Electronic / Early Electronic

Anthology of the German-born dancer and choreographer's electronic music for dance, made in his three North London studios: tape loops, kettle-lid percussion, radio interference and generator pulses, in Sub Rosa's Early Electronic series.

The first band to make music with networked microcomputers: Jim Horton, John Bischoff, Rich Gold and Tim Perkis's KIM-1 recordings from the San Francisco Bay Area, 1978-1983. Limited double LP on Death Is Not The End.

The new issue of Electronic Sound dives into the world of tape music – from Pierre Schaeffer and Delia Derbyshire to today's sharpest loopers – and comes bundled with an exclusive Steve Reich CD, Tape Pieces, pairing his mid-'60s phasing landmarks Come Out and It's Gonna Rain across some 30 minutes.

Purple Vinyl. Limited to only 150 copies. Joe Meek’s I Hear A New World stands as one of the most visionary and groundbreaking albums in the history of recorded sound. Created in 1960 with the help of The Blue Men-Rod Freeman, Ken Harvey, Roger Fiola, Chris White, Doug Collins, and Dave Golding-this electronic symphony was Meek’s attempt to capture the sounds of outer space and the future, decades ahead of its time. Already a legendary figure, Joe Meek was the first truly independent…

Two classic analog electronic works by Morton Subotnick, Sidewinder and Until Spring, in multi-channel surround sound, previously available only on LP, in the second volume of his electronic works.

The 3rd issue of early Japanese electronic music made by NHK (Nippon Housou Kyoukai : National Broadcasting association) electronic music studio. Engineer Satou assisted many electronic works of avant-garde composers. Contents : Makoto Moroi 'Shosange' (1967), Minao Shibata 'Display '70' (1969), Toshiro Mayuzumi 'Mandara with source of Voice and Electric sound' (1969), Joji Yuasa 'Voices Coming' (1969), Makoto Shinohara 'Broadcasting' (1973)    1. “Small Confession” Makoto Moroi     The works ar…

In the mid 1960’s, there was a collective of contemporary musicians in Osaka, called Art Zyklus. Because Hajime Yamashita, one of the core members, had sold a part of his privately stored sound source over the Internet, the whole picture of amazing and completely unknown activities was revealed. The release compiled works created by Art Zyklus as well as Yamashita. Worth mentioning is that ‘Music for Electric Metronomes’ by Toshi Ichiyanagi was premiered in Japan. Apart from that, the fact that …

Works by Vladimir Ussachevsky, Otto Luening, Pril Smiley, Bülent Arel, Mario Davidovsky, Alice Shields . In 1950, the Columbia University Music Department requisitioned a tape recorder to use in teaching and for recording concerts. In 1951, the first tape recorder arrived, an Ampex 400, and Vladimir Ussachevsky, then a junior faculty member, was assigned a job that no one else wanted: the care of the tape recorder. This job was to have important consequences for Ussachevsky and the medium he dev…

Digipak CD edition. From the world-famous "Psyché Rock", to "La minute éternelle" sent by NASA into space, to "Variance", an unpublished remix of the iconic work "Variation pour une porte un soupir". Pierre Henry’s Collector is conceived as a Best Of collection of 16 tracks from 1950 to 2013. This album is a gateway for any listener to discover the innovative and masterful work of the founder of electronic music, exploring an intense, audacious and fascinating sound universe.

**2020 stock** Chance combinations, accidental themes, chaos in general—these are the musical modes that Tod Dockstader uses in composing electronic pieces. Blending oscillating electronic sounds with natural sounds is like being "confronted with a potential orchestra of thousands of instruments," he says, and the task becomes one of "improvising." This CD is a custom made copy from Smithsonian Folkways collection. Every effort has been made to preserve its historical and aural integrity. The or…

Tip! At the time, Yuji Takahashi was known internationally primarily as a pianist. Yet the decade from Phonogène (1962) to Tadori (1972) reveals another essential side of his work: an exploration of electronic sound, mathematics, and computers in composition, and of their changing relationship with human performance. One of the starting points was his encounter with Iannis Xenakis. Takahashi studied probability theory and set theory, and in Phonogène developed his own probabilistic approach to o…

