Reissues

Originally released as a small run cassette in 1987, only to fall into tape label obscurity, Robert Turmans industrial genre-bending masterpiece album Way Down finally has been excavated for a proper vinyl reissue after twenty-three years in the shadows. This album solidifies Turman as a cut above the rest with respect to his talent and his natural ear for experimental composition. Turman first came onto the industrial scene in the late 70s as the ominous other half of legendary noise outfit NON…

The Amsterdam String Trio emerges from Europe's most vibrant improvised music scene: Maurice Horsthuis on viola, Ernst Reijseger on cello, Ernst Glerum on double bass. No violin. An unusual configuration that delivers, as Glerum puts it, "a dark sound, a kind of obscurity, and we like that very much." Three instruments exploring music's lower registers, without the violin's brightness to lead. Recorded live at the Academy of Music of the West in Santa Barbara on December 2, 1988, Wild West captu…

Lingua Franca: the language that allows different peoples to understand one another. And what better instrument than the clarinet - voice of klezmer, Alpine folk, New Orleans jazz - to speak across borders? Daniele D'Agaro was born in 1958 in Spilimbergo, Friuli, at the foot of the eastern Alps, where Italy, Austria, and Slovenia merge at a cultural crossroads. In 1979 he debuted with Andrea Centazzo's Mittel Europa Orchestra, then Berlin, then Amsterdam from 1983 - where the Dutch improvised sc…

** 2026 Stock **  If Laptop Noise looks forward into the blinding glare of the digital, Tapestry of Noise looks outward and backward, unspooling an expansive grid of analogue and hybrid recordings that show how Merzbow’s classic language was woven together in the first place. Slowdown’s 6CD expansion assembles long, previously scattered or hard‑to‑access works into a single, overwhelming fabric that moves from twitching tape‑loop delirium to fully seared harsh‑noise architectures. Early discs re…

** 2026 Stock ** Laptop Noise zeroes in on the period where Merzbow’s long‑running practice of junk‑metal abuse, feedback and tape saturation is rechannelled through the seemingly modest frame of a computer. Across six discs, this edition amplifies the original’s premise into a deep survey of his fully digital soundworld: long‑form works where full‑spectrum distortion, high‑frequency shrapnel and seething low‑end swarm are carved into towering blocks, then eroded into swarms of microscopic detai…

On Tepepa, Ennio Morricone turns the Mexican Revolution into an operatic fever dream, braiding solemn mariachi‑tinted themes, mystical guitar‑and‑orchestra adagios and defiant song into a score where personal vengeance and collective uprising share the same melodic bloodline.

On Lo squartatore di New York, Francesco De Masi fuses rock‑charged aggression with aching lyricism, setting Lucio Fulci’s urban nightmare to a score where feral action cues collide with the unforgettable tenderness of “New York One More Day” and the bittersweet elegy “Fay.”

In August 1971, the white wizards of South Africa's psychedelic rock underground shared the stage with the black witchdoctors of the Afro-jazz avant-garde. The event was the Tribal Blues concerts at Wits Great Hall, an unprecedented cross-cultural showcase of independent music hosted by the maverick 3rd Ear Music label. Ourang-Outang (2020) presents rehearsals and jams recorded by 3rd Ear director, producer and engineer David Marks in rural KwaZulu-Natal as this unlikely alliance of musical drui…

From a southern small town this after school project is hard to describe other than there’s nothing else like it. Teens exploring soul, funk and rock and this album is their interpretation of all three. Catchy tunes, plenty of effects and earnest vocals. Fantasy Train is one of the freshest sounds I’ve heard in many years of digging. – Rich Haupt (Rockadelic)  Fantasy Train is a unique, genre-bending album cooked up in the sweltering Southern heat that impresses me with a special kind of style a…

A remarkable document finally surfaces after nearly 40 years in the NDR archives. John Taylor - the piano master of dense, orchestral voicings and skittish melodic invention - captured here in 1987 with the full NDR Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Dieter Glawischnig. All music written and orchestrated by Taylor himself. This is the logical conclusion of everything the man stood for musically - from Azimuth to Johnny Griffin's band to this luxurious symphonic setting. Stan Sulzmann on sopra…

The title comes from Langston Hughes: "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?" For a pianist who traversed Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Amsterdam chasing a musical vision few could grasp, the question is anything but rhetorical. Curtis Clark was born in Chicago in 1950, studied at the California Institute of Arts in Valencia, then moved to New York where he crossed paths with David Murray. But it was Europe where he found home - Amsterdam, where American…

Solo piano. The format that separates the genuine article from the pretenders. No rhythm section to hide behind, no horns to share the weight. Just eighty-eight keys and whatever's in your soul. Curtis Clark came to this music through Horace Tapscott - not just as influence but as mentor. Born in Chicago in 1950, raised musically in Los Angeles, Clark became a Tapscott protégé, absorbing that open-ended spiritual approach to the keyboard before striking out for New York and eventually Amsterdam.…

