Experimental / Free Improvisation

The debut album of the French master improviser from the early 80s finally available again! her impressive release-list over the years - solo, duos, trios, big projects – shows a range of works with most of the current improvisers, to new music (Cage, Scelsi) and dance and theatre with two main constants - playing live plus the celebration of improvisation. This album here shows in a wonderful way how it all started – a strong player with her voice and her instrument. Recorded at Studio Achille,…

Solo percussion by Sven-Åke Johansson, recorded at his SÅJ Studio in Berlin in March 2010: fifteen short pieces named after Swedish surnames, rolls, cymbals and a towel flicking on the drum skin.

Percussionists Burkhard Beins and Sven-Åke Johansson with harpist Rhodri Davies, recorded at Sowieso in Berlin in 2013 and 2015: acoustic sounds that come close to electronics, plus a harp solo by Davies.

Berlin trio improvisation recorded in June 2015 by Liz Allbee on trumpet and seashell, Annette Krebs on electric guitar and electronics and Sven-Åke Johansson on percussion, with notes by Thomas Millroth.

*218 copies limited edition* An LP split between old friends of the weirdo American Underground converges on this 180 gram slab of adventurous out-sounds blurring the boundaries of genre. The duo of Max Nordile and Justin Clifford Rhody deliver high energy bursts of noisy free jazz and a live, slow-burning piece (titled Semi-Rural) that rings reminiscent of Lol Coxhill and Loren Connors carrying out a ritual invocation far from the red carpets of Hollywood. Prior to this album the duo had only r…

*40 copies limited edition* We’re living through a difficult period to be publishing creative music (which is really the least of our problems!) And the 7” format seems to have taken an exceptionally hard blow, with apparently little interest from pressing plants in making the format affordable again. But at Physical we’re thoroughly convinced that the little record is a perfect platform for big ideas, and we plan to stay a believer despite financial hardship and almost zero commercial viability…

The Finnish-Norwegian trio of Olavi Louhivuori, Eivind Lønning and Kim Myhr make their debut with Nubes, released by We Jazz Records on September 25. Recorded at We Jazz Festival in Helsinki in 2021, the album’s organic flow moves beyond genre, building a sound world that gains intensity slowly and surely as the piece progresses. The music of the trio, documented when joining forces here for the first time, sounds unified, confident and searching, taking the listener to places far from the obvio…

Jonah Parzen-Johnson & Lau Nau return with a double CD edition on We Jazz Records bringing together their 2025 debut duo release A Few We Remember first time on CD, plus a live recording from the album release tour recorded in Bolzano, Italy, in April 2026. In April of 2026, Lau Nau (Laura Naukkarinen) and Jonah Parzen-Johnson crossed into Italy separately and made their way by train to meet in Bolzano for their first tour together. There was a bit of the energy of the first day of school. Nervo…

Corbett vs. Dempsey is thrilled to announce the release of ‘Reason’, the second album from international free music quartet The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.

IVM Trio is made up of percussionist & composer Sébastien Forrester, producer & visual artist Mika Oki, and artist & producer Apulati Bien. All three sit within the French-Brussels axis, united by a shared love of free improvisation, sparse atmospherics and rapturous club mutations. Explain Yourselves is a genuinely exploratory record — abstraction and contemplation sit side by side, as the trio dives into the micro-precision of computer music while mirroring organic, environmental schemes. Thes…

*250 copies limited edition* First release from Channel 4, a new Berlin–London based quartet. Emerging from the duo Paroxysm (Werner Dafeldecker & Roy Carroll), whose work has been developing since 2019. The group grew out of a 2025 Ireland tour with saxophonist John Butcher and was completed after a London concert and recording session with violinist Angharad Davies. Drawing on decades of shared history — including Dafeldecker and Butcher’s long collaboration in the influential group Polwechsel…

Lummer is the Swedish name for the now protected family of vascular plants (Clubmoss/Lycopodiaceae). Lummer grows slowly and the spores with which it reproduces can take 12—20 years to develop. These spores, known as Nikt in Swedish, were once ground into an extremely flammable light yellow “old woman’s gunpowder” that was used for early theatrical pyrotechnics. Volatile and explosive, Lummernikt requires careful handling. There is something of the small scale dangerous in Finn Loxbo’s Lummernik…

Body/Head's Bill Nace on taishogoto and Purling Hiss' Mike Polizze on guitar in their first duo set, caught on a phone at Philadelphia's Pageant Soloveev in May 2025: twenty-three minutes of amplified free string playing on a one-sided LP.

