Metal Machine Music
*2023 stock* Lou Reed's Metal Machine Trio/Re-Mastered to the specifications of the original master, playable on home theatre systems. Lou Reed has gone back to the original multi-tracks and has digitally re-mastered his 1975 classic album "Metal Machine Music." This is the one and only official re-mastered edition of "Metal Machine Music", re-issued, supervised and approved by Lou Reed himself. The re-mastered edition is released on Reed's very own Sister Ray label in three formats - double gat…
Le Composant Compositeur
“Nobody Move!”, so says Philippe Doray and his Asociaux Associés (the Antisocial Associates)! Having dynamited the end of the 70s with two radical albums – Ramasse-Miettes Nucléaires in 1976 & Nouveaux Modes Industriels in 1978, both reissued by Souffle Continu – Doray still hadn’t finished singing. Throughout the next decade he began his Composant compositeur which would document the “second period”, as he calls it, of his Asociaux Associés.
The record includes new schizo-electro songs which ma…
Music Now For Harp
Wewantsounds is delighted to announce the first international reissue of Ayako Shinozaki's hard to find LP "Music Now For Harp" released in 1974 by Nippon Columbia. The LP was released on the label's cult "Master Sonic" series and features Shinozaki's harp soundscape on works by renowned composer Toru Takemitsu and Katsuhiro Tsubono. The highlight of the album is the spaced-out liquid 25-min ambient epic 'Heterodyne' featuring cult musician Takehisa Kosugi (Taj Mahal Travellers, Group Ongaku) on…
Veils Of Transformation 1972-1980
Veils Of Transformation 1972 - 1980 is a collection of the earliest works of Gregory Kramer, one of the 20th century masters of textural electronic music. This collection is available on CD and cassette with liner notes from Gregory Kramer and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, who first brought this fascinating work to the attention of Important Records. “Greg is one of the pioneers of electronic music and these pieces are unique opportunities to discover how intricate and dynamic early synthesizers are.” …
Hosono House
*2023 stock* The unbelievably prolific Haruomi Hosono is one of the major architects of modern Japanese pop music. With his encyclopedic knowledge of music and boundless curiosity for new sounds, Hosono has put his unmistakable stamp on hundreds of recordings as a session player, producer, and auteur of his own idiosyncratic musical world. Born and raised in central Tokyo, his adolescent obsession with American pop culture informed his early forays into country music, which he would revisit late…
The Sound Pool
Pioneers of live electronics, found sound and urban environment-as-instrument, Musica Elettronica Viva created suites that were as imaginary as imaginative.
No New York
One of the brightest and most famous projects of the entire punk/new wave scene, No New York was released in 1978 on Island's sub-label Antilles. Featuring some of the most incredible rule breaking bands of the underground N.Y.C. art and music scene, the project - produced by Brian Eno - is a genuine snapshot of the massively creative N.Y.C. scene. Artists: Contortions, Teenage Jesus And The Jerks, Mars, D.N.A.
La Perversita
*2023 repress!! Limited edition* Sofa Records is delighted to propose the reissue of this seminal French underground record ! Released in 1979, this concept record is an attempt to sublimate sexual perversion. It results from the association between Jacques Pasquier (founder of S.C.O.P.A./Invisible Records and central figure of the Parisian alternative scene during the 70s), the producer Hector Zazou, the outraging graphic design collective Bazooka and other talents from the outskirts of artisti…
Quartz Mirliton Cassettes
Biggest Tip! Quartz-Mirliton Cassettes has been among the most obscure of 1970s experimental music labels. This forthcoming VOD release, presented in two boxes, throws light on this mysterious cassette venture, its context and associated recordings. Closely associated with the London Musicians Collective, Quarzwas launched by Paul Burwell and David Toop in 1977. Produced in tiny editions with handmade covers, the cassettes largely documented live sessions and field recordings made by a close net…
Antropofagia
Tip! An outstanding recording, and an unjustly neglected contribution to prepared piano performance by Area member Patrizio Fariselli issued on Cramps in 1977 (in the legendary "DIVerso" series), a record with energy that's somewhere between John Cage and Cecil Taylor! At times, Patrizio Fariselli plays with a great sensitivity to silence – letting it emerge with as much force as his well-placed work on the keys of the piano. But at other times, he comes off with a full, frenzied sound that's re…
L'incendie
Vocalist-multi-instrumentalist Areski and singer Brigitte Fontaine are a legendary French musical couple that rose to prominence in the ‘60s, making a series of albums that showcased a boldly unorthodox approach to the art of song.
