Experimental / All styles

"A splendid collaboration between experimental vocalist Maggie Nicols and multi-instrumentalist/vocalist Phil Hargreaves. Human is a work in eight movements through which runs Hargreaves’ title poem. A long and delicate collage of vocal interventions, acoustic improvisations, field recordings, and electronic textures. Sophisticated, captivating, poignant at times [“Fugue (We Are Not Certain)”] and – the greatest feat here – imbued with honesty and immediacy, rare qualities in this kind of collab…

Fran Bass - electric bassRichard Harding - chapman stickPhil Hargreaves - saxes/fluteRichard Harrison - drums/percussionPete Smyth - electronics

Four fifths of Bloodcog, this is more of a playing session than Bloodcog's power electronics.

"A live recording of freely improvised improv captured at All Hallows Church in High Laver, Essex in 2023 from the trio of AMM drummer and Matchless label-leader Eddie Prévost, Zürich and Maastricht trumpeter Silvan Shmid, and London double bassist Tom Wheatley of the group Widdershins, heard in three investigative conversations of great creative drive." * squidco.com

Cancrena III is a solo side project from [fla] - Splinter Vs Stalin. Death ambient - drone - lofi - hopeless and slow cancer. Limited edition. 50 hand-numbered copies in special cardboard sleeve (black/silver). Typographic print.

Matteo Uggeri is an Italian visual designer and composer from Milan. He invests himself in sound poetry of everyday life, organized around a vast array of personal field recordings, plunderphonia and melodic compositions meticulously arranged in a story-telling way. He’s part of the duo Starlight Assembly along with Dominic Appleton and he plays in Sparkle in Grey, Open to the Sea and The Last Five Minutes. Recently, he has released an album in collaboration with Nigel Ayers, from Solstice to Eq…

Tip! Inspired by Georg Trakl's "Nocturnal Song" and recorded in separate locations during lockdown 2021. The Japanese free music players Harutaka Mochizuki and Makoto Kawashima excite with their haunting play in the spirit of Kaoru Abe – beautiful and sad and violent at the same time. The French lapsteel guitarist Michel Henritzi mixes the pieces together, they float naturally into a melancholic but vibrant soundpoem, envocating their ghosts, their desires and feeling the mood of Trakls poem, th…

Mia Doi Todd is known for her quiet, haunting songs, usually conveyed through her evocative and instantly recognizable voice. With a deep body of work spanning twelve albums, and as a formidable collaborator on records by Laraaji, Tunde Adebimpe (TV on the Radio), Scientist, and more recently with André 3000 and Carlos Niño on New Blue Sun, Mia is an essential element in the richly woven musical tapestry of her native Los Angeles. Morning Music is an instrumental, ambient experience unlike anyth…

CD digipack. Fire! have always been about finding the essence by getting to the core of the music. Their 8th album sees the trio - for the first time on record - stripped down to the bare-bones essentials; with no flutes, no electronics, no guests and no extras, recorded live in the studio to analogue tape - the Steve Albini way - with the master himself at the controls in Electrical Audio in Chicago. Thus, this album stands as a true testament to the group´s expressive power and glowing intimac…

"The compilation that started the renaissance. In 2002 Audika Records entered into an exclusive licensing agreement with the estate of Arthur Russell to compile and issue previously unreleased and out of print material from Arthur's vast archive. This first album Calling Out of Context, features 12 previously unreleased tracks of Buddhist Bubblegum Alt Disco Pop recorded during Arthur's prime years 1985-90." "Four years ago, Audika Records began releasing the exceptionally varied, long sought-af…

"Wilderness Audiographics - Recordings 1977-1984" is an astounding 11LP wooden boxset and a hardcover book, issued in a numbered edition of 333 copies, that takes a deep, exploratory dive into Charlie Morrow’s historically significant and much coveted imprint, gathering mind-blowing, little heard works by Morrow, Philip Corner, Jackson Mac Low, Pauline Oliveros, Jerome Rothenberg, R.I.P. Hayman, Ocarina Orchestra, Alison Knowles, Dick Higgins, Bernard Heidsieck, and a great many more. While rema…

