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Why Not? (CD)
1990 release (light wear) ** The second ESP-Disk' statement, 1966: Marion Brown with a killing band including Stanley Cowell at the piano, deepening everything the debut promised. The writing is stronger, the group interplay more spacious, and Brown's alto - that singing, speech-like sound, closer to a voice than almost any horn of the era - moves through the material with total assurance, balancing fire and lyricism phrase by phrase. The mid-sixties ESP sessions caught a whole generation at the…
Far Cry (CD)
1990 release (light wear) ** December 1960: Eric Dolphy and Booker Little's first recorded meeting, with Jaki Byard, Ron Carter and Roy Haynes completing a frighteningly good band - the Five Spot partnership taking its first documented steps, seven months before the club residency made it legend. The Charlie Parker tribute sequence - "Mrs. Parker of K.C.", "Ode to Charlie Parker" - shows exactly where Dolphy came from and how much love he carried forward; "Tenderly", solo alto saxophone, shows w…
Free For Alll (CD)
1994 release (light wear) ** February 1964: the most ferocious Messengers record ever made, and one of the most intense hard bop sessions in the whole Blue Note vault. Wayne Shorter's title track is eleven minutes of controlled fury - Art Blakey playing like a man possessed, pushing wave after wave of pressure under the horns, with Freddie Hubbard answering everything at full burn. Shorter's "Hammer Head" and Hubbard's "The Core" keep the temperature high. Recorded right as the new thing was bre…
Mosaic (CD)
1992 release (light wear) ** The 1961 sextet masterpiece: Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, Curtis Fuller, Cedar Walton, Jymie Merritt - and Art Blakey detonating Walton's title track, one of the great set-openers in the hard bop repertoire. This edition of the Messengers was a compositional powerhouse: nearly everyone in the band wrote, and wrote brilliantly, giving the records of this period a richness that goes far beyond blowing-session logic. Shorter's pieces already carry that unmistakable s…
Drum Suite (CD)
1992 release (light wear) ** The 1957 Columbia session with a split personality, and both halves are excellent. One side belongs to the Art Blakey Percussion Ensemble - Art Blakey surrounded by Latin percussion masters, exploring African and Afro-Cuban drumming in extended, ritualistic pieces years before such projects became fashionable. The other side is a hard-swinging Messengers date, business as usual at the highest level. Blakey's lifelong fascination with the drum as a global instrument, …
Endometrio
2014 repress. Originally issued as a private LP edition of 400 copies in 1983. De-composition for synthetic sounds and electronically generated noises. Here M.B. distanced himself from the movement of the industrial Bruitists, introducing his "bionic music." Notwithstanding the difficulty of listening, especially upon initial impact, you are facing treated and filtered synthetic sounds that become new organisms -- sound cells analyzed under the microscope. This CD also includes excerpts …
Ubique
Last copies! ** Edition of 250 copies in incredible diorama-style hand-made sleeve. **One more top mysterious trace from the Little Skull legacy: Dean Brown's album Ubique (i.e. "everywhere" in Latin) marks the passing of time and people. This sense of loss is very present though the whole record; not getting around to saying the things we meant to say and making sense of the leftovers. Screaming calmly, Dean Brown's Little Skull has shrunk, even more, until his head is almost just sore meat - t…
Spacecraft / Unified Patchwork Theory
Originally released in 2001. In the fall of 1966 a group of composers that included Frederic Rzewski, Alvin Curran, Allen Bryant, Jon Phetteplace, Giuseppe Chiari and Richard Teitelbaum organized "Avanguardia Musicale I," a festival of several consecutive nights at the Accademia Filarmonica Romana. The program included tape music, Fluxus performance art pieces, and live electronic works. It was also the beginning of the group MEV.
