Experimental / Contemporary

Originally released in 1977, Moondog In Europe was visionary composer Moondog’s first release after moving from NYC to Germany. Regarded as reflecting the historicity of his new environment, the album is more structured and formal than most of his previous releases; however, his layered song-cycles are just as circular and experimental, and still backed by a fair amount of tribal percussion. “Viking I” opens the album with Moondog’s solo celesta playing and retains the quirk and charm of his pre…

This tape is the culmination of a series of collaborative performances between Kevin Coleman and J.W. Bird that took place in the latter half of 2024. It is meant to encapsulate the spirit and energy of those performances; spontaneous and communicative. Musical conversations between banjo and fiddle that left no language off the table. A great combination of elements from avant-garde classical, to American Traditional/Primitive, and free improv, exploring improvisational spaces of widely varied …

Nostalgia is not an ideology, though in this moment, we could be mistaken for thinking it might be just that. Over the past years, the idea of nostalgia has been filtered through various political and technological lenses and has become a tool used for forgetting, rather than remembering. Instead of embracing histories’ complexities and inconsistencies, this version of nostalgia seeks only singular recollection. This contemporary phenomenon of nostalgia has become a methodology at best, and a we…

For Hind Rajab is a deeply personal and meditative exploration of sound, memory, and sonic embodiment. Across the album’s intimate unfolding, Khoury draws on extended techniques, silence, and subtle timbral shifts to create a landscape where each gesture resonates with emotional and cultural depth. Inspired by and dedicated to Hind Rajab, the work weaves contemplative lyricism with bold experimentation, revealing the violin as an instrument of both introspective nuance and radical presence. The …

“Saudade” is the new solo album by Ramon Moro — a journey for trumpet, flugelhorn and analog effects.Eight compositions move through melancholy, memory and light, blending contemporary jazz, ambient textures and refined sound research. The album opens with See You Soon, a brief poetic prelude that sets an intimate, cinematic tone. From Atena, Eirene and Afrodite — tributes to the archetypal feminine — to Tatreez, inspired by the Palestinian embroidery tradition, the record shapes a suspended and…

This record shouldn’t, strictly speaking, be possible at all.

Dark Companion come up roses again with dazzling, never-before-heard haunting compositions and songs by Jeanette Sollén, compiled from her archive specifically for this album. 300 individually handnumbered transparent emerald green audiophile vinyl. "My first recordings were on an old tape recorder in my childhood bedroom. I spent a lot of time with that machine. Listening to the radio and pressing the green and red buttons when something I liked came on. And I seemed to have liked a lot. One ta…

MMMD returns with Absens, a commanding new album that expands their deep monolithic sound into a darker, more intimate terrain: across nine tracks, the record fuses subterranean low frequencies, complex inter‑modulations and brooding textures with distant threads of folk, all rendered through custom‑made instruments and meticulous sound design. Absens is an exploration of absence and presence, where physical weight meets spectral intimacy — MMMD assemble these elements into an immersive work tha…

*2026 stock* Zimoun returns to 12k with Wind Dynamic Organ, One & Two, a pair of longform pieces created with the Wind Dynamic Organ (Prototype III), located in Bern, Switzerland. Zimoun spent many sessions over a few years exploring and recording the instrument and recounts: “I have had the wonderful opportunity to engage regularly and over a longer period with the ‘Wind-Dynamic Organ, Prototype III’—a truly outstanding and marvellous instrument developed by Daniel Glaus and his team. In contra…

*2026 stock* Swiss artist Zimoun had the honor and joy to spend time with a unique instrument, the Wind Dynamic Organ (Prototype III), located in Bern, Switzerland. He was given access to explore and record over the past few years. The result is two albums of material: a solo work of more pure and unmaniuplated sound titled Wind Dynamic Organ, One & Two (12k2061) and this, Wind Dynamic Organ, Deviations, on which he collaborates with Taylor Deupree. On this latter work they use the organ’s tones…

