Experimental / Minimalism

Yvan Etienne creates sound installations and performances blending composition and perception. His work explores acoustic and electronic spaces, memory, and psyche, often in site-specific contexts.

Thank you : floors, walls, ceilings, corridors, chairs, tables, air-conditioners, heaters, alarms, plastic, paper, foil, tins, boxes, containers, microphones, speakers, shellac, tape, magnets, dust, data, hollows, surfaces, bodies, actions, weather, vibration, Jennifer Callaway, Carly Fischer, Eric la Casa, David Prescott-steed, Martin Kay, Matthew Davis, Francisco Meirino, Justas Pipinis, Ursss, everyone from C3, Simon Whetham, Edwina Eves, Yvan Etienne, Chisato Ishiyama, Pierre Judon, Aposiopè…

The Duke of Wellington is a vivid portrait of Derek Bailey and John Stevens in spontaneous conversation, recorded live at a London pub in 1989. The set captures their dynamic synergy; jagged guitar and agile percussion interlock and diverge in an unrepeatable display of free improvisational skill.

*75 copies limited edition* DNZ122 Drew Wesely – Silence is a Sharpened Blade Silence is a Sharpened Blade speaks in the language of materiality — a stripped bare mantra of nylon and wood conjures unspoken and veiled interiors, channeling the intimacy of a single guitar alone in a room. Silence is a mirror, a shadow, an absence. It speaks when words fail in the poetry of negative numbers. Where do we go when the lights burn out? What is beauty in hell? What can pierce a heart of stone? Silence i…

“La Proyección”, the debut LP by Jose María Lluch, architect and musician from San Sebastian, appears as a transition, a gradual shift that happened over time. Intimate and innocent, disconnected and erratic at times, the 11 compositions presented here are extracted from recordings spanning 9 years, between 2015-2024. Humbly assorted in his home studio, the music here is for letting your mind drift. The processes of composition, recording, and editing intertwine. Field recordings from daily chor…

"Impassable moments lingering in the present,” utters Beth Robertson, the soft spoken voice cresting over a jostle of harmonics, creaks and knocks. “Existing just after us but before her. Everything lingers.” It’s inevitable that a record inspired by gigantic mounds of waste should be rich in the residue of the past, yet it’s striking to hear these atmospheres crackle with future-facing anticipation. Out of the sounds salvaged and recycled from previous performances at Tokoro Studio, we hear all…

The experimental landmark Opera by FNTC returns in a remastered CD edition, nearly forty years after its original cassette release on Staalplaat in 1987. A striking document of Europe's late 80s cassette underground, Opera captures the collective at their most adventurous - merging spontaneous composition, sound collage and performance art into a single immersive experience. As a member of the Fluxus movement, Willem de Ridder brought his conceptual sensibility to the project, pushing the bounda…

Yara Asmar’s new album, “everyone I love is sleeping and I love them so so much”, presents 11 pieces recorded over the past year between the small town of Alfred in upstate New York and Beirut. These sometimes fragile and tentative sound sketches reflect the times as Yara steps out, as if onto ice, into a new life on a new continent. She works with unfamiliar instruments, new materials and new sounds to build on her intimate style; homemade mechanical music boxes and a personal archive of family…

*50 copies limited edition* Chaparral is a collection of field recordings, drones recorded on trumpet and trombone, feedback from a metal sheet and mixer, and various samples, including heartbeat, bells, and pencil on paper. The three pieces came together over the course of December 2025 to March 2026, drawing from improvised material and found sounds, combined to gradually create a sense of structure. The work is concerned with Nev Wendell’s relationship to the city she lives in at this point i…

*100 copies limited edition* First public release by Pittsburgh / WV area noise artist. Weird, tape-centric stuff. a f ish -- wears a hat, hiccup as usual, the expect ed ; uun til, some thing other th an. Packaged in foldover bag with inserts and packing tape / xerox banderole affixed to tape

Before history will be made by machines, British musician Thomas Bush sends a new humane record. DIY chamber music, for the Kashual, no Plastik. Ten curious arrangements, looking for new horizons, those hiding behind the previous. They are short, they are epic. A great beautiful mess, in which Thomas Bush occasionally sings and speaks in veiled pitch. On hallucinated rhythms. Along the guitar, that’s everywhere. As chord. As melody. As sound. As a sliding desert stoner. Droning, zoning. Keeping …

Sull’Accordo Mimetico (On the Mimetic Chord) dates back to the end of the 80’s. It was commissioned by the artistic director of the ParcoScenico Festival, held in Treviso, Italy. Since the area where artists and the public gathered after the Festival was located to a very busy street, Marco asked me for a sound installation that could work as some sort of a defensive barrier for the street noise. I suggested that my work, rather than hiding the noise, should aim to harmonize the disturbances com…

