New Arrivals / Last week
Resonance: Cultural Practice and Performative Analysis of Contemporary (Art) Music
Bilingual Edition English/German This inspiring book, with texts in German and English, reflects on the aesthetic, cultural and performative dimensions of contemporary (art) music. It opens up and challenges new perspectives in musicological and artistic research with a cultural studies orientation. Texts from the last 15 years are divided into two main chapters: Cultural Practice – including analyses of major festivals such as Warsaw Autumn, Festival d’Automne à Paris and Wien Modern, the impor…
Gaku-No-Michi Materials
Big Tip! The 5-CD set Gaku-No-Michi is a grand experiment that shatters conventional musical concepts. Electronic music and soundscapes merge, inviting the listener's consciousness into an infinite universe. With this work, composer Eloy pursues the ‘path of sound’ and opens up new horizons of aural experience. In this work, the composer Eloy combined Western musical traditions with Eastern thought to create a unique musical world. Gaku-No-Michi is not just a musical work, but a meditative exper…
Of Ghosts And Goblins
Ikue Mori's album "Of Ghosts and Goblins" is a collection of instrumental miniatures inspired by Lafcadio Hearn's Japanese folk tales, featuring themes of ghosts, goblins, and the supernatural, with tracks like "Fragment," "A Passional Karma," and "Lafcadio's Garden". Lafcadio Hearn is an author who spent much of his life researching, documenting, and preserving the ancient folk tales of Japan. He published a series of books in the late 19th and early 20th century including In Ghostly Japan, Kwa…
Drosselbart
"Was Drosselbart a Krautrock band just because they came from Munich like Amon Düül, sang in German and released their first and only album on a major German record label in 1971?
'No,' says Monika Vincent-Gunia aka Jemima, Drosselbart's singer. 'We were the first punk band in Germany. The guys in the band could only play three chords, maybe four, but they were burning with enthusiasm'.
However, Drosselbart's music on the album of the same name has very little to do with the punk of the mid-seve…
The Great God Pan
The third chapter of this extraordinary trilogy by the world's most extreme musical explorers—John Zorn, Bill Laswell, and Mick Harris.
Bye Bye Bird
"Nina Garcia has been actively moving the art of noise guitar into surprising and intriguing new spaces. She has been at it for some time now, a bit of a secret weapon all the while hiding in plain sight. As I listen to her music and ruminate upon seeing her perform it brings me to a realization which I have with very few musicians: the ego inherent in making art can be transcended through a purity of direct action. At least that’s the feeling I have when experiencing Nina’s music which comes a…
Siamo Tutti In Pericolo
"Siamo tutti in pericolo" is the third album by Golem Mecanique, the nom de plume of French multi-instrumentalist composer Karen Jebane, to be released on Ideologic Organ. Jebane works within the fringes of contemporary folk (aka La Novea community), microtonal and early modern spheres, as well as touching upon the ashes and fibres of back metal and the DNA of gothic music, literature, sorcery and most of all - poetry. Jebane's work with the "drone box" (a mechanised hurdy-gurdy) and zither as a…
Entrance Music
After nearly two years, Okonski returns with Entrance Music — an album that finds the trio at the height of their improvisational prowess and celebrating the spontaneous and meditative. On the heels of 2023’s debut Magnolia, pianist and leader Steve Okonski has reconvened long-time musical collaborators (Durand Jones and the Indications bandmate Aaron Frazer on drums and bassist Michael Isvara “Ish” Montgomery) for another session in the spirit of artists like the Bad Plus, Gerald Clayton, and T…
Nekkuja
*2025 stock* While she was waiting for her last album 'Pripyat' to be released, Catalan composer and producer Marina Herlop was restless. She was concerned about her (by then) uncertain music career, and felt emotionally unmoored. "Some days I used to sit on the balcony of my flat to catch some sun,” she explains, "I would close my eyes and start visualizing myself as a gardener, pulling out purple weeds from the soil, every bad memory or emotion I wanted to expulse being one of the plants." As …
The Truth
If you face a „Jesus“ look-alike in a white robe with an acoustic guitar and a beard in full blossom on the cover of a record you know you’re on the trail of a real oddity, in whatever way it might be. Then you check the name and it says D.R. Hooker on the cover. Is it his name or is he a doctor who cures prostitutes, so called “hookers” ? What is this all about? With a bit of effort you may find out that this is the name of a musician from the Connecticut scene of the early 70s and that he gath…
