New Arrivals

There's clearly a great deal of care and thought gone into the sequencing of this ace new mixtape on Arthur Magazine's record label, and that's down to the estimable taste and selection skills of Al Cisneros (known for his work in the bands Om , Sleep and Shrinebuilder). Opening with the introductory cosmic ambience of Lichens' 'Kopernik Trip Note', the playlist takes a left turn towards Linval Thompson's classic 'Wicked Babylon' before stopping by the sublime 'Everyone In Turn' by Grouper (the …

Guest contributions include David Sylvian, Daniel O'Sullivan (Miracle and Ulver), Duke Garwood and many others with the two creators, Daniel Lea and Matthew Waters, both taking a directorial role. The album was sculpted in Reykjavik by Ben Frost, enhanced by his signature aural physicality and visceral sub bass. The album is a vast collision of sound, from free brass and woodwind to "geometric" bowed cymbals and metallic percussion.But more than simply music, the multidisciplinary L A N D draw o…

Sven-Ake Johansson, Andrea Neumann and Axel Dörner formed the trio Barcelona Series in the end of the 90's. Their music was utterly important for the development of the new improscene, the new ways of improvising by using your instruments more as acoustic bodies than traditional instruments. Johansson had since the 70's been experimenting with a music with less gestures but anyhow keeping the emotional pressure. Both Dörner and Neumann were pioneers in their ways of playing their instrume…

CD version housed in a Digipak following the immediate sell out of the LP version. Released to coincide with Ellen Fullman's new full length for Important titled "Through Glass  anes."  Full length collaboration between Ellen Fullman, Theresa Wong, and Barn Owl produced by The Norman Conquest.  Barn Owl's extended drones and Theresa and The Norman Conquest's strings are the perfect accompaniment to Fullman's Long Stringed Instrument; a product of her own invention. This is an album of deep mater…

Lost and found all of a sudden, this album is the exploration made with the chanting voices of unknown nature. Choral fragments were decomposed and restructured, arranged with the effects and atmospheric shifts, creating the mysterious soundtrack to the otherworldly ceremony. These echoing voices are going directly from the lost memory or the daydreams, nobody can tell you where they are from, where they are calling you. Here are some words of the author, giving you just the hint but not t…

Blood & Time is an offshoot of Neurosis, featuring band members Noah Landis, Scott Kelly and Josh Graham, who take country blues into some seriously dark territory. Like, country navy blues, perhaps? As with all the releases in Southern Records' consistently excellent Latitudes series this set was recorded as a specially commissioned session, designed to capture a band at its rawest - or at least as raw as a band is likely to get in a studio environment. The results here are especially bewitchin…

'Jean-Luc Guionnet and Seijiro Murayama have been playing and performing a lot over these last past years. Their unique approach is based on space exploration and intensive relationship to sounds and silence. The first piece - Procédé - was recorded live at Radio Slovenija (Ljubljana - Slovenia) on june 2010. The three other pieces - Processus, Procession, Procès - were recorded by Eric La Casa in Paris on december 2010. The main purpose was to work out a specifically designed process for…

Brooklyn, NY’s Liturgy deal in a style of black metal steeped in the genre’s most basic foundations of buzzing, dissonant guitars and whirlwind percussion, and yet they demonstrate an acute ability to make the sound firmly their own, both modern and ancient. Liturgy’s unique take on the genre only slightly recalls their NYC friends Krallice and the earlier works of the Norwegian wolves Ulver (particularly their 3rd LP masterwork Nattens Madrigal). In some sense Liturgy represents the seeping of …

A split album with Volcano the Bear and La STPO. VTB tracks 1-5 and STPO tracks 6-9. Bears and Birds, oh my! One side keeps the hot hot. And the other keeps the weird weird. VTB’s typically atypical entomological set scratches like a hive that has evolved just to the point of thumping out tribal fealties to its giant insect God-Thing. Environmentally ritualized sub-rhythms mix musique-concrete with actual concrete, forming freakishly minimal foundations for the hive of whatevers to swarm within.…

'A 2-CD set containing four very different settings all featuring Paul Rutherford (trombone & euphonium): two festival solos - one with electronics and the other without;a festival brass quartet with George Lewis (trombone), Martin Mayes (french horn) & Melvyn Poore (tuba); and a studio trio with Paul Rogers (double bass) & Nigel Morris (drum set). The electronically enhanced solo and the brass quartet are unlike anything else in Rutherford's discography. All previously unissued.'