One year later, the group was in Rome, Italy, but also involved i…
Ephemere I & II
Alga Marghen presents Éphémère I & II (for tape, or to be played with various instruments) -- two previously-unpublished masterpieces which represent for several reasons a very specific moment in the creative life and catalog of Luc Ferrari. Even if Ferrari's perfect skill in creating some of the most beautiful sonic works ever is now well known to the large audience appreciating his music, the undetermined character marking the two works presented here is quite surprising. Luc Ferrari was tempt…
Coldwater Basin No.2
Re-emerging from deep Fluxus celebrations in this 2012 summer, alga marghen realized that Philip Corner “Coldwater Basin” LP was instantly sold out. Could there be a better decision than issuing an alternative version of this masterpieces from the glorious 60s, by master of ecstatic music Philip Corner? If you fluctuated over sonic landscapes with the first version, then “Coldwater Basin No.2” will knock your socks off! More intense that Whitehouse, more liquid than your wildest dreams. “Rememb…
Soft Need 23
**Edition of 431 copies** Alga Marghen in collaboration with Expanded Media Editions is proud to present the final issue of “Soft Need”, a publication centered on the work of William Burroughs and expanding its deep influences into contemporary consciousness.
Founded in 1973 as a reaction to the aftermath of a three weeks’ stay across Xmas and New Year’s with Brion Gysin and Burroughs by their confidant Udo Breger, “Soft Need“ had its roots in the underground press of the previous two decades a…
Oeldorf 8
2017 release ** Issued by the Dutch "Nea Mousa Promotion Centre for Contemporary Music", the initial 1976 issue of this music documents the 8th meeting of "The Oeldorf Group" of Composer-Performers Pëter Eótvös (whose "Cricket Music" graces Creelpolation 1), Joachim Krist, Dietrich Frische, Gabriele Schumacher, and Mesias Maiguashca, who met annually at the barn pictured on the cover to workshop & perform each other's pieces from 1971 on. The two-part "Oeldorf 8" suite, composed in 1975, is a th…
Going fragile
2006 release ** Mattin: gnu-linux computer feedback. Radu Malfatti: trombone. Recorded in 2005. Going fragile is the latest collaboration between Radu Malfatti and Mattin, following 2004's critically lauded "Whitenoise". This album sees them refining their approach; they string incidents of sound along a long axis of time, creating distinct events against a stark backdrop. The cumulative effect is the creation of an enormous scale, small moments building to coherent wholes. This album is a vibra…
Discursive Rhythms: One and Twelve Durations
2006 release ** Edition of 150 numbered and signed copies. Twelve one-minute tracks from an audacious emerging west-coast artist.
Rough and tumble
Althoff, the master of kinetic sound sculpture, returns to machines for a new offering of textured compositions. Knowing that I used these items for music-making, a friend recently gave me a large old aluminium pot lid with a beautifully flanged edge, just begging for some marbles to roll around in it. Attaching the lid to the platter of a slanted record player meant the marbles would gather at the lowest point, and roll when the lid rotated. Fixing a ‘bump-post’ in the path of the marbles push…
Error
2006 release (storage wear) ** Oversize booklet cover. The history of our music is arguably defined by a tendency to push things to the extreme—by the ability to transform what might once have been dismissed as mere flaws into genuine new qualities. These are the very qualities that a whole host of copycats usually latch onto, often to the point of suffocation. Let me reassure you right away: Monno are not among the copycats. Their music is saturated—in the truest "noise" sense of the word. Nois…
I Can't Promise
Recorded between August 24, 1983 and September 9, 1984.
Seeds
This long-awaited LP reissue of a European jazz treasure released in 1969 and led by multi-reedist Sahib Shihab!
Mosaic
★ Japan exclusive LP ★ First press limited edition. Fennesz, who creates unique electronic sounds with guitars and computers, has released his first album in about five and a half years, "Mosaic." It is an unparalleled masterpiece with incredibly beautiful sound images constructed with incredible precision. This is Fennesz's most introspective album to date. It was written and recorded at the end of 2023 and finished in summer 2024. Fennesz opened his third new studio space in the last four year…