One of the most significant archival recoveries from the deep history of Japanese electronic music. Electronic Music Works gathers, for the first time anywhere, the entirety of Shuko Mizuno's tape and synthesizer output - a body of work that, until now, had remained almost entirely unknown, even to those familiar with the composer's name. Spread across three CDs, issued by the indispensable Three Shells imprint, it presents music drawn from tapes discovered at Mizuno's home and salvaged on the v…

Tip! Celebrating the 90th anniversary of the birth of Maki Ishii (1936-2003), we present "Electronic Convergence," a collection of his pioneering electroacoustic works. These tracks represent a crucial era in the history of Japanese electronic music, primarily produced at the NHK Electronic Music Studio around the 1970s. Ishii’s unique fusion of traditional Japanese aesthetics and cutting-edge technology remains incredibly avant-garde even today. In February 2026, special memorial concerts will …

Big Tip! Born in the mid-1950s, the NHK Electronic Music Studio was a world-leading lab where Japan’s electronic music took shape. This album gathers works created there between 1968 and 1974—a vivid snapshot of chance operations, ring modulation, waveform experiments, broadcast collage, and intense hand-made tape craft. Launched in 1993 in memory of the studio’s founding architect Hiroshi Shioya, our project treats these tapes as living works—not nostalgia. We re-check sources, rebuild the li…

*300 copies limited edition. In process of stocking* Library act with different people involved depending on the record. Not a side project of Jenkins & Ratledge per se. Karl Jenkins co-forming Nucleus, which won first prize at the Montreux jazz festival. This was followed by a period with Soft Machine, one of the seminal bands of the 1970's. Michael Ratledge Founder and long-time member of Soft Machine.

Complete Electronic Works 1955-2012 Dacapo Records (Book + CD + Complete Digital Discography). In a Gestapo prison cell in 1944, a young Danish resistance fighter saw a star flash through the window and heard music coming from inside herself. The next morning she scratched the melody into the wall with a buckle from her girdle. That woman was Else Marie Pade, and this moment marked the beginning of one of the most remarkable careers in 20th-century electronic music. This special edition book fro…

On Electronic Music, Pär Lindgren turns the studio into a charged, architectural space: three acerbic, abstract works where voltage, noise and spectral residue are shaped into disorienting landscapes with no obvious landmarks, only shifting fields of tension.

This month's cover star is the legendary Stephen Mallinder, once of Cabaret Voltaire, now of Wrangler and Creep Show, and we have an exclusive and totally glorious green vinyl seven-inch by this giant of UK electronic music to accompany the issue.

2023 Restock. Triple yellow LP version. Pressed on audiophile grade heavy duty vinyl. Else Marie Pade, born in 1924 in Denmark, is a precious golden gem in the world of contemporary electro-acoustic music. She is a true pioneer of electronic music and musique concrète. Pade is Denmark's first lady of electronic music and her piece "Syv Cirkler (Seven Circles)" became the first electronic piece performed on Danish radio. Pade's fascination with sound began in early childhood. Isolated in her bed …

2025 stock ** "In the world of sound library and production music French Avant-garde composer Patrice Sciortino is both unique and universal. His astounding late 1960s and early 1970s recordings for the prestigious Musique Pour L’Image and PSI labels receive their first serious reissue and reappraisal here. Cellos growl and twist with an air evocative of Bernard Hermann, choirs hiss and howl like Alessandro Alessandroni’s ‘I Cantori Moderni’ and the whole thing is as dexterous and playful as Enn…

Incredible 30 track anthology ranging from spaced-out Kosmische to blunted & skewed pop - honestly one of the most eye-opening and worthy archival discoveries of the year RVNG Intl.'s issue of 'A Period of Review (Original Recordings: 1975 - 1983)' is a wide-reaching and revelatory survey of Kerry Leimer's prescient output operating on the cusp of ambient, 4th World and industrial musics. From his base in Seattle, Leimer accumulated a unique catalogue of recordings created on a Micromoog, drum m…

