Back in stock
Maquishti
Mexican born, New York-based vibraphonist, marimbist, improviser and composer Patricia Brennan has confirmed the release of her debut full length album Maquishti, January 15, 2021 on the Valley of Search label. The twelve original instrumentals that make up the album were composed and performed solo by Brennan on vibraphone and marimba. Employing unusual performance techniques and occasional electronics, many of the compositions were borne from improvisations created live in the studio at the ti…
Valley of Search
** 2021 Stock ** The first ever reissue of the 1975 free jazz album originally released on India Navigation. What we know of Downtown New York comes from the countercultural and creative flowering that emerged in lower Manhattan in the 1960s, attributable to cheap live-work spaces called lofts. These were often abandoned and disused small manufacturing spaces and they became a nexus for artistic practice and life. From a jazz perspective, lofts were alternatives to the club scene, and they gaine…
The Fire Still Burns
** 2021 Stock ** 45 years after his debut album Valley of Search (1975/India Navigation), jazz saxophonist Alan Braufman returns. The Fire Still Burns has that gritty, forthright sensibility we hope to hear in sonic collaborations borne out of beauty and struggle, but there’s a populist ease that comes with age and reflection. Put simply it’s natural music – complementary, individual, and full of the sweet, hot taste of celebration.
The Bedroom Tapes
*In process of stocking* A Compilation of Minimal Wave From Around The World (1980-1991), The Bedroom Tapes features rare, unreleased, and licensed tracks all the way from Belgium to Australia to Japan. The Bedroom Tapes excitedly marks Minimal Wave’s 66th release and is a follow up in the series to The Lost Tapes, The Found Tapes, The Hidden Tapes and of course The Minimal Wave Tapes. The twelve artists on this compilation mostly recorded their music onto 4-track tape in their bedroom studios. …
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…
Smells Like Teen Spirit
Smells Like Teen Spirit is premised in a haptic interrogation of each of the label's previous editions. Berlin-based and Mexico City-born multi-disciplinary artist Mario de Vega occupied the gallery space of Rumpsti Pumsti (Musik) for three consecutive days in October 2016 with a hitherto complete Tochnit Aleph catalog, sanding machine, hammer, and recording equipment. Conflating acts of "playing" with destruction, de Vega took to the recorded works and assorted media with his Spartan too…
Yesterday + Today, A Music Of Time
"Vincent Wrenn works with a microtonal system of seven octaves and each octave being divided into 360 notes, with Saturn being the lowest and the sun being the highest octave. That may sound also pretty esoteric, but the six pieces here are excellent studies in what seems to be sine wave like sounds. Each of these pieces appears to have very few variations and when played very loud may burst an eardrum, or destroy your relationship with your neighbour. I would think these pieces are best enjoyed…
Exploratorium
Swedish experimental outfit White Stains created five highly influential albums. Band members Carl Abrahamsson and Thomas Tibert later on went on to form the equally influential act Cotton Ferox. Their improvisational approach and dark musical atmospheres created a following which remains to this day, and which even led to a one-off reunion gig in Gothenburg in 2013 together with long time collaborator Genesis P-Orridge (Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV). The album Exploratorium is a compilation of…
Defragmental
Cotton Ferox key members Carl Abrahamsson and Thomas Tibert have composed, performed and produced groundbreaking music since the late 1980s. After their time in White Stains and several solo projects, Cotton Ferox have been their main mothership. Always producing cutting edge stuff, they have also always made an issue out of collaborating with other interesting artists. In both White Stains and Cotton Ferox, they’ve worked together with industrial pioneer/legend Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. Some ex…
Solo Etudes I
"We begin with the flickering, fire-like erraticism of the first track. Despite bearing the title of “Snow”, I’m drawn to imagine the very opposite: an intense heat that billows and dwindles across the stereo frame, suddenly erupting from left to right as if devouring an oil slick, promptly receding through oxygen exhaustion. To what extent are these fizzing, crackling chords – presumably electronics, but ultimately too distorted to accurately identify – under Hahn’s control? To what extent does…
Tietoisen Siirtymän Oletettu Toiseus
Ilpo Väisänen (Pan Sonic), offers a deeply personal and emotional record that literally translates to “The Presumed Otherness Of The Conscious Transition”. An appropriate title for a very somber and serious listening.
