Experimental / Contemporary

*200 copies limited edition* Our 2nd release in the Axis series, graced with the beautiful b&w photography of Martina Verhoeven, is a special one.  When José Lencastre came over last year for a recording with Dirk Serries (a pending release somewhere), we did this last-minute trio concert for the Jazzblazzt series in The Netherlands.  With Martina Verhoeven on the electric crumar piano, this trio became something else.  Tryptophan Suite represents the very first notes this new trio played togeth…

*2024 stock* This 1983 recording is a four-part composition representing the four seasons in Vermont. Composed by Malcolm Goldstein, The Seasons features a collage of sounds of nature infused with live instrumental/vocal improvisation structures meant to “extend the sounds of the natural environment into the sound/space of human gesture.” Performers play instruments, their own bodies, and found objects such as stones, wood, and metal. Liner notes contain Goldstein’s detailed explanation of how a…

*2022 stock.* The celebrated improvising vocal group Trondheim Voices and two of Norway’s most important composer/producers, Helge Sten and Stale Storlokken, explore the boundaries of sound in a series of thirteen other-worldly pieces that act on the ears of the listener like magical invocations to a secret ceremony. Led by Sissel Vera Pettersen, the nine female singers combine in rich and varied ensemble effects, from choral polyphony to extended-vocal techniques that recall Cathy Berberian int…

Thermal (John Butcher / Andy Moor / Thomas Lehn) formed in 2001, three musicians from different musical backgrounds, evolving along their personal routes to meet in free improvisations. For twenty years they’ve been taking their subtle and explosive music throughout Europe. Unsounds released their first album Thermal in 2003. In 2023 the trio of quiet giants comes back with Ice in a Hot World, a new album recorded live in Avignon. The Thermal powerhouse has become highly confident but spontaneit…

*150 copies limited edition* Nate Scheible makes amorphous music that evades easy classification. Whether working with electronics or as a drummer, his fascination with tone and texture results in a sense of playful exploration, undercutting the stoicism that defines so much contemporary ambient music and free improvisation. Sounds quiver at the edge of existence, flickering imperceptibly between presence and absence. The boundary between the familiar and otherworldly blurs as he approaches the …

*Comes with a 72 page booklet including texts and pictures* All in all, there are more than 50 pieces, new and old, live and studio, finished pieces and scores to be performed, acoustic and classical, solos and pieces for ensemble, using classical and special instruments. Archivio Conz in Berlin provided access to their extensive Fluxus archives and Edizioni Conz provided coproduction. Ursula and René Block made possible the realisation of John Cage's historical composition Rozart Mix from the E…

Reissue of this 1999 release and out of print since a long time. Some reviews at the time of release : ' After a tentative opening consisting of damp harmonic scrapes, the piece takes off like a single-engined light aircraft when David Maranha kickstarts his four-motored Piano effect and then starts to tease single notes from the bubbling background with his bow. This is a great and physically affecting slab of sound, where the slightest minimal shift causes tectonic plates to groan. It's gravy …

2023 marks the 35th year of Idea Fire Company’s ongoing commitment to the radical avant-garde. To mark the occasion, Horn of Plenty is proud to present the band’s latest campaign statement Bathroom Electronics. IFCO’s core members are Scott Foust and Karla Borecky who operate from rural Massachusetts. Early despatches came via Scott’s Swill Radio imprint alongside titles by The Shadow Ring, RLW, and Asmus Tietchens. The last decade or so has seen them work with other notable labels including Kye…

As the mist clears from their Sift LP (hop9) Eyes of the Amaryllis return to Horn of Plenty with the equally enigmatic Perceptible to Everyone. Recorded in various remote locations around the northeast of the US over a few warm months in 2022, Perceptible to Everyone maps the band's poetry in nebulous song forms that dance on their constant fission between pastoral and ghostly inner galaxies. Its eight tracks utilize a wide range of instruments and techniques to span an alien, ritualistic territ…