A leading saxophonist on the Japanese improvised music scene, Junji Hirose also gives performances using self-made analog noise instruments. It was in the 1980s that Hirose started presenting noise performances on his SSI (self-made sound instrument), made of various everyday objects. Over the years he continually modified the instrument, for each version attaching a different number to the name SSI. On the Hitorri label, Hirose has released the CDs "SSI-4" (hitorri-997 / 2013), "SSI-5" (hitorri…

*250 copies limited edition* Three Chinese musicians performed at Ftarri, Tokyo, on January 2, 2024. Li Song is a computer programmer and musician who lives in London. Zhao Cong and Zhu Wenbo are experimental/improvisational musicians based in Beijing. This album is made up of two performances (each over 30 minutes): "The Invisible Tangerine," a duo by Zhao Cong and Li Song, and "Three Lines," a trio by Li Song, Zhao Cong and Zhu Wenbo. The compelling feature of "The Invisible Tangerine" is the …

Seijiro Murayama is a Paris-based drummer, percussionist, improviser and composer. It was in 2009 that he first released CDs on the Ftarri labels Hitorri, Ftarri and Meena. He has since released over ten CDs of performances in solo, duo, trio and quartet formations. "Uchidome," Murayama’s fifth solo album from the Hitorri label, consists of three tracks recorded in France in January 2025. All his drum solo albums are outstanding, and this CD, with its unique and inimitable performances, is no ex…

*300 copies limited edition* Pianist Fumi Endo, alto saxophone player Kanon Aonami and Tokyo-based British guitarist Sean Colum have performed together several times in duo and trio formats at Ftarri, Tokyo. The year 2023 saw the release of "Kanon Aonami Composed Works" (meenna-954), an album consisting of duo and trio performances by these three musicians. On January 3, 2024, Taku Sugimoto, a guitarist/composer renowned on the international improvised/experimental music scene, joined the three …

Mausoleum is the latest release by David Jackman, following the eight-part David Jackman / Organum Electronics Subscription Series issued by Die Stadt between 2023 and 2025. While continuing concerns explored throughout the Subscription Series, Mausoleum also recalls aspects of earlier Organum recordings such as Horii and Rasa. The spatial placement of sound, use of low frequencies, and distinctive sense of duration remain central to the work. The recording is built from recurring elements inclu…

*150 copies limited edition* Tomoyoshi Date and Stijn Hüwels met for the first time in 2015 in Tokyo, being introduced to each other by Chihei Hatakeyama. That same evening, they recorded what would later become Hochu-Ekki-Tou, their first album, released on Home Normal in 2019, followed by 遠き火、遠き雲 (A Distant Fire, A Distant Cloud) in 2021 on Laaps. Tomoyoshi Date creates acoustic and organic sounds with a little touch of digital processing. He began to create electronic music in 1998. In 2003, …

To quote Pitchfork, this is 'one of the most sumptuous, spiritual ambient albums of any era or provenance.

On Country / The Country, J.WLSN and Liam Keenan pare things back to the bone, using repetition, space and grain to sketch a faint, flickering idea of “country” where landscape, memory and rusted‑out song forms quietly bleed into one another.

Gamut inc presents their first album for computer-controlled pipe organ, transforming Berlin's second largest instrument into an acoustic synthesizer — exploring overtone series, cascading canons and spectral transformations.In 2010, Marion Wörle and Maciej Śledziecki discovered that pipe organs could be controlled via MIDI. This technique, largely ignored by the organ world, became the foundation for a fundamental rethinking of the instrument. Over fifteen years, they developed sophisticated al…

Sacro Bosco (“Sacred Grove”) is the starting point for Anna von Hausswolff’s All Thoughts Fly. Here in solo instrumental mode, the entire record consists of just one instrument, the organ, and represents absolute liberation of the imagination. All Thoughts Fly radiates a melancholic beauty, and is distinguished by fluid transitions of contrasting elements; calmness and drama, harmony and dissonance, much like the place that inspires the music. Sacro Bosco is a garden, based in the centre of Ital…

*300 copies limited edition* Tremble With Joy is a new collaboration between Cinder (Cindytalk), Michael Anderson (Drekka), Mark Trecka, and Michael Carlson (remst8). Their debut, >Born Trembling<, comprises two longform, complementary experimental compositions. >Born Trembling< is the first in a series of limited edition CD releases from False Walls: 300 copies each, including visual artwork by David Caines and letterpress packaging by Hellbox Letter Foundry (Kent, UK). This is the second relea…

A solo improvisation and composition by Lionel Garcin (on soprano saxophone) inspired by listening to natural environments and built on exploring the harmonic possibilities of the instrument.

Totally beautiful and rare piano performance from Loren Connors, joined on guitar by long time collaborator Alan Licht.

