Experimental / Avant-Garde

**2020 stock** "What about this Cosmofonia Rudimentale? Well, here we have a group of friends who liked to improvise together around 2010 in studio and on stage. The “excuse” was to create a music that could accompany futurist poetry. Roberto Zanisi is a polymorphous musician playing a lot of ethnic string instruments who collaborated between others with Amy Denio, Giovanni Venosta, David Moss, Sainkho Namtchylak and Fabien Guyot. Valerio Scrignoli is an important  guitarist of Italian jazz scen…

*Limited edition 100 copies* 4th compilation of French unconventional projects on Out of Standard!!, ADN side label. Mastered by Ruggero Tajé. Dedicated to Chris Marker.

Repressed and available again for the first time in years. After Dinner was the Japanese group from the late 80s, let by vocalist Haco. This reissues their original ReR studio album from 1984, plus tracks from the live cassette release that followed, etc.. "...bizarre experimental 3D surround-sound, backwards/sped up/slowed down tape technique (before the days of sampling), complex but charming arrangements featuring a huge cast of Japanese instrumentalists. The influences are many: John Cage, n…

Together with Photons (2005), released as KOO002, Lightwaves completes the investigation of the electro archetype, documenting the Neosurrationalist* bridge between art and science, that began with a dialogue in a Kreuzberg bar involving Giovanni De Donà, Paololuca Barbieri of Alterazioni Video, and physics researcher Markus Gühr, now professor and lead of the Experimental Quantum Physics group at Potsdam University in Berlin. The dissemination given by the current interpretations made by variou…

Fred Frith has been heard in all possible contexts, from solo improviser to composer of orchestral music, but he remains at his best when trapped in a studio, alone or with a few musicians, building layered pieces. This process previously yielded stunning albums such as the delicate Middle of the Moment or the avant rocking Speechless. Accidental features Frith performing all instruments and voices, mostly guitars, violin, junk percussion, and random radio tuning. This music was commissioned by …

It was a long wait, but, 12 years after the fact, Fred Frith put together a live album of his group Keep the Dog, which had previously gone undocumented. Comprised of sax/flute player Jean Derome, guitarist René Lussier, keyboardist/harpist Zeena Parkins, sampling artist Bob Ostertag, and drummer Charles Hayward, Keep the Dog was formed by Frith in 1989 to perform a best-of repertoire of his career and remained his last rock group. By the time of this 1991 European tour, the unit had grown beyon…

'A Face We All Know' breaks new ground altogether. This is a single work with texts by Chris Cutler, Rainald Geotz and Thomas Pynchon and documents the last days of a political nightmare. Start here with Cassiber.

An amazing record. It’s beautifully recorded and almost impossible to believe that such a layered and polyphonic music, with chords, percussion, lead lines, bass lines, harmonies, string sections and sometimes voice could all be produced by one person in real time, without overdubs or loops. But it is. The instrument, a specially designed and augmented Sardinian guitar (almost the size of a cello) is equipped with motors, pedals, individual string mic’ing, and extra appendages; and of course the…

Paolo Angeli and ex-After Dinner/Volapuk violinist/singer Takumi Fukushima present an integrated, complex and largely composed programme of deft, focused pieces that make the most of their not inconsiderable individual talents and instruments; mostly sounding like a much larger ensemble. The sonorities of Paolo’s extended, customised, prepared giant Sardinian guitar doing extraordinary, and sometimes chameleonic, work as bass, chord accompaniment, melody instrument, viola/cello, and even percuss…

Thinking Plague, Hail, EC Nudes, 5UU's bassist and mixmaster with his second solo CD. Fast and furious country picking meets weird fragmentation and fast cut compositions. Guitars, Bass, Drums, Violin and odd unidentifiable noises all flawlessly performed, recorded and mixed into a single organism of musical strangeness. One of a kind.

Continuing the definitive Fred Frith edition, this is the CD based on Fred’s music for the second film he made with Humbert and Penzel – following nomads – that features, along with Fred’s compositions and re-workings, a restless and gripping unfolding of atmospheric locations, tuareg and other musics, ethongraphic material and times captured. A collage or a soundwork rather than a straightforwardly musical composition, this is a serious and unfairly marginalised piece (because it falls between …

Magnetic pickups, analog electronics, and consumer detritus (springs, styrofoam, metal sheets, motors, magnetic tape, wood, dental floss) generate evolving/shifting/mutating sound-textures. Born in Canada, currently residing in Kobe, Tim Olive's discography includes releases on BISAD, Caduc, Chocolate Monk, Copy For Your Records, Dasa Tapes, EM Records, Hard Return, Humanhood, Intonema, Kirigirisu, Korm Plastics, Minimal Resource Manipulation, Notice Recordings, Pilgrim Talk, Steep Gloss, Tsss T…

