Experimental / Avant-Garde

The mystical figure On Ka'a Davis returns for his second CD on Tzadik, and his first in twenty-five years - Blending the psychedelia of Sun Ra with Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix, this is an epic, direct from the ever-growing counterculture of Downtown New York - Performing on guitar, synth keyboard, programmed sounds, and percussion On is joined here by Don McKenzie on drums and Ali Ali on trumpet. Years in the making the music is wild, varied, and intensely felt. A New York Underground classic! …

Temporary Super Offer! * Limited edition LP Translucent green vinyl* Musica Elettronica Viva, or MEV for short, was formed in 1966 in Rome by Allan Bryant, Alvin Curran, Jon Phetteplace, Carol Plantamura, Frederic Rzweski, Richard Teitelbaum and Ivan Vandor. From the very beginning the group was based on musical freedom and the shunning of convention. Using contact microphones to record and manipulate sound wherever it could be found – from box springs to vibrators – and improvisationally combin…

*200 copies limited edition* Unbeknownst to the general public at the time and underappreciated until today, arguably the world's first punk record was recorded on September 28, 1966, in New York. On that day, The Godz got together to record their first album "Contact High with The Godz" in about 30 minutes, to be released on the avant-garde label ESP. It comprises eight rudimentary songs (plus one bizarre Hank Williams cover), played without prior rehearsals or repeats, sounding deliberately in…

'La deviazione del profilo’ (the deviation of the profile), is a sound/concrete work that focuses its research on environmental and sonic "profiles" of multiple landscapes, interior or otherwise. It is not about travel, but the freezing of an environment without identity, seeking the auditory erasure of the subject/object concept of a hypothetical territory, temporal suspension. Thus the sound as a weft or a fabric, where, in its spaces, between its threads, voids and smaller sounds nestle. At t…

Emerging out of Amsterdam's vibrant squat scene in 1979, The Ex – a name chosen for the ease and speed with which it could be spray-painted onto a wall – have for four decades been an entirely self-sustaining musical entity, charting a course through the global underground with a spirit of freedom and radical exploration. On 1985's Pokkeherrie (Dutch for "terrible noise"), The Ex return to the more stripped-down instrumentation on their early LPs. A key lineup change would also see the arrival o…

Emerging out of Amsterdam's vibrant squat scene in 1979, The Ex – a name chosen for the ease and speed with which it could be spray-painted onto a wall – have for four decades been an entirely self-sustaining musical entity, charting a course through the global underground with a spirit of freedom and radical exploration. Blueprints For A Blackout, The Ex's fifth album and first double LP, combines caustic studio experimentations and loose songs from their gripping live-set at the time. The band…

*90 copies limited edition* The legendary Charlemagne Palestine returns with the second volume of his monumental God Bear Archives series, and what a treasure trove this is. For those who have followed Palestine's singular journey through the outer reaches of sound - from his early days as a carillonneur at St. Thomas Church in New York to his groundbreaking work with sustained piano tones and electronic drones - this collection offers a deep dive into the vaults of one of contemporary music's t…

The only album by Flaming Tunes, the duo of This Heat's Gareth Williams and his childhood friend Mary Currie, first issued in 1985 as a hand-coloured cassette.

*300 copies limited edition* Before there was a second volume, there was this - the first installment of Charlemagne Palestine's archival excavation, and what a revelation it remains. Palestine has always been a prolific artist, his output spanning live performances, studio recordings, installations, and collaborations that stretch back to the late 1960s, yet much of this work has remained hidden in personal archives, heard only by those fortunate enough to be present at the original events. The…

An extended duo for violin and reed organ, developed by Biliana and Sarah which extends a series of short gestures from Ernstalbrecht Stiebler’s composition ‘Für Biliana’ into slowly expanding harmonic suspensions, highlighting the simple beauty and fragility of the intervals and chords.

