. Spiral-bound, lined, 8x10 inches. In her beautiful flowing cursive, Linda Hill documented every rehearsal, every concert, every recording session of the Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra. The names of three hundred musicians passed through those pages. When she died, the notebooks vanished - a treasure of information, lost. But the music survives. Lullaby For Linda, recorded on April 25, 1980 and released the following year on Nimbus West, is the only album Hill made as a leader. …
Flight 17
Seventeen years. That's how long it took the Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra to make their first record. Founded in 1961 by Horace Tapscott as the Underground Musicians Association, the orchestra had weathered the Watts uprising, the ferment of the Black Arts Movement, a decade-long residency at the Immanuel United Church of Christ - all without committing a single note to vinyl. Not for lack of industry interest, but by choice: Tapscott wanted to build a community, not a recording career.
It was T…
The Call
For nearly two decades, Horace Tapscott and his Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra made music without making records. They played in parks, on street corners, at fundraisers, churches, community centers - anywhere the people needed them. While the rest of the jazz world chased contracts and critics, Tapscott was building something else entirely: an ark for the Black arts in the heart of Los Angeles.
The story of The Call is inseparable from this larger project. When long-time jazz devotee Tom Albach f…
Desert Fairy Princess
There's a particular light in the music of Los Angeles's spiritual jazz community of the late 1970s - something warm, searching, unpretentious. Adele Sebastian's sole album as a leader catches that light perfectly. Recorded in 1981 and released on the legendary Nimbus West imprint, Desert Fairy Princess stands among the finest documents of West Coast creative music from the period.
Sebastian was born in Riverside, California in 1956 into a musical family - her mother played piano with the Albert…
Maximizing The Audience
Venice, 1984. Teatro Carlo Goldoni. Jan Fabre's legendary play The Power of Theatrical Madness premieres - and with it, a defining document of Pop Minimalism. This primarily European phenomenon - rooted in first-generation British minimalists Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman - took the tunefulness of Reich and Glass and gave it a pop base rather than jazz/African or western classical foundations. Mertens wrote the first full-length study of the genre, American Minimal Music (1983), before becoming…
Dialoghi del Presente
Naples, 1977. Luciano Cilio's sole recorded work is pure magic - four "quadri" where strings, woodwinds, wordless voices and solitary guitar trace the edges of silence. Closer to Arvo Pärt and Morton Feldman than to any Italian prog, yet entirely its own universe. Music that breathes, suspends time, breaks your heart without raising its voice. Decades ahead of its time. First ever remaster from the original tapes.
Live - Hhaï
Remastered and pressed on translucent blue vinyl. 2LP deluxe edition. One of the greatest live albums ever recorded is back on vinyl in deluxe form. Christian Vander and his cosmic warriors captured at the absolute peak of their powers - Taverne de l'Olympia, Paris, June 1-5, 1975. The Island Mobile studio rolling tape. Five nights of pure Zeuhl fury. This is the lineup. After the departure of Jannick Top and most of the original formation in late '74, Magma rose from the ashes with a rejuvenate…
Félicité Thösz
The masters of Zeuhl return on vinyl! Christian Vander's cosmic vision at its most luminous and transcendent. Originally released in 2012, Félicité Thösz was Magma's first album of new material in 27 YEARS after their 1996 reformation. Think about that for a second. Twenty-seven years!
And what a comeback this is. Gone are the martial thunderstorms of Mekanïk Destruktïw Kommandöh - here we get celestial vocal tapestries, Stella Vander's voice soaring like a messenger from another dimension, pian…
Compass Rises
On Compass Rises, Compass condense the grit and openness of early‑’70s upstate jazz into one privately pressed statement, an acoustic‑electric set that threads post‑Coltrane toughness, modal burn and soulful swing into a clear, straight‑ahead identity.
Horizonte
On Horizonte, PSI channel the late‑’70s German fusion boom into a lean, high‑octane set where Matthias Frey’s electric keys and Volkmar Zimmermann’s manic guitar ride a phenomenal rhythm section, delivering melodically rich jazz‑rock that punches as hard as it dazzles.
Four Seasons
Four Season finds Virgo - the German fusion group that first came together as Lava in 1974 - stepping away from major‑label orbit into a more autonomous, exploratory phase, stretching their jazz‑rock language into a calmly expansive, four‑part suite tracked at Tonstudio Bauer in late 1976.
Park Of Reason
On Park of Reason, Paul Chain loosens doom metal’s grip just enough to let in air, colour and delirium, fusing obsidian riffs, reverb‑soaked keys and his unmistakable glossolalic vocals into a wandering, lysergic meditation on faith, doubt and psychic drift.
El-Hadra - The Mystik Dance
El-Hadra is more than ambient music - it’s a sonic ritual that leaves a permanent mark on the soul. This album has transformed the way many perceive sound, becoming a personal landmark for countless listeners. Originally recorded in the late 1980s, it fuses elements of Sufi trance with hypnotic tabla rhythms, meditative zither, and deep ambient drone to form a truly transcendent experience. Listening to El-Hadra is like entering a space beyond time - a journey one can take again and again, alway…
Rhythm Immortal
Carrier’s debut album features eight elegantly rude arrangements that dance in negative space between Photek’s frictional syncopations, Rhythm & Sound’s dubwise minimalism and Torsten Pröfrock’s fractured dynamics, bolstered on two tracks by contributions from Voice Actor & Memotone, summoning a noirish, jazzier frisson to his signature metrics and temporalities.