This is a collection of electronic works composed between 1959 and 1969 at the Institute for Sonology in Utrecht, Holland. Once again, Sub Rosa offers a chance to reflect upon a rare lineage of electronic music's origins, a revolution of the fifties and sixties when an art form was emerging without a base -- ex nihilo -- a new music produced by machines designed to construct the new. Utrecht University's large complex of studios that comprised the Philips laboratories housed an extensive collect…

Temporary Super Offer! Reissue of 1960 BAM label release. Musique Concrète represents an important milestone in the development and progression of the genre of the same name. It marks a crossroad for the genre and its originator, Pierre Schaeffer and another of the genre's most important protagonists, Pierre Henry. In 1942, Schaeffer and Jacques Copeau founded the Studio d'Essai (renamed Club d'Essai in 1946) as part of Radiodiffusion Française studios in order to experiment with radiophonic tec…

Decca Records presents a limited edition 13CD Box dedicated to the composer Pierre Henry, entitled Galaxie, gathering 33 works including 14 unpublished - composed between 1958 and 2017. This edition of 13 CDs represents, with Polyphonies (released in 2017), the essence of Pierre Henry's work, highlighting his prodigious inventions, his work as a composer and his attachment to his masters. CD 1Le Voyage (1962)Prisme (1973)CD 2Variations pour une porte et un soupir (1963)Hugosymphonie Gouttes deau…

2024 stock. This 1982 recording builds on Barton Smith's previous Reelizations release, incorporating acoustic and electronic instruments with tape-recording technology into a unique one-person orchestra. The ability to create and perform music with the use of new technology and without large and expensive orchestras made sharing creations easier, especially for accompaniment in film, radio, and television. Liner notes include descriptions of how each track was composed, instrumentation, and sug…

2024 stock. This 1980 recording explores combinations of acoustic instruments and recording technologies. The increasing cost of large ensembles performing new works led composers to experiment with inexpensive alternatives. Barton Smith creates his own orchestra mixing recordings and acoustic instruments with everyday items such as swivel chairs and glass bottles. Liner notes include descriptions of how each track was composed, the composer's biographical information, and suggestions for how ea…

2024 stock. Sounds of New Music is a collection of 18 compositions from the 1920s to the mid-1950s representing attempts at a "new means of musical expression." Some use familiar instruments in new ways, while others experiment with new instruments; the formats of the compositions range from structured musical scores written for orchestra to electronically altered music using tape-recording devices. Composers include Edgard Varèse, Henry Cowell, and John Cage, whose "Dance" is played on a transf…

2024 stock. While some of the sounds on this album could be the noise produced by various electric equipment (fax machine buzz, phone busy tones etc.) this album is actually to provide “a standard by which record playing equipment can be checked for frequency response, and distortion, without equipment other than an oscilloscope and volume indicator.” Recorded and annotated by Peter Bartok. Liner notes include detailed information about each track (frequency) and method of testing.

*2024 stock* What did the future sound like in 1980? Futurible is brought to you by Italian composer Gianni Safred and will take you both back in time and into the future. Safred uses Moog and Arp synthesizers that have now become commonplace in popular music. These sounds are "suitable for space travels, space explorers, experiments, fantastic adventures, future enterprises, interplanetary stories, important achievements, industrial accomplishments of broad implication… modern scientific discov…

2024 stock. Jon Appleton, Sydney Alonso, and Cameron Jones set out to create a new digital synthesizer at Dartmouth College’s Thayer School of Engineering in 1972. They considered the computer-controlled synthesizer superior to analog because of its “ability to create, by digital means alone, time-variant timbres which make all natural sounds interesting to our ears.” This 1976 recording presents the results of their effort—four different compositions, one each by Jon Appleton, Lars-Gunnar Bodin…

