Experimental / Acoustic

FRIM Records presents Plucked and Bowed. Released February 25, 2022 My Hellgren: celloPeter Söderberg: guitar, theorbo, oud All music by My Hellgren & Peter Söderberg (STIM/NCB)Produced by FRIMRecorded February 11, 2021, at Fylkingen, Stockholm, by Göran StegbornMixed and mastered by Göran Stegborn

Satomimagae entrusts listeners with Hanazono, a compendium of miniature beauty, a sonic globe enclosed with subtly resonant energies. Satomi’s fourth full-length arrives as an invitation to revel in your immediate and imagined surroundings; to make time and space for guileless curiosity and garden variety enchantment. Hanazano, translated as “flower garden,” is a tribute to everyday mysticism, that sense of pure and private wonder excited by a stone, a river, or winds. Its often unplugged and af…

*100 copies limited edition* 'There are many things that go unsaid of true artistry. The building of a craft for the sake of self-betterment, and to more deeply explore that which makes us who we are, and perhaps even better defines the things we feel we need to say or have left unspoken. One cannot think of a better example of true artistry than the works of Kaily Moon Schenker & Nick Keeling. Two artists that continually strive for the most sincere, deepest explorations of sound and human expr…

*50 copies limited edition* Archaic Vaults presents First passage/Excommunicated. Ancient rituals and pilgrimages. a labour of love. Composed and arranged by Severin Black & Vanessa Bedoret. Mastered by Owen Pratt Artwork by Severin Black

WRWTFWW Records and MEG Museum (Geneva) announce a new full-length album by celebrated Japanese percussionist Midori Takada, in collaboration with Buddhist monks belonging to the Samgha group of the Shingon school of Koya-san, led by Reverend Syuukoh Ikawa. Recorded at The Premises Studio (London) and in Tokyo in 2019, You Who Are Leaving To Nirvana is a majestic work combining a suite of six Buddhist liturgical chants and a musical creation by Midori Takada. The Buddhist chants come from three …

Akousis Records is pride to announce the out of the new solo realise by French musician Pascal Battus: Cymbale Ouverte. Pascal Battus plays an self-invented instrument : the rotating surfaces inspired by the hurdy- gurdy principle are driven by an electric motor. By this way, Pascal Battus uses many material to rub, to hit, to play with the pitches, timbres and produced sounds. With Cymbale Ouverte, the musician has decided this time to use only cymbals to drive different kind of resonances. Fou…

**200 copies** The new Unexplained Sounds Group’s compilation of exploratory music and sound works from India intends to present a comprehensive collection of sonic practices that have emerged from the desire to break away from India’s traditional sounds, e.g. classical music and folk tunes, while simultaneously drawing on ideas and inspirations from these lineages and auditory heritages in the form of recurring motifs and sonorities as well as textures and open-ended compositions. It features B…

The most promising vibraphone virtuoso Emilio Gordoa collects an excellent quartet with such fantastic young colleagues Dag Magnus Narvesen and Don Malfon and legendary iconic bass player John Edwards. They presented their music first time at the Artacts Festival in St. Johann in Tirol. Now this great performance is available on CD.

Tip! For over 25 years, Keiji Haino has used the Hurdy Gurdy to channel dark dimensions- creating music that bridges the centuries between distant medieval eras and a future awash in densely layered sounds that grind and float in an otherworldly atmosphere. “My Lord Music…” is a suite of nine pieces that reveal the startlingly distinctive and wide range of Haino’s approach to the instrument. The music is at once dissonant and hypnotic, rich with unfurling drones that dynamically ebb and flow - H…

Tip! *100 copies limited edition* Erosion is a sprawling yet focused love affair with the bass drum, allowing myriad objects to playfully interact with its grand form. Kevin and Jacob engage with the instrument in an entirely unrelenting way, traversing textural, pointillist sections, as well as rippling metallic drones. Notice’s admiration of Kevin and Jacob’s work goes back to circa 2008, with Kevin’s album with Tetuzi Akiyama and Christian Kiefer ‎on the much-loved Digitalis Industries, and J…

