Imerro
Canadian bowed guitarist and multi-instrumentalist C. Diab announces his fifth album Imerro, out February 16th, and presents the trip-infused lead single 'Lunar Barge'.
Hot Plate Only
Honestly Same is an amplified acoustic and synthetic quintet from Chicago. They improvise patient, contemplative and distinctly contemporary music harnessing the sounds of cello, clarinet, electronics, piano, bass, recorder, percussion, synths and accordion. The group is Zachary Good, Lia Kohl, Mabel Kwan, Zach Moore and Sam Scranton. On their second album (and first LP), “Hot Plate Only”, the quintet finds a balance between airy and organic ambience alongside insistent rhythms and dynamic explo…
Sainen Hildo
*300 copies limited edition* Dopelganger is the project in collaboration between classically trained accordion player and singer Garazi Navas (Usansolo, Bizkaia-Biscay, 1995) and Miguel A. Garcia (Vitoria-Gasteiz), an artist living in Bilbao with an extensive career in the fields of experimental music and sound art. Sainen Hildo is an album based on Miguel’s original compositions, recomposed and rearranged for accordion and voice by the two composers. Using the natural resonance and harmonics of…
Appear To Fade
*100 copies limited edition* Tip! Brooklyn pianist and composer Richard Sears debuts on Shahzad Ismaily’s Figureight records with the hypnotic Appear to Fade, a gentle, melancholic, semi-improvised expression for piano and experimental tape loops, recorded in a single day.
Appear to Fade unveils a realm where the boundaries between jazz and ambient music blur, guided by the skilled hands of Richard Sears on piano and Una Corda. This recording weaves between improvisation and composition, brought…
Azure
Having each followed their own distinct trajectory of exploration for decades - interweaving rigorous experimentalism with transcultural conversations - and building upon roughly 20 years working as a duo, Jessika Kenney and Eyvind Kang return with Azure, their third full-length with Ideologic Organ. Among their most riveting outings to date, comprising five new compositions recorded in Seattle during the spring of 2022, this remarkable body of sonority culminates in a singular gesture of contem…
Blind ecosystem
We are nine voices, sighted and blind, who have been singing and exploring together for 11 years. Our practice consists of listening to and imitating sound ecosystems. We become the sounds of biotopes, machines, endangered species, humans and non-humans. Our songs blend ancestral and experimental vocal practices. We are the stumbling blocks of a memory populated by tunes, buried melodies that emerge and carry us away for hybridizations, mutations.
Sekihi Oidori
Organum ‘Raven’ CD, which was released by Siren Records in 2018 was the last piece that Jackman released under the name Organum. He changed the name Organum to Organum Electronics in 2019 and has released five volumes of the albums on Siren Records since then. ‘Sekihi Oidori’ is a development of the quiet nature of earlier Organum works and Jackman decided to release the album under his own name because of a very personal essence. ‘Sekihi Oidori’ is composed of low-key church organ drones, airy …
Fine Tuning: The Gradisca Concert
The ubiquity of Coxhill’s sax lines are here answered, cherished, enhanced by the excellent guitar touch of Enzo Rocco. It’s a sort of subtle anarchic dance, intriguing and true.
Trap
Michal Vaľko, aka Line Gate makes a return to mappa with his third cassette for the label. Once again the material is deeply minimalist, but shows marked evolutions in the Slovak, Prague-based artist’s unique trajectory. This time comprising two relatively short pieces (compared to the 40- and 60-minute works previously published on mappa), 'Trap' is perhaps Line Gate’s darkest yet. Whereas previously his works focused on psychoacoustic phenomena, or highlighted the sacredness and timelessness o…
Adage Vestige
*200 copies limited edition* Roxane Métayer is a french musician and artist based in Brussels. Embracing both folk and experimental music, her project mostly builds on sound recordings taken in nature, violin, wind instruments, percussion, and her own voice. Her albums have been released on labels like Kraak, Morc, Primordial Void, Wabi-Sabi, Marionnette and Matière Mémoire.