If the three compositions proposed by Denis Fournier have already been recorded, they merit to be here as resurgences, like scenarios encouraging the freedom of transformation without which free interpretation is nothing. “I often say that I don’t make improvised music, but that I improvise music. In other words, I put together there and then elements of my life, of my history, of my culture…” In other words, no structure commands the action. Every structure opens to the action (to sharing) whic…

first ever legit reissue of THE UNITS. This genre-defying band, from San Francisco's barely-documented synth/punk/art underground of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, combined sarcastic humor with deadly serious cultural critique, and synthetic experimentation with the bombast of punk. Includes the most sought-after early singles and selections from their first LP, Digital Stimulation, along with unreleased demos, and more. Remastered audio. Packaged in gatefold LP style sleeves with 32-page booklet…

this CD is an amazing achievement. Kjos Sørensen is a brilliantly gifted performer, but clearly an imaginative and creative one too. A very special issue, continuing BIS’s tradition of opening our minds and our ears.

Volume 3 in the series of Sun City Girls singles, compilations, and rare tracks, consists of material recorded between the mid-1980s and early 1990s. Much of this collection reflects the Arabic guitar instrumental and acoustic pseudo-Asian vocal folk styles of the band from the period when they recorded relentlessly. The 14 cuts vary wildly in scope yet maintain a consistent listening experience throughout, bridging a wide gap between the band's second full-length LP Grotto of Miracles (T…

Novaya Zemlya (lit. "New Land"), also known in Dutch as "Nova Zembla" and in Norwegian as "Gåselandet" (lit. the "Goose Land"), is an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean in the north of Russia and the extreme northeast of Europe, the easternmost point of Europe, lying at Cape Flissingsky on the northern island. The artwork, by Jon Wozencroft, includes an essay by Thierry Charollais, "Thomas Köner's Novaya Zemlya: towards a metaphysical geography"... Of course we find the unique Köneresque glow…

Barbara Romen, hammered dulcimer. Kai Fagaschinski, clarinet. Gunter Schneider, guitars. All music by B. Romen (AKM), K. Fagaschinski (AKM), and G. Schneider (AKM). Recorded by Christoph Amann at Amann Studios, Vienna, May 31st, 2008. Mixed and mastered by Christoph Amann with Schneider and Fagaschinski on October 31st, 2011. 300 copies.

Recorded on March 8th, 2008 at Alte Gerberel, St. Johann in Tirol/Austria at Festival ArtActs 2008. Features on trombone Johannes Bauer, drums Paal Nilssen-Love, analogue synthesizer Thomas Lehn & reeds Ken Vandermark.

Mixing improvisation & tightly controlled jump cut compositional complexity, AHLEUCHATISTAS are one of a handful of rock groups that can give the Ruins, Meshuggah, & Naked City a run for their money. Fascinating & powerful, passionately performed & beautifully recorded, this is New Rock Complexity at its very best.

With a title like ‘Improvisation Anarchy’, you pretty much have the blessed assurance that the record will be either a right-on, spontaneous surge of electricity, or at least an entertaining disaster. Recorded in 1978-79, this patchwork quilt of straight-arrow punk and meandering synth-assisted psychedelia manages to be both at the same time. It should be noted that this kind of music was not common for 1970s West Japan before the ‘bubble economy’ of the 80’s allowed for more impulsive consumpti…

For the better part of the past decade, Loren Chasse has been refining his compelling sonic approach, which generally involves "activating" the latent sound-making qualities of natural / commonplace objects, such as pine cones, leaves, stones, or paper.  This approach will seem immediately familiar to fans of John Cage, although Chasse's work has always felt more humanist to me than Cage's—driven less by theory and more by a romanticism that isn't afraid to get muddy or wet. You could also align…