Super Tip! In the midst of a wave of hybridizing ambient, drone, folklore and experimental electroacoustic music, Roxane Métayer has gained a cult following with only a couple of releases to date. Following her debut album (Éclipse Des Ocelles) for Morc with a split EP and a limited cassette for Wabi-Sabi, Roxane now turns to Marionette with her intimate narrative based multi-instrumental recordings, a match made in the heavens if you ask us. With her violin, woodwind, voice and various effect p…

Coming 8 years after Volume 2 and 23 years after the first installment, Volume 3 of Music And Words is the 4th solo release by Adam Bohman on Paradigm Discs. All 4 releases have focused on his earliest recordings, mostly from the 80s, mostly domestic and all using cassette recorders. There are 4 principle styles that are employed in this early phase of Adam’s work - most unexpectedly there are songs, often constructed with trumpet as the lead instrument, then more typically there are improvised …

Naiads by Martin Iddon, realized by Apartment House, is a cycle of five chamber works inspired by freshwater nymphs from Greek myth. Each piece constructs its own world of slow-blooming gestures and modestly veiled lyricism, balancing clarity and ambiguity as the ensemble circulates between unison playing, shifting tempos, and suspended harmonies. The result is a collection of subtly haunting, atmospheric music shaped with patient detail.

L’art de toucher by Evan Johnson features five chamber works that probe the outer limits of sound and silence. With a triptych for piccolo, violin, and percussion at its core, the album also presents finely wrought solo and trio pieces. Johnson’s sensitivity to musical detail shapes an experience full of ambiguity, microscopic interactions, and delicate intensity.

5(zwischenfaelle) is the latest release by dutch electronic musician Roel Meelkop. It is a special release in Meelkop’s catalogue because it is consist of five piece that were originally used in the context of sound installations running over a certain period of time in specific special surroundings. For 5(zwischenfaelle) Meelkop has set himself the task to compress these soundscapes into five dense and still minimal audio pieces that could work outside the context of the original installations.…

Employing a vast array of advanced vocal and instrumental techniques, Broken Gargoyles is arguably Diamanda Galás' most intellectually, sonically and viscerally formidable work to date. The album finds the visionary artist deftly probing the weaving, warping transformation on the nervous systems of her post-traumatic soldiers and dying diseased. The album's first part, "Mutilatus," contains the Georg Heym poems "Das Fieberspital" and "Die Dämonen der Stadt," and concerns the suffering of the sol…

“Terror Iridescence” is the 4th full length release by the latter-day, New York City based reincarnation of the seminal Punk Jazz/No Wave/Brutal Prog unit The Flying Luttenbachers, and the 17th album since 1992. After all of this, longtime fans tend to expect notable creative twists to be pulled by the band with each release, and this one will not disappoint. This time around, our heroes have issued forth a boldly abstract haunted-house salvo of dizzying surrealism, loaded with exceptionally biz…

*2022 stock. Limited edition of 300 copies.* And I ask my lovers "Do you know where the Desert Roses bloom and grow?". Following the disband of Black Sun Productions in 2012, Massimo & Pierce released their first album as Anarcocks.Exposing the fictional character of teenage Johnny as he joins the underground revolutionary army of the Wild Boys, Desert Rose is the first installation in a trilogy called europArabia. An aural investigating of the intertwine between west and east, north and south, …

*2022 stock* David Cunningham: guitar, footpedals, delays and kalimba. "When I'm having a bath I often feel strangely privileged that I can listen to music on the radio - a century ago I would have had to have a bigger bathroom and enough money to hire a string quartet." - David Cunningham Yasuaki Shimizu: tenor saxophone, piano, delays. "He is a truly one and only performer, for power, spirit and pride. He has the ability to encompass any kind of music." - Haruomi Hosono about Yasuaki Shimizu

Waswaas wanders further down the path of analogue and modular darkness, casting out his first album, Memories of Perversion.  The 11 tracks traverse a range of electronic moods, tinged with moments of liturgical voicing, dissonant canonistic sequences and arcade-style sequencing.  This is music for the wormhole interior.