'An investigation into some smaller sounds and interactions from this new trio, plus a few excursions into more expansive territory. All of the music was improvised and performed as heard, apart from the coda of the closing track Rotten Star which is a collage. Heartless, Heartless…… / Rotten State edits together, in alternation, parts of two separate longer improvisations. Pat plays grand piano interior and keyboard simultaneously for much of the album, while Johnny responds with sounds from a …

This LP reveals the extraordinary diversity of research - almost all hidden - by Spanish musicians in the '50s and '60s. Those pieces were composed while the country was under the tyranny of Francisco Franco. It is truly the ultimate grail, developed by musicologist Miguel Álvarez-Fernández, he is its curator, editor and commentator. This undoubtedly marks a major step in the approach and understanding of this music which had to fight to exist before the death of Franco in 1975. Miguel Álvarez-F…

*222 copies limited edition* Making music is trying to start over again every time. It’s a matter of questioning and approaching. It’s never settling for the sound that fills the world around. It’s looking for a door in the sky. And maybe find it, open it, go beyond it. Rod Modell and Gigi Masin, this time together, are offering each other vibrations and insights. The former lives between two lakes, the latter between the Venetian lagoon and the sea. Everyone on their own shore, building electro…

*2024 stock* This album is dedicated to Rosetta Barabino: grandmother, art collector and sparkle of the fire that still burns in the family. This is a collection of material prepared for exhibitions,dance, visual art and theatre pieces; mostly home studio recorded. Intimate, dreamy and inspired by multiple inputs. The first 7 tracks have been conceivedin a deep exchange between words and music with Pavlica Bajsić Brazzoduro, during our art residency in Nantes, during the Trempolino - Slash event…

Nine duo improvisations for guitars, bouzouki and cello by Ayman Fanous and Frances-Marie Uitti, recorded in the studio the day after their first concert together, the first release in the Fanous Edition.

*50 copies limited edition* Astral Spirits presents Unfamiliar Ceilings. Lina Tullgren: violinAlec Toku Whiting: koto, bass kotoTed Reichman: synthesizer, pedals (track 3) Engineered and mixed by Ted Reichman at Subtext Sound SystemMastered by Jack Callahan

Reading Group is thrilled to introduce the debut LP from a new improvising group of three singular artists: Fred Moten (voice), Brandon López (double bass), and Gerald Cleaver (drums). López and Cleaver have been improvising together as a duo for a number of years, over which they’ve developed a secret, unspoken language of organically growing repetitive figures in a wide range of sonic palettes. López and Cleaver have long been recognized as some of the most vital voices in contemporary experim…

Joanna Mattrey & gabby fluke-mogul, two of the most radical & revolutionary New York-based improvisers, join forces in the birth of Oracle. Rejoicing in the strange magic of sound, the duo weaves together new worlds while simultaneously destroying the ones that no longer serve them. Oracle is a declaration, a remedy, and a revelation.

In 2015, Lemur started a collaboration with German pianist Reinhold Friedl. Friedl is the leader of the international ensemble Zeitkratzer, working at the intersection of improvisation and composition. In this respect, Friedl's experience and working method have much in common with the ideas and working methods Lemur uses. Not least through an interchange between work with large and small ensembles.In collaboration with Reinhold Friedl, we focus on the use of extended playing techniques, form ex…

*100 copies limited edition* On ‘Fluorescent Standard,’ guitarist Anthony Vine and clarinetist Gareth Davis present two luminous and serene worlds of harmonic sound. The duo entwine sustained tones, glowing with the resonant hues of their instruments, into enveloping and expansive atmospheres. Clarinet sonorities, swelling guitar chords, and tumbling elegiac piano fragments drift quietly through time in elusive cycles that subtly change and expand with each return. Every vibration is interconnec…

