Experimental / Contemporary

Dark Kitchen, the latest collaboration from Tom Jackson and Daniel Thompson, emerges as a striking exploration of sound and emotion. Released through Confront Recordings, a label renowned for adventurous and boundary-pushing music, this album exemplifies the duo’s deep commitment to improvisation and sonic innovation. From haunting textures to dynamic interplay, Dark Kitchen offers listeners a richly layered experience that challenges the conventional boundaries of modern music. Jackson and Thom…

Confront Recordings proudly presents Towers of Silence, an evocative new album by acclaimed artists Don Malfon and Vasco Trilla. This release explores sonic landscapes that blur the boundaries between experimental jazz and ambient improvisation, inviting listeners into a deeply immersive auditory experience. On Towers of Silence, Malfon and Trilla weave intricate textures and haunting melodies, crafting a soundscape both intense and contemplative. Their masterful interplay demonstrates a profoun…

Cristián Alvear & Taku Sugimoto (guitars). Recorded live in concert at Ftarri, Tokyo, November 2017. This piece was originally composed for ‘Songs’, a duo project with Minami Saeki, a female singer who I have been working with recently, when we had a tour in Europe last October. The piece, ‘h’, was actually completed in an airplane flying from Denmark to Finland where we were to have some concerts. We simply needed a new song (or more) which would be different from what we had played on the tour…

Transmutancia presents music caught in the act of becoming. Raw, luminous, and alive.

Florence-based composer Marco Baldini has quietly emerged as one of the most compelling voices in contemporary composition, and this cassette compilation for The Trilogy Tapes offers the perfect entry point into his world. Known for his stunning releases on Another Timbre – the chamber works of Maniera performed by Apartment House and the historically-engaged Vesperi – Baldini here curates a personal sonic journey that reveals his wide-ranging influences and aesthetic sensibilities. This isn't a…

The two unusually groundbreaking and genre-free artists from each extremity of the globe release their long-awaited album, Kassandra, presenting their unique musical universe and collaboration together over many years as a duo of intimate interplay on saxophone and vocals. This album marks a profound exploration of sound, where the ethereal voice of Juliana Venter merges seamlessly with the expressive and masterful saxophone of Rolf-Erik Nystrøm. Kassandra defies traditional genre boundaries, we…

kÖök continues their journey into the unknown and invites vocalist Sarah Camille and folk musician, Harding fiddler and harpist Tuva Færden into their musical universe. Over a few days in the studio, the four musicians have played and experimented with sound and interplay, and the result is a unique soundscape consisting of poetry, improvised Norwegian folk tunes and extended use of instruments, voice and space. The music and song titles paint a picture of a gloomy world, but with hope for a bri…

*200 copies limited edition* "Opposite directions, two different places, other means of expression—and the same extraordinary sensitivity with which Rożynek guides her sonic narrative. Two acousmonia, in which sound gradually gains vibration and density, finally blooming open and unfolding straight towards us. Pathopoeia is a term borrowed from the theory of rhetorical figures used in Baroque music—codified melodic progressions with specific assigned meanings. This figure leads sounds downward, …

Where to From marks the much-anticipated solo return of Hildur Guðnadóttir, a composer-collaborator equally versed in spectral pop, avant-garde, and soundtrack work. Reaching beyond her acclaimed film and TV scores, Guðnadóttir crafts nine intimately reflective pieces for strings and choir—drawn from years of voice memos and melodic fragments—where minimalist restraint meets moments of luminous warmth. The album’s texture hovers between Scandinavian melancholy, sacred choral atmosphere, and a me…

Next to the entire All is an astonishing work by Danish experimental sound quartet We like We, consisting of Katrine Grarup Elbo (violin), Josefine Opsahl (cello), Sara Nigard Rosendal (percussion) and Katinka Fogh Vindelev (voice). Although classically trained, all four share a desire for exploring, experimenting and shaping a sound of their own, something which is truly present on this album. Both instrumentation and composition feel glued together with an abundant sense of playfulness and vis…

**12" pink-hued clear RTI vinyl pressing** Customer’s Copy is the debut LP of contorted cosmic jazz and eccentric minimal electronics by Exotic Sin. The duo of Naima Karlsson and Kenichi Iwasa first came together for a performance celebrating the art and music of Karlsson’s grandparents, Moki and Don Cherry, before continuing as an independent unit that still incorporates some of the Cherrys’ instruments as well as their synergetic integration of music with artistic practice. Preferring the star…

*2025 stock* This reissue brings to listeners of concrete and electroacoustic musics and to all those with deep ears a fleuron of Canadian auto production. It enlightens the exemplary work of composer Bernard Bonnier, born in Montreal in 1952, who died in 1994 in Lévis, Québec, at the early age of 41 years. Bernard Bonnier had a good time, literally, when he accomplished this atypical and cheerful disc. Casse-tête is a bizarre and enjoyable music world conceived with various percussions and elec…