** Limited edition of 50 tapes, in fluorescent green edition, includes download code** Aurora Central Records proudly presents Climmma's Rastros Impensados. In the beginning of 2020, four experimental composers from different cities of Latin America got together during an event in Córdoba, Argentina. The event culminated in an intense improvisational jam between the four. One week later they got together to continue in the same vein they had taken during the improvisation, to structure it and re…

Two pieces for cello and piano by Canadian composer Linda Catlin Smith, both performed by Anton Lukoszevieze (cello) and Kerry Yong (piano). "In Ballad (45 minutes in duration) I was extending myself into a longer work; I wanted to make a work that could be the entire concert, that could unfold over a longer time. With Through the Low Hills (10 minutes), I was working with a very restricted vocabulary in a process of constrained variation, working and re-working just a few elements. I felt like …

5 chamber works by James Weeks, beautifully performed by Explore Ensemble. An album of interlinked pieces that form a sequence. James Weeks says "I was aware of tying the pieces together as a set, by continuing and extending certain poetic ideas, ways of using and combining instruments, and ways of thinking about material....Things like the use of mixed instrumental duos, which comes from Violet-Violute, the use of a slow-moving or static background harmonic layer, which comes from Summer, the o…

** Hand stickered & stamped LP with lyric insert ** Five years after the release of ‘Pressure Loss’ the modern master of electronic minimalism Nicola Ratti returns to Where To Now? in collaboration with Japanese MC ‘MA’, for a suite of submerged, outsider Trip-Hop. ‘Shinkai’ meets at the crossroads of the gloomy sonic snapshot world of Tricky, the South London DIY avant pop bloom of Curl/Mica Levi, the outer fringes of Hip-Hop heralded by the Anticon crew, and the deep textured minimalism of Mac…

A one-time pressing of 150 copies only, on thick 180g-vinyl, with two inserts and download-code included. Gad Whip blend avant-garde sensibilities with a contemporary take on the place where D.I.Y. culture meets post-punk, hints of deconstructed garage rock and interstellar voyaging through sweat-drenched waking dreams. Immediate, powerful, confounding and kept in place by wry, sometimes observational, vocals that recall Jason Williamson and Mark E. Smith.

Rain Drinkers' inaugural release, originally on 99 cassettes via Earjerk Records   "Five cinematic, moody pieces for a grey day. Rain Drinkers are Joe Taylor, Zavier Krall and The Creative Spirit. Track one, 'You Are Now Starting the Awakening Process' calms the soul with a nice organ and piano melody that you can drift on. 'The Next Phase' gets a little scarier as the demons stir in dark places not wanting to be disturbed. "Let us sleep." they moan. But that can not be... for The Healing Begins…

**White vinyl LP** Re-issue of the incredibly rare Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza 1975's album, which comes in a fully remastered version with new sequence / structure as per recently discovered original tapes.When gazing over the expanse of 20th Century avant-garde music, few European projects can claim the seminal importance of the Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza. Formed in Rome in 1964 and considered to be the first experimental composers collective, its membership incl…

Built on Erv Wilson's Meta-Slendro scale, seventeen pitches to the octave, for an orchestra of brass and woodwind made or adapted for the purpose. The diamonds of the title are shapes that turn up inside the tuning when the intervals are drawn as a lattice.

Five works for flute, percussion & electronics, recorded during Covid-19 lockdown in a church in Basel, Switzerland, March 2020. Commissioned by Another Timbre and performed by Mara Winter - flute and Clara de Asís - bowed objects, percussion & electronics. "There were some pieces that I composed and others that were formed by Mara and I, where the roles of composer / performer dissolved into each other. ‘A passage through’ was composed specifically for Mara’s bass flute, also relating very much…