2024 stock. Released in 1976, Rhythmania and Other Electronic Musical Compositions spotlights the sounds of a specially assembled Moog Synthesizer (a type of analog synthesizer). The variety is impressive: from birdcalls and the sounds of machines in a factory to waltzes. Pieces such as “Cosmic Dance of Shiva” and “Hear the Clock Tick” are “composed of natural sounds recorded through a microphone,” rather than generated electronically like the “Triptych” fugues. This album also highlights electr…

2024 stock. "Ingenious use of echo, artificial reverberation and electronic alterations gives the music in this category a weird, spooky futuristic, 'out of this world' quality, well-suited to super-natural happenings of any kind. Piano, drums and electronic instruments are used to achieve the strange atmosphere and spatial sounds." Vaclav Nelhybel crafts a supernatural world, describing nebulae, meteors, star clusters and craters on Mars with sounds natural and manipulated to tell the story of …

** 160 gram vinyl, old school tip-on jacket +  8-page booklet ** A new LP collection of incredible performances by the virtuosa of theremin, Clara Rockmore, accompanied by her sister Nadia Reisenberg on piano. Recorded in 1975 and never before released on vinyl, this compendium features stellar performances of compositions by Bach, Chopin, Schubert, Gershwin and more, and even features a cello ensemble on a few songs!  Some of the finest examples of Clara Rockmore’s unrivaled art - rich with bit…

"Some of the most breathtaking, intrepidly advanced electronic music ever recorded" - five revolutionary masterpieces from WDR Studio 1952-1960. Stockhausen's systematic exploration from Etude Musique Concrète to monumental Kontakte established the foundation of electronic composition during the heroic age of studio experimentation.

*2023 reissue* Now available on classic black vinyl. The inventor of exotica/cocktail music goes electronic/Moog. Originally released in 1969, "Exotic Moog" is a much sought after title in our Martin Denny reissue series. Great music for hunters of synth, exotica, experimental, 60's rock, and psych. "Exotic Moog is the glittering grail for both Martin Denny collectors and Moog fans. There really is nothing else like it, and the LP is very much in short supply. The Moog in this case is one of the…

One of the most influential bands in the last five decades, Kraftwerk virtually established the blueprint, the source code even for electronic music. Founded by classically trained musicians Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider-Esleban in Dusseldorf in 1970, the band has informed and inspired a diverse range of genres and artists including David Bowie, Björk, Afrika Bambaataa, and Joy Division. This early live performance, in Soest, Germany in Winter 1970, broadcast on WDR-TV displays the band in …

**500 copies with insert** Futuristic synthesizer specialist and sound designer Matsuo Ohno was responsible for the sound design of a broad range of film, television and radio soundtracks, most famously the animation series Astro Boy, which he began working on in 1963, together with his assistant, Takehisa Kosugi. Ohno was born in the heavily-populated Kanda district of central Tokyo in 1930 and was heavily affected by the repeated bombing raids on the city enacted in World War II, which took pl…

This edition of Electronic Sound's cover star is Hannah Peel, whose latest album is a superb reimagining of 'Electrosonic', a 1972 library music collection on KPM Records featuring The Radiophonic Workshop. To accompany the issue, we also have an incredibly special seven-inch release, for which Hannah Peel has incorporated excerpts from a previously unknown interview with Delia Derbyshire into a brand new composition called 'Unheard Delia'.

It's 50 years since the launch of the Minimoog and the latest Electronic Sound has a very special gold foil cover to celebrate. Our lead feature tells the inside story of this superb machine and we also have an exclusive seven-inch reissue of 'The Sound Of Moog', the demonstration disc that Moog released to welcome the Minimoog to the world.Pages of features and articles, this is a journal not to be missed.

** 500 Hand Numbered copies only** Lithuanian-born violin prodigy Clara Rockmore became the best-known master of the electronic theremin after emigrating to the USA, her uncommon approach enabling its integration in the classical milieu even as she refined its construction. This landmark debut surfaced in 1977, when she was already 66; produced by synthesizer pioneer Bob Moog and featuring her sister Nadia on accompanying piano, Theremin (aka The Art Of The Theremin) showed all the majesty and g…