*2022 stock* "Madam Press is a quintet from Denmark created by five talented women whose main goal is to experiment within coherent musical structures. In fact, the first thing that struck me when comparing Madam Press´ music with other improvisational outfits was the emphasis that some of the musical pieces here have in achieving melodies and twisting them beyond recognition. That is, while other improvisational musicians try to extract sounds from their instruments this woment try to shape thi…

Journals, stories, and songs from Michael Gira/Swans spanning the years 1981 to present. Includes visual archives and artwork dating back to 1974. Hardbound, 408 pages, includes 101 color images printed on high quality photographic paper.

Tip! »Alchemical Allures« is the first album by the duo Claussen/Klement, founded in 2019. With a unique instrumentation of voice, objects, zither and electronics, the artists have created a soundscape composed of field recordings, vocal and instrumental elements as well as electronically generated sounds and noises. All the tracks on this album were recorded during a residency at the Center National de Création Musicale GMEA in Albi-Tarn in July 2022.

*150 copies limited edition* The scheme is simple and decisive: a similar electronic device for an instrument played at each soliloquy for direct, introspective music, according to my psychic states. In this case, a lap steel guitar, an electric sanza and a bass guitar. Three instruments for four soliloquies, because there's no numerical logic here. The bass guitar speaks alone twice on the S side, and that's that. Speech is banished. "Quatre soliloques" without voice or words: the title may see…

Etant Donnes is a French duo named after Marcel Duchamp's last major work. The group consists of brothers Marc and Eric Hurtado, born in Morocco and working mainly as performance artists and musicians. Their sound can be described as a mix of field recordings, found sounds and sometimes whispered, sometimes violent vocals. They describe their sounds like this: "Through Marc and Eric, it is the volume of each word that becomes an object-sculpture, together with the power of their bodies expressin…

Definitive remastered edition with extensive liner notes* 'In C' is one of Terry Riley's best-known and loved compositions, and essentially the first ever "minimalist" composition. It's a semi-aleatoric work - basically open-ended - written by Riley in 1964, and here performed in 1967 by the composer, and leader on saxophone, with members of the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts in the State University of New York at Buffalo, featuring Jon Hassell and Margaret among other notables in th…

May is a double-LP collection of recordings made between 2020–2023 by Arianne Churchman & Benedict Drew (AC&BD), whose ongoing series channels, inhabits and transmogrifies the vast corpus of traditional English folksong celebrating the most fertile of months. An auditory tapestry, May employs at its base a flank of analogue synthesizers, field recordings and Churchman’s layered vocals, each combining to form a beautifully dizzy sonic collage that often spirals out across long durations into hypn…

Keiji Haino is, without question, one of the truly iconic artists to rise beyond the dusk of the 20th century. An artist focused singularly of the beautiful visceral promise of music, his practice is a many headed beast taking in movements from the gentlest of guitar play, through free improvisation and noise. As divergent as the work might be, it is held tightly by his unique way in sound, one that exists moment to moment with a force like no other. 20 years since its first release, Black Blues…

The first LP by the Taj Mahal Travellers was recorded at Sogetsu Hall in Tokyo on July 15, 1972, which became the title of the work and was released the same year by CBS Sony Records. A live performance celebrating the 50th anniversary of this album was held on July 15, 2022. The only original members of the Taj Mahal Travellers who attended were myself and Seiji Nagai. This is because two of the six members passed away, two are religiously active and they can not play music according to their b…

Characteristically invisible and inaudible, the wind is made manifest solely by its agency and performance on objects: huge waves crash to shore, sand dunes edge forward over millennia (rumbling as they go), cyclones uproot trees and houses, intergalactic winds confound the planets. On a more modest scale, I’ve been building aeolian instruments since 1979, part of my investigation into the innumerable aspects of the vibrating string. I designed the two recent aeolian instruments heard on this al…

