Reissues
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…
The Mental Answer 1
Originally published in 1984, this obscure Italian outfit centered around Pietro Mazzocchin was very active in the industrial/noise scene. He put out several cassettes under different moniker: Swastika Kommando, The New Sadism, Observation Clinique and also as Lyoto Music togheter with Pierpaolo Zoppo of the legendary Mauthausen Orchestra. Some of his tapes were published by Broken Flag (UK), Recloose Organisation (UK) and Aquilifer Sodality (Italy). "Music for psychotic states. Compulsive noise…
Tensions at the Vanguard: New Music from Peru (1948-1979)
This new Pogus 2CD compilation, curated by Luis Alvarado (writer, journalist, sound poet), presents some of the most important pieces of the Peruvian musical vanguard of the 1960s and '70s, offering a representative sample of works and composers from this important period in Peruvian music. This release also includes a 24-page booklet in both Spanish and English with an essay giving an overview of the works, the composers, and a brief musical and social history of Peru during this time. T…
The Lost Tapes
Limited Vinyl Box Set, includes 5 x 180GM vinyl LP's, 28 page 12" booklet and a 24" poster - includes 30 previously unreleased tracks* "The Lost Tapes was curated by Irmin Schmidt and Daniel Miller, compiled by Irmin Schmidt and Jono Podmore, and edited by Jono Podmore. When the legendary Can studio in Weilerswist was sold to the German Rock N Pop Museum, they bought everything, including the army mattresses that covered the walls for sound protection, and relocated it to Gronau. Whils…
Triola ou Symphonie pour moi-meme
Recollection GRM presents two electroacoustic works by Croatian composer Ivo Malec. Triola (1978): "This piece marked my return to the studio after several years of absence, a return, which for unknown reasons, needed to be part of a rather ambitious project -- a strictly personal idea. This is how my mind slowly turned towards the design of a musical narrative meant to stand for a relearning of the trade, the temptation to use purely electronic material so as change it into something other…
Presque Rien
Recollection GRM presents four musique concrète masterpieces by French electro-acoustic innovator Luc Ferrari -- all of the Presque Rien's collected together in one vinyl set for the first time. Presque rien n°1, le lever du jour au bord de la mer (1967-1970): "Following the complete disappearance of abstract sounds, we can regard this piece as a sonic snapshot and the culmination of an evolution. This is a realistic rendering (as faithful as possible) of a fishing village waking up. T…
Improvisations
Stunningly beautiful harmonium improvisations recorded in 1949 by spiritualist G.I Gurdjieff. Many who heard these performances live found themselves crying uncontrollably. After this cathartic listening experience they reached a place where they felt happy and whole. We hope this record will bring a similar experience to the modern day listener. It doesn't get much purer than this. Cover is silkscreened with gold ink. A co-release with Psychic Sounds Research."An extraordinary collection of har…
Das Testament
Backwards proudly presents the reissue of a private Maurizio Bianchi vinyl LP, issued in a small edition of 300 copies in 1983 and titled "Das Testament". M.B. is an Italian pioneer of noise music, born near Milan. Bianchi began to produce music in 1979, and since 1980 has used electronic equipment with the avowed goal "to produce technological sounds and in such a way to work on complete realising of the modern decadence". Now remastered, for this release MB plays electronics, rhythms, neutroni…