Experimental / Solo Instrument

Lou Gare's first solo recordings: five improvisations for tenor saxophone, recorded at Firefly Studios, Throwleigh, Devon, on 13 and 20 April 2005, with liner notes by Seymour Wright.

"It is raw material rather than tool. Polished metal body or beslavered tube. Just tenor sax at the end of its pilgrimage. It is sculptural object - assemblage without original function rather than a museum artefact of musical viruosity. Heavy metals flowing through the sewer from the concert hall. Small scrap dried by sunlights. Bubbling, squealing and rustling. Circular breathing - as if you have been blowing glass. Objects shaped by breath. Sébastien Branche as a sculptor and a bricolier."Séb…

**200 copies** Western Songs marks the first time Nathan Amundson is releasing music under his own name. This record is his first for Silentes, and features two side-long late night instrumental guitar jams evoking the vast, arid landscape surrounding his home state of Colorado.  Minimalist singer/songwriter Nathan Amundson began recording as Rivulets in 1999, when his self-titled debut was issued by Chairkickers Union, the Duluth, Minnesota label run by the veteran slowcore outfit Low. Since t…

**Edition of 300** Reynols is back! More than fifteen years after their separation, the most insane combo of the galaxy and beyond will therefore continue to surprise us. And what a return since they are accompanied by some no less eccentric friends, namely the group Acid Mothers Temple.  On one side the Argentinian group guided by the drummer-singer-spirit Miguel Tomasin, known for his embodied chants, his absurd proposals and his chromosome 21 in three triplicate, on the other, the Japanese gr…

Expanded reissue of New Zealand guitar pioneer Roy Montgomery's rare and revered full-length debut, Scenes From The South Island, originally released in 1995 by West Coast experimental / space rock label Drunken Fish. Recorded on both coasts on a pair of Tascam 4-tracks, the album is alternately wistful, windswept, skeletal, shredded, and strange. Solo guitar figures flow and fray through echo and empty space, evoking loss, long roads, and low-lit landscapes.Montgomery's own memories of this era…

Martina Verhoeven has been working on the development of her own photographic style for about 20 years, almost parallel to this process Martina took up the electric fretless bass when recording the two criticaly-acclaimed 3 Seconds Of Air albums (with Dirk Serries). As her photography continues to grow, expand and develop, slowly mutating into collages on canvas, so does her approach to music. Switching from electric bass to double bass to piano, she slowly mastered a technique that's exceptiona…

Reinhold Friedl and Dirk Dresselhaus come from really different backgrounds: Dirk Dresselhaus has released several experimental-electronic freak-pop recordings as Schneider TM since the late '90s. He started making music in the late '80s and developed his personal approach to sound and structure as an autodidact, starting with guitar effect devices and four-track home-recording. Reinhold Friedl studied mathematics and music, won scholarships and international commissions, and built up the ensemb…

**Limited edition of 300 copies with a download code** Canadian Blake Hargreaves got deeply into classical music and specifically the church organ as a child. When he was 11, he accidentally discovered that some of his school friends sang in a church choir. Once, during practice at school, they belted out the kind of high notes that would turn the students’ heads and the singers’ faces red. Impressed, and encouraged by the fact that choir membership entailed getting paid, Hargreaves wanted in. H…

"Tom Cora made his musical debut as drummer on a local US television programme. In the mid 1970s he played guitar for a Washington, D.C. jazz club house band. He took up the cello while an undergraduate at the University of Virginia and studied with cellist Pablo Casals' student Luis Garcia-Renart and later with vibraphonist Karl Berger. During this time he formed his own group, The Moose Skowron Tuned Metal Ensemble and began constructing instruments for it.In 1979 Cora moved to New York City w…