»Memorial« grew out of Nate Wooley’s work alongside Annea Lockwood recording the Columbia River, and in particular from a visit to Kettle Falls in northern Washington, once one of the river’s great salmon fishing and meeting grounds and a place of enormous importance to the Sinixt and other Indigenous peoples of the Upper Columbia. The falls disappeared from view following the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam in 1940, submerged beneath what is now Lake Roosevelt, yet beneath the still surfac…

*150 copies limitede edition* Originally released by Umor Rex on cassette in 2015, NK012 documents the first-ever musical meeting of Berlin-based musicians Aidan Baker (Nadja, Canada), Andrea Belfi (Italy), and Erik Skodvin (Svarte Greiner / Deaf Center, Norway). Now, more than a decade later, the album is available on vinyl for the first time, newly remastered for the format by Rafael Anton Irisarri. This marks the third release in a series of four special, limited reissues to be released in 20…

*150 copies limited edition* Derma emerges from my dialogue with music, space, and silence. It is an immersive sonic experience where every gesture is guided by the here and now—by raw emotion, sensory perception, and the act of creation itself. Through the use of extended techniques, the performance evolves into a unique, unpredictable path where distinct soundscapes merge into a deep, continuous flow. The core of the sound lies in the tactile relationship between the drum skin and the objects …

Been a fan of Brian Ruryk since the early 90's when Pete Larson convinced me to buy his Out Guitar Explosion 7" on the classic Stomach Ache label. Fan for life! So honored to release this new cassette of garbage throwing tape cut-up guitar spasticity. Twenty things happen before you blink...brains blast out of ears... fly back into nostrils... next thing ya know yer using guitar strings as dental floss. Thats a warning!

On Untitled (Solo for the Building of a Museum), Tony Conrad stages an unseen encounter between amplified violin and his self-built Long String Instrument. Recorded in 2002 behind a concealing sheet, the performance turns drone, friction and physical resonance into an act of radical listening - music whose hidden actions remain inseparable from its vast, exposed sound.

Which is the more productive situation for improvisation: the shock of the first time encounter, unhindered by history or habit, or the long-term association and the evolution of more complex interactions? It's an unresolved, perhaps even undecidable, question. This recording brings together four improvisers together in a multi-layered situation which combines multiple permutations of the untried and the familiar. The four had never all played together before but the quartet contains various his…

*300 copies limited edition* Berlin-based percussionist and vocalist Teresa Riemann presents Can I stare at you publicly?, a new collection of solo works for percussion and voice. The pieces are meticulously composed, while their origins lie in improvisation, and improvisation remains part of the way Riemann performs them. The compositions stay open, allowing her to interpret them differently each time and keeping the music in a state of movement rather than fixing it into a final form. On “The …

*2026 stock. 100 copies limited edition* "Bill Harris is a community builder first and foremost. As one of the founders of the Amalgam collective, he has helped to keep Chicago’s storied improvised music scene together through the dark ages of the 2020s. Additionally, his studio space Marmalade has hosted performances from some of the most boundary-pushing voices of contemporary experimental music - artists such as Charmaine Lee, Brandon Lopez, Sandy Ewen and more - during a time in which such s…

»Baby Ghost« is the debut album by double bassist and vocalist Jordan Sand. Released through Hallow Ground, it blurs the lines between different genres and modes of expressions, improvisation and composition and showcases the unique playing style the composer has developed. Sand blends her voice with the bowed harmonics and subharmonics of her double bass. At once conceptually rigorous and musically open-ended, Sand’s wordless meditations on death and what comes after are both visceral and explo…

*2026 stock* Zach Cooper weaves recordings with the Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble, high school demos, solo compositions and eraserhead-less tape experiments into the shining fabric of The Sentence. A debut album brimming with many talents and tales, The Sentence is atemporal, a divining of Cooper’s personal history to map his musical travels through formative years in New York state, his studies and collaborations within the University of Vermont’s music theory and composition department, …

*2026 stock* Polish drummer and composer Tomek Chołoniewski presents Music To Make Your Body Suffer, a visceral and uncompromising album that treats percussion not simply as rhythm, but as a force capable of transforming the entire body. Raw, intense, and deeply physical, the record explores the boundaries between composition and improvisation, control and release, structure and collapse. In Chołoniewski’s hands, the drum kit becomes a laboratory of sound: an instrument of impact, resistance, re…

2026 stock "A vibraphone, a snare drum, a knitting needle, a cymbal, and a marimba compose five flickering points: stars at the threshold between perceptibility and deep space. The constellation they form shimmers dully, its design clearly painterly, but out of grasp. I stand on the outskirts of a large city, trying to keep them all in view. But, I just can’t make out anything. So instead, I fix myself to a singular point of the five. My eyes strain and tremor as I gaze at one star amongst trill…

*2026 stock* Split The Sky, Sheets Dipped In Chrome is a new album from Chaz Prymek & Seth Andrew Davis. This recording was a long time coming, with both Prymek & Davis in discussion for a long time about when and how to collaborate after connecting online. The duo first performed together in Kansas City at Farewell in December 2022 and from there developed a sound together. The music heard here varies from sparse introspection, energetic catharsis, and the exploration of a new landscape created…

Bolt Of Void // Performance DocumentRecorded Live AtDuct // Nagoya JapanSubstore // Koenji-TokyoJuly 2026

"There are fewer great guitar trio records than you'd suspect. Guitar duo sessions are far more abundant, and these three players have all done their share of those. But the dynamics of a trio are more-fickle. And when creating collaborative non-hierarchical music, maintaining a balance between three distinct voices is not easy. It requires rapt attention, a fearless approach to entering the unknown, and very good ears to do it successfully. Clearly, Connors, Vallera, and Sharp display mastery o…

*2026 stock* Following 'Passenger' (tsss tapes, 2023), Ted Byrnes & Jeph Jerman Play Drums is a further exploration of percussive collaboration. Recorded in much the same way (iterative file exchange), Play Drums is quite literal in its title. It is entirely acoustic, with both participants playing a conventional drum set, albeit *all* parts of it. The recording is dedicated to Tim Barnes, close friend and constant source of inspiration to both Ted and Jeph.