Tip! *400 copies limited edition* Outside of the world, the second album by Japanese trio Usurabi, is a rare pleasure – a guitar pop album that’s deep with spirit, bristling with energy, melodically rich and precious: full of life. It’s even more thrilling than its predecessor, 2021’s Remains of the Light, also released by An’archives, its eight songs falling together just perfectly. If you’ve ever swooned to the sound of rattling, humming organs on countless ‘60s garage rock sides, the wistful …

*2023 stock. 150 copies limited edition* Indonesian art-doom duo Senyawa — vocalist Rully Shabara and instrumentalist Wukir Suryadi — will release their new studio album Alkisah in February 2021, through a cooperative arrangement with a number of labels across the globe, in an attempt to decentralize the hierarchical structures of the music industry, particularly the distribution system. Alkisah translates roughly to "Once Upon a Time," and tells the tale of a formerly rich and powerful country …

Cockroach sound. Tender hammering. Whistling, chirping. Much silence in between. Small modulated electric guitar sound. Aha: a rock band?

"After two and a half years of refining, calibrating, and reconceptualising their approach, pianist Darius Heid, cellist Emily Wittbrodt, and double bassist Jonas Gerigk are now releasing their debut CD. With great enthusiasm, the trio met frequently for playful and dedicated rehearsals, improvising freely then observing and discussing the resulting phenomena, delving further into the depths of their music. A long and involved process - creating trialogues that weave through constant re-examinat…

"Kuden is a method of communicating information verbally in Japan. The word also refers to the knowledge of secret techniques traditionally passed on orally, be it from martial arts or from music and the performing arts. An apt title for this exceptional, non-arranged meeting of three musical experts who tell each other about the rich vault of their sound treasures in order to enrich it with something new through this musical dialogue, which is immediately passed on to the spellbound, amazed aud…

Double Dagger’s new EP, Masks, continues in this vein, taking up where their acclaimed 2009 full length, More, left off. Masks presents a series of vignettes, ranging from acerbic to facetious to self-reflective, on the facades we build within our lives. Masks contains some of Double Dagger’s most catchy songs to date, yet characteristically the tone of the album encompasses the abrasive and sarcastic as well as the upbeat and closes with a surprisingly delicate instrumental. The EP was recorded…

Custodian marks a much grander stylistic experiment in The Cyrillic Typewriter’s discography of cinematic pop enigmaticism. Explained away as a score for an unreleased horror film, Custodian may be a uniquely Ruritarian soundtrack, referencing an origin of unverifiable existence, a plausible, approachable, but ephemeral stranger. Suggesting a Heart of Darkness narrative of doomed exploration and dreaded discovery, the album employs swelling drones and Delphic female vocals to convey an overarchi…

Costes practices the scorched earth policy. Everything you can listen to after it is made paltry and lighter than air. This is also what we recognize important records. They are not necessarily fun but replace all the others. The killed life is a major disc, stupid and brilliant, regressive and decisive, a political record and in its way more ecumenical and unifying than all the speeches of national reconciliation. 500 numbered copies.

Tip! *Limited edition of 300 copies.* The Locked Room imagines a protagonist who experiences the outside world as an endless escape room, a place where, in the early hours, every passing tail-light, train in the distance, hunched bike rider or crying bird might be a possible riddle, leading to a passage or the discovery of a key. Once opened, however, a room locked from the other side could just be the same room as the one you're in - only slightly different. And maybe the person wanting to bre…

** Limited edition of 60. With insert ** An imaginary soundtrack to the films of Egisto Macchi by Brecht Ameel of the Belgium band Razen

An imaginary train journey between Bologna and Moscow. The original recording of the entire experimental electronic session performed at the audiovisual festival "Geometry of Now," Moscow (2017) curated by Mark Fell, reworked in Bologna (Italy) with custom analog equipment in 2022. Alexei Borisov, the Moscow underground legend who has spanned new wave, electronic noise and constructivist experimentation, measures up with artist and curator Sergey Kasich, a sound and media artist originally from …

**300 copies** ?Alos and Xabier Iriondo's Coscienza di sé is a new esoteric cyberpunk record dedicated to the feminist and anarchist Emma Goldman. ?Alos, born Stefania Pedretti, and Xabier Iriondo need no introduction. She is active since 2003 with her solo project ?Alos, as a member of OvO and of the historical female band Allun. He was part of Six Minute War Madness and actually is guitarist of Afterhours, as well as sound manipulator for projects like Uncode Duello, A Short Apnea, Bunuel, The…

** Numbered edition of 250 copies. Transparent Blue Vinyl ** Cold crushed electronics and tape noise by Ideal faithful, Altar of Flies, returning to his native Swedish label with a 3rd album of possessed and unsettling tonal abstraction and psychoacoustic isolationism. Known to the reaper as Mattias Gustafsson, Alter of Flies is the Mjölby-based sound artist’s most prolific alias, responsible for dozens of tapes and LPs for Chondritic Sound and White centipede Noise beside his trio of turns for …