Musician, writer and filmmaker, Sunik Kim follows up ‘The Bent Bow Must Wait to Be Released’ (Takuroku 2021) with their second LP - a deadly serious dismantling of the limits of contemporary computer music, delivered with playful dexterity and a touch of slapstick humour, a la Henry Cow. Enlisting General MIDI to create frenetic, vital patterns of dis-organisation made up of gleeful synthetic trumpets, wry orchestral sweeps and brutal key clusters, Sunik Kim explodes a kind of simplistic sound i…

Sophie Agnel plays the whole piano. Its body matters as much as its strings. The keyboard's lid is just as good closed as it is open - in fact it’s best slammed open and closed rapidly. Joined by bassist John Edwards and drummer Steve Noble, Three on a Match explodes the piano trio - each player sparking off the other so quickly that it’s impossible to figure out who lit the flame.

Musics for the Savage Planet' is the new album from Bloodcog, part of a year-long project to record a new soundtrack to the 1973 animated movie 'Planete Sauvage' (also titled 'Fantastic Planet'). As well as the full 70-minute OST, 'Musics for the Savage Planet' is compiled from two takes to form 13 discreet tracks. Bloodcog is a band from the North-West of England featuring five of the region's top improvisers, with a sound part rock, part free jazz, part musique concrete, part electronica (and …

Kassel Jaeger (aka François J. Bonnet) returns to Shelter Press after Swamps / Things, Shifted in Dreams, and the recent reissue of the classic Zauberberg, co-composed with Akira Rabelais and Stephan Mathieu. With this major new album, entitled Sub Re, Bonnet continues his long exploration of the musical possibilities of sound, extending the concrete approach developed at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, the historic and essential Parisian studio that Bonnet has been directing since 2018. Sub…

*300 copies limited edition* In 2021, at the invitation of Chant du Moineau, Le Un experimented in collective spontaneous creating on a section of the Dordogne River. In an aquatic and poetic logic of space, Le Un continued its research along the Gironde estuary. Three working sessions with three different teams, ultimately bringing together the entire orchestra and our guests: Claire Steimer, historian, Olivier Chadoin, sociologist, Eric Chauvier, anthropologist, Guillaume Bonnel, photographer …

Over the last couple of decades Magda Mayas has developed a rigorous and distinctive prepared piano practice, working inside the piano with great musicality. The music on Chant captures a dramatic expansion of the pianist’s vision. Reflecting her devotion to social and musical communities through recent stretches of political upheaval and the disruption of the pandemic, she’s found solace in harmony and repetition, and after a period of exploring such sounds with clavinet and Fender-Rhodes, she …

Stifled wailing distortion, suspended chords, glistening bundles of gentle mallet strikes, streams of notes produced by handheld fans. A nearly hour long session of free improvisation - played and recorded without pretense in a basement - by two of St. Louis's most dedicated improvisers and organizers of the city's warped and faded experimental music scene.

A spellbinding five-CD box set documenting the entire enigmatic production of one of the missing links in experimental electronic and prototypical industrial music: Anne Gillis. From her groundbreaking 1983 Devil's Picnic release through her 2005 installations and exhibitions, this comprehensive collection unveils the hidden world of a visionary French composer whose work anticipated much of what would follow in electroacoustic composition and sound art. Since the early 1980s, Manon Anne Gillis …

Félicia Atkinson first saw Les yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face), the 1960 horror film by Georges Franju, when she was a teenager, around the turn of the century. At the time she was frequenting arthouse movie theaters, immersing herself in cinema, and she was encouraged to go by her father. The film made an impact for its iconic imagery and the way Franju draws on the aesthetics of early filmmaking, from its score that relies on stylistic markers typical of the 1940s or 50s to the decision…