Tip! "Whether we experience music as abstract or concrete depends largely on our sensitivity to the richness of perception. Common opinion – often reductive – draws a sharp distinction: music is abstract when it does not “speak,” when it seems diffuse, branching into multiple, elusive directions. It is concrete when it “tells” a story, when its sounds and structures feel familiar, graspable. Yet this distinction quickly dissolves. From a scientific or cognitive perspective, structure itself is i…

Pierre Bastien and Christophe Petchanatz (aka Klimperei) met more than twenty years after their last musical collaboration. “Aeroplane Chess”—what is that? It’s the Hong Kong name for the universal game known here as “Ludo.” Pierre and Christophe play together here on sixteen simple, stripped-down tracks. They pass back and forth their figurines made of melodies, sounds, and rhythms, creating a minimal yet dense ensemble, with nothing missing from these two record jockeys. It brings to mind the …

Insane," or in French, "un truc de malade": expressions often used to describe a strange work of art, a daring piece of architecture, or an experimental piece of music. It’s a comment that should be taken figuratively: not necessarily pejorative, and most often even positive. In contrast, the music of this album reflects a "sick" theme in the true sense of the word, as the two protagonists chose to resume their twenty-year collaboration in the antechamber of a hematologist's office. The album’s …

For a while the trio just called itself "Me, you and Sue", which suited them - none of the three has ever seemed especially concerned with naming things. Adam Bohman, Sue Lynch and Crystabel Efemena Riley found each other through London's Horse Improvised Music Club and have been playing together in various rooms for years. This is their first record as a three, and it needed a real title. Lynboril Lisinopril takes Lyn(ch), Bo(hman) and Ril(ey), puts the invented word into a search engine and ke…

* Edition of 100 copies * Chant is the starting point. Not chant as decoration or as a mood, but late medieval chant as a compositional problem, taken up by someone working alone with a bass clarinet, a piccolo, her own voice and a rack of analogue electronics. Emily Rach Beisel has described what drew her to it: music from before the rules hardened, with a wild freedom and density that later codification would take away. Multiple voices, as she puts it, "both intertwined and independent." Which…

Second An'archives album from Tokyo trio archeus - Keiko Higuchi, Shizuo Uchida and Tomo - recorded in a single day in Koenji, with guest Kiyotaka Moriuchi on two pieces. Free improvisation moving from dense noise to near-silence. Edition of 290 with silkscreened jacket and obi.

Bill Orcutt built The Four Louies by dropping Steve Reich's Four Organs onto "Louie Louie" - two of the most stubborn riffs in American music, high minimalism and dumb garage, forced into the same frame. This is what happened when he took it off the record and into a room. At Roulette last March the four organs became six, the rock trio swelled into a small army, and the plunderphonic stiffness of the studio version simply burned off. Six organists, twin drummers, William Winant on maracas, Chri…

*40 copies limited edition* "Midlife Crisis Ambient Moniker" is a Personal Greatest Hits. A Selected Ambient Works Volume 1. Lost Episodes. Archival Deep Dive. Bastard tracks with no home nor family, but with proximity to one another. Unreleased recordings dating as far back as 2014, with source material as old as 2004. There’s even a few songs that once saw the light of day, but never got their time in the sun (“Drain, When It Hit Me,” excerpts from “Earth Day…”). Many of these recordings were …

*28 copies limited edition* Lofi Experimental Cassette label focusing on reuse. Breathing new life into unwanted ephemera.    Jabe Ledoux: Percussionnd dentico: electric bass, magnetic tape, field recordings

Descending from the first volume, Variierende Töne vol.II retraces the essential threads of the label, this time through two parallel perspectives: membranes + machines. A continuity of path, where past and future blur into new readings, into sounds that move between repose and tension, between presence and absence. The work is divided into two movements. Side A: an immersion in organic matter—field recordings, acoustic research, surfaces shaped by Hanna Maria & Mattia Onori, Marco Ragni & Leona…

Violeta García and Hora Lunga return with 4ever, their second album and the follow-up to I’ll Wait For You In The Car Park. Released in 2025 on -ous, their debut received airplay on BBC and NTS and was selected for Bandcamp’s Best Experimental Music year-end list. 4ever picks up where that record left off: in ordinary moments, small scenes and the strange emotional weight of being somewhere between places. But here, these moments are stretched across a much larger, darker screen. A night flight,…