The Birds of Marsville, the seventeenth album from Friendly Rich, is a whimsical and experimental sound guide to 76 imaginary birds inhabiting the fictional island of Marsville. Featuring orchestrion, chamber ensemble, and a playful mix of genres, the work brings together carnivalesque sonorities, witty narratives, and a centuries-spanning tradition of birdsong composition.​

Composed and performed by Ronan Courty, this piece for solo double bass slows down the layers of time by invoking an invented age-old music, somewhere between imaginary folklore and early music. Acoustically produced, the violent and obsessive friction of the bow on the string gradually reveals hovering layers of harmonics that extend the suspension of the moment while evoking a kind of electronically produced ambient sound; the illusion created by the emergence of sustained tones is particularl…

October Flowers for Joe McPhee is a luminous solo work by Ken Vandermark, recorded in tribute to his longtime friend and mentor. Released by Corbett vs. Dempsey in March 2025, the album unfolds as a suite for reeds—melding lyricism, memory, and improvisation into a deeply human meditation on influence and kinship. Each piece, named after flowers, resonates as both homage and renewal.

Pièces Monophoniques by Marc Melià transforms reduction into revelation. Composed using a single analog monophonic synthesizer, it unfolds nine meditative studies on tone, silence, and resonance. The result is a luminous work where simplicity becomes substance, and constraint opens a portal to emotion and timeless stillness.

Christian Kobi’s new album Aare is a deeply immersive solo sound art work built around sine waves and field recordings, inspired by the experience of underwater listening in the river Aare. Released by Cubus Records in a limited vinyl edition, it offers 40 minutes of hypnotic, flowing sonic textures that subtly shift as they evoke both the meditative constancy and dynamic richness of aquatic environments.

** 2025 stock ** Thomas Schulz (1950-2021), predominantly perceived as a visual artist, has continuously been as much a sound researcher and sound designer and a musical improvisor as well. He performs with Marino Zappelini (Sax) and opera singer Jane Smith at J.J.Donguy (Paris 1982) and meets Shelley Hirsch, with whom he shares a longtime friendship, at Büro Berlin. Listening to John Cage and attending an early concert of the Seesselberg brothers awakes his interest in sound and composition, bu…

Simultaneous reveals Pamela Z’s fascination with the intersection of speech and music, blending voice, electronics, chamber ensemble, and video into an immersive, multi-layered exploration. Through looping, gesture control, and narrative fragments, the piece meditates on simultaneity—how overlapping events and speech form new harmonies and meaning.

“) / (" is a collection of improvisations and alternate versions of existing productions recorded onto cassette. The track "swim" by Baraboro sampled in the opening of ")". Released on the label Forlaget Kornmod, a collective label based in Odense and Copenhagen introducing New Danish heartfelt sounds."

Tip! Travel, the 19th studio album by Australian improvisational trio The Necks, documents their recent practice of starting each day in the studio with a 20-minute trio improvisation. The recordings offer some of their most ecstatic and captivating music cut to tape. As bassist Lloyd Swanton puts it: “It’s a really nice communal activity to bring us together in focus each day, and some lovely music has resulted from it.” Although a straight “live” improvisation has never been recorded in the st…

The debut album from Whitney Johnson & Lia Kohl has evolved over several years from their initial practice of free improvisation on viola and cello into (for the moment), this: a neophonic orchestral expression. At once stimulating and soothing, For Translucence is a living, breathing meditation in which layers of acoustic strings, synthesizers, field recordings, radio and sine waves illuminate each other as they twine and grow.

300 copies, Clear Vinyl. Heirloom is the first Lisa Ullén solo recording to appear on LP and exploits the two-sided nature of the physical format with two variations of the same three-part suite, exploring what it means to be ‘in between’ — be it genre, method or identity. The combination of Ullén’s deft control, patience and unconventional technique makes ‘Heirloom’ a sublime, ravishing listen. The LP is pressed on clear vinyl in an edition of 300 copies and housed with a photo of the small box…

Four Fold unites four singular musicians—Iva Bittová, Marilyn Crispell, Benedicte Maurseth, and David Rothenberg—in a chamber where jazz, improvisation, and modern composition intertwine. Voices and instruments curve and spar, yielding an album of subtle poetics and palpable communion whose articulated silences are as charged as its most explosive moments.

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…

John Also Bennett’s Ston Elaióna forms an elegantly rigorous world of electroacoustic sonority, bridging the expanse of time with the immediacies of environment and happening in the here and now: a profound sonic mediation on the countless dimensions unlocked by life in Greece.

