New Arrivals
Propeller Product Prop 4–1
Long traded and coveted, discussed and debated, Propeller Product’s 1981 cassette compilation finally receives a physical release reflecting its original intention and aim. And this is its Boston origin story: a small collective with a DIY artistic bent, Propeller launched in 1981. Founded as a collaborative taking inspiration from Factory Records and the “pay no more” ethos of DischordRecords and CRASS, Propeller offers an unique window into Boston and the American post-punk underground. Led by…
Reflex
"Reflex" is Gábor Lázár's debut album on Raster. His new album is a collection of seven tracks, featuring an extended sound palette of percussions and synthesizers drawing our attention towards the essential soundscapes of techno while maintaining his distinct, uncompromising and meticulously detailed style. While the tracks do not follow traditional narratives, the album has an evolution: it gently builds up from challenging, unpredictable, and organically composed structures to linear yet play…
Dragon Man
"Only a decade ago Leong Lau remained a well-hidden Malaysian-Australian treasure, known only to small circles of Australian record collectors. In 2013 we met Leong in person at the Brisbane state library, where after a long and somewhat transcendental ‘conversation’ received his blessings to re-release his music. In 2014, we reissued his sophomore album ‘That Rongeng Sound’ and later in 2021, his sole single ‘Late Night Flyer. In 2024, we are going back to finish the triangle of Leong releases,…
Egon Bondy's Happy Hearts Club Banned
Perhaps there is no need to introduce this legendary recording, but few people realized that this year it will be 50 years (!) since the band secretly set foot in Hrad Houska and started recording there in the winter of 1974. And Sváťa Karásek shined a light on them.
Take A Picture
Take A Picture is Margo Guryan’s one and done classic — one of record collecting’s real unheralded masterpieces — bright, breezy, lightly psychedelic, and utterly cosmopolitan, recorded in New York City no less. Newly restored by Jessica Thompson from the original two-track safety masters, this beguilingly melodic 1968 pop tour-de-force has never sounded better.
Giorgos Katsaros
Big Tip! Our obsession with underground Greek music continues with 10 ultra-rare recordings of heartbreak and vice from rembetiko legend Giorgos Katsaros. Katsaros, who by some accounts lived to be over 100 years old, carried the old songs of Greece to the Diaspora in the United States, bridging centuries of music in one storied lifetime. Born in 1901 on the Greek island of Amorgos, Katsaros’ was enchanted with the songs he picked up as a kid in the streets of Piraeus and Athens. Encouraged by h…
Live At The Panafrican Festival
Tip! Archie Shepp has many made many Afrocentric statements in his long distinguished career but this meeting with Algerian and Touareg musicians in 1969 ranks among his greatest artistic achievements. The backdrop was the inaugural Pan African Festival Of Culture that took place in Algiers in July 1969 in order to promote solidarity among African nations at a time when many were emerging from the yoke of colonialism and some were still fighting for freedom. Their struggle chimed with the Black …
Spooky Two
"Spooky Two is this British blues-rock band's pièce de résistance. All eight of the tracks compound free-styled rock and loose-fitting guitar playing, resulting in some fantastic raw music … their smooth, relaxed tempos and riffs mirrored bands like Savoy Brown and, at times, even the Yardbirds … Although Spooky Tooth lasted about seven years, their other albums never really contained the same passion or talented collaborating by each individual musician as Spooky Two." - Mike DeGagne
Música Para Teatro 2009-2022
*100 copies limited edition* Wasser Bassin has just released a brief anthology of the work of José Albert Gomes, Música Para Teatro 2009-2022; or, in other words, a road of discontinuous lines, where the contemporaneity of tracks like “Ciúme” is followed by the abstractions of “Quarto Poder”, the meditative atmospheres of “Laudes”, or the glitch of “Needle”. That said, this compendium may sound a little scattered or paradoxical, but the same mind doesn't necessarily have to think the same things…
Klusterfuck
Biiig Tip! This is a strange one. Originally conceived as part of an anarchistic publication, the tracks culled from two live performances at separate locations in London’s Shoreditch got as far as the test pressing stage as long as 5 years ago and then forgotten. The publication never materialised and the cut lacquers and metalwork lay languishing in a dark corner on a dusty bottom shelf in the pressing plants storeroom. Forgotten until we were presented with a hefty bill for production and s…
Godtet
7 years since its release; the iconic debut from Godtet gets a repress. The self-titled LP marked the inception of La Sape Records along with the genesis of Godtet. Stitched together more like a beat tape. 12 movements recorded live with no overdubs; "This record came about with no preconceived ideas of what we were making or what it would sound like". A crystallisation of Godtet which aided to form the sound of La Sape.
