Jazz /
Shoals
*300 copies limited edition* Magnificent meditative / shamanistic / ambient / improvisational offering from Liran Donin on double bass and shakers, and Idris Rahman on bass clarinet, tenor sax, shells, and Tibetan singing bowl — both members of the acclaimed ensemble Ill Considered. Original artwork by Vincent de Boer. Despite how governments and multinational corporations try to isolate us from one another, we can’t make it alone without our shoal. To truly have a shoal, we need to accept each …
The Oracle
Composer, clarinetist, singer and spiritual jazz soothsayer Angel Bat Dawid descended on Chicago's jazz and improvised music scene just a few years ago. In very short time, the potency, prowess, spirit and charisma of her cosmic musical proselytizing has taken her from relatively unknown improviser to borderline ubiquitous performer in Chicago's avant-garde. On any given night you can find Angel adding aura to ensembles led by Ben LaMar Gay, or Damon Locks, or Jaimie Branch, or Matthew Lux, or e…
Groet
2025 stock In the ever-evolving landscape of European improvised music, Groet stands as a testament to the restless creativity and sly wit of pianist Guus Janssen and drummer Han Bennink. Released on the Dutch label Data in 2005, this album captures two of the Netherlands’ most idiosyncratic voices in a dialogue that is as unpredictable as it is deeply musical.
Janssen and Bennink, both veterans of the Dutch avant-garde, approach the piano-drum duo format with a sense of play that borders on the…
Apa Ini
2025 stock In the ever-evolving landscape of European improvisation, Apa Ini stands as a testament to the restless creativity of saxophonist Tobias Delius and his ensemble. Released on the Dutch label Data Records in 2003, the album brings together a formidable quartet: Delius on tenor saxophone, Hilary Jeffery on trombone, Wilbert de Joode on double bass, and Serigne C.M. Gueye on percussion
Apa Ini is not an album that seeks easy answers or comfortable resolutions. Instead, it thrives on the t…
Cellotape & Scotchtape
2025 stock In the early 1980s, the Dutch improvisation scene was a crucible of restless invention, and Cellotape & Scotchtape stands as a quietly radical document from its margins. Released on the small but influential Data label, this collaboration between cellist Ernst Reijseger and Scottish percussionist Alan "Gunga" Purves is a study in playful, tactile exploration—music that feels as if it’s being assembled in real time from the detritus of the everyday.
Reijseger, already known for his uno…
Mistakes
2025 stock In the late 1970s, Amsterdam was a crucible for radical improvisation, and Mistakes—the collaboration between South African saxophonist Sean Bergin and Dutch cellist Ernst Reijseger—stands as a vivid document of that era’s restless energy. Released on the Data label, the album captures two musicians at the threshold of their creative powers, forging a dialogue that is as unpredictable as it is intimate.
Bergin, who had recently relocated from Durban, brings a raw, searching lyricism t…
Elastic Jargon
2025 stock Elastic Jargon is an album by Dutch composer and violist Maurice Horsthuis, released in 2007 on the Data label. The project brings together a unique ensemble of string players, with Horsthuis as the sole composer, exploring the boundaries of what can be achieved with string instruments alone.
Slang
2025 stock In the shadowy interstices of contemporary jazz and free improvisation, Slang by Elastic Jargon emerges as a document of restless inquiry and coded communication. Released on the Dutch label Data in 2010, the album is a cryptic dispatch from the margins, where genre boundaries are not so much blurred as actively subverted
Elastic Jargon—true to their name—stretch the language of jazz until it snaps, then reassemble the fragments into something at once familiar and alien. The group’s a…
Astronotes
2025 stock In the ever-mutable landscape of Dutch jazz, Joost Buis’s Astronotes stands as a testament to the playful collision of composition and improvisation. Released on the Data label in 2004, the album finds Buis—trombonist, composer, and bandleader—at the helm of a vibrant ensemble drawn from the heart of Amsterdam’s creative music scene.