*200 copies limited edition* Music composed in resonance with Orlando di Lasso’s ‘Prophetiae Sibyllarum’ (ca 1555-60). The Sibylline Prophecies are a 16th century collection of vocal motets that could be considered prophetic, because they open up the music of its time to chromaticism beyond diatonality, posing new challenges to tuning. On the other hand, the sung text is an unambiguous appropriation of ancient Greek Sibylline oracles, claiming these predicted the coming of Christ —a fictional re…

*200 copies limited edition* Australia-based baroque violinist Lizzy Welsh has recorded three new compositions for solo baroque violin—the astounding result of a decade-long process of commissioning repertoire of such work during her doctoral research. Each of the works on « The Target Has Disappeared » initiates an intimate conversation between Welsh and her instrument, outlining the contours of memory and loss, weaving together fragments of old and new traditions in the sound of gut strings.

Tip! *60 copies limited edition* Also known as Tachycardie, and part of Pneu, Kick5ive, Binidu, La Colonie de Vacances, the musician, field recordist, drummer and Presque Tout co-founder Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy wears many hats. With 'local exoticism' it is the attentive listener who is summoned and twists the notions of exoticism in a sonic investigation of the Loire river’s shores. “The idea behind this project is to go against the accepted principle of exoticism, and the envy that this notion c…

Skyllumina represents a new evolution of London-based, Italian-born composer, bassist, and vocalist Ruth Goller. Goller is known for her bass and vocal work with Alabaster DePlume, whose music she elevates in live contexts with her genre-less improvisational intuition. She's also known for work with Bex Burch's Vula Viel, whose DIY label released Goller's solo debut Skylla in 2021. And she is known to creative musicians far and wide, with an incredibly diverse CV that includes performance and re…

The Swedish dancer, choreographer, and performer, Greta Lindholm, has remained, since her emergence during the late 1960s, a singular and unique force on the global contemporary dance scene. Having developed a synthetic and experimental approach to movement and generative sound, her boundary pushing body of work can be understood as a celebration of the body and its languages, and their intimate relationship with the voice; using primarily foot drumming and vocal rhythms, her body is transformed…

*200 copies limited edition* "Suspension pour une perte was created with a gap in time. A first recording of a broken piano was made by chance in 2012. This recording was forgotten for a long time, as its nature was that of a very limited sonic range. But as a premise in my work, limitations are always potential motivations to work with; so I decided to reevaluate it 10 years after, hoping that a new approach of the same recording would offer a quite different perspective. Sustained and continuo…

**90copies** When Dylan Henners debut EP A Reason for Living was released through Phantom Limb in February 2019, it became quite clear that there was more to discover than what the record made us listen to. Electronic Sound Magazine described it as “an ambient delight” and in September that same year he returned with his second EP Stormbird Brother in the Dusk, featuring the Trinidadian steel pan maestro Fimber Bravo. Besides his own work, Dylan Henner remixed other musicians such as Oliver Coat…

Music imitating life imitating music. Improvisation, Emilian sound poetry, fluxus reminiscences, subtractive syntheses and everyday life's forays in the new naive collage from Cascina Mulino Magnani Collective. Cascina Mulino Magnani Collective is a group of musicians, improvisers, organizers, agitators, friends who revolve around the underground scene between Lodi and Piacenza.

* 2CD casebound with a 24 page booklet *  The new album from Sarah Davachi on her own Late Music imprint is a collection of nine extended compositions for chamber ensemble and solo pipe organ.  "The expanded instrumentation on this album includes carillon (a keyboard instrument comprised of very large cast-iron bells), choir, string quartet, low woodwinds, and trombone quartet, alongside sine tones and electronic drones.  Among the pipe organs featured on the album is an extremely rare Italian t…

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…

*150 copies limited edition* In 2010 Giovanni Di Domenico formed a band called “Mo(ve)ments Ensemble” and released a CD on Belgian independent label Spocus. The concept and repertoire of that band reflected Di Domenico’s love for subtle orchestration and chamber music sensibilities, the basic idea behind it being the dissertation of the organic elements that form the instruments involved (in that case the wood of the strings and clarinet) and the re-construction of them by means of musical ideas…

Circular Music and Extended Circular Music are two collections of compositions written by Jürg Frey between 2011/2016 and 2014/2015 respectively. The first cycle is composed of seven distinct compositions while the second is divided into nine parts but, in reality, the n. 4 and no. 9 of the second series share the same harmonic progression. What distinguishes them, in addition to the ensemble (no. 4 is for string quartet and piano while no. 9 is for piano.

