Reissues
You Tourned the Tables on Me (Book)
Tip! Photographs by Roberto Masotti, texts by Carlo Maria Cella, Silvia Lelli, Luca Scarlini. You tourned the tables on me, one hundred and fifteen contemporary musicians and composers portrayed by Roberto Masotti between 1974 and 1981 with the constant (but always variable) presence of a table as a prop that always travels with the photographer. Including, among others, Robert Ashley, Derek Bailey, David Behrman, Han Bennink, Steve Beresford, Luciano Berio, Carla Bley, Lester Bowie, Anthony Bra…
Frost
Reissue of an obscure Italian minimal album from the 80s. Recorded in Northern Italy in 1989 by Michele Tadini, this release effortlessly fuses ambient and library overtones with the influence of early digital electronic music, underlined by an ethereal atmosphere eerily reminiscent of the best soundtracks by John Carpenter. Seemingly unplaceable in time and space, it is both Italian and world-spanning.
A young, free-reined musician with a rich music vocabulary and avant-garde sensibilities pour…
Dress
* Edition of 500 + 16-page booklet *By the mid-1990s, there was a quietly thriving underground in Wellington, New Zealand, made up of a number of loosely aligned operatives - Surface of The Earth and their World Resources imprint; Fever Hospital and 8 Dec, and the music made by the members of The Garbage & the Flowers after that group temporarily dissolved in 1992..." One of those rather short-lived groups was Dress, who on record consisted of Yuri Frusin and Helen Johnstone from The Garbage & t…
2nd Session 1956 Revisited
Here is a chance to hear Miles Davis in something close to real time. Small matter that most collectors of hard bop will have these sides already and will be familiar with a particular running order. Perhaps those who have invested in the complete sessions will have a clearer sense of the continuity of these remarkable sessions, but that now familiar obsession with the burrs and snarf of the studio process may win out over musical appreciation. What happened at Van Gelder’s on October 26 1956 is…
Play Annette Peacock, Revisited
By 1965, Paul Bley had settled on the trio format, and touring Europe revealed a warmer reception for music that employed chordless improvisations, three-way rhythmic counterpoint, unfamiliar melodic constructs, and malleable song form. But there was an equally momentous conceptual change in the group’s material, as the adventurous pieces by Carla Bley were gradually being replaced by those of Paul’s new partner, Annette Peacock. - Art Lange
Controfase
Composed by Ennio Morricone alongside friend and frequent collaborator Bruno Nicolai, "Controfase" is one of the most overlooked and lesser known chapters in the maestro's extensive catalog. Various experimental elements perfectly intertwine in these skilful compositions, VCS3 blend with hair-raising violin notes on a pattern of ominous percussions by Egisto Macchi. With the precious help of Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza as well as Edda Dell'Orso angelic voice, the two masterminds h…
All Thoughts Fly
**2022 Repress. Black Vinyl** Sacro Bosco (“Sacred Grove”) is the starting point for Anna von Hausswolff’s new album All Thoughts Fly, recorded at Gothenburg’s Örgryte New Church and heavily infused with the space’s atmospheric nuance, which renders the theatric richness of Anna’s compositions at their most billowing and melodramatic. Here in solo instrumental mode, the entire record consists of just one instrument, the pipe organ, and represents absolute liberation of the imagination. All Thoug…
Theme From The Gay Man's Guide To Safer Sex
180gr black vinyl version Entirely a category of their own, fifteen years after the untimely passing of John Balance and the project’s demise, it remains impossible to calculate the importance of Coil. For just over two decades, following the band’s founding by Balance in 1983, it stood among the great emblems of underground music - a full realisation of the seeds and potential planted by punk, bred with the higher realms of experimental and electronic music. Their sprawling, deeply emotive cat…
Edo
*Includes OBI and 4-page inserts with text in Japanese and English.* "Edo" is a cosmic ambient experimental masterpiece conceived in 1977 by Masashi Komatsubara and developed alongside with Hideki Matsutake (a.k.a. Logic System and reductively defined by many as the "fourth member of the Yellow Magic Orchestra"). As a true sound scientist, he pours all his efforts into this record, and aimed at the widest possible use of an electronic instrument that was at the forefront at that time — the Moog …
Woodstock Generation
**Clear blue and white marbled vinyl, edition of 200** For more than 20 years, Cinedelic has gained a remarkable reputation for illuminating unexpected trajectories within the world of avant-garde sound. While the primary body of their efforts has been dedicated to reissuing unconventional soundtracks and Italian library music, increasingly they’ve been casting their eye abroad. This was partially noteworthy with the launch of their Orient Series in 2021, which endeavors to make seminal gestures…
Neighborhoods