From the opening bars of “The Eggs,” it’s clear that Buis is less interested in adhering to tradition than in subverting it with wit and invention. The b…
The Ill-Tempered Piano
2008 release ** ""Nicola Cipani's "Ill-Tempered Piano" is a suprising and playful album of solo improvisations played on broken and untuned pianos. Cipani's accomplished melodic and rhythmic approach and his responsiveness to each instrument's raw potential set this project apart. The recordings were made over the span of two years in different New York City warehouses, on several keyboard instruments (among the pianos you hear also a clavichord), some of which are so damaged as to be hardly rec…
Picnic
Rare Original A little-known gem of Dutch free music, Picnic is the brainchild of cellist Tristan Honsinger, who composed all but one of its 12 compositions. Brilliant and whimsical, the tracks bring to mind Honsinger's work with ICP Orchestra, for whom he has also composed extensively. Here he's working in an incredible ensemble, with trumpeter Toshinori Kondo, saxophonist Sean Bergen, Jean Jacques Avenel on bass, Michael Vatcher on drums and percussion, and Tiziana Simona Vigni on voice. Decep…
Breath in Definition
Ingrid Schmoliner and Alex Kranabetter are pillars of the improvised and experimental music scenes inAustria stretching back more than a decade. Although the former is known primarily as a pianist and vocalist and the latter as a trumpeter, they both possess seriously expansive sonic palettes. Schmolinger works rigorously with sound direction to generate vibrant psychoacoustic and spatialized effects, while Kranabetter routinely deploys electronics to radically transform and expand his sound wor…
Urban Magic
2003 release ** "A lesser-known set from the Art Ensemble Of Chicago – a CD originally packaged with an Italian magazine, now presented here on its own! The performance is from 1997 – and the group features Lester Bowie on trumpet, Roscoe Mitchell on reeds, Malachi Favors on bass and percussion, and Don Moye on assorted percussion – all in a style that shows all the relaxed, confident modes of the group in their mature years. The ensemble's almost more compelling here than on some of their bette…
Voyage À L'Intérieur D'Une Trompe
1992 release ** "Descriptive work comparable to film music or the story of Babar... First collective composition of the Compagnie d'Eustache by Jean-François Bovard, Pierre Cochard, Philippe Genevay, Jacques Henry, Philippe Krüttli, Jean Rochat."
F4 Fake
This is for sure no fake news! F4 Fake is the exciting new album by Made To Break, the gripping quartet of Ken Vandermark, mixing jazz, funky patterns, and electronics in groovy improvisations -- interrupted by abstract insertions. Recorded by Daniel Schatz, November 29 2017 at Primitive Studios, Vienna. Mastering by Alex Inglizian at Experimental Sound Studio, Chicago. Mixing by Alex Inglizian and Ken Vandermark. Artwork by Federico Peñalva. Personnel: Ken Vandermark - reeds; Christof Kurzmann …
The Trance of Seven Colors
Big tip! *2024 much needed repress* The Trance of Seven Colors by master Gnawa musician Maleem Mahmoud Ghania and free jazz legend Pharoah Sanders comes in a gatefold sleeve and also include download code. Produced by Bill Laswell and - according to The Attic - "one of the most important albums of Gnawa trance music released in the '90s", The Trance of Seven Colors was originally released in 1994 on Laswell's Axiom imprint and is the magic meeting of two true musical masters. Maleem Mahmoud Ghan…
Edge x Jim O'Rourke
*2024 stock* The cliffhanger collaboration by Masataka Fujikake and Takeharu Hayakawa, which has been going on since 2007, is now complete with a live performance of the May 2011 session with Jim O'Rourke as a guest. The trio's bold arrangements are a powerful work centered on a solitary guitar sound that only Jim O'Rourke could express.
Cereal Music
LP – strictly limited one-time edition / 500. Jacket printed on reverse board, includes insert with full credits & liner notes by William, Ellen, and Steven. A beauty. Includes full-res download card/code of the total work (w/ 3 bonus tracks). Cereal Music is indeed William Parker’s first spoken word album – poetry and observations from a profound life devoted to the path of finding truth in beauty and speaking truth to power. Hard to believe this hasn't happened before! Parker’s words are furth…
Heart Trio
CD Edition. 6-panel digipak, printed on heavyweight stock reverse board. Per AUM standard, a beauty. Notes/poem by WP & photos on inners. Heart Trio features three lifelong-devoted fellow travelers on the path of healing through sound. World-renowned & revered bassist, multi-instrumentalist, composer, improvisor, community leader William Parker has performed and recorded extensively with both master pianist, multi-instrumentalist, composer, improviser, inveterate performer Cooper-Moore & master …
The Invisible
"Masters of musical tension. Maintaining tension, resolving tension. It's an integral part of improvised music, but of this international trio in particular. Rodrigo Amado and Dirk Serries first bonded over a couple of duo concerts in the summer of 2018. With his roots in (free) jazz, lauded Portuguese saxophonist Amado became an intriguing sparring partner for the Belgian guitarist, who's been involved in a more abstract style for some time now. With English Andrew Lisle, a drummer with an extr…