Three pieces based on traditional Japanese scales. Lisa Ullén is a pivotal person on the Swedish improvisational and experimental music scene. Active as a composer and performer since the 1990’s she has produced more than fifteen albums over the last decade with many constellations. In 2018, she was awarded the Jazz composer of the Year prize by the Swedish Radio. Ryan Packard is a percussionist, composer and sound artist based in Stockholm/Chicago. His versatile musical practice can be heard in…

*Last copy remaning at source* Fredrik Rasten (born 1988) is a guitarist and composer based in Oslo and Berlin. He is primarily focusing on musical exploration of just intonation and related sound phenomena, and in his work he is reaching for an actively listening state wherein to intuitively explore the complexities of tone and harmony. On the guitar he is applying real time retuning of the instrument, vocal shadings and different preparations to create warm and fluctuating resonances. As a com…

Tip! There’s music inside of lace stitching, and electro-acoustic composer, improviser, and harpist Zeena Parkins has spent years finding it. Her lace pieces use images of lace as musical scores for ensembles to play, building webs of sound that emerge from its contours. LACE is a boxset of artifacts including an LP of two of Parkins’ multi-movement works, “LACE I.” and “LACE II.,” presented for the first time on recording. The pieces were performed by percussionist William Winant, electronic mu…

*200 copies limited edition* Recital is thrilled to present the first full-length vinyl LP by sound artist Asha Sheshadri. Whiplash combines elements of sound poetry, diary-like narration, and delicate incidental music. Sheshadri has crafted a unique and marvelous album here: "This record is an alternate approach to the autobiographical 'confessional' – I wanted to stitch together some pivotal sketches in self-understanding and forgiveness. While their designs may seem affectively disparate, the…

*Limited edition of 20 copies.* Audio constructed with analogue Function Generator, and Panasonic SV 3800 DAT Recorder. BASF 15 minutes master tape, physically altered.

2023 Stock, few available. Comes in transparent PVC cover. Slip stamed 'Antikvarisk' Inner label design differs from original release. Limited edition of 40 copies.

*Limited edition of 25 copies.* Second volume of the Kodemusik series of limited edition releases containing repurposed or "upcycled" morse code training records. Each release has two records that can be mixed together and eg. slightly pitched differently. This way complex syncopated rhytems can arise, as well as new verbal meanings contained in the code sequences. Jonas Olesen is a renowned Danish composer and sound artist. Born 1979. Formerly lecturer in electronic composition and history at t…

Tip! 200 copies. Comes in a beautiful gatefold sleeve, designed to our house style by Rutger Zuydervelt. Liner notes by Guy Peters. Live concert at Festival DME - Lisboa Incomum, recorded by Mariana Vieira and Jaime Reis on the 30th July, 2021. Title inspired by Kurt Schwitters. Mastered by Dirk Serries.

Tip! In Vital Weekly 1397, I reviewed a CD by Dirk Serries, Benedict Taylor and Friso van Wijck they released on the Portuguese label Creative Sources Recordings. Now, the Portuguese entered Serries' label New Wave Of Jazz. The improvised music scene is small but very busy. A trio consisting of Carlos "Zingaro" on violin, Guilherme Rodrigues on cello and José Oliveira on percussion. They played on July 30, 2021, in Lisbon and for the title, they took inspiration from Kurt Schwitters. I think the…