Taken as a whole the 13 pieces on L’Incendie stand as high-impact scenes or episodes in a theatre or TV production as much as they represent another take on the concept album. Translated from French L’Incendie means fire, but Areski & Fontaine give it admirably broad …
Waiters On The Dance
*In process of stocking. Limited edition of 500 copies* Another unsung hero of the long lost british prog history, Julian Jay Savarin is a keyboard player and composer, poet and science fiction author, hence the association with the most epic and romantic tendencies of the genre. He was born in Dominica (an island between Martinique and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean) and moved to the UK in 1962. He debuted in 1970 with Julian's Treatment, a short-lived progressive rock band which his sole album – …
Concerts
Originally released in 1976, this collection offers a snapshot of Henry Cow as audiences would have heard it in the year before. In the chronology, Concerts came between In Praise of Learning and Western Culture - that is, after Virgin had lost interest in releasing any more Henry Cow studio records and before the band quit to make one of its own. It was also the year of the 'merger' with Robert Wyatt for a series of concerts in which compositions were shared - the last show, in Rome, was also R…
Flee Past's Ape Elf
*2022 stock* Splendid, expanded reissue of this monster album, which most people know from its placement on the NWW List. Stapleton even went so far as to name a track of his ("Fashioned to a Device Behind a Tree") after a mis-hearing of one of Flee Past's' many memorable lines. The music has its roots in Hampshire College's Electronic Music Studio in the early 1970s. While taking a class on electronic composition, Robert Carey was smitten by the potentialities lurking inside piles of reel-to-re…
Eclipse
Masayuki Takayanagi was one of the truly iconoclastic musicians to emerge from Japan, or anywhere else, in the 20th Century. Though he won acclaim in the 1950s and '60s as a master of the electric guitar and jazz improvisation, Takayanagi was a restless spirit, deeply engaged with the era's new movements in contemporary art, music, literature, and philosophy. His work, beginning in the late 1960s placed him on the leading edge of these developments; he began expanding on the most radical element…
Sunrise From West Sea
** 500 copies ** Wewantsounds is delighted to announce the first-ever release of 'Sunrise From West Sea', a mesmerising performance by Stomu Yamash'ta accompanied by Jazz pianist Masahiko Satoh (well known for his involvement in the New Herd Orchestra and his 'Belladonna of Sadness' soundtrack) and Taj Mahal Travellers founder Takehisa Kosugi on Electric Violin. The line up, also comprising Hideakira Sakurai on Electric Shamisen, is a spaced-out improvisational soundscape over the two LP sides. …
The Mermaid's Purse: Live at Chatham College, 1976
In 1976 the Entourage Music and Theater Ensemble reached a creative zenith. The nomadic troupe had just released The Neptune Collection, its iconic second album for Moses Asch’s Folkways Records, and decided to present the music to audiences across the rust belt in its most miasmic, elemental form. Extended stretches of full-group improvisation mingled with folk-tune like melodies during these performances, which featured multiple dancers spontaneously interpreting the music, at times in elabora…
Reflex
Francesco Messina is perhaps best known for his collaboration with fellow composer Raul Lovisoni on the album Prati Bagnati Del Monte Analogo, originally released on seminal Italian label Cramps in 1979. Along with contemporaries Franco Battiato, Juri Camisasca and Giusto Pio, Messina would help reshape the world of modern composition with an organic rawness and haunting beauty.In 1979, Messina was asked to perform at the Teatro Quartiere in Milan. As the composer writes in the liner notes, "Due…
Mémoire Magnétique, Vol. 2
Transversales is very glad to announce the release of Mémoire Magnétique Vol. 2 spanning 1966-1993, revelatory collection of short and secret music by electronic music pioneer Bernard Parmegiani. Since the late '50s, Bernard Parmegiani, a major figure of electroacoustic music and a founding member of GRM has created some eighty two concerts music. From the start, Parmegiani’s work was closely linked to the screen, with dozens of documentaries, films, long features, animation films but also music…
Incipient ICP, 1966-71
The untold early history of Amsterdam's seminal collective. Founded in 1967 by three of European free music's leading lights -- pianist Misha Mengelberg, drummer Han Bennink, and saxophonist and clarinetist Willem Breuker -- the Instant Composers Pool (ICP) was simply one of the most important vehicles for experimentation and improvisation in the history of creative music. Culling ideas and materials from jazz, modern and contemporary classical music, Fluxus, traditional music from the Balkans a…