*In process of stocking* Like its predecessor, Philos, The Gleam is a completely solo work, all the music composed and played by Park Jiha on the piri, a type of oboe, the saenghwang, a mouth organ (shown on the album cover art), the hammered dulcimer known as the yanggeum, and glockenspiel. There’s a stark clarity to the sound, yet it’s never spare or empty. There’s a searching warmth to what she does. It’s minimal without being minimalist, occasionally presenting itself with the formality of t…

Suzuki's third solo album, framed by a single instrument she modified herself: a melodica re-engineered to play via foot bellows, so that high-pressure airflow overblows the small reeds into a sustained, loud excitation. The pumped breaths are amplified through time delays, layered with oscillators and manipulated highs to develop the combination tones that emerge at extreme volumes. A durational, psychoacoustic drone work that 'rewards endurance with transcendence', performed live.

Improvisers Xavier Charles and Bertrand Gauguet have been playing duets since 2013. They produce frequency landscapes that change slowly and thus move the listener towards a contemplative listening. With the multiple sounds of the clarinet and the saxophone, other inflated spaces based on breaths arise...  Spectre, which was released on CD in early May 2020 at Akousis Records, contains six pieces exploring multi-phonic spaces on the clarinet and alto saxophone (Phonomnèse 1, Phonomnèse 2 and Pho…

London-based guitarist and producer Leo Abrahams and NYC master musician (and boss of figureight records) Shahzad Ismaily unite for a unique imagining of guitar music on Visitations. The work of two highly skilled, highly celebrated musicians, Visitations marks a curious, mysterious, uncanny collection of music, offering a take on guitar playing that snakes and collides with unexpected turns. It encourages - requires even - a deep listening experience, every discordance balanced with harmony, ev…

**Limited edition of 100 copies** “Following some forty CD releases on his imprint New Wave Of Jazz, Dirk Serries thinks the time is right to expand to the world of vinyl. Here he plays a 1957 Hoffner archtop guitar, and recorded with a single microphone, some 50 centimetres from the guitar and there has been no other audio processing. The liner notes, as always by Guy Peters, are on the front cover, and he uses the extra space the format allows him, to talk some more on the history of free jazz…

Another Thought was the first collection of Arthur Russell’s music to be released after his death in 1992. Released on CD by Point Music in 1993 it marked the beginning of nearly 30 years of work to let the world hear the enormous archive of unreleased recordings Arthur left behind. Be With revisits this first compilation for a new gatefold double vinyl version and a triple-fold digipak CD re-issue. This is the only place where you can hear some of Arthur’s most recognisable music, like the titl…

Tip! “When choosing a title for an audio document of improvised music, you really can’t go wrong with Impermanence; it’s not exactly original, in terms of either the specific genre or music as a whole, but it will never not be accurate. In the case of Violeta García (a cofounder of the splendid TVL Rec imprint) and Émilie Girard-Charest’s first meeting as a duo, the word accumulates a more unique meaning because of the two musicians’ chosen instruments. Cellos are often associated with their abi…

Tip! "I met Benedict Taylor in London in 2017 where I was doing a six month residency thanks to the Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec. I heard Benedict perform in ensemble and solo contexts and rapidly felt a strong connection with some of my musical concerns. I was particularly caught by his ability to listen to what sound elicits or suggests as he articulates and shapes it; a dynamic interplay of sensitivity and agency, at times yielding pretty surprising results. We managed to meet for a …

“Oxygen Room is a wonderfully moody, at points downright haunting/uneasy trip into primally slurred and ritual tipped improv. The four-track CD appears on Slovenia’s Inexhaustible Editions, and I must say it’s a most compelling and often eerier ride of an album – really taking the improv form down a fairly original and distinctive path.The CD comes presented in a white six-panel digipak – this features on its cover and first inside flap two different green circles made up of different shapes, th…

Mathieu Werchowski's latest album draws its sounds from improvisations generated by a violin, a few dozen freshly awakened birds, highly reverberant spaces, a voice saying words of Roberto Juarroz and Paul Verlaine, the nostalgia of childhood westerns, a viola mounted with electric guitar strings and the memory of those who left too soon.