*2026 stock* Ellen Arkbro and Johan Graden embody the limitless curiosity and fearless innovation of the Swedish and Berlin new music scenes they inhabit. Arkbro is a composer and musician whose work has been presented around the globe at prestigious institutions such as the Barbican in London, GRM in Paris and the Kölner Philharmonie in Köln. Graden is one of Sweden’s most sought-after pianists, moving freely between classical music and the European contemporary jazz scene. Currently living in …

The group originally began as a duo formed by Paweł Doskocz and Vasco Trilla, who gave their first concert together in 2017. Since then their collaboration has continued to evolve. In 2018 they toured together and recorded tracks for an album released in 2019 on the Antena No Grata label. In 2023, Zofia Ilnicka joined the group, bringing her own musical language, which perfectly complemented the project's concept. The group relies on an in-depth knowledge of their instruments, which allows them …

*2026 stock* Diffraction is the amplified reflection, across a wider sonic territory, of what takes place within the making of DDK’s music. A composition written for the GGRIL, in which the three musician-composers weave their texture by juxtaposition, by overlay, in parallel, always within the musical material itself. But Diffraction truly comes to life only through close collaboration with the GGRIL performers, where each person’s character becomes raw material. A compositional process intimat…

Ben Kaczor and Niculin Barandun reveal their debut album on Dial Records, dedicated to the healing properties of sound. "Pointed Frequencies" contains six mesmerizing compositions. The collaboration between Niculin Barandun and Ben Kaczor started in 2022 with a carte blanche for an audiovisual show at Digital Art Festival Zurich. While working on the performance, a common understanding of sound aesthetics emerged and the foundation for the duo’s project was laid. At that time Ben Kaczor studied …

*2026 repress* On his debut album “Scattered Memories”, the composer, musician and true master on the Iranian spike fiddle kamancheh Saba Alizadeh blends his instrumental virtuosity with spherical electronics, samples of Persian music instruments and field recordings from his hometown Tehran. Born in Tehran in 1983 as son of the world renowned Tar and Setar virtuoso Hossein Alizadeh, Saba Alizadeh studied the Iranian spike fiddle with Saeed Farajpoury and Keyhan Kalhor plus photography and later…

*2026 stock* Named one of 23 artists who are “changing the sound of classical music” by the Washington Post, Ben Roidl-Ward has been praised for his “dazzling technique” (The Sydney Morning Herald), “breathless virtuosity” (Bandcamp Daily), and “astounding flexibility and range” (The Double Reed). He is the Assistant Professor of Bassoon at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and also holds positions as Principal Bassoonist of the Chicago Sinfonietta, the Illinois Symphony, and the Champ…

*150 copies limited edition* Filmmaking and music-making share a common element of worldbuilding. Whole cloth, environments are raised in which a perspective can be placed; the viewer, the listener, is taken on a ride into the unknown for a time. Movie, the newest album by DMV-based duo Lifted, is like a film shot with microphones rather than cameras, using the pacing, spatialization, and semiotics of cinematic sound design to lead us through a surreal soundworld that draws as much from Foley ar…

Formed in 2022, Fjall features a cornucopia of instrumental sounds, both acoustic and electronic, which the group uses to create soundscapes rooted in folk and ceremonial music, together with field recording material drawn from the sounds of the natural world - all mixed together on a canvas of open ended improvisation. This release documents in full two performances by the group, both in front of large and attentive audiences.

That Wolf At The Door is a collaborative 2 CD between Henry Kaiser (Califonia, USA; guitar) and P.ST (Prague, Czechia; electronics). The first CD That Wolf At The Door is a solo baritone guitar disc that pays a heartfelt tribute to the late science fiction author Gene Wolfe (May 7, 1931 - April 14, 2019). The album is a testament to the decades-long friendship and mutual appreciation between Wolfe and Kaiser, two creative minds who shared a passion for pushing the boundaries of their respective …

