Experimental / Avant-Garde

*2022 stock. Edition of 80 copies.* Granny Records presents Office Swan by Mark Templeton. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Design & Artwork by Yorgos Vourlidas. Written and Produced by Mark Templeton.

The sum to infinity of a sequence is the sum of an infinite number of terms in the sequence. It is only possible to compute this sum if the terms of a sequence converge to zero. "sum to infinity" is also the second release from Gamut Inc, the retro-futuristic ensemble around composers and curators Marion Wörle and Maciej Sledziecki.

Alessandro Pizzin (a.k.a Alieno deBootes) continues his unconventional reinterpretation of The Residents' music by proposing 18 new variations on well-known themes of the legendary american art combo. Assisted once again by brilliant international musicians such as Ken Field (Birdsongs of the mesozoic/Revolutionary Snake Ensemble), Christophe Godin (Morglbl), Dave Newhouse (The Muffins), James Larcombe (Stars in Battledress), Luis Gonzalez (Caballero Reynaldo) and with the invaluable help of lon…

Officer! was founded by Londoner Mick Hobbs. His roots were in the Rock In Opposition scene of the late 70s and early 80s. Initially he worked as guitarist in The Work, subsequently he became closely associated with This Heat and their Cold Storage Studio in Brixton, working with artists like Family Fodder, Catherine Jauniaux or Zeena Parkins. The band's first album "8 New Songs By Mick Hobbs" came out in 1982 on casette only. It was followed by the second album, "Ossification". The third album,…

Huge Tip! On June 30, 1986, the same day that Diamanda Galás's The Divine Punishment was released, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Georgia's so-called sodomy law in Bowers v. Hardwick, criminalizing consensual sex between men. At the time, about 15,000 people were known to have died of AIDS in the U.S. alone, with little government acknowledgement besides suggestions to quarantine homosexuals on island colonies. By the end of 2021, the number of AIDS deaths globally would excee…

Tip! *300 copies limited edition* "Open Mouth LP At last! The long-promised duo LP by two undisputed masters of post-tongue instrumental gesticulation and invention. Augured by their eponymous 7” from 2019, Off Motion is a full-length exploration of the previously unknown aural destinations these two guys continually discover as they move beyond the borders of music-as-it-is-played. Often, when writing about music, it's possible to draw comparisons to players' stylistic relationships to what has…

Tip! *In process of stocking. Limited edition of 500 copies, offset printed covers with risoprinted interview.* "Fly like a butterfly, sting like a bee". We're very proud to present the most exciting all-acoustic percussion based releases in years. Alexis Degrenier handles time and space as the master drummer that he is, with the finest of touches. Each breath, friction, percussion, whether manual or progammed (metronomes, clocks) is skillfully executed and high-spirited. Degrenier's poetic appr…

*2023 stock. 25 copies limited edition C30* Both recordings took from underpass gig, Outer Pulsation #25 at Shi-Da Underpass Sept. 24 2022. Two sessions of no-input electronics vs acoustic instruments.

Uruguayan guitarist Santiago Bogacz is a genre-bending virtuoso with a strong penchant for improvised music. Over the years he has released many solo and duo recordings, some under the stage name Matador. On the stimulating and poignant Retrato Años Despues he joins forces with his compatriot Emiliano Aires for nine spontaneously created pieces.Aires sticks to the infrequently heard soprano clarinet, the twittering tones of which, with their hints of vibrato, complement Bogacz's resonant strings…

New York City-based Pavone and Kasten Krause met by being placed together in the ensembles of other like-minded music experimentalists. It wasn't long before they realized their unique sonic preferences, aesthetics, and approaches to their instruments were similarly aligned and worth further investigation. Over the course of two seasons, they explored and experimented with sound worlds and structures, resulting in the four pieces that make up this album. Images of One is the first release from t…

In The Wilderness opens with textured drums, a muted bass, celestial sound, like stars breaking into puddles. Confident engineering and gentle instrumentation invite the audience to wander into the unknown. The project draws from an experimental performance by drummer Gerald Cleaver and bassist Brandon Lopez, at 577 Records’ Forward Festival, which was later deconstructed and rebuilt by hip-hop producer Hprizm of the Antipop Consortium. All three musicians were involved in visioning the project’…

R. Iwanski presents new sound project explorating experimental approach to ethnic instruments like zanza, kalimba and other idiophones of African origin. Advanced electronic techniques are mainly used to process various acoustic sources - in order to create organic electroacoustic music.