Recorded at Dreamland, a historic church converted into a studio just a few miles from Woodstock, NY, August Light captures the organic and spiritual essence of its unique setting. Owned by acclaimed drummer Jerry Marrota, Dreamland’s sensational acoustics and vibrant wood surfaces provided the perfect backdrop for Richard Carr’s collaborative explorations. Joining him on this musical outing are cellist Clarice Jensen and violist Caleb Burhans, both shining lights of the new music scene. Togethe…

In 2022 Lori Goldston went on a small 4 date tour of Ireland playing in Cork, Limerick, Leitirm and Drogheda. Willie Stewart of Nyahh Records drove her on the tour and recorded each performance. With Lori’s permission, Willie edited and mixed each performance and put them together to make this album. The end result is a collection of improvisations and spontaneous moments. Every performance is drastically different to one another in mood, energy and technique. In these recordings you can hear ho…

Burning Love Jumpsuit were an Underground Irish band of movie obsessive shut ins who had access to a computer. They were active between 1991 – 2002. A three-piece of proto-edgelords, (D.F. Dresden, Smiley, J. Bassetti) Burning Love Jumpsuit jammed and sampled their way to notoriety in the 1990s, making experimental music that was equal parts thought-provoking funk and stroke-inducing gunk. A penchant for sleazy Americana, obscure movies and exploitative daytime telly inspired a pool of samples t…

Tip, tip tip! *2024 stock. Deluxe packaging* Listening to the music of Stephan Micus – which is as itinerant and wide ranging as his life – is one of the most profound experiences possible today. Beyond categories and labels, this German artist was already way ahead of trends when he released his first album in 1976. Fifteen recordings later The Garden of Mirrors, his first CD since the phenomenal Athos, seems on the surface to be heading in a stylistic direction pointing towards the Orient. But…

Extended guitar hero Oren Ambarchi returns with Shebang, the latest in the series of intricately detailed long-form rhythmic workouts that includes Quixotism (2014) and Hubris (2016). Like those records, Shebang features an international all-star cast of musical luminaries, their contributions recorded individually in locations from Sweden to Japan yet threaded together so convincingly (by Ambarchi in collaboration with Konrad Sprenger) that it’s hard to believe they weren’t breathing the same s…

Dating back to the 13th century in Wales, the Telyn Rawn is a nearly forgotten horsehair harp; UK improvising harpist Rhodri Davies researched the instrument and its unique sound, commissioning the construction of a harp on which he performs 18 improvisations of impressive technique and sonority, launching his new Amgen Records label with this album named for the instrument. "A Telyn Rawn is a harp strung with horse hair and predates the appearance of the triple, lever and pedal harps. The earli…

Double CD Edition. The first release from Gastr del Sol in over 25 years is nigh! Like a bolt echoing back from the blue, We Have Dozens of Titles restrikes the iron of Gastr del Sol, plunging us back into the maelstrom of David Grubbs and Jim O’Rourke’s all too brief (but ultimately, long enough to change everything incisively) run together between 1993–1998. For We Have Dozens of Titles, Jim and David reconnected to assemble nearly an hour of previously unreleased live recordings — including t…

"In this album, Akira Umeda mixes 42 recordings, dated between 1988 and 2018, which, in a sense, reflect the incredible range of his creative work: from songs, to ambient music; from field recordings to prank calls. The cassette tapes, whose contents make up this double-LP, had been stored in Umeda’s house in São José dos Campos, in São Paulo, Brazil.  Restless, and easily bored, Akira moved seamlessly from one activity to another – he was a little bit of everything (and nothing at all). Such pe…

An epic second installment from the trio of Mats Gustafsson, David Grubbs, Rob Mazurek, nearly 90 minutes of intense live performances from January 2020. They converge here on a wide swath of sounds: expansive free improvs, full-tilt electronics, alt-universe chamber music and spontaneous arrangements of three previously released Grubbs’ songs.