Axiom
2015 release. A reissue of arguably the rarest LP of European free jazz, Axiom, recorded in 1963 for the Swedish label Sonet. Test pressings were released to the musicians, but they were not approved and the label never printed more than the two first copies. Tom Prehn's music, which is exclusively known from a 1967 release that was reissued on the Unheard Music Series, is not only impossibly uncommon, it is also exceptionally wonderful, featuring an extended tenor saxophone solo by Frits Krogh …
Nuclear Family
2016 release. Multi-instrumental master Joe McPheeand his longtime colleague, French saxophonist and clarinetist André Jaume, joined forces for this studio recording in 1979 that was prepared but never released. It is primarily structured around pairs of tunes by Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, and Duke Ellington (or Billy Strayhorn), adding Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman" for good measure. The results are stunningly intimate and show the twosome's capacity for creative interplay at a fairly e…
King Alcohol
A reissue of King Alcohol, recorded for the German FMP label in 1972. King Alcohol is one of the landmark recordings of free jazz in Europe, a mind-blowing studio session featuring Rüdiger Carl on tenor saxophone, Günter Christmann on trombone, and the astonishing Detlef Schönenberg on drums. Volatile and precise, anticipating much of the future sound of free music in Europe but also paying homage to American antecedents like Roswell Rudd and Archie Shepp, King Alcohol is truly a lost jewel. Fir…
Sounds of Liberation
Hailing from the Germantown section of Philadelphia, well known as the site of the Sun Ra Arkestra communal homestead, Sounds of Liberation were at the forefront of '70s Black liberation music. After a series of gigs in elementary schools, prisons, and community centers, the band travelled along with their manager George Gilmore (father of Linc Gilmore of Breakwater fame) to NYC in 1973 for a recording session at Columbia University. This five-song session has never been heard until now. Had it …
No Time Left for Sadness
Despite having worked together in innumerable settings, including the longstanding Survival Unit III, with drummer Michael Zerang, cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm and multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee have never released a CD of duets. In an extra intimate studio setting in upstate New York, where both players reside, No Time Left for Sadness demonstrates their incredible musical understanding. Recalling some of McPhee's landmark records with Marseilles musicians in terms of telepathy and trust, it's a…
Distinction Without A Difference
A reissue of the long out-of-print first solo record by American violinist Billy Bang (1947-2011), recorded at Gaku Gallery in New York on August 12, 1979. Originally released on Hat Hut Records in 1980. Distinction Without A Difference features Bang's own compositions, extrapolated at length in an intimate live concert, as well as traditional and improvised material. Remastered from original tapes and augmented by newly discovered recordings from the same concert. Part of the large cache of his…
Brace For Impact
Some recordings, the world is just not ready for them when they're made. In 2008, Swedish born, Austrian resident saxophonist Mats Gustafsson and Poughkeepsie, New York multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee made a suite of studio recordings, Brace For Impact that they loved so much they immediately culled, mixed, and mastered them. A decade later, when the original label for which they were planned had not yet issued them, Gustafsson and McPhee offered them to Corbett Vs. Dempsey, and when the label …
Glasses
2012 release. A reissue of Joe McPhee's Glasses, originally released on Hat Hut Records in 1979. Glasses was recorded in October, 1977, during a highly significant period in McPhee's work, as he was pioneering the transatlantic, collaborative spirit that has helped to define the last three decades of his career. Documented in Tavannes, Switzerland, the set contains sensational tenor work, including the title piece, which finds McPhee ringing out a rhythm on a half-full wine glass, from which he …
Vario 34 3: Free Improvised Music
Since its first iteration in 1979, Vario has appeared in some fifty different versions, with a great variety of musicians, also actors, dancers, and filmmakers. It's the brainchild of Günter Christmann, a powerhouse of improvised music in Germany whose influence is out of scale with his acclaim. Since his emergence on the scene in the early 1970s, including appearances on classic FMP outings such as Rüdiger Carl Inc.'s King Alcohol (CVSD 032CD) and the eponymous Peter Kowald Quintet LP (CF 015LP…