New Arrivals
Ancestral Ground
*100 copies limited edition* An interrogation of identity pervades every corner of Zeynep Ağcabay’s ‘Ancestral Ground’, the debut body of work under her birth name. As someone who has formed their practice creating soundscapes for high fashion labels and runway shows, this is an artist finally being given full carte blanche in creativity. Zeynep’s Turkish ancestry is present through all seven tracks. However, it is not simply a borrowing or a homage. Very much still connected both geographically…
Tokyo Flashback
2023 repress. Black Editions present the first ever vinyl edition of Tokyo Flashback, the legendary 1991 compilation that defined the Tokyo psychedelic movement and first brought it to the outside world. Tokyo Flashback is one of the most iconic compilations in the history of underground music. Originally released by Japan's P.S.F. Records, Tokyo Flashback defined the breathtakingly unique and previously obscured musical movement that had been developing in Japan since the late 1970s. The compil…
Space Is The Place
Tip! The holy grail for Sun Ra collectors and fans, an album that forever gave them a slogan to live by! The record's different than some of the other Arkestra work from the time – in that it's a bit tighter and more spiritual, more in keeping with the style of the Blue Thumb label, for which it was recorded – and soaring along on a wave of post-Coltrane spiritual jazz enthusiasm. Side one features the ultimate recording of "Space Is The Place" – an anthemic tune that blends chanting, modal rhyt…
Love Cry
Tip! Love Cry (1968) is a true Albert Ayler manifesto: a sometimes disorienting combination of childish dirges, band music and folk melodies, all revised according to the New Thing perspective. Experimental album (for the time) containing some of the saxophonist's most famous tunes, such as "Ghosts." Ayler's last recording with his brother Donald, while the others are double bassist Alan Silva and drummer Milford Graves, with (surprise) contributions from harpsichordist Call Cobbs.
Attica Blues
This Impulse! classic is one of the saxophonist’s most lasting and enduring works. With its powerful avant-garde tracks and strong political messages, the album is one of Shepp's most successful large-group projects. Rolling Stone wrote that it is "not just a masterpiece of protest: it is more a political/religious experience, an appeal to higher human consciousness to, for God's sake, help us out of this torment."
Vista
Saxophonist Marion Brown ended his '70s stint at Impulse! Records with this serene and colorful album. It features musicians such as drummer Ed Blackwell and bassist Reggie Workman, plus Stanley Cowell on acoustic piano and Fender Rhodes. While Brown wrote the blissful coaster Vista, the five other compositions are well-chosen, starting with an inviting version of Cowell's "Maimoun" and an impressionistic and deeply meditative take on Stevie Wonder's "Visions".
Pneuma
Violinist and composer Michael White was among the first to play the violin in avant-garde jazz, and became one of the first jazz violinists to play jazz rock fusion. During his career, he played with Sun Ra, McCoy Tyner, Eric Dolphy, Pharoah Sanders and others.
Black Sun Ensemble Vol. 2
"Lion's second volume of the Black Sun Ensemble's recordings for their classic first album contains an alternate version of that album, including the tracks from the Camera Obscura label CD (2000) version of that album -- well, sort of. When sifting through the masters while preparing the Lion reissue of the real, actual first Black Sun Ensemble album -- as issued in 1985 on Pyknotic -- it became clear that many of the original LP tracks were also on the Camera Obscura CD release, but under the …
The Path
The Path is the latest album from Belbury Poly (aka Ghost Box records founder Jim Jupp). This time round Jupp has recruited a full band roster to expand his own unique electronica. He is joined by occasional Belbury Poly collaborator Christopher Budd on Bass and Guitar, Jesse Chandler (of Midlake, Mercury Rev & Pneumatic Tubes) on flute, clarinet and keyboards, Max Saidi on drums plus narration from author and poet, Justin Hopper.
Musically it takes as its starting point a particular moment of e…
a two
The Kyoto-based musician Yusaku Arai is known for his production work in the avant-garde scenes of Japanese hip-hop and R&B. On this solo album, though, he offers more lengthy, piano-centric meditations that use the techniques of musique concrète. Arai’s compositions on the A-side emerged out of a reflection on the corporeal and interwoven relationship between his own body and things he encountered in the world—the ocean, a flower petal, a plastic sheet, a hand. His intent is to represent a proc…
Forever Voiceless
An instrumental edition of the critically acclaimed 2022 album, Foreverandevernomore written and produced by Brian Eno.