Loud Object is the second solo release from artist Billy Steiger, following his self released 'Recordings, drawings and photographs from in and around Fr​î​dd Newydd' in 2016. Both a visual artist and a musician, Steiger’s Loud Object plays as a two sided experiment in markmarking and sound, as a kind of writing by ear - metallic, brushed, wooden - lines imprinted and pressed circular.  The record takes its name from the discarded title of the several-hundred-page draft of Clarice Lispector’s ev…

“Mujer de Sal Junto a Un Hombre Vuelto Carbón” is reissued here on vinyl for the first time, in its original artwork with an extra OBI and including a 4-page insert with liner notes by Uruguayan music writer Andrés Torrón. Synth ambiences, acoustic landscapes, deep songwriting and subtle candombe percussions. This LP is the first in a series of full-album reissues that Vampisoul (co-produced in collaboration with Little Butterfly Records) is releasing as a valuable add-on to its recent and large…

*2024 stock* Sapropelic Pycnic is the world debut of music presented under the name of "Ka Baird." While this record is a commencement of many sorts, it is in no way a mere beginning: Ka is one of the founding members of experimental psychlings Spires That In the Sunset Rise. Formed in 2001 out of the Chicago scene, and described by late guitar legend Jack Rose as a "female Sun City Girls," Spires' sisterhood of sound deepened the New Folk slant with an array of avant- and world-flavored directi…

David Grubbs and Jan St. Werner met in the mid-1990s when Grubbs was playing with Gastr del Sol and the Red Krayola and St. Werner in Mouse on Mars and Microstoria. After years of exchanging ideas, Translation from Unspecified marks their first time locking horns as a duo, and it’s clear this deck-clearing collaboration was long overdue. In January 2020 Grubbs arrived at Mouse on Mars’ Berlin studio Paraverse with a guitar and “Translation from Unspecified,” an open-ended, seemingly self-generat…

Don King was the mid-'80s band from Mark Cunningham (post Mars), originally formed to play Thurston Moore's Noisefest at White Columns in 1981. The six concerts tour in 1986 were the last European appearances of the New York no wave band Don King, starting in Padua and following a wide arc around the Mediterranean, by train, through Switzerland over to Toulouse (France) and then down to Barcelona (Spain). The original cassette was a selection of the best live recordings released by the historic …

The Long Shadow Falls is Current 93's first-ever CD box-set, and is as beautiful as the moon! This gorgeous, elaborate, boxset consists of 7CDs, plus a 7" single, and a beautiful 48-page art-book. The Long Shadow Falls collects the 41 unknown and redreamt mixes that C93 created for two (long-ago sold-out) lathe-cut 12" releases, respectively titled The Long Shadow Falls and Why Can't We All Just Walk Away?, which were both issued in editions of just 39 copies, cut by The Bricoleur at Bladud Flie…

Very rare Indian-only cassette of 1940's recordings of wonderful ragas by Pandit Pran Nath's master Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan, distributed by La Monte Young.

Biomes are little worlds of organic relationships, full of struggles, symbiosis, and sheer obsolete noise. In "De Silenti Natura," Henrique Vaz is meticulously crafting synthetic auditory biomes, sprouting from their own fuzzy logic. Unfolding across two distinct acts, the Brazilian artist interprets and replicates the complex, often ambiguous sounds of (un)natural environments, creating imaginary systems to inhabit over two sides of tape. The soundscape of the first side and title track is enti…

Suspenseful Fantasias Unraveling Into A Humbly Wondrous Journey

  Catherine Anahid Berberian (July 4, 1925 – March 6, 1983) was an American mezzo-soprano and composer based in Italy. She interpreted contemporary avant-garde music composed, among others, by Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna, John Cage, Henri Pousseur, Silvano Bussotti, Darius Milhaud, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, and Igor Stravinsky. She also interpreted works by Claudio Monteverdi, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Kurt Weill, Philipp Zu Eulenburg, arrangements of songs by The Beatles, and folk songs from several…