But Everything Now Left Before It Arrived
*2023 stock. 300 copies limited edition* Guitarist John Russell, a leading figure on Britain's improvised music scene, passed away on January 19, 2021. Born in December 1954, Russell started performing improvised music in London in his late teens, and for many years he toured and gave concerts not only in the UK and Europe but throughout the world. Known as a Japanophile, Russell traveled to Japan for the first time in 2001, and subsequently visited the country many times, including as recently …
CTX1
*2023 stock. 200 copies limited edition* Masahiko Okura is a Tokyo-based reed player (clarinet, alto sax, etc.), improviser and composer. Apart from his performances on reed instruments, he is energetically engaged in performance activities with his solo project Active Recovering Music. Okura is also a member of the experimental music group Suidobashi Chamber Ensemble.
In 2004, Okura released the solo album "Time Service" on the Improvised Music from Japan label. The highly original performance …
Several
*200 copies limited release* "Needless to say, anything new from saxophonist / composer Anna Webber raises an eyebrow or two. Her works for large and small ensembles exhibit a knotty sophistication that can be compared to that of Anthony Braxton. Here, she teams with experimental multi-instrumentalist Weston Olencki for just over 32 minutes of sax / trombone outside improv.
Several comes across more in the established style of Olencki than that of Webber. While there are a number of contrapuntal…
Tayutauta
Tip! *200 copies limited edition* While continuously engaged in the field of traditional Japanese music, female-school gidayu shamisen player Yumiko Tanaka has since the 1990s been carrying out multifaceted musical activities including contemporary classical music, improvisation (in 1996-97 she was a member of Otomo Yoshihide’s band Ground-Zero), experimental music, and theater performance/composition, performing and exchanging ideas with many musicians from Japan and other countries. While Tana…
Sept duos pour guitare acoustique & piano préparé
Sept duos pour guitar acoustique et piano préparé is the second duo recording from Stephen O’Malley and Anthony Pateras. Their first together, Rêve Noir (2018), took an electro-acoustic scalpel to a 2011 duo concert for electric guitar and piano, using Revox and digital treatments to twist and smear gig documentation into ghostly echoes and fractured drones. Here, in contrast, the music is entirely acoustic and presented as it was performed, without overdubs. Both players’ choices of instruments…
The Devil, Probably
*300 copies limited edition* The Devil, Probably is Patrick Shiroishi (saxophones), from Los Angeles, Àlex Reviriego (double bass) and Vasco Trilla (percussion), both from Barcelona, altogether in a long-distance correspondence. The three of them are key figures of the youngest generation of their respective free improvisation and avant-garde scenes, where they develop an unstoppable and vibrant activity, deeply involved in reconfiguring its boundaries with unforeseen references and sounds. An e…
FFlair III
"Basically, we witness an intimate dialogue between two improvisers. If there had not been a special circumstance leading to this result. Christine Abdelnour and Hans Koch could not hear each other. In fact, "FFlair" is based on two separately recorded solo improvisations, which were superimposed at the end. Mind you, without any subsequent editing." - Rudolf Amstutz
dissolution of the other
Tip! Banjo and woodblocks are the scarce ingredients of Poor Isa's second album, ‘dissolution of the other’. The instruments can be used not only in their usual form, but in alternative tunings, with preparations and additional attributes. This creates an otherworldly vacuum, rich in silence and shadow, with sounds that seem equally familiar as mystical. The music is broken up from its classical form and sounds like an instrumental eld recording or a musical ceremony. In contrast to the rst al…
Soma
*2023 stock* The duο’s work focuses on the creative fusion of composition and improvisation, where links between experienced and ideal sound are constantly being formed and deformed. This double CD reflects the two dimensions of Soma. The first CD presents the close musical liaison between Anisengos and Atzakas, along with three additional trios with Michalis Siganidis. The second CD features guest musicians, Savvina Yannatou, Maria Thoidou and Michalis Siganidis, who form trios, quartets and qu…
Z Druhé Strany
*100 copies limited edition. 2023 stock* This new collaboration of Jakub Šimanský and Jiří Štěpán is sort of happy coincidence. They are both active musicians, both coming from different background and performing in within slightly different scenes. Jakub Šuminaský has been cultivating his guitar playing based on the echoes of american primitive guitar style. Bass player Jiří Štěpán is active in his group Národní Divadlo, which steer towards free improvised and dissonant music.
They both met at …