*300 copies limited edition* Two guitars heard, one played that listens to the second. Two superimposed timelines that are replayed through the disc. Libellule: One side with use of drone. Ébouli: a side where the guitar is detuned as the piece progresses. Guilhem Lacroux designed this disc so that it could be listened to in 45 rpm and 33 rpm. The 45 rpm, as a version of real time - I live - and the 33 rpm version that of the state of suspension, the invitation to slow time. Interview between Gu…

We're absolutely delighted to announce the reissue of Ouroborindra on the Ghost Box Records label.

Tip! HUH are the wild, freeform duo of Kyosuke Terada and Takuma Mori. Based in Tokyo, and playing together since 2007, HUH have released a clutch of cassettes, CD-Rs, and digital albums; they’ve toured Europe (in 2017) and Australia (2019); and they count amongst their collaborators the likes of T Mikawa of Incapacitants, ASTRO, and Government Alpha. You may know Terada from his duo with Shizuo Uchida, MAI MAO, who recently released an LP on An’archives, but he's super prolific, performing solo…

In recent years Swedish musician Linnéa Talp has grown interested in liminal spaces of sound, increasingly searching for her breath deep within passages of a song when instruments gently and patiently bridge the verses. In 2020 she released Cochlea, a brooding pop-rock record made under the name Deerest. “I’ve been trying to work with my body, my breath and my listening,” she says of her work since finishing that release. “I wanted to integrate a sense of slow and simple movement into the music—…

Tip! Paul Baran is the hidden master of Scottish experimental and electro-acoustic music, an ignorer of boundaries and a fuser of genres. In this age of constant engagement, Baran’s Pan Global Riot takes on the necessary task of assessing the now. This remarkable new album might be the only one you’ll hear this year where a pure acousmatic ambition mingles with politics and p-funk. Fang Bomb has previously released his previous two solo albums, Panoptic (2009) and The Other (2014) and two albums…

*50 copies limited edition* September 2019, during a residency exchange programme curated by the Lijiang Studio, Chunyang Yao set foot in Shiraoi, a town in Hokkaido historically populated by Japan’s indigenous people, the Ainu. A peculiar sense of inversion struck her. Being a Naxi artist emerging from the southwestern city of Lijiang, Yao had become accustomed to performing under a certain exotic gaze in China. Yet, dipping into the arcane, almost bygone lifeworld of the Ainu, for the first ti…

*50 copies limited edition* By the time of winter 2022, musicians around the globe had stopped making lockdown albums. Telling stories of the pandemic had been out of fashion in some parts of the world, and no longer emotionally bearable in others. This was the time when Sheng Jie recorded Review in Beijing, as accumulated feelings of anxiety, frustration, and loss rose to the peak across China. A deeply personal project from start to finish, Review bears the heavy weight of these collective sen…

A vibrant, wry, and engaging account of life as an adventurous, queer young person in late 1970s London discovering themselves as an artist, and an individual. While working as a photographer's model, gallery usher, and exotic dancer, Dorothy “Max” Prior witnessed the births of Adam and the Ants, The Monochrome Set, The Sex Pistols, and Throbbing Gristle, as well as drumming in her own cult band Rema Rema and recording with Industrial Records.  Her exuberant commentaries, each presented as a sta…

Full title: "Caught in the dilemma of being made to choose" This makes the modesty which should never been closed off itself Continue to ask itself: "Ready or not?" The renowned trio of Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke, and Oren Ambarchi return to Black Truffle with their 11th release. Demonstrating once again their commitment to continual experimentation in instrumentation and approach, the record begins with a long-distance collaboration made in response to a commission from New York's Issue Project …

