Reissues
Plastic Love
Sympathy Nervous is the project of Japanese artist Yosihumi Niinuma. Influenced by both classical and Krautrock, he began recording in 1979, and released several records on the highly coveted Vanity label. He continued to record and self-release much of his work throughout the 80s and 90s. His sound is intelligent and probably the most unique minimal synth to come out of Japan. Exploring dystopian themes, his music is well balanced and beautifully recorded.The Plastic Love album features songs Y…
The Art Dance
Minimal Wave proudly presents a full length LP by Ruins, an Italian electro-wave duo. Ruins formed in Mestre in 1978 with the intention of experimenting with electronic devices and mixed media. They mainly created music out of self-expression without any intention of joining the mainstream. Interested in multimedia, they had a strong visual aesthetic apparent via their album art, videos and projections. The classic hit ‘Fire’ is one of our favorites to date, so powerful with its great energy and…
Oppenheimer Analysis
The first release from Minimal Wave, Oppenheimer Analysis, is back by popular demand. The EP is a second pressing limited edition (500 copies) on 180 gram vinyl of selected tracks from the Oppenheimer Analysis cassette entitled “New Mexico” released in 1982, as well as two others that were previously unreleased. Andy Oppenheimer (nuclear weapons consultant) and Martin Lloyd (previously involved in the Survival Label, also known for his project “Analysis”) formed Oppenheimer Analysis in the early…
Singing in Unison
Singing in Unison is the latest in a series of recordings from acclaimed sound artist, composer, and performer Yoshi Wada. Recorded live over two nights in 1978, on March 14th and 15th at New York City's legendary performance space The Kitchen, Singing in Unison is a dramatic yet meditative work: modal improvisations for three male voices, singing, with great gravitas, in purposeful unison. These previously-unreleased recordings, featuring vocalists Richard Hayman, Imani Smith, and Wada himse…
Hathor
This is probably Wakhevitch's most esoteric and occult-influenced work. Some sort of dark ritual for synthesizer and orchestra inspired by Kabbalistic writings where Igor's trademark bottom heavy electronics pulse, wizz and sweep to a backdrop of heavy tribal drumming. Elsewhere, menacing and majestic spoken word passages open us the doors to the netherworld, leading you into an esoteric sound ritual that sounds spooky, virulent, powerful, droning, entrancing and mystical at the same time. Agai…
Docteur Faust
Housed in a fantastic and menacing sci-fi cover courtesy of Druillet and bearing the famous dedication: "A mes grands amis Robert Wyatt et Mick Rattledge", Igor Wakhevitch's second album was a step beyond it's predecessor into a music alchemy that defies categorisation and the one that started to define his trademark sonic collage of styles and moods. Like the previous record, this was the music for a Norbert Schmucki ballet "Ergonia", premiered at Festival D'Avignon 1971, and featured top frenc…
Inventionen VII: 30 jahre inventionen 1982 - 2012
* Five hours of electroacoustical compositions, recorded during the first thirty years of the Berlin festival “Inventionen”. Box set with two audio CDs and a multichannel (surroundsound) DVD * Mindblowing two re-releases of Edition RZ LPs that are now available in this double CD box with additional tracks, as well as a mainly acousmatic DVD that features electronic tracks by a variety of electroacoustic composers. The present DVD contains mainly acousmatic music. This is when a pure "tape piece"…
Einstein on the Beach
Widely credited as one of the greatest artistic achievements of the 20th century, this rarely performed work launched its director Robert Wilson and composer Philip Glass to international success when it was first produced in Avignon, France in 1976, with subsequent performances in Europe and in New York at the Metropolitan Opera. It is still recognized as one of their greatest masterpieces. Now, nearly four decades after it was first performed and twenty years since its last production, Einstei…
The Complete Recordings
Collected here for the first time are the complete studio recordings of one of the major ensembles in the renaissance of Jewish Jazz. Featuring five Downtown New York improvisers, these four CDs originally released by Knitting Factory records from 1996 to 2001 embrace the Hasidic musical legacy with a fresh new voice. Blending together an intense mixture of ethnic and cosmopolitan sounds, Hasidic New Wave fuses spiritual songs from Hasidic dynasties to funk and jazz, Arabic dances with avant-gar…
Cover Versions
Andrew Pekler selected 300 different covers from second-hand records and, using colorful geometric elements to cover over all titles, performer’s names, and label logos, removed traces of the covers’ original contexts. The sunsets, couples in silhouette, alpine panoramas, roses on pianos, female faces in close-up, and seascapes no longer serve as the packaging for easy listening and exotica. Instead, the romantic, bizarre and intriguingly bland images of the original covers are free to lend thei…