Studio Mule present a reissue of Eitetsu Hayashi's Kaze No Shisha, originally released in 1983. Spiritual leaning rhythms come from none other than Eitetsu Hayashi, one of Japan's most renown taiko drummers, a percussive instrument that is deeply rooted in the mythology of Japanese folklore. Kaze No Shisha is a crucial album in his long-spanning career, that started in 1971 when Hayashi joined the famed Ondekoza Group. The so-called "demon drum group" established the taiko drumming to a global a…

**Deluxe edition** Black Editions present the first ever vinyl edition of Go Hirano's third album, Corridor of Daylights, originally released in 2004. Corridor of Daylights is a quiet work of dreamlike brilliance. A home field recording where fragile piano melodies float alongside wind-chimes and wistful melodicas - insects hum in the distance and a breeze gently rustles as summer day eases toward evening. Originally released in Japan by P.S.F. Records in 2004, Corridor of Daylights is a beautif…

Peaceful, percussive and idyllic. Three words that describe perfectly ‘Jomon-sho’, the key New Age album from Japanese composer and expert of gamelan music, Yas-Kaz. This seminal composition is a cornerstone to understand the Japanese ambient and environmental movement, heavily influenced by this record and the whole New Age scene that developed in Japan throughout the 80s. The album features a wide range of entirely acoustic instruments and field recordings and was made for stage performance by…

Studio Mule open the roster towards sophisticated spiritual sounds on the crossroads of electrified jazz, oriental fourth-world spheres and deeply composed experimental sounds. This time, the label welcomes Japanese artist Ya-Sukazu Sato, aka Yas-Kaz, a university-trained percussionist, that gained global success as a composer for the internationally known Butoh dance troupe Sankai Juku which has toured the world since 1975. His infrequent musical amalgamation of ancient Eastern genres, airy sou…

Yet another luxurious spectacle from the Saraswati Series. Ex-Sun City Girls master guitarist Richard Bishop teams up with Cul De Sac’s long time Girls live collaborator Ed Yazijian. Two Grand Seigneurs of underground deliver an unique album deeply Western rooted, filled with the musical spirit and structures of Indian music at the same time. Elegant interplay, brilliantly arranged, using mostly guitar (lapsteel, tenor) and strings (viola), and some Indian stringed instrument which I can’t prono…

* Edition of 100. Housed in High Quality folded card stock silk screened * I’m thinking of following a river up and up stream until it becomes just a little trickle on a bare hill. I’m thinking of the time I climbed into the attic of my church when I was a kid, and found a disassembled pipe organ, and we took the smallest pipes with us and blew into them like whistles that made golden tones, but then we lost them or threw them away and then felt bad about stealing from church, but also ruining t…

The members of Minamo(Keiichi Sugimoto and Tetsuro Yasunaga) have known Moskitoo (Sanae Yamasaki) for many, many years and have worked together in all sorts of ways. They have not, however, performed a live set or recorded together before what has become Superstition. Superstition is a gathering of close friends creating music they love to create and exploring the small crevices and details of electric, electronic, and acoustic sounds. While the songs sound intentionally composed and arranged, t…

Tip! Mixed and produced by Leon Marks Mastered by Alex Gordon at Abbey Road, London. Czn presents complex interwoven forms plenty of small grooves throughout here and there, scattered throughout polyrhythmic passages. Built in density, this a trance-enducing and hypnotic masterwork. Czn stands for Copper, Zinc and Nickel the raw path of Materials used by percussionist and sculptor Joao Pais Filipe turned into gold for this compelling drum and percussion album recorded in duet with composer and d…

** Edition of 65 ** Psychedelic and experimental free improv collaboration project by Müriscia and Aphra from Vlubä + Pablo Picco aka Bardo Todol (also known from Ø+yn). Lots of sounds, acoustic and electric, floating around and inside the mind, from the hidden inner lands of the ancient and timeless. Müriscia Divinorum: Sings on the Wancaina LanguageAphra Schneal: Fluor Synths of Middle AgePablo Picco: Tea Gardens inside the BrainAdditional sounds on "Ajna Meditation": Birds by David Jarrin.