2004. Jean Claude Jones (electro acoustic bass and live electronics) is a central figure on the Israeli jazz scene since many years and a pivotal member of the avantgarde - free jazz movement in Israel. Former member of the Kedma trio, he played with litarally everybody on the scene during the years. This is his debut album as a leader and he performs a series of duets with usual friends like Josef Sprinzak (voice), Harold Rubin (clarinet, text), Yuval Mesner (cello), Gan Lev (alto sax, baryton)…

In the beginning there was the piano. As soon as he had mastered the basics, Jean-Philippe Goude discovered the spell of melancholy while working on a little musical piece: an etude ringing out in the style of a somber hymn. Not the dead meat smells of somberness that, according to Picabia, serious people emit, but the earthen gravity of an abyss dug by life itself. Everything is the result of this bedazzlement. At 11 years old, Jean-Philippe Goude closed his eyes. When his eyelids finall…

Composed by Taku Sugimoto. Tetuzi Akiyama: guitar. Recorded live at Loop-Line on October 23, 2009. Recorded by Taku Sugimoto. Mastered by Taku Unami. Drawing by Taku Sugimoto.

Vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz's (of Exploding Star Orchestra fame) Chicago Trio with drummer Mike Reed and bassist Nate McBride in a great modern jazz release of original compositions, informed, warm and compelling music.  "The Jason Adasiewicz Trio features Jason on vibraphone, Mike Reed on drums, and Nate McBride on bass. The Chicago jazz group formed in 2008, first experimenting as a free improvising trio, and later focused attention on arranging tunes that Adasiewicz wrote during his wife's …

This powerful 1972 performance by Arni Cheatham's group provides a unique glimpse of the jazz scene in Boston. The group borrowed the most innovative characteristics of jazz and rock, but never sounded derivative. This is early seventies "jazz fusion" of the highest order, before the term evolved to mean a light, commercially acceptable genre. As with many innovative jazz forms, the recording was made at one of the many local universities, Harvard. The resulting album was pressed in scant…

poSTepeno is inspired by a multi-part collage created circa 1890 by an anonymous schizophrenic patient (known only as Frau ST) at the Viennese Oberdöbling asylum. The compositions (for piano and sine tones) morph musicalthemes through continual microtonal modifications. Sine tones are unstable, but nevertheless they consistently keep their individual frequency direction (up or down). In the chordal sense, the distance between the tones is subject to alteration. In this way the harmonic indicatio…

Live composition for portable radios, FM transmitter, 4 corner speaker PA, found sound textures, & Shruti drone box. Sound is all around us. An ethereal tapestry of invisible radio waves and sound pressure waves fills our world. Live in concert, Phoenix and Phaedra plays with our sense of place and scale, by using a surround sound speaker system in combination with a short range FM transmitter which broadcasts to a collection of hand held radios located within the audience. The concert is perfor…

This is the long awaited debut release of Streifenjunko. “No Longer Burning” presents the two Norwegians Espen Reinertsen (saxophone) and Eivind Lønning (trumpet) in 9 extraordinary pieces. Both musicians have background from all kinds of collaborations in jazz, rock and more contemporary projects such as Trondheim Jazzorkester, Christian Wallumrød Ensemble (Eivind), and the recent release: “Varianter av døde trær” with Tetuzi Akiyama and Martin Taxt on SOFA. Streifenjunko is/has also collaborat…

Riccardo Dillon Wanke’s Caves was composed and recorded in 2006 in Alfama (historical district of Lisbon, Portugal) using acoustic and electric guitars, saxophones and natural sound elements starting from pure radical improvisation evolving into the investigation of drones and static and looped music related to minimalism. At the center of these works are the binaural beats in musical composition, the results lying between classical composition, minimalistic improvisation and a "folk" sensitivit…

Urs Leimgruber (soprano saxophone, tenor saxophone), Alexander Schubert (electronics, violin), Oliver Schwerdt (piano, percussion, organ) and Christian Lillinger (drums, percussion). Recorded April 17th 2008, Leipzig.

