New Arrivals
Duo Live 1984
Celebrating the 10th anniversary of Studio Songs! Popular titles that have been out of stock for a long time are being reissued at mid-price. The first title is the miraculous duo of Togashi and Takayanagi. Although the album is only 35 minutes and 50 seconds long, the tense improvisation on this masterpiece has captivated many free jazz fans. Masahiko Togashi/percussion, Masayuki Takayanagi/guitar Recorded: September 29, 1984 at Nagoya Far Out
Live I Kungsten
New album from Blod recorded during the second half of 2022 by Gustaf Dicksson. Där Ska Barnet Vara is a continuation of the themes explored on Pilgrimssånger and contains nine more songs dealing with faith in different forms, with a strong presence of death. Compared to Pilgrimssånger, the sound is slightly more lo-fi and fucked up and the approach is somewhat looser and more desperate, but here are some of the strongest and most fragile and heartfelt Blod songs to date. Additional players on t…
The Emerald Duets
Part of his 80th Anniversary celebration and subtitled "The Art Of The Trumpeter And Drummers", this 5-CD box set brings legendary improviser Wadada Leo Smith together with four long-time collaborators and masterful drummers--Andrew Cyrille, Jack DeJohnette, Pheeroan akLaff and Han Bennink--with Smith performing on both piano and trumpet. 5-CD BOX SET. Includes 60 pages booklet. The Emerald Duets is a crowning achievement among Wadada Leo Smith's many recorded duo collaborations with drummers/p…
Piano Interpretations
2023 Stock. Kukuruz Quartet started 2014 their involvement with Julius Eastman and his musical works. In 2017, their performance at documenta 14 in the Megaro Mousikis concert hall in Athens earned a standing ovation. They performed works by Julius Eastman: 'Evil Nigger', 'Gay Guerrilla', 'Buddha' and 'Fugue No. 7'. The recording of these compositions followed in November 2017 on four Steinway D pianos in the main hall of the historic Radiostudio Zürich. Composer, trombonist and scholar George E…
Music Delivery/Percussion
Andrew Cyrille’s longtime companion Oliver Lake praises the master of African-American rhythms in his poem The Real Cyrille – “making the real magic … the real rhythms … the real sounds … expanding his African/Haitian roots … surfing the drums for masterful lyrical snippets … a master of color … painting coloring riffing always stretchin’ searchin’lookin’ for that next sound color sound!” Lake’s words astutely describe the artistry of Andrew Cyrille and the music that he makes on this record. Un…
Two For Two
Aki Takase and Han Bennink love the art of dialogue. Bennink is paired for life in a duo with the pianist Misha Mengelberg. Intakt Record also offers a duo recording of Han Bennink with the Zurich pianist Irène Schweizer. After having released five duo CDs at Intakt Records with Silke Eberhard, Lauren Newton, Rudi Mahall, Alexander von Schlippenbach and Louis Sclavis, Aki Takase is now presenting a breathtaking and very entertaining recording with Han Bennink.
Every tone reveals enjoyment and de…
Kasumi
Jazz as the art of dialogue: two of the great musicians of today's jazz from different continents and generations make music sparkle. Born in Osaka in 1948, Aki Takase moved to Berlin where her musical partners included Han Bennink, Evan Parker, Rudi Mahall, David Murray, Louis Sclavis and Fred Frith as well as her husband and pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach. Ingrid Laubrock, born in 1970 in Stadlohn in North Rhine-Westphalia, moved to London at the age of 19 where she studied with the saxop…
Hokusai - Piano Solo
Aki Takase, the Berlin-based pianist, is one of the great personalities of modern jazz. Moments of freedom, form and humour characterize this stylistically versatile avant-gardist, the stubborn virtuoso who toys with jazz traditions. In the year of her 70th birthday, Aki Takase was honoured with The Berlin Jazz Prize. Recorded over two days at the Sendesaal Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg, the album includes some pieces captured live during the award ceremony, and some recorded in a studio setting i…
Leo
Meandering, autobiographical solo works from Aki Tsuyuko, tracking her 30 year relationship with her beloved Kawai Dreamatone organ. As so touchingly explained in the release notes, Aki’s relationship began with her instrument of choice after her Dad (who worked as a salesman for the Kawai corporation) brought one home for her. From here, she started to explore the vast combinations of tones and colours the half digital / half analogue organ can produce, regularly retreating away to practice a…
Lineaments
Sofa is proud to release a new solo album from Fredrik Rasten, following his fantastic Six Moving Guitars (released on Sofa in 2019). Lineaments consists of two long-form solo pieces performed by Rasten, for an extended instrumentarium of guitars, voice and sine waves. Lineament I and II proceed from two different plucking patterns played on one acoustic and one electric guitar, both sharing a specific tuning from where the two pieces explore diverging tempos and structures. Humming voice, sine …
Trending
*2022 stock.* Sofa Music is proud to welcome a new project on board. It’s Propan, a duo comprising the two Norwegian vocalists; Natali Garner and Ina Sagstuen. On their second album Propan continues its research within the frameworks of the song form and presents a psychedelic, and more delirious landscape than on its first, somewhat more electroacoustic album, Baby. The duo explores the meeting point between improvised music and studio production, and builds the album around Propan's well-estab…
Renaissance
Modern and grounded in the 1960s hard-bop sensibility, the American pianist and composer Albert Dailey (1939 – 1984) had perfect control over his instrument. Since an early age he played with cutting-edge musicians of the likes of Art Blakey, Sarah Vaughan, Stan Getz, Charles Mingus, and Lee Konitz, only to name a few. But despite that, he was an underrated artist during his lifetime, receiving the deserved recognition only after his death. Renaissance 2 November 1977 is his second album, played…
The Wheel
Moon Bros. is more or less the solo project of guitarist 'Fred' Schneider and was brought to our attention by the Queen of Colorado herself (aka Josephine Foster). Fred appears on Foster's No Harm Done album, and she returns the favor by singing on one of the tunes here. Many of Fred's earliest recording efforts were done with a variety of Chicago-based post-rock/jazz-flecked combos (The Exciting Trio, HIM, etc.) But for the past few years, he has used Moon Bros. to explore contours of more rura…
Performances
A follow-up to the duo's LP, CCTK Music (2021, Gilgongo Records), Performances features three sets from James Fella and Gabriella Isaac, from Gilgongo Records' 15th Year Anniversary celebration in Phoenix, AZ -- December 2019. Like the event, the record starts with a recreation of the second side of CCTK Music, using six reference lacquers of CCTK's A-side as source material to make a live collage. Following this are solo sets from Isaac (using her laptop as a feedback loop/sound source/physical…
Through Mazes Running
Edition of 100. Crystal-clear vinyl. Tip-on jacket. The second collaborative album by Drew Daniel (Matmos, The Soft Pink Truth) and John Wiese (Sissy Spacek), "Through Mazes Running" builds turbulent complexity from a real time