**Edition of 250 copies, Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Painting by Gayle Paul, design by Ashley Paul** 'Ray' is Ashley Paul's bright, sensual return to Slip: a lifting, delighting suite of yearning winds, loose beats, and cocooning, humid bass coming together and falling apart as songs. The LP airs Paul's new trio, alongside bass clarinettist Yoni Silver and bassist Otto Willberg, who fatten out and shine light on her singularly intimate, multi-instrumental with mystery and grace. 2018's 'Lost In…

Originally released in 2016 by Klopotec and ZARŠ on cd, Širom first album “I”, will see the light again on a double gatefold vinyl, including two unreleased magical tracks from the same record session, out via Torto Editions. The metaphysic and the “out of time” stream of (alt)counsciousness gets richer and even wider vibrations on this new vinyl edition. The new tracklist developed on four sides helps to give the record a spacier, deeper and detailed texture. "Slovenia bordering the border wi…

Avin is the solo project of musician Christian Meaas Svendsen. The album consists of Norwegian lyrics in a traditional singer/songwriter-style wrapped in a somewhat challenging and unconventional format. The music is arranged for an 8-piece band consisting of some of Norway’s finest musicians. Avin is a Kurdish maiden name meaning love. Avin is also the name of Svendsen’s girlfriend. The central theme on the album is their unfinished love, and the texts and the music describe Svendsen’s feelings…

Tommaso Rolando and Jean Renè met thanks to Paul Goodwin (front cover painter) and Paolo Bonfiglio. After some live experiences together, in June 2018 they decided to try to record something: the result of a short term session eventually ended with a full album recording. 
The album is published by Torto Editions, a label run by Rolando and Bonfiglio.Two people, two musicians, two generations, two instruments. Music as a language, a common language."It takes two to know one" - Gregory BatesonPer…

With L’Inattingible, Delphine Dora’s music unfolds by drawing upon a new palette of colors. It will not escape anyone, that after having sung, in foreign, invented languages, or through extended vocal techniques, the musician resorts for the first time, to solely using the French language; and that after having often set texts and poems by other authors to music, she authorizes herself here to sing her own texts and fragments.But beyond these formal enrichments, the new musical ambitions develop…

**300 copies, purple vinyl** "This is Annie Barbazza’s first solo album. She was a young drummer in love with progressive rock when Greg Lake discovered her talent as a singer and wanted her on stage with him for the concert which would later become the posthumous “Live in Piacenza”. Again Lake produced Moonchild, the duo with pianist Max Repetti for Manticore Records where she sang many songs formerly sang by Lake with ELP and King Crimson. If these were the beginnings of Annie’s career, now sh…

"This album documents a recording of Tori Kudo’s Last Song of My Life. Some may know Kudo already as prime mover in pop-naïf collective Maher Shalal Hash Baz; his history stretches back over four decades, and he’s a significant figure in the Japanese underground, thanks to his membership of groups like Noise (with his wife Reiko Kudo), Guys ’N’ Dolls, Snickers, and Sweet Inspirations. Untold numbers of said underground have passed through the ranks of Maher Shalal Hash Baz, among them members of…

"You wake up and find a room full of things, but no music. Music has to be reinvented every day. You take your instrument and play - and there it is. Others come and talk about "influences" and f... jazz and clusters and all their helpless keywords. Joe Williamson and Olaf Rupp met in Berlin, Prenzlauer Berg in 1999 and played just from their simple inner impulse. They wanted to produce the sound that had to be produced. And why shouldn't they? Every craw does it. And every rusty garden door."Ol…

In 2009 Drifting/Falling released Gareth Dickson’s debut album, Collected Recordings, a stunningly beautiful and haunting ambient folk album which caught the attention of 12k’s Taylor Deupree. Thus began a not-as-easy-as- expected search for Dickson to try to coax him into writing an album for 12k. After a couple of cross-Atlantic voyages and a brief run-in involving a failing rental car and a herd of sheep on a dusty Scotish road, Deupree and Dickson met and Quite A Way Away was recorded for 12…

Mark Kozelek is back with a new Sun Kil Moon album featuring Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley, Jen Wood (who has worked with the Postal Service), Will Oldham, and Owen Ashworth (formerly known as Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, now of Advance Base).

6 songs, 21 minutes. In high summer of 2007, Phil Elverum, in the guise of Mount Eerie, found his way to Southern Studios. Armed with a borrowed guitar and some notebook paper, and with little time before an evening gig, Mount Eerie and Southern's engineer Harvey Birrell recorded the six songs of Black Wooden.Black Wooden is the coming together of ideas that had travelled with Mount Eerie for months and had solidified into compositions in the days and hours before the studio session. The title i…