Sexy Tears
'Sexy Tears' is a bold departure from Tristanne's (fka Tristan) critically acclaimed pop-jazz debut Wellif and lets you veer into uncharted territory, from the first tone, the bittersweet and haunting violin tones fade in on opener 'Steady Mouth'. In a split second, Tristanne lets you vanish in a dazzling matrix deep down a rabbit hole, a place where Piero Umiliani's 70s sleazy giallo era sensually resonates with Oneothrix Point Never goldwave frequencies. With a whisper of panting tension, her …
Baby, It's Cold Inside
'The fun years', comprised of multi-instrumentalists Ben Recht and Isaac Sparks, have been making music together since the turn of the century, producing intriguing interrogations of ambient, drone, post-rock, and turntablism. Originally released in 2008 on the now-defunct Barge Recordings, 'baby it’s cold inside' is perhaps the high watermark of their discography. Equally concerned with microtonal nuance and harmonic intensity, it is both a product of its time and something well past it. The ch…
Edge Games
Although Berlin-based musical seekers Jules Reidy and Sam Dunscombe are friends who’ve worked together in numerous contexts over the last decade or so, Edge Games is their first, long overdue collaborative album. Over two expansive, mind-bending excursions the former’s microtonal guitar lines are woven into a gorgeously unstable mass of synthesis, field recordings, and clarinet produced by the latter, but it’s important to note that the recording process was deeply collaborative, with a rigorous…
Baby Huey Story
This is the only solo album by American soul singer James "Baby Huey" Ramey. He died at the age of 26 while recording his solo debut, and the album was finished and released posthumously. A quarter century after its release, The Baby Huey Story went on to become a cult classic among soul musicians and fans. Its single "Hard Times" has been sampled many times by a lot of artists and was covered by John Legend and the Roots in 2010 for the album Wake Up!
Arctic Summer
"The richness of these recordings cannot be overstated." — A Closer Listen
Their internal diapasons
The pipes that Miłosz Kędra used to craft his own organ emulator have lived many lives. They come from churches scattered across Greater Poland—some trimmed for a more presentable façade, others left to gather dust in parish houses until, stripped of purpose, they were cast away. Their first voices have faded, their inner resonance unsettled, yet with patience, one can teach them to sound again—to sing in their altered state, to be gently coaxed out of silence. Audiomancy—the conjuring of lost s…
Flashback
Azzurro 80's new album—his first ever on LP—is a beautifully faded Polaroid that, like a true flashback, plunges listeners into the heart of the 1980s. It's a sonic journey that captures the essence of a decade, distant yet vividly etched in our collective memory. The Roman producer unleashes his sonic vision with even greater intensity than before, weaving through dreamy italo-disco, electric atmospheres, soundtrack-worthy synth-pop, and boogie-funk grooves. Each track opens a window onto an er…
Starlight
Julius Smack engages in a dialogue with a fictional AI assistant to create an album using the prompt, “Make an album that tells the story about the origins of Julius Smack.” Starlight emerges as the imagined response, envisioning a world where beauty and violence intertwine, and memories and dreams are excavated to craft stories.
In a near-future Earth, where artists are among the planet’s last inhabitants, a symbiotic relationship has formed between humans and AI—each relying on the other for n…
Decomposition: Fox on a Highway
While working a job that required frequent drives between Philadelphia and a remote warehouse to sort furniture, Brendan Principato, the artist behind the project Saapato, noticed a fox on the side of the highway that had been struck dead by a car. Its vibrant red coat stood out against the asphalt. Day after day, the fox remained there, gradually transitioning from serene lifelessness to an unrecognizable state, a haunting reminder of nature’s cyclical processes. This encounter sparked a year-l…
A Cooler World
Portlander Paul Dickow, as Strategy, presents his latest album— A Cooler World. Fascinated by the unfamiliar limitations and inherent playability of a hand-me-down, 1989 model sampling keyboard, he played these pieces by hand, mostly abandoning the sequencer driven framework of sampling based music; he plays the sampler here the way a guitarist approaches the guitar. A Cooler World is a deep dive into glacial, pensive soundscapes that navigate the boundaries between experimental, ambient, and da…