Since 2017, Deathstar has been a project about the microphone — in Marina Rosenfeld’s hands, a void, a mirror, an unruly instrument of transformation and mediation. This music is heard in traces, through thickly amplified silences punctuated by momentary eruptions of noise or a voice at the threshold of intelligibility. The sculpture at the center of the action—a plexiglas orb housing a 7-microphone array originally installed as part of an exhibition the artist mounted at Portikus, in Frankfurt …

Trances, Jules Reidy’s follow-up to the celebrated Music by Jules ReidyMixed by James GinzburgMastered by Stephan MathieuArtwork by Florian & Michael QuistrebertPhotograph by Camille BlakeDesign and art direction by Bartolomé Sanson  (2022), takes place in between states, tracing a kind of restless movement in search of—or is it away from?—a center. The twelve tracks shift between fragment and epic, returning to familiar phrases between forays outward into uncertain expanses. Through its explora…

*100 copies limited edition* A « monochrome » approach to composition implies working within a restricted aural palette and, in this particular case, using fixed pitches. It focuses on developing interactions between these parallel elements in a time dominion. Establishing a dialogue devoid of structural repetitions and, most importantly, free from any hierarchy of notes. Such coexistence gives way to a particular environment of musical democracy where unevolving sounds lose their individual imp…

2018 release ** "Claudio F Baroni returns to Unsounds with Motum, an album featuring three recent compositions for electronic quartet, organ and string quartet. The thread connecting the works on Motum is – nomen est omen – motion and movement. Baroni explores this central theme in concept and sounds, in his inimitable layered, open and dynamic style. Motum takes the listener on a path from the very origin of sound as air in motion to hitherto uncharted territories. The music originates in myria…

Lénok’s 'Langue of Tongue' is a descent. An unhinged pinballing down a realm of incomprehension and lunacy, a darkly psychedelic ego-death-spiral into a world of pure, deranged disquiet. It is, and this cannot be emphasised enough, a truly fucked up place. It comes complete with clearly marked borders delineated by its opening and closing tracks '(Entrance' and 'Exit)’. The message is clear: this is less album than zone. There's no comfort to be found here. It’s like the inner monologue of some …

Acclaimed composer, producer, DJ, and founder of Nonclassical, Gabriel Prokofiev, unveils his long-awaited album Dark Lights, marking his first personal release on the label in over a decade. Known for his distinctive fusion of genres, Prokofiev bridges the worlds of orchestral music and electronic production with an intensity that feels uniquely his own.   Dark Lights represents a bold step forward in Prokofiev’s sonic journey. Drawing on his background as a producer of hip-hop, grime, and elec…

*100 copies limited edition* Soundtracks for the edge of day. Visible Light use their instruments to open portals of seasonal consciousness through site-specific recording and real-time composition. Over the past two years, Amy McNally and Matthew Hiram have developed a collaborative practice rooted in earthly attunement, intuitive structure, and place-based sound. Their outdoor listening events have quietly established them as distinct voices in a growing conversation around nature-based music.…

*200 copies limited edition* Recital is pleased to announce The Holy Restaurant, the new full-length album by Derek Baron, and their first solo LP since Curtain (Recital, 2020). The album is built from years of miniature transcriptions of improvisations, functioning in many ways as a sister to Curtain. Half-thoughts and mistakes are revisited, gilded, and illuminated. The floorboards of the album are laid with piano, organ, string pads, while serrated accruements (distortions, flourishes, and re…

1998 release ** Cardboard sleeve.  "This disk documents the music made at the opening of DIMC '97 by a dozen delegates, most of whom had never played together before. Assuming there was no conductor (none is credited) and no pre-arranged sequence of events, the result is pretty astonishing. Twelve strangers improvising together is a recipe for disaster; what usually happens is this. The music begins tentatively, unstructured, with no-one wishing to tread on toes. Slowly, pressure builds up as eg…

Michael Grigoni and Pan•American present their first collaboration. The album’s title, New World, Lonely Ride, gestures toward its meditative orientation. The duo offers a series of reflections on the zeitgeist of our present moment, the spirit of our age: the isolation and loneliness that continues to echo in the wake of the pandemic; the fractures that mar our political discourse; the uncertainty that has stamped itself on the future of democracy. The vast geography of America and the absence …

"Devotion, Muriel Grossmann's debut for Jack White's U.S.-based Third Man Records label, continues her musical evolution, arriving at a sound that wears inspirations transparently, but in practice, is markedly original holistic work. It is titled after Grossmann's experience of a natural sense of devotion that arose from her Buddhist meditation practice. She says, 'noticing that sounds are dissolving into the vast empty space, the true nature of reality. Just as thoughts are always dissolving in…

Artist, composer and researcher Max Syedtollan arrives on bison with 34 minutes of merrie-making madness, written for a parade-performance by basketmaker Lewis Prosser and informed by the tradition of masked mummer’s theatre. Written to be blasted off the back of a lorry, ‘Prynhawn Da!’ accompanied a troupe of huge wicker figures - Parsnabler o Grog, Vogum Gertlin, The Woman with The Big Head and Goyle Cornett - as they paraded down the streets of Newtown, Swansea, Cardiff and Caernarfon as part…

Double CD with Suite blanche, composition, and Angelica, a live concert.

Tip! These Rites are designed (realised and situated) – through/in – the saxophone, as: (conic) vessel,text,structure,lens,‘kitchen’,nexus,body/organ(s),rhythm,ecology/knot,speculative (entrepreneurial) invention,(and shadow).