Tip! Elders is the debut release from Ensemble Nist-Nah, a nine-piece percussion group led by Nantes-based Australian drummer and percussionist Will Guthrie. The diverse group of French musicians that make up Ensemble Nist-Nah – whose collective experience encompasses traditional Gamelan performance, contemporary composition, noise, jazz, and everything in between – perform on drum kits, traditional and junk percussion, and a complete set of Javanese Gamelan instruments. Though building on the f…

Riccardo Dillon Wanke (b. Genova, Italy 1977) established in Milan from 1982 until 2005, lives and works in Lisbon. Multi-instrumentalist and composer. From 1995 active in arts (music, installations), his interest includes classical, improvised and exploratory music and it is focused on the diffusion of contemporary art. He is particularly interested in digital and analog manipulation of sound and its use into musical compositions. His work with guitars, keyboards (piano and rhodes) and electron…

Lucrecia Dalt presents No era sólida, an introspective path to unworldly surroundings where self becomes sound, and a compass for the searchers of musical possession. For her follow-up full-length to 2018’s Anticlines, Dalt relinquishes control of the corporeal to reach imagination’s outer realm. Where Anticlines framed the physical processes of matter changing state, No era sólida observes a transition in Dalt herself through the emergence of Lia: an apparition, or second self, of the artist as…

RHaD (Research for Historical Audio Documents) is a side project of Raffaele Pezzella (better known as Sonologyst). What Pezzella brings us here is a concrete example of something of what I have always believed – that ALL sound is music, whatever its source (radio transmissions, telephonic conversations, hi-fi test signals, old and forgotten documentaries, unknown field recordists). More than that, there is something else that goes beyond the simple creation of seemingly random sound collages; t…

**200 copies** The electronic music emanating from the Scandinavian region encompasses a vast universe and has a long tradition behind it. In 1964 the electronic music studio EMS in Stockholm opened as a conventional analogue studio, its primary intention being to build the world’s most advanced hybrid studio and to conduct an international research program into sound and sound perception. Since then the Scandinavian electronic music scene has continued to flourish decade upon decade, culminatin…

*Deadstock. Last 85 copies. In process of stocking* Très toxique is the first ever recording of Un Drame Musical Instantané as a trio, three weeks before Trop d’Adrénaline Nuit, but already a year and a half after Défense De by Birgé Gorgé Shiroc (Nurse With Wound List). On December 21, 1976, it was the first time the three musicians met together in the basement of Studio GRRR. They had no idea what they were going to play, but the session was full of energy. Jean-Jacques Birgé plays the ARP 260…

Ephemeralds is the first recording by Finn Loxbo’s new ensemble Kommun and marks a distinct development in the guitarist’s compositional practice. Performing together with pianist Lisa Ullén, kontrabassist Vilhelm Bromander and percussionist Ryan Packard, Loxbo has set up a situation of intense focus, dissolving individual identities into a collective sound world of resolute clarity. Each musician manipulates a collection of tightly stipulated pitch material whilst bringing the shared timbral qu…

Absolute Tip! A dusty array of machine parts, appliances and objects found throughout the last five years by Ivan Papadopoulos in junk shops, scrap yards, flea markets, abandoned factories and car graveyards were circuit-bent and modified, dynamically shaping his concept of an ever-expanding laboratory comprised of eye-catching, sculpture-like sound-generating devices. Experimenting with those newly-developed instruments resulted in an abundance of unforeseen as much as unrepeatable sounds, and …

Aaron Turner: guitar, tapes, effects Turner is known as guitarist of legendary Isis and Sumac, among others. Today exploring with his solo work an abstraction of metal, avantgarde and noise. Brutal and beautiful at at the same time.