A Colourful Storm presents a new album by Beequeen, the duo of Frans de Waard (Kapotte Muziek) and Freek Kinkelaar (Brunnen). Over two long-form pieces, new material from 2020 and almost-discarded fragments dating back to 1988 are collaged to form a brand-new composition. Think woodblock, guitar, static radio signals, ethereal ambience. An honorable addition to Beequeen's discography and a beautiful piece of the Dutch avantgarde with historic ties to Edward Ka-Spel, De Fabriek, Merzbow, and Nurs…

Records are almost always more than they seem. For all the sound and joy that they bring, they are works of art in multiple that indicate vast networks of happening, history, and ideas; beacons to be chased, leading to understanding beyond themselves. Particularly in the case of historical works, whether they emerge from dusty crates or as reissues and archival releases, these objects can reveal unexpected creative intersections that defy our notions of what was. Aguirre’s first-time reissue of …

**CD version** "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 she is a rising …

**Limited edition LP on marbled vinyl, includes printed inner sleeve and poster.** Edited and mixed between Montreal and Paris, From Somewhere Invisible summons the fever of experimentation and the powerful sound of the game coming together in the service of a luxuriant and psychedelic drift. Synthetic brass meets hammered rhythms, string electrics with cracked electronics, saxophone cries and laughter at a pulsing and seminal bass. Created in 2012 by multi-instrumentalists Frédéric D. Oberland …

**250 copies** "The Lloyd Pack is a project the prolific Dan Melchior has taken in a variety of directions. The band has been composed of various people, sometimes it's large, sometimes it's small, and the music's nature has always been unpredictable. On Holiday, recorded at various places and assembled in Raleigh, NC, is one of the Pack's small format efforts. For most of the music the only players are Mr. Melchior and vocalist Russell Walker (of the Pheromoans, among other bands). They are som…

Directed and produced by David Toop, Dirty Songs Play Dirty Songs reacts against our poisonous present, inspired anti-nostalgically by similarly reactive records and live performances from the 20th century: Soft Machine and Pink Floyd 1967-68, The MC5’s Kick Out the Jams, The Stooges, Sun Ra’s Cosmic Tones For Mental Therapy and The Heat Is On by The Isley Brothers. Dirty Songs Play Dirty Songs is the musical offshoot of a project conceived by artist Maxime Rossi, originating in (among other thi…

New York based producer Marc Urselli had the idea to bring people together who had never met before and let that meeting of minds create beautiful soundscapes. Film director and musician Jim Jarmusch, Sonic Youth co-founder and guitarist Lee Ranaldo shared space with versatile drummer Balázs Pándi for a night session at Urselli's EastSide Sound studio in downtown NY. These are the unfiltered results. Absorbing instrumental patterns of cinematic sounds and improvised rhythms. No overdubs, no edit…

Consists of the whole of the LP previously issued as Re/arc and most of "The Golddiggers". Featuring Lindsay Cooper, Sally Potter, Phil Minton, Georgie Born, Fred Frith, Chris Cutler, Marilyn Mazur, Kate Westbrook, Collette Lafont, Eleanor Sloan, Lol Coxhill and Dave Holland. Explores the song form as so many of the early post Henry Cow records by ex alumni did. With a full book of texts and pictures (74+ minutes).

It is an astonishing gift of fate when a creative artist, known to the world for a particular achievement, is suddenly shown in a quite different light thanks to the existence of a single document that has somehow escaped the ruthless culling mechanisms of time. Harry Partch's Bitter Music is such a document, a “diary of eight months spent in transient shelters and camps, hobo jungles, basement rooms, and on the open road”. This long-lost journal of Harry Partch's wanderings during the Great Dep…

Simply put, Malkuth are a Leviathan; rising from the West, to lay waste to the Eastern lands—fierce and spiteful, having been awakened from centuries of contemplative slumber. In comparison to their two full-lengths on Hospital Productions, Hathir Sakta (and its accompanying disc on Prison Tatt Records, Tamahprabha, the set originally intended as one double LP) finds Malkuth in relative or even greater form, this material having been simmered to perfection, its ferocity seasoned to epic proporti…