**200 copies** Lebanese saxophonist Christine Abdelnour brings an impressive, extended instrumental vocabulary to Joachim Nordwall’s cryptic electronics in this live recording made at Ystad Konstmuseum for Sweden’s Firework Edition Recordings.Falling deeply within the label’s taste for sounds that exist on the liminal edge of perception, A Higher State of Body and Mind sees Abdelnour coaxing spittle-inflected small sounds and bestial whimpers from her brass tool while Nordwall colours the negati…

**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…

It is with such pleasure that I introduce the first vinyl LP by composer/event-maker Charlie Morrow.  Toot! Too culls performance recordings from 1970 to 2014.  It focuses on his Wave Music series, which are compositions based around swarms of like-instruments; i.e. sixty clarinets, conch choruses, and an army of drums and bugle horns, etc. A personal favorite is the 1978 piece, “100 Musicians With Lights” which was performed at dusk in Central Park. One hundred players (brass, reeds, percussion…

Double LP version. Includes a bonus track: Philip Glass's "Etude n°5". Inland is Vanessa Wagner's continuation of the exploration of the minimalist composers register to complete the solo continuum of the Statea released in 2016 with the Mexican producer Murcof. Inland highlights a set of pieces, mostly rare or unavailable to date (Moondog, Nico Muhly, William Susman, Bryce Dessner, Gavin Bryars...) and some other well known (Philip Glass, Wim Mertens, Michael Nyman) that Vanessa Wagner performs…

**300 copies** "On the morning of January 20th, 2019, I was woken up especially early at 8am (that's early for me anyway) by the sound of freezing rain bouncing off my bedroom window. Rather than trying to go back to sleep I impulsively got up, put on some clothes, brought my two autoharps, a digital recorder, a plastic tote (to protect the recorder from the elements) and an old card table outside, I set the autoharps up on the table so the freezing rain would hit the strings, placed the recorde…

Phill Niblock's Music For Cello collects three pieces from the '70s and early '80s, performed by cellist David Gibson. This CD includes a 16-page unpublished interview with Niblock. Since the late sixties Phill Niblock has been composing long-form acoustic drones with a focus on the rhythms and overtones that rise from closely tuned instruments. His highly original and influential music is an exploration of timbre, microtonality, stability, duration and psychoacoustic phenomenon."3 To 7 - 196' i…

Zeitkratzer's boss revisits the piano guts some years after his much acclaimed and genre-defying album Inside Piano (2011). While Reinhold Friedl's first solo album defined the practice of playing on the strings of a grand piano and revealed the source of sounds we couldn't identify on some of Zeitkratzer's recordings, Music For Piano, ... Spring/Flower/Cracker/Stream, brings concrete and quasi electroacoustic sounds together with clearly articulated piano notes. In the enigmatically titled Musi…

Dark and gloomy string arrangements by Michigan’s Michael Collino (Dog Lady Island, Alien Passengers) on both sides, concluding to an intentional dragged out silence on side B to complete those sounds of loss. “Funeral Zither” at its best.   

A trumpeter and improviser living in Mexico City, over the last ten years Jacob Wick has become known for deconstructing the instrument itself and any expectations of how it "should" be played. The explorations on Feelfocus on sound as it relates to specific spaces and in turn the subtle but profound connections they have to emotions and the body. The result is a highly personal music that is both unique and immediate, abstract yet undeniably visceral. On Feel, Wick creates two intense side-long…

Nearly 15 years after the edition “Maison.House II-V” – in duet with his electroacoustic friend Eric La Casa – Vert Pituite La Belle is pleased to collaborate once again with Jean-Luc Guionnet, this time alone and at the organ.For Arantzazu Close & Far, the vinyl medium makes perfect sense: two sides, two versions of the same sound event, the recording of the same improvisation on the organ of the basilica of the monastery of Arantzazu in the Spanish Basque country, realized during a residency o…