2022 Repress expected to ship early November - Ernest Hood’s Neighborhoods was released some two decades after the Portland, Oregon born and raised musician’s first forays into field recordings. These very recordings, and those captured over intervening years, define the universal sound and aural images of childhood, a theme memorialized by Hood’s privately-pressed opus of 1975.Sprawling through a haze of zither, synthesizer melodies, and foraged pedestrian sound, Neighborhoods is both a score …
Queens of the Circulating Library
**Clear vinyl edition** Queens Of The Circulating Library stands alongside Time Machines and Nurse With Wound’s Soliloquy For Lilith as a post-industrial pinnacle of sensory-warping long-form drone. Crafted by the distilled duo of Thighpaulsandra and John Balance, the 49-minute piece unfurls in swirling, cyclical waves, tidal as much as textural, channeling the spirit of levitational minimalism pioneered by La Monte Young. Touted as the first part in "a continually mutating series of circulating…
Maskerade
*2022 reissue.* "Maskerade“ is among the most fascinating fusion and spiritual jazz LPs from West Germany. The sought after album was originally released in 1974 on the tiny label "Creative Music Records“, with only a few hundred copies known to exist. Leader Dieter Bihlmaier stands out as a fantastic flute player, recalling some of the best moments of icons like Eric Dolphy, Sahib Shihab or Jeremy Steig. Bassist Jan Jankeje, percussionist Gerhart Ziegler and vibraphonist Gerhard Dietz form his …
Pupa o Crisalide
Tip! **First time Officially reissue. Sourced from the original master tapes and housed in a deluxe gatefold cover. Edition of 500 copies** A body of evocative recordings included in Pupa O Crisalide with three different line-ups for this fantastic album by Enrico Rava which, thanks to Dialogo Records, finally sees the light for jazz lovers. Enrico Rava was the first Italian jazz artist to represent the country internationally, born in Trieste in 1939. A border city with a long history as part o…
The Sinking of The Titanic
**CD digipack** Gavin Bryars was born in Yorkshire, England in 1943. His first musical forays were as a jazz bassist working in the early 1960s with improvisors Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley. Bryars later worked with composers John Cage and Cornelius Cardew, founded the Portsmouth Sinfonia and collaborated with Brian Eno on his famed Obscure imprint.
The Sinking of the Titanic, Bryars' first major composition, was inspired by the tragic event of the British passenger liner's cross-Atlantic maiden …
Froggy’s
*In process of stocking. Limited edition of 500 copies* Pleased to announce that after two years as a digital only release Little Wings' Froggy's is now available on vinyl!! We've been fans of Little Wings for 20 years now so to be able to release a new record from the brilliantly prolific Kyle Field is a dream come true! Not to mention Froggy's is one of the weirder and most amazing Little Wings albums we've heard and we're thrilled to have it here on Astral Editions. Based on a now defunct res…
Blue Butterfly (Selected Sound)
*2023 re-issue.* Behold! Yes, Blue Butterfly, one of the absolute stunners on the revered Selected Sound, is finally available for all the beat-heads. Heavyweight library funk with a psychedelic touch, the super in-demand Blue Butterfly from *deep breath* Hardy's Jet Band, Orchestra Klaus Wuesthoff, Jan Troysen Band and Orchestra Gary Pacific - was originally released in 1971. Incredibly ahead of its time, it's been rare and sought-after for decades. For many aficionados, this is the best Select…
Arabian Nights
Quartet Records, in collaboration with EMI Music Publishing and GDM, celebrates the centenary of iconic filmmaker, author, poet and intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini with this remastered reissue of Ennio Morricone cult score for Arabian Nights (1974). Rounding out the director’s trilogy of classic short story adaptations (started by Decameron and Canterbury Tales), Arabian Nights was based upon stories from 1001 Nights. Pasolini shot on authentic Middle Eastern and Himalayan locations in a stunn…
Newocean
Since their first album in 1995, Japan's Nagisa Ni Te has created an enchanting and deeply personal sound world woven from elements of folk, psychedelia and rock along with wistful melodies and gentle arrangements. Centered on Shinji Shibayama (Hallelujahs) and Masako Takeda's partnership, the group has created intimate, emotionally resonant music that floats and breathes with an ease that can only come from a sort of telepathic chemistry. Released in Japan on the group's 25th anniversary, Newoc…
Eat Meat, Swear an Oath
A dreamlike dispatch from mid-80's Japan, the first and only Hallelujahs album is an entrancing and gentle work of psychedelic pop brilliance. In a series of informal studio sessions between 1985 and 1986, Shinji Shibayama (Nagisa Ni Te) gathered a group of friends, emerging luminaries from the burgeoning Kansai underground rock scene including Naoki Zushi (Hijokaidan, Spiral Stairs / 螺旋階段), Ken Ichi "Idiot" Takayama (Idiot O'Clock) and Chie Mukai (Ché-SHIZU) to form what would become known as H…