Anthology of Experimental Music From China
* Edition of 200 * China’s experimental music and sound art scene began to take shape in the post-Tiananmen era in the late 1990s. A few musicians from the mainland’s underground music scene started to experiment with new ways of making music while the music industry co-opted the once revolutionary and independent rock music scene. The Hong Kong based experimental musician Dickson Dee and the U.S. based artist Dajuin Yao introduced Western avant-garde, experimental music to the mainland through …
Silence Please
The 14th release on Good Morning comes from... Tapes! Along with fellow cult member's Taal Tarang Digitall, Riyaz Master and Raagini Pro, Tapes transcribes physical interaction into electrical energy on his first cassette release in almost 10 years! Uniquely personal & 100% originally composed, “Silence Please” see’s the London Dub Meister veer away from his past riddim traditions and see’s him dive into a totally different sonic environment! Light a stick of your favourite incense and let these…
Hymns from the Harbour
**Edition of 118 numbered audiophile golden CD** Best known as producer and mainman behind Dark Companion Records and the reborn Manticore Records, Max Marchini gives birth to his first solo album where he plays all instruments except for two collaborations with avant-garde singer songwriter Paola Tagliaferro and the amazing pakhawaj indian drum playing of Akhilesh Gundecha. This album was intended as a present for his friends for Dark Companion’s 5th anniversary, but eventually label insisted t…
Shakuhachi for Latin Lovers
* Edition of 70 * Clive Bell’s roots in British experimental music run deep. Many will know him for his frequent contributions as a writer for The Wire magazine, while others will know him for his sonic explorations that date back into the 1970s, both solo as well as in collaboration with New Jazz Syndicate, Peter Cusack, Jac Berrocal, Steve Beresford, Jah Wobble, David Ross, David Toop, Mike Cooper, and countless others.Bell is an accomplished player of the shakuhachi (Japanese flute), khene (T…
Taiwan Years
A stunning journey into the archives of one of the most fascinating composers / percussionists working today, Michael Ranta’s Taiwan Years, issued by Metaphon, is nothing short of a revelation, seamlessly binding acoustic interventions with a subtle pallet of electronic and electroacoustic ambiance in a landscape threaded by East-Asian esotericism, psychedelia, minimalism, and outright experimental avant-gardism.
Live at the Sky Church - September 3rd, 2004
The first new Sun City Girls release since Funeral Mariachi (2010), Live at the Sky Church is a performance that melds their signature alien-jazz improv, Asian-tinged psychedelia, and Middle Eastern meditations together with their ranting psychodrama. An audio and visual recording from Seattle in 2004 shows a group that is both aware and committed to its history, while still demonstrating the power of the experimental to drive an enormous cudgel through the heart of those who believe to have all…
Negoum
The music on this album was recorded in the studio the day after Frances-Marie Uitti and Ayman Fanous spent ten minutes improvising together in concert, in a first meeting. It represents bidirectional ideas in music often and erroneously thought to be opposites: western vs. eastern, improvised vs. through-composed. In this recording they are stood on their head, examined, dissected, tortured, and ultimately reconciled. Fanous says: “Musically, Frances and I came from two distinct sets of emphase…
Sir Richard Bishop and Ed Yazijian
Yet another luxurious spectacle from the Saraswati Series. Ex-Sun City Girls master guitarist Richard Bishop teams up with Cul De Sac’s long time Girls live collaborator Ed Yazijian. Two Grand Seigneurs of underground deliver an unique album deeply Western rooted, filled with the musical spirit and structures of Indian music at the same time. Elegant interplay, brilliantly arranged, using mostly guitar (lapsteel, tenor) and strings (viola), and some Indian stringed instrument which I can’t prono…
The Tower of Mirrors
25 years ago, David Shea released a crafty piece of complex philosophical and narrative audio collage: The Tower of Mirrors. Composed and produced in New York City, during September-October 1995, it includes 24 tracks, and features guests such as David Morley on analog synthesizer programming, Dave Douglas on trumpet, Zeena Parkins on piano and prepared piano, and Jim Pugliese on percussions.This is what David Shea had to say about it in 1995: "In 1994, I wrote a work based on the Hsi-Yu Chi nov…
Mantras
*Triple LP.* In June 2016, the great-outdoors music festival Echos asked Ernest Bergez aka Sourdure to produce a series of "Mantras" set to be diffused in between each concert of the twenty-four hours event taking place in the french Alpes. These pieces were played on the festival's gigantic speakers/ horns system in the afternoon, evening, night, morning, noon... and reverberated fully in the rocky valley. This triple vinyl edition gathers the field-recording-like captures of the tracks deliver…
Sweet Season
Glen Velez is perhaps not a household name, but let Emotional Rescue change that with this wonderfully curated collection of works from a masterful drum devotee. Velez has Latin American roots, and he has performed since the late '60s in New York, but his interest in percussion spans the globe and all kinds of hand drums. His respected techniques have been snapped up by collaborators like John Cage and Steve Reich, not least thanks to the advanced polyrhythmic modes he operates in. Don't be fool…
Kami
Since launching in middle 2000s, the dual imprint Sloowtapes / Slowax, founded and run by visual artist and musician, Bart De Paepe, has been proved to be among the more ambitious platforms for the wild and wonderful sounds emerging from the contemporary scenes of avant-garde and experimental music. Whether viewing individual releases, or the catalog as a total context, theirs is a world which pointedly defies easy definition and being nailed down. Slowax’s latest, Kami, a stunning collaboration…
Die Mauer
**500 copies** Die Mauer is a collection of previously unreleased music composed, performed and recorded by Michael Ranta in 1988/1989 for a ballet choreographed by Philippe Talard. CD is housed in a 6-panel fold out sleeve.
One Instrument Sessions 03
**200 copies** "For the latest chapter in the One Instrument Session series, we’re pleased to present the Indonesian artist Fahmi Mursyid. This mini-album includes six tracks that take the listener on a warm, experimental journey of varying timbres.The artist has always had a personal interest in traditional Indonesian instruments, specifically from Sundanese culture, the second largest Indonesian ethnic group, native to the western part of the Island of Java.Paying homage to this source of insp…
Assyrian Caesarean
**300 copies ** Chicago-based percussionist Michael Zerang presents his first solo recording after a long career as an exploratory musician and composer. Recorded and mixed by Matt Bordin in the woods at (the new) Outside Inside Studio, the album features a range of approaches to percussion that Zerang has developed over the years, including the use of vibrating drumhead surfaces, expressive friction passages, multiple timbre percussion, and straight up trap-set drumming - all infused with a ric…