A new album of piano driven ambient music from British composer Robert Haigh. Following in the path of his albums for the Japanese Siren label, Creatures of the Deep is an underground vantage of a meeting between the musical worlds of Harold Budd and Erik Satie.  With a storied musical career that has ranged widely in style — from his industrial-avant-garde works on Nurse With Wound’s United Diaries label as SEMA to his legendary ambient drum and bass records as Omni Trio on Moving Shadow — Robe…

**Art edition of 100 copies, hand-painted and -drawn by Loren Connors** Before the spectral, romantic electric guitar miniatures for which he is celebrated today, Loren Connors recorded a string of nine solo acoustic guitar improvisations under the name of Loren Mazzacane between 1979 and 1980. The records feature Loren's contorted impressions of Delta and country blues, persistently kneaded into sidelong guitar excursions entangled with wordless, mournful vocal utterances, hummed and moaned in …

Recorded at Ftarri, Tokyo, 28. Limited edition, 200 copies. Lovingly recorded on acoustic guitar, his improvisations have the spiky quality associated with the elder statesman of the freely improvised guitar, as well as some John Fahey touches here and there, but Masubuchi's lines sound as though coated in oil, possessing a slipperiness and liquidity that peeks back at Japanese traditions

Okkyung Lee is a cellist, composer, and improviser who moves freely between of artistic disciples and contingencies. Since moving to New York in 2000 she has worked in disparate contexts as a solo artist and collaborator with creators in a wide range of disciplines. A native of South Korea, Lee has taken a broad array of inspirations—including noise, improvisation, jazz, western classical, and the traditional and popular music of her homeland—and used them to forge a highly distinctive app…

limited edition of 55 numbered copies only. Grouped together are the latest CDr efforts set featuring the following albums: St 13, 090114, Blackie - Solo Guitar, Sete and Exodus.Manuel Mota's sparse fingerpicking style with the sound of the guitar drenched in reverb creating music of a reflective and contemplative nature from the guitarist. The music gradually evolves throughout the five albums whilst creating a consistent atmosphere and sense of space that requires careful listening to be ful…

The fourth LP in Recital's Loren Connors editions/reissue series. Pretty As Ever is a beautiful collection of Loren's guitar ballads, dedicated to his wife Suzanne. It includes the "Pretty As Ever" and "Trinity" suites, from the out-of-print album Sails (2005), alongside the complete Little Match Girl (2000). This album falls in line with the other LPs Recital has published, Airs (2015), Lullaby (2016), Evangeline (2017)... as hopeful and careful as a heartbeat. This LP includes "Woman of Sorro…

Next to being one of the core members of the acoustic deep listening ensemble Razen, Ameel Brecht is a trained guitar player who has a life-long involvement with the instrument’s repertoire under his belt. On his debut album “Polygraph Heartbeat”, he puts his guitar-heart on the line by means of 9 compositions for steel resonator and resonator mandolin. The album is a reflection of polyphonic music as seen through a multi-coloured and highly personal lens, as Ameel’s guitar idiom crossbreeds a c…

Asakusa Follies is a luminous scene of interplay between melody, breath, and the shakuhachi flute. Following on from the initial triptych of electro-acoustic releases on the Cuspeditions imprint, Clive Bell’s Asakusa Follies shifts the listener away from the studio and toward the player himself. Breath is a central theme in the album where a punctuation of purring, spitting, flicking and gasping intersects the tones, overtones and noise of the shakuhachi. The opening composition Ultramodern Vari…

After superb solo CDs on piano and luthéal piano, Veryan Weston makes an equally fine solo organ album. Touring England in search of tracker-action organs, Weston tried about 40 to see if both the instrument and the space were suitable for the planned trio tuning out tour. In several cases there wasn't the opportunity to try them extensively, but in others it was possible to get beyond the discoveries of the particular instrument, and make some magnificent music. This collection consists of seve…

Solo bass played and composed by Kasper T. Toeplitz. Layers of noise full of details like the voice of dead machines !“A purely formal présentation of Almasty would point that it is a composition for solo bass – electric bass, which implies a few electric/electronic machines around the string instrument, which change or modifiy its resonances somehow, but nothing more that what is seen those days around any electric instrument. And Almasty is also a solo composition, as it is recorded and presen…

Debut solo album by the cellist and composer, half of the duo Live Footage: sixteen miniatures for cello and Roland Space Echo cut in a Tokyo apartment facing a freeway, extended technique standing in for portamento, filters and noise. Mastered by Rashad Becker. LP on Faitiche.