Dirk Dresselhaus (Die Angel, Schneider TM), John Duncan, Ilpo Väisänen (Die Angel), Zappi (Faust). Strange attractors. Zappi's subtle tribal rhythms. Powerdrone electronics by Dresselhaus and Väisänen. Duncan's lyrics and vocals. Sublime and daunting. Tanzcandid stumbling wobbling shuffling muddling wallowing careening blundering toppling faltering unraveling bungling entangled snarling blustering bullying wrecking butchering mangling

Deluxe LP Gatefold. Edition of 250 copies ** Welcome to Paolo Angeli's sixth release for ReR Megacorp (2013) now in Vinyl deluxe edition! It's an extraordinary collection of pieces that explore the full range of his highly modified, extended and prepared Sardinian guitar. And although it's just him and electricity, it seldom sounds like fewer than three people playing. There are twelve fine compositions, each as crafted as a short novel, and beautifully recorded. Paolo's is a music that pretty m…

Anastassis Philippakopoulou - voiceAntoine Beuger - breath recorded at home in 2022 mastered by Taku Unamipainting by Maria Philippakopouloudesign by Yuko Zamaproduced by Jon Abbey

Abrasive and challenging, mad, unpredictable, with a wistful, quirky, even humorous side!

*100 copies limited edition* Oorsprong is a tube, a line in a forest, a sound sculpture. Acoustics to be revealed. Activated by entering, it becomes a giant flute producing a tone that is so low, the body crashes into waves of pure pressure instead of sound. Untranslatable energy. Cerchi Cerchi is a quest in a forest to find traces of that untranslatable sound, its impact, its imprint, its memory. A hide and seek in which the body is concealed in the instrument, becoming its second voice, hidden…

Crazy Doberman are an Indiana free-improvisation and jazz collective created in 2016 as an offshoot of the group Doberman, started three years before. Core members, including Tim Gick and Doberman cofounder Drew Davis, appear on many recordings, but Crazy Doberman’s lineup is loose—it varies on each of the band’s 40-plus albums and has featured dozens of musicians, among them Wolf Eyes’ John Olson and percussionist Tyler Damon.

** 140g black vinyl hosued in printed inner and outer sleeves with gloass varnish ** Lake from the Louvers is a new solo work for concrete sounds, electronics and instruments from Australian composer-performer James Rushford, who has spent the last fifteen years honing his singular approach to composition and performance through solo works and collaborations with artists such as Oren Ambarchi, Crys Cole, Will Guthrie, Graham Lambkin and Klaus Lang. Created primarily during a stay at the La Becqu…

At the Moers Festival 2018, OXBOW got together with Peter Brötzmann to deliver a memorable performance, bringing out the best of two legends in their very own genres while playing old and new Oxbow songs together.

*Limited edition of 344 copies.* Before No wave there was China and after China there was Mars. For the first time on vinyl the complete 'Rehearsal Tapes and Alt​-​Takes NYC 1976​-​1978', an incredible document from this era. The rehearsal tapes are a chronological record of the 3 years of Mars' existence, the first year of which was spent forming their sound and musical identity, starting out with a lineup of upright piano, bass, acoustic guitar and percussion before going electric with guitars…

** 500 copies ** Released only one year prior to their split, III digs even deeper into electronic and experimental territories. Lard Free’s music has never sounded more cinematographic and spacey than on this record which perfectly blends the players, their instruments and some kind of dialog with the Universe.This is the most electronic effort of the group and the instruments on this album consists of mostly synths. In addition we have piano, drums, vibes, guitar - and clarinet as the first ti…

Incomparable bluesman Mike Cooper marks over 50 years of deadly cool and restless experimentation with a masterful melange of free jazz, Oceanic, and Hawaiian inspirations in his umpteenth hallucinatory collage

Intense, mind-bending, and spectral long-form drone works inspired by the way neural networks self-organise thru repetition, variation and reiteration. Features input of Lucio Capece and Judith Hamman.

A collection of Elvis Presley covers recorded by the duet David Fenech & Pierre Bastien

A further collection of missing pieces uncovered since the release of the 18 CD Henry Cow Box that fills in parts of the story still undocumented - even on the bootleg circuit. Contents: 1: The earliest and only known stage recording of the band as it was in June 1972 (Martin Ditcham, Fred Frith, John Greaves and Tim Hodgkinson) at the first Glastonbury Fayre. The recording is quite clean, though the mix heavily favours bass and guitar but, in a way, this makes it of special interest, both music…

Edgar Valcárcel (Puno, 1932-Lima, 2010) was one of the most important composers in Peru. He belonged to a crucial generation centered around the 1950s, which also included César Bolaños, Leopoldo La Rosa, Celso Garrido-Lecca, Enrique Pinilla, and Francisco Pulgar Vidal. These musicians were responsible for introducing locally the new languages of the international musical avant-garde, in a meeting with the legacies of Peruvian native music, where the folkloric material was used under very free a…