Exophilie
*200 copies limited edition.* Heavy scrap metal harsh noise and exploratory, sensory-degrading video game - Exophilie is a training tool to prepare congitive adaptation in the azathothcene and speculative effects of libidinal anticosmic frequencies on human boundaries. Explorable 3D representations of the audio logs are available by scanning the QR code inside the album (Windows only). CW: Strobes, loud noise and aberrant extraterrestrial erotism.
Sin Memoria
*200 copies limited edition* Forgot to put on the helmet for the drainpipe slide? Breathe in deep as the smoke, chunks of shrapnel and microplastics fly high while the celestial dremel drills through the gorilla skull of the great offender. Rugburn on the listener's skin are just some of the side effects of this full spectrum junk elektronix noizu catastrophe.
Tightrope Walker
Tip! *315 copies limited edition* Barstool Mountain returns to Absurd Exposition after the well-regarded "III" CD from 2022. On "Tightrope Walker", the project's debut LP, Mattias Gustafsson continues his "harried, frazzled, grizzled" experiments in tape mangling with his Altar of Flies alter-ego. The album furthers the buildings-crumbling barrage of "III", leaving just enough room to realize that the walls are coming down hard.
Leadlined
*2023 stock* Leadlined is a 35-minute lamentation of the perverse ideology of the English, shaped by sound collage and heavy electronics. Heaving drones of memory churn the decayed hum of modernism and the spiritual bus routes of the past. £40 million of military hardware flying low over the colonial jugular; the knifing wind off the Kentish coast, shearing through the tendons of Roman roads and Saxon shores. Through the record’s mediation of these imagined pasts and displaced futures — the sine…
Free Time / Dead Time
Free Time/dead Time is the first full-length 12" LP from Robbie Judkins’ long-running experimental sound project Left Hand Cuts Off The Right. The album combines elements of focused minimalism, experimental electronics and twitching musique concrete to create a series of meditative compositions that reflect on the precarious boundaries between labour, leisure, and the quality of lived experience under late-capitalism. Judkins exploratory practice of sonic experimentation invokes the work of Blac…
Medina Vibrations
"A couple of months before lockdown, the housing block where Tom White lived got covered in scaffolding. Residents were left in a building veiled by translucent white netting for months on end. This composition was made in this specific urban lockdown context: the fridge whirs, birds chirp on scaffold poles, electromagnetic activity & tape loops reverberate on the eardrums, within the home and out into the world. Composed of archive and site specific sounds, spring 2020. Medina Vibrations was o…
Environments
Opal X’s Environments is a deep droning meditation on the polar vortex and computer generated environments. Recorded on the Prophet 8 synthesiser in weeks where temperatures dropped to -8° in subzero South London, Opal X conjures a hallucinatory snowstorm where material and augmented realities coalesce. Environments is mastered by the ice cold Amir Shoat. Following previous releases for The Tapeworm and Industrial Coast — and building on the topographical rust of the Nonexistent project — Enviro…
Unlimited Dream Company
Unlimited Dream Company is the latest barrage of rhythmic industrial noise from Iker Ormazabal Martinez. The release is 40 minutes of tense sleep paralysis in which piledriver basses, blown out kicks, slicing synths and growls of feedback straddle sub pressure drones. IOM’s voice is minced by this machine churn: the infernal drill master swallowed up and regurgitated by his nightmares in a fugue of recoiling anguish. Bringing to mind the great Esplendor Gemoterico, IOM channels a torrent of frus…
Hand / Fist
Noise Against Fascism flexes their tendons, clenches their fist and pulls back from the brink to deliver a blistering cacophony of harsh electronics for a new release on Brachliegen. Hand/Fist is aural struggle against a feeling of contemporary socio-political melancholia, manifest in two differing approaches to confrontational noise and bludgeoning tone. In the wake of a relentless decimation of social communality, Mathias Kristersson cites the importance of art and utopian ideals for both the …