Deluxe 2LP version. More voraciously bestial soundwork coming from Daniel Menche -- this time, his chosen theme is the piano, in which he attacks, investigates and dissects with the precision of an autopsy surgeon, adding a whole new meaning to the concept of prepared piano, or should we say, unprepared piano, for an all-out assault. Guts lays out quite possibly some of the finest slabs of Menchian sonic mayhem to date. Slightly different track sequence over CD and vinyl formats due to ti…

"During his lifetime, classically trained composer, cellist and disco legend Arthur Russell studied and performed with a wide variety of musicians and artists including The Flying Lizards, David Byrne, Rhys Chatham, Ali Akbar Khan, Allen Ginsberg, John Hammond, Peter Gordon, Jon Gibson, Jerry Harrison, Garret List, Frank Pagano, Andy Paley, Leni Pickett and Peter Zummo. In 1979, Russell, working under the name Dinosaur, wrote and produced Kiss Me Again -- the first disco single to be released by…

Italian minimal synth & drum machine duo, another side project by Ottaven/Canedicoda, abstract  dread sounds with elements of clinical drone and throbbing frequencies to a more introspective ambient chaos

A three-way collaboration by Chicago based sound artist and renowned researcher in the field of Electronic Voice Phenomena Michael Esposito, Hamburg based operator of the Fragment Factory label Michael Muennich and long-time conceptual/performance artist, filmmaker, writer and core member of The Haters GX Jupitter-Larsen from Los Angeles. The origin of this project was a field investigation conducted by Esposito at American Film Studios, Santa Barbara, CA, additional sounds recorded by Michael M…

The live music experience is what it’s all about! Let’s face it, the recording, the thing (CD, vinyl, ipod), that you’re listening to now is a luxury – a convenient form of storing and a flawed attempt at revisiting the ecstasy of the live experience. Live music is at the heart of civilization and culture. Live music is real music – the recording is simply the run out groove of time, a means to try and capture the experience. This trio is defined by live performance. The relationship between the…

Kampanerura is the name of a boy appearing in the children's story Night on the Galactic Railroad by Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933), Japanese poet and author of children's literature. A boy with pure soul transmigrates and becomes a dissipated man around a trip to the bottom in Asia. From accompanying text by Masayoshi Urabe 'What are my legs on? What are my feet standing on? Sand? I feel something sharp and pointed! And a gentle breeze where am I? The sea? I feel it flowing! I've crossed ove…

CD reissue of the ultra rare Multhipla related (on its sublabel Fonia) LP from 1981 - the works of Giorgio Battistelli (b. 1953) are often linked to the theater, and even his instrumental works are highly dramatic, with various instruments and elements considered as 'characters' in a drama. For the past 20 years, 'Experimentum Mundi' has been one of the most-performed works of 'musique concrete,' i.e. music made with everyday objects instead of conventional instruments. In this work, 16 everyday…

Awesome compilation in a limited edition of 300 hand-numbered copies. With Sébastien Roux / Eddie Ladoire, Rafael Toral, Elio Martusciello, David Toop, Terry Day, Matt Davies, Skoltz / Kolgen, Scanner, KK NULL, Alvin Curran, Efzeg, Eddie Prevost / John Butcher, Lawrence English, Rhodri Davies / Joe Williamson / Stefano Tedesco, Olivia Block...."We, the 'kids' (whowe?) should listen more to classical music. At least that's what Deutsche Grammophon wants, since they want us to buy their CDs. B…

'Tim uses several boxes of speakers and Seijiro uses a snare drum as a resonance box, with microphones. They put boxes for their music in another box = the space. They create different levels of universe within the space. From micro to macro. Always with one clear intention: to improvise listening and to organize sonic space together in a very delicate way.Thanks to La Comète 347, Paris. 'Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to i…

New York duo of Joshua Convey and Luke Krnkr. Blistering, overdriven shards of noise obscure the almost entirely hidden melodies. These musical moments are few and far between, as The Persistence of Meaning is more about reveling in destruction and decay, emphasizing raw feedback and hollow, rhythmic loops that shamble like the walking dead. Dirges from the deepest ossuaries can almost be heard, pained notes buried by locust swarms of static. While occasionally the pair engage in erratic Krautro…