Tony Moore's double-tracked cello interpretations of four scores devised with the artist Josep Vallribera in Lower Saxony in February 1995, recorded at Basement Tape Studios, Amsterdam, on 7 May 1995.

Sixteen solo cello improvisations by Tony Moore, recorded without overdubs and in playing order at the Basement Studios, Amsterdam, on 16 and 17 August 1993.

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.

*In process of stocking* Since his Beat Diary debut (a 12xLP box set comprising 365 beats recorded daily over the course of a year), Julian Sartorius has immersed himself in unique and ambitious projects - trekking the path not travelled to arrive at rhythmic life forms through found objects and prepared instruments. Equally as mighty are his two other escapades, the most recent being Locked Grooves - 112 beats cut as endless loops on vinyl spanning 56 dense 1.8 second compositions per side. Pre…

Isak Hedtjärn plays the clarinet — a straight, metal variant of the more common wooden B flat Clarinet. Kvarpan is Isak’s first ‘solo’ record, but you also hear him in ‘quartet’ with himself, too on this diverse suite of improvisations recorded ‘on location’ on a single day at Patons Malmgård — his usual practice spot just by where the ferries head over to Finland. We recorded until the throb of the boats and waiting cars took over.

  A polymath of undeniable musicality, Isak is a constant, alw…

It's hard to believe that it's been roughly two years since Blume Edition's last LP, but thankfully the waiting game has come to an end with the delivery of Valentina Magaletti’s “Rotta”, the first in a coming series of stunning releases from the label. Widely celebrated for her work in Tomaga, Holy Tongue, and Vanishing Twin, the album encounters the Italian born, London based percussionist and composer embarking into the territory of the solo performer, sculpting a remarkable sense of emotive …

Hairbone is a New York-based power trio of artists Raúl de Nieves, Jessie Stead, and Nathan Whipple, formerly known as Haribo. Functioning mainly in the art world, Hairbone has inflicted audiences from museums to decrepit basements with their carnivalesque live shows for nearly a decade. Each unique, thematically pointed multimedia performance narrative features frontman de Nieves inhabiting new personae in a sculptural actionist mode, brandishing oversized text-emblazoned props as if they were …

Small repress available. Unique, engrossing room recordings of Kaliff pipe organ dirges played by composer, sound technician, and multi-instrumentalist Kali Malone, released in early 2018 on a super limited tape run and now finally pressed up on vinyl for wider public consumption. Very little in 2018 is as elusive or magical as this record. In four pieces recorded at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, it's the characteristics of the room itself that add a crucial dimension to these pieces,…

**Edition of 400 copies, sold-out at source** Before the spectral, romantic electric guitar miniatures for which he is celebrated today, Loren Connors recorded a string of nine solo acoustic guitar improvisations under the name of Loren Mazzacane between 1979 and 1980. The records feature Loren's contorted impressions of Delta and country blues, persistently kneaded into sidelong guitar excursions entangled with wordless, mournful vocal utterances, hummed and moaned in imitation of the dogs that…

Koen Holtkamp presents Gong Solo on Cassauna. Holtkamp on the release: "These pieces are the first part of a series devoted to exploring the gong, so I decided to begin with a very simple approach. Mallet is literally the first recording I made with the gong on the day I acquired it, so it represents my initial reaction to the instrument. It's the same basic tempo struck with a single mallet but varying intensity and position of the mallet on the gong to get a wider range of dynamics and sound. …