John Heward Quintet
*2023 stock* Playful reverence acts as the adhesive in this recording. The muse is filled with chromatic color and interlocking light and shadows. This release celebrates a life of music-making from John Heward and Barre Philips, both whom were eighty-years young at the time of this concert. Other members of the quintet include: Lori Freedman, Joe McPhee and Dana Reason. Positive and negative space is the organizing principle of this improvised concert. Heward, a well-respected Canadian musician…
Solos and More at Studio 304
*2023 stock* "Railing backstage at his musicians between sets, drummer and big band leader Buddy Rich once declared, “There’s no sound in flutes. All I hear is noise!” It’s unclear if Alex Riva ever listened to these covertly made recordings of Rich chewing out his band. But if he had, Rich’s words certainly could have been the rallying cry on Riva’s new solo CD, Solos and More, recorded in Bangalore, India in 2019. Riva plays a wide variety of plastic recorders, the bane of many parents worldwi…
Look In To My Eyes, I’m Watching You
Outstanding violinist and improviser from Serbia Szilard Mezei in his latest studio recording! Alongside him on double bass are Zoltan Zoltán Csányi and percussion painter from Catalonia Vasco Trilla.
Distance Between Us
*100 copies limited edition* Eventless Plot joins forces with a duo of clarinets for the aptly titled Distance Between Us, an extended composition that gives sensual expression to the nature of distance and its implied correlate, closeness – reflecting and blurring the two across multiple levels both apparent on the music's surface and hidden beneath it. As with previous releases, the ensemble forgoes straightforward narrative forms in favor of a process they call 'semi-composition,' which invol…
Triangular Progressions
»Triangular Progressions« can be considered a perfect synthesis of Petersson’s academic interests and aesthetic ideas, combining a mathematical approach with artistic rigour. The magic number triangle highlights the beauty of symmetrical properties.
Distance Between Us
*100 copies limited edition* Eventless Plot joins forces with a duo of clarinets for the aptly titled Distance Between Us, an extended composition that gives sensual expression to the nature of distance and its implied correlate, closeness – reflecting and blurring the two across multiple levels both apparent on the music's surface and hidden beneath it. As with previous releases, the ensemble forgoes straightforward narrative forms in favor of a process they call 'semi-composition,' which invol…
Ephemeralds
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…
The Well And The Gentle
Tip! The Well & The Gentle, two of the major works of Pauline Oliveros, are presented here in a first time reissue on double vinyl in a gatefold sleeve with extensive liner notes. If Oliveros had followed a more conventional path she may have, all social obstacles aside, been considered among the major composers of her time. However, Oliveros approached composition in a more egalitarian manner. She wrote music for musicians to interact with or, in the composers words, she wished to create "an in…
Postcards From Hereafter
Razen's Postcards From Hereafter was recorded using a 17th century organ tuned at 398 Hz (meantone) in a Belgian cathedral erected in 1305. The ensemble explored, with rich results, the organ's strict and limiting tuning with an arrangement that included hurdy gurdy, recorders, chalumeau, violone and nyckelharpa. The pieces on Postcards From Hereafter explore the crossover between this world and the next with improvised spiritual, religious music. Brussels-based ensemble Razen use the unique tim…
Bass Duos 2000-2007
*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…
God Made My Soul An Ornament
*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…
Entre Pliegos
Entre Pliegos embarks on a quest through shared sonic ancestry to explore the immediacy of communication, invoking a mercurial, yet at times uplifting, musical environ. The drones and growls of low strings flow into explosive electronics, while ecstatic vocal spikes morph into rambunctious linear intertwinings that settle into an interminable, grating exhale. Chilean-based double bassist Amanda Irarrázabal and Brooklyn, NY-based pianist Eli Wallace crossed paths in the summer of 2019, where they…
Les Bons Contes Font Les Bons Amis
*2023 stock* Un Drame Musical Instantané were founded in 1976, featuring Jean-Jacques Birgé, Bernard Vitet and Francis Gorgé. Their aim was to promote collective musical creation, co-signing their albums, which they consider as artworks in themselves, or their live shows which they tried to renew every time they played. Their sound was created with many influences: They borrowed their sources from rock (synthesizer player Birgé and guitarist Gorgé, both authors of the album, Défense de); jazz (t…
Absolut Gehör
*321 copies limited edition. In process of stocking. 2023 stock* Origami Arktika is one of Norway’s best kept secrets. They serve a mutated folk music, rooted in the county of Telemark, interspaced with drones, noise, electronica and undefinable elements. They mix the archaic with the modern. Paper folding with frozen fingers.
"People forget that noise music is just as much grounded in subtlety and elusive sophistications as in deafening roars and colliding atonalities. I cite Morphogenesis' fi…
I Don't Want To Be An Individual All On My Own
*In process of stocking. 2023 stock* I Don't Want To Be An Individual All On My Own relates the powerful yet incomplete impressions of a childhood memory. The story takes us to a garden party where Genevieve, turning 8, and her mother, are celebrating their birthdays with friends and family. Various characters will come into focus during the evening as young Genevieve moves between her childlike world and that of the adults. We discover the people around her as she experiences them in a new ligh…
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.
Upe
Upe is the result of a composition commissioned by the Ensemble Contrechamps from the group Massicot for a joint event with the Ensemble Vide. The creative process involved a dialogue with the musicians of Contrechamps and a work of accompaniment and translation by Louis Schild. The trio shared the stage of the magnificent Arcoop building (built in 1959 by Honegger Frères) - a favourite venue for Ensemble Vide's projects - with fourteen string instruments.
The rain pounding on the corrugated roo…
DAM
*300 copies limited edition* A super special environment with over 40 seconds of reverberation. Amazing electro-acoustic dam music recorded in a huge concrete space inside the dam.
One day in 2022, Carl Stone, an American computer music pioneer, and Ken Ikeda, a musician and artist who emits primitive and original electronic sounds, visited "Uchinokura Dam" deep in the mountains in Shibata, Niigata. This album is a record of musical experiments secretly performed inside the dam to explore new po…
Coast
Super Tip! Limited edition of 300 copies. Mike Majkowski is a double bassist / music-maker from Sydney, based in Berlin. Active across a wide range of experimental music since the early 2000s, he has released music with numerous projects. Coast is his twelfth solo recording.
I'm in it. The music on Coast doesn't beckon,it purely compels you closer through sheer insistence on its existence. insistin sistins isti nsistinsist'Spiral' presents full gorgeous tones, timbres and textures.Round throbs l…
Scosse Elettriche
*2022 stock* 'He took off his earphones. Around him only fog and no sound. Where had the countryside gone? In his ears the music he had been listening to persisted. The final exploration on the piano tailpiece in search of rhythm and resonance still dilated time and space. In that music the grey that now surrounded him was not there. He had 'heard' and glimpsed yellow, red, sometimes ochre, blue, black (the shiny black of the piano, to be precise). He resumed walking, and with his steps, his tho…