Mount Analogue is a double‑album pilgrimage into René Daumal’s “symbolically authentic non‑Euclidean” world, conceived by Bill Laswell and P.ST as a musical counterpart to the writer’s cult novel. Daumal’s book, left incomplete at his death and breaking off mid‑sentence, follows a band of mountaineers seeking an invisible, unreachable peak on a hidden continent that can only be approached with obscure knowledge and altered perception. The record honours that premise by treating sound as a climbi…

For over half a century, Sven Åke Johansson and Rüdiger Carl have explored the boundaries of music together. Villa Hügel captures a rare moment: a concert with no audience, recorded in 2020 in the library of Villa Hügel during the 2 x Kippenberger exhibition. The few present could only experience it  in-house via TV transmission. Carl on accordion, Johansson on percussion, cardboard, and crackle box—an interplay of structure and openness, sound and silence. This release follows Johansson’s exhib…

Jessie Marino is a Berlin-based composer, performer, and media artist. Her compositions and performances abstract ideas drawn from all stripes of popular culture and political discourse, girded by a definitively humanistic sensibility rife with equal doses of wit and pathos. “Murder Ballads Vol II: The Positive Reinforcement Campaign” is the first recorded output from an ongoing band project, launched in 2023, with the Norwegian percussion trio Pinquins (Sigrun Rogstad Gomnæs, Ane Marthe Sørlien…

On Antologica 1977 - 1990, Filippo Testa emerges from the Turin electronic underground as a quietly radical miniaturist, tracing thirteen years of music where chamber instrumentation, liturgical stillness and SMET‑forged electronics converge into a lucid, introspective panorama.

2024 Stock. 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 Is…

Ondanaconda does not compose with the jaw harp, but through it. For their self-titled debut album, the quartet turns this lamellophone, often perceived as archaic, into the record’s sole sound source. Found for centuries across continents, from Asia to Europe, the jaw harp is played against the teeth, using the mouth as a resonating chamber, shaping sound through breath and bodily movement. Here, amplified, prepared and sometimes pushed to its limits, it becomes percussion, bass, drone and textu…

Coming a couple of years after High Peak Selections, Early Music was the second 'studio' full-length album by Jon Collin. More spare and sparse than its predecessor, both in atmosphere and presentation (the track names are simply numbers), it's also perhaps more focused and consistent in terms of sound and mood (as well as instrumental set-up and recording locale). While High Peak Selections and later recordings feature environmental and external sounds bleeding in and out of recordings, the onl…

Recorded in churches and industrial buildings in the the North of England, and originally released on Winebox Press in 2013, High Peak Selections was the first full-length vinyl release by Jon Collin. Across its six mostly improvised tracks, it showcases an artist somewhat at odds with much of the wave of fingerpicking acoustic guitarists that was in the middle of breaking around this time. While the base technique here is still fingerstyle, his use of various preparations, metal slides, feedbac…

Ella Fitzgerald meets Gangsta Rap and the Beach Boys encounter their despotic father. American Psyche by Raymond Pettibon & Oliver Augst is an ABC of Jazz standards and nostalgia on speed, "that the world will never forget."

*2026 stock. 350 copies limited edition*  Keith Rowe - Guitar, Electronics, DrawingKjell Bjørgeengen - Video, Dave Jones Synthesizer Recorded by Byron WestbrookExperimental IntermediaNew York City, NY, USA5 December 2010 Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi Dedicated to Phill Niblock (1933 – 2024)

Tip! *300 copies limited edition* fold/interval is an audiovisual project and publishing and curatorial platform founded by Giuseppe Ielasi, Fabio Perletta and Giulia Bruno. This is their first release. Thirty minutes of guitar and electronics duos with a 12-page photo booklet and a letterpress sleeve.

Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart are a trio who utilize string instruments, voices, and manual tape effect processing to craft compositions from alternately tranquil and disquieting improvised music. The three musicians are individually rooted in deep sound exploration, multi-disciplinary composition, and all manner of cross-genre collaboration. The musical ground covered by their solo practices is correspondingly expansive, and their individual recording and performance credits read…