Traversing across spiritual jazz, dub and experimental gestures. It caught …
Twin Color (vol. I)
Twin Color - Vol 1 marks the grand return of Murcof to producing a full-length album in all its glory and generosity, nearly two decades after the release of Cosmos in 2007. Celebrated for his classical, minimalist textures and unique soundscapes, Murcof has established himself as a master of modern ambient music alongside Tim Hecker, Alva Noto, and Johann Johannsson. With this new album, Murcof takes a bold step forward, embracing a distinctly cinematic and dystopian narrative influenced by the…
Sueños acuáticos
Water ripples all around, and echoing sounds stretch out into a shady sub aquatic habitat. Its dark corners slowly burst into view as cresting noises reveal fresh caverns teeming with liquid life. This is Sueños Acuáticos, the latest sonic exploration from Lamina, a musical project by French artist, Clarice Calvo-Pinsolle. Built from years of carefully gathered field recordings, the album constructs immersive, detailed soundscapes where watery environments, caves, and forests intertwine with dig…
Alene Et
On "Alene Et", Michaela Turcerová, a Copenhagen-based, Slovakia born musician, takes minutiae — the tiniest scrapes and breathiest hums — and distorts them into sprawling, collaged webs that barely resemble the instrument in its natural state. Each shard, when pieced together, makes a rhythmic, undulating sound born from the subtlest motions
Éthiopiques 9 (1969-1974)
*2024 stock* The Alèmayèhu songs already presented in Ethiopiques 3 and 8 have given a foretaste of this outstanding stylist of Ethiopian pop, a singer as remarkable for his frenetic rock numbers as for his heartrending ballads. By dint of rampant Americanism, he earned himsef such nicknames as The Ethiopian James Brown or the Abyssinian Elvis. With his dazzling stage presence, nimble voicebox and wicked pompadour, he is a strutting show-off, straight out of American Graffiti or Saturday Night F…
Throb, shiver, arrow of time
Oliver Coates' Throb, shiver, arrow of time is a portal into somatic chiaroscuro, aglow with the embers of imperfect memories and smudged with the plumes of internal echoes, which augment in vast, mercurial dimensions. The ten compositions of Throb, shiver, arrow of time find weightless melodies soaring across after-image gradients, while Coates reaches further to collapse the digital into the analogue and vice versa, allowing serendipity to reorganize the material and push outwards, so the musi…
Kuma Cove
“Music is my forever cove,” writes Portland, Oregon’s Luke Wyland of the ideas that give shape to Kuma Cove, his latest album under his own name. Though named after a real place on the Oregon coast, Kuma Cove casts its gaze far beyond the sightseer’s line of vision. Recorded live in the studio and blurring obvious lines between computer-based composition and electro-acoustic instrumentation, it is an album about flow, borders, transitory states, and shelter. Composed of discontinuous ripples and…
Oxide Manifesto
"Oxide Manifesto is intended as an audio sketchbook, which explores a particular method of creating music. It aims to link obsolete machines and experimental composition. In recording it, I embraced as many techniques of working with magnetic tape as possible. I gave myself the freedom to lean into the perceived flaws of tape as a recording format. Often we hear ‘it’s not about the equipment’. But on this album the equipment is in equal focus to the music. Wow, flutter, wonky pitch, abrupt edits…
Harlesden Sessions
‘Harlesden Sessions’ is a collection of duo recordings between versatile saxophonist David Bitelli and gifted drummer Ollie Usiskin, whose imaginative improvisations take us on a journey through post-bop, jazz-funk and free jazz landscapes. The two North West London natives would meet up on occasional Thursdays to play improvised sax and drums duo sessions. As their understanding grew, they decided to start recording them and ‘Harlesden Sessions’ presents the best of these concise improvised exc…
Duos
*300 copies limited edition* The first duo recording between towering free jazz saxophonist Paul Dunmall and the highly creative saxophonist Kevin Figes, sees them perform ten improvised pieces using an assortment of instruments, including various saxophones, clarinets and flutes. With no pre-composed themes or motifs, what you hear are two master musicians in the moment of creativity. The wholly improvised conversations seem to encompass and distil the history of jazz, moving between free and c…