*2023 stock. In process of stocking* Double LP version. Full title: In the past only geniuses were capable of staging the perfect crime (also known as a revolution) Today anybody can accomplish their aims with the push of the button. For its 50th release, Black Truffle presents the ninth album from one of the label's core ensembles, the power trio of Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke, and Oren Ambarchi. Drawn from a November 2015 performance at Tokyo's now-defunct SuperDeluxe, the record's opening piece…

Clap. An Anatomy of Applause is a compilation of original works by a group of musicians and composers brought together by Andrea Stillacci and Unsounds. The project goal is to highlight the radically different forms and meanings that the sound of applause can take according to its context. The principle was to work from original recordings of each artist’s choice, with sources ranging from the thunderous applause celebrating Maria Callas’ last public appearance to the crowds cheering at the fall…

*2023 stock* "I met Joëlle Léandre when she was a visiting professor at Mills college in 2002. This was very exciting, as I had been collecting her albums since I started to play the double bass and she was an important influence on my work. I had a bass lesson scheduled with her the day we lost Maestro Kowald. She was very close to him and it was devastating to her. For me, it meant losing a role model; for her, it was losing a close friend and supporter. We had a long phone conversation and sh…

*2023 stock* "There are some people who are very singular in their conception of improvisation. People whose music embodies them as much as they embody the music. People who take from their life experience and put it into their sonic practice. People who search every crevice of their instrument to find sonic potential. These practices are beyond what may or may not be learned at a conservatory, no matter how deep the teaching goes. Listening to these improvised moments between Sarah Ruth Alexand…

"Sights and sounds move from place to place with promiscuous gesture. Ships, airplanes, and churning whirlpools appeal more to mechanical economies than street feet sharing pulse rate interiorities. The people twist on metric rails. Oxygen converters reflect swinging diatonics. Blackouts resound. Triggers blackout pots, pans, tin cans, and appropriate Lydian roots, talking tanks, and time-sliced wildlife. By 1950, modernist cultural curdling sacrificed aesthetic convenience for intuitive product…

*2023 stock* "From the late 1990s to the early 2000s, Jerome & I toured & recorded with the great Wolfgang Fuchs. It was a formative experience for both of us. All titles are quotes by Fuchs. He was a constant source of wisdom and humor." - Damon Smith

"Applying to their utmost the timbres, textures and tessitura from the double bass and percussion, veteran drummer Ra Kalam Bob Moses, and younger bassist Damon Smith play up the instruments' orchestral as well as rhythmic functions. Moses, whose career began in the 1960s, and Smith who has partnered numerous international improvisers have played together in larger groups. But as a duo none of the 14 tracks sound reductionist. That's because each uses his instrument to its utmost. Moses, as he d…

*2023 stock* "This recording is a modern interpretation of sound poems written and performed by German Dadaist Hugo Ball more than a century ago. Those familiar with Ball know him as the author of these innovative works and founder of the Cabaret Voltaire, Dada’s Zurich birthplace. Despite the sound poems’ artistic legacy, they constitute only a small part of Ball’s creative output. The purpose of these liner notes, then, is to consider the complex life and work of the man behind the sound poems…

*In process of stocking* "A double album of electroacoustic improv sessions from Sommerville, MA, centered around electronic artist Andrew Neumann on the Buchla Music Easel--a complex additive analogue synth--heard in quartet and trio sessions with Forbes Graham (trumpet), Sandy Ewen (guitar & objects), Junko Fujiwara (cello), Damon Smith (double bass) and Eric Rosenthal (drums & percussion). Neumann, also an artist, sculptor and installation artist, can be heard on the Driff album Bathysphere w…

*In process of stocking. 2023 stock "Lady Band (of Various Fruit Names) is an all-female experimental music ensemble founded by Sandy Ewen in 2009. Performances are singular, often site-specific events, featuring a rotating lineup (and different fruit-themed name for each show), with members contributing graphic and text-based scores for structured improvisation. Drawing parallels between Ewen's group and Scratch Orchestra, the 1960s-70s London experimental music ensemble Rowe was involved in, S…