"Trying to play serious music in an area as shallow and fad-driven as Los Angeles were too much for this band to deal with." So reads the liner note epitaph for one of the most potent ensembles to emerge from the UGMAA constellation. One hundred minutes of music. One night in Santa Barbara. July 1987. Then silence. The Nimbus Collective assembled six of the scene's finest: Nate Morgan on piano, Jesse Sharps on reeds, Danny Cortez on trumpet, Rickey Kelly on vibraphone, Joel Ector on bass, and De…

One album. One statement. One of the great mysteries of the Nimbus West catalog. Born Arthur Wells, the alto saxophonist and flautist who became Dadisi Komolafe studied under Horace Tapscott at the Cross Roads Art Academy, the educational arm of UGMAA. He appeared on numerous Nimbus sessions throughout the late seventies and early eighties, a reliable presence in the extended family. But Hassan's Walk, recorded in Los Angeles in October 1983, remains his sole document as leader - and what a docu…

The second night. October 11, 1979. Same club, same sextet, completely different energy. Where Volume 1 leaned heavily on UGMAA repertoire, this follow-up session finds Horace Tapscott diving deep into the Great American Songbook with results that border on the transcendent. The personnel remains unchanged from the previous evening: Reggie Bullen on trumpet, Gary Bias on alto, the twin-bass attack of Roberto Miranda and David Bryant, and George Goldsmith holding down the drums. But the setlist t…

Recorded on October 10, 1979 at the legendary Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach, California, this unearthed treasure captures Horace Tapscott in the very temple of West Coast jazz, the club where Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Lee Morgan, and Elvin Jones had left their mark in previous decades. Under Rudy Onderwyzer's management, the Lighthouse continued hosting music of the highest caliber, and this evening stands as irrefutable testimony. The sextet reunites some of Tapscott's most trusted…

In 1979, Horace Tapscott traveled to New York and recorded In New York with Art Davis on bass and the immortal Roy Haynes on drums. That album captured something approaching magic - a West Coast visionary meeting East Coast rhythm masters on neutral ground. Five years later, Tapscott returned to NYC for another trio date. The results sat in the vaults for fourteen years. Dissent Or Descent pairs Tapscott with Fred Hopkins on bass and Ben Riley on drums - two musicians whose credentials need no e…

The final volume in the Tapscott Sessions series, Vol. 11 is gentler than some of its predecessors - stretched out and moody, with a contemplative feel that rewards patient listening. Twelve tracks recorded in 1982, released twenty-five years later as Tom Albach continued excavating the Lobero Theatre archive. What distinguishes this installment is the breadth of its sources. Tapscott opens with Horace Silver's "Nica's Dream," moves through the Mexican standard "Bésame Mucho," then lands on Sun …

Drawn from two different recording sessions at the Lobero Theatre, The Tapscott Sessions Vol. 10 showcases Horace Tapscott in an especially exploratory mode. Nearly all original compositions here - "Miguel," "Roses In Bloom," "First Love," "Searching," "Upside Down," "Maya & Me" - hauntingly introspective pieces performed with a sense of creative searching that's incredibly powerful despite the absence of other instrumentation. The album runs seventy-five minutes. That's a significant amount of …

Between 1982 and 1985, whenever Horace Tapscott felt ready, Tom Albach would hire an engineer, a crew, and a mobile sound truck to record him at the Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara. Sessions typically ran between 2 and 4 a.m., when auto traffic fell quiet and the room's natural acoustic could breathe. Albach believed these solo recordings represented his greatest accomplishment as a producer - a conviction some found puzzling given its commercial futility. Solo piano albums by unknown pianists p…

Recorded on February 26, 1980 at United-Western Studios in Hollywood, Dial B For Barbra stands as one of the absolute peaks of Horace Tapscott's output for Nimbus West. Following his monumental orchestral sessions with the Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, Tapscott here condenses his vision into a sextet of extraordinary cohesion, achieving with just six musicians the same sonic vastness of his larger ensembles. The album opens with "Lately's Solo," where Tapscott weaves Miles Davis's "Milestones" t…

The Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara, built in 1872 by local composer José Lobero, has witnessed over a century of California cultural history. On the night of November 12, 1981, it became the site of one of the most powerful trio recordings in the Horace Tapscott discography. Tom Albach captured it all for Nimbus West. The group is a study in complementary forces. Roberto Miranda, born in New York to Puerto Rican parents but raised in Los Angeles since the mid-1950s, had been a member of UGMAA a…

"Yeah, I'm Nate Morgan. I'm going to play with you all." That's how a teenage Nate Morgan introduced himself to Horace Tapscott after hearing The Giant Is Awakened on the radio and tracking down the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra. Not "I want to" - "I'm going to." He'd already been studying with Joe Sample and Hampton Hawes, but Arthur Blythe's wailing saxophone on that Flying Dutchman LP had gone straight to his heart. A spiritual experience, he called it. Over the next decades, Morgan became a c…

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…

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…

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…

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 …

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…

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…

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. …

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

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…

Magma's 2012 album, composed by Christian Vander and recorded between September 2011 and April 2012 at Studio ÜZ, with Stella Vander, Isabelle Feuillebois, Hervé Aknin, Bruno Ruder, Benoît Alziary, James Mac Gaw and Philippe Bussonnet.

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.

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 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.