In their third collaboration, the shared project between Merzbow and Pedro Vian shifts towards less confrontational and more introspective terrain. Bardo Thödol, released as an LP, draws on The Tibetan Book of the Dead not so much as an explicit narrative framework but as a conceptual resonance: a passage, a suspension between states. Where Inside Richard Serra Sculptures and The Wheel of Mani foregrounded a relatively defined dialectic between Vian’s environmental restraint and Masami Akita’s i…

On Uchuu, Oowets drifts into their most abstract work yet, blending tapped cloth boxes, reed organ warmth and bedside field recordings into a gentle, cosmic meditation where minimal rhythms and environmental sounds merge science and nature into a single, weightless drift.

German ambient musician.He was briefly a member of the krautrock band Popol Vuh in the early 1970s where he played on the albums Hosianna Mantra and Seligpreisung. Comes in jewel case with slipcase.

Limited edition of 50 copies on purple vinyl. A meeting of two uncompromising sound artists, Carlos Giffoni and Joachim Nordwall, New Music fuses pulsating electronic rhythms, immersive drones, and abstract textures into a vivid, physical listening experience. Emerging from the outer edges of techno, noise, and electro-acoustic composition, both artists channel their distinct sonic vocabularies into a shared space of tension and transformation. Giffoni's deep synth drones collide with Nordwall's…

During a 2016 trip to Colombia, I was very fortunate to be welcomed by the staff of the Rio Claro Natural Reserve, located in the central Cordillera. After several days of recording in the caves—the ones open to the public—inhabited by small colonies of cave-dwelling Guacharos (Steatornis caripensis), Juan Guillermo Garcés, director and founder of the Rio Claro sanctuary, allowed me to access a secret location outside of the reserve, home to what ornithologists reckon is one of the largest known…

"Halfway between the Summer Solstice and Autumn Equinox falls the pagan Lughnasadh festival marking the beginning of the harvest season in Ireland. Pas de la Demi-Lune was originally composed and performed for this festival in a celebration event organized by Phelim Ó Laoghaire. For that occasion, Dylan performed the piece in the river crossing leading to the Brennanstown Dolmen in Co. Dublin, a megalith portal tomb estimated to have been erected sometime in 4000-2500 BC. They chose to record in…

"I call it ‘the Shadow Pattern Vignette’. A fragmentary and pleasingly non-discriminatory exercise in audio capture which, when sequenced, compiled or arranged alongside other such vignettes, leads to the finished work of Nate Ivanco’s Shadow Pattern. You can reach into the hermetic depths of his Hamilton Tapes micro label, recent transatlantic appearances via Infant Tree, Chocolate Monk or adhuman, or indeed, this new LP ‘Live at Somewhere’ and find the Shadow Pattern Vignette. Forever in evide…

The Vestige is the first fruit of a new intergenerational collaboration between Giuseppe Ielasi, a quietly prolific key contributor to the European experimental music scene for over twenty years, and Jack Sheen, a young composer-conductor-sound artist from Manchester whose recent projects have seen him moving seamlessly from enigmatic chamber music composition and installations to conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. Their materials and working methods differ significantly, with Ielasi havi…

“On ‘Dissolving Strawberry’ (2020)” is a collection of interpretive sound compositions thematically centered around the titular painting by Swedish artist Christine Ödlund.
 “Dissolving Strawberry” (2020) portrays an ongoing decomposition process through several parallel perspectives, or planes – molecular and cosmic, as well as symbolic – by means of color pigments produced from the strawberry plant itself. Transfer of knowledge and exchange of meaning between plant and animal world is a consta…

On Hyperit, Nev Lilit (Hedvig Jennefelt) turns a performance‑lecture into elemental sound‑theatre, carving electronic landscapes from dirt, magma and meteorite lore until you feel less like a listener than something buried inside the mountain.

*2026 stock. 60 copies limited edition* Tela is the full-length debut of Stockholm-based composer Simon Hansson and was recorded in April 2024. Across its four movements, waves of pulsating feedback are woven into a dense sonic fabric. The title 'Tela' refers to plain weave, or simply cloth, reflecting the intricate processes of over-under interlay that structure the material. Recursive patterns and constant iteration unfold at a glacial pace, continuing Hansson's exploration that defines his si…

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.

Sam Andreae, Li Song, and Rory Salter are UK based artists. All of them perform and present their works in a minimalist style, and they are all noteworthy figures among current artists who take an experimental approach. As the title suggests, this work consists of four performances using three melodicas. Silence and sustained sounds produced by the instruments appear and disappear, creating single notes and harmonics. They are performances of intense concentration, and at the same time, it is a …

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…

In Finnish language Alkeis is not exactly a full word, but functions more like a prefix, meaning rudimentary or primitive. It communicates well the habitus of the crude oscillations that are inspected here: the smallest possible, single-cell organism devoid of thought, driven by instinct. Liskoaivo is a finnish word for "lizard brain", the region of the brain that regulates our primitive reactions.As sophisticated as oscillators and modular synthesis might be, at the core lies an unexplainable u…