Cainus
Maurizio Bianchi is an Italian composer of electronic/experimental/industrial music. Taking a cue from its unconventional matrices (we are in the year 1976), has officially started its activities in August 1979: originally influenced by the tendency of 'musique concrète', under the name of Sacher-Pelz, he composed four works on tape over eight months. The first of the four tapes, recorded between August and September of 1979, is entitled Cainus. Tracks remastered from original analog tape…
Dedicated to J.Goebbles
The tape more provocative and irritating of Pierpaolo Zoppo, the Italian sub-genius behind Mauthausen Orchestra, is certainly Dedicated to J. Goebbels . The tracks were recorded during '82-‘83 and offer an overwhelming noise ferric devolves into agonizing nightmare and atrocities sound that recall the dark side of humanity. This is the fourth official reprint on Urashima in Lp and the artwork was approved by the artist.Tracks remastered from the original tape and the record has been pressed on 1…
Check Point Charlie
Double LP edition, seminal album recorded in 1989 and originally released by Aaya in 1990, Check Point Charlie is the first work by Ghedalia Tazartés conceived for the compact disc format and its different time boundaries. Check Point Charlie is a collage journey where Tazartès pulls out all the stops to captivate and confuse the listener: street recordings, pseudo-enticing dialogues, sampled instruments, real instruments, rapid-fire splices, and that uncanny voice of his reciting, yodeling, sc…
1974 - 2004
Per Henrik Wallin, piano. Sven-Ake Johansson, drums, voice, trumpet, accordion. Plus Joe Williamson, doublebass on one CD. Unique release of a 4-CD box including rare recordings of swedish pioneers of free jazz and improvised music, as well as a 28-page booklet with extensive writings and photos, letters and drawings by the artists taking you on a historical, yet contemporary, ride through over thirty years of musical continuos development. This box honors and puts in to attention the gr…
Mabushii itazura na inori
Mabushii itazura na inori (which translates as Dazzling, mischievous prayer) is the staggering new studio album from guitarist and vocalist Keiji Haino’s Fushitsusha, the second in a series of three thematically and structurally linked sets recorded with drummer Ikuro Takahashi and bassist Mitsuru Nasuno.Bassist Nasuno also plays with Haino in his electric blues group, Seijaku, and the new Fushitsusha album has a direct umbilical to their experiments with slurred roadhouse phrasing and overlappi…
CD Box 1970-1973
Massive 7xCD box set compiling rare material by the great alto screamer Kaoru Abe is the lost wild legend of '70s Japanese free jazz. In the short space of his tempestuous life, he burnt a path which has served as a map for a whole generation of Japanese artists to follow who would call themselves 'free' in any sense of the word whatsoever. Though he performed live frequently in his day, his releases were sporadic, many of them emerging after his untimely death in 1978, and on a string of Japane…
CD box
Abe at his best! Crudely generalising a contrast in free jazz tendencies between AMM/SME/MIC/FMP and AACM/ESP, it's hard to say if Abe's closer to the gentle, bearded intellectualism of some European improvisation, or to the gutsier funk of more US freedom fighters. Up there with the best of both Western sides of the sea, but unlike any one from either, his stroppy, razor-sharpening alto style mixes tousled emotionalism with dogged puzzling, like an amalgam of Anthony Braxton and a sadder, angri…
Merzphysics
This 10xCD box set composed of previously unreleased recordings from 1993–95, it focuses on pure noise from before the introduction of synthesizers and other electronic instruments. The noise is described as being linked to grindcore, having a sense of speed, and was recorded live to cassette. Merzphysics can be considered to be a sequel to Merzbient, which also features unreleased vintage cassette recordings.As with some of the tracks on Merzbient, the titles are taken from cassette brands: AX…
Drop on Down in Florida: Field Recordings of African American Tr
Based on four years of fieldwork throughout the state, the Florida Folklife Program released the two-album, 27-track LP Drop on Down in Florida: Recent Field Recordings of Afro-American Traditional Music in 1981. The album was intended to highlight African American music traditions for a statewide public audience, particularly blues and sacred traditions. When the Folklife Program sought the opportunity to produce an expanded reissue of the album that would include previously unissued field…
Etude IV / D'une Etoile Oubliee / La Grande Vague
Etude IV: points-lines-landscapes' (1979). This work is designed as an all-electronic piece without considering any configuration with soloist parts for later use (unlike the two following pieces featured on this CD). It was realized by Jean-Claude Eloy in 1979 on the CEMAMu's UPIC upon Iannis Xenakis's invitation to whom this work is dedicated as a friend. The UPIC (Unité Polyagogique Informatique du CEMAMu) is an electronic tool invented by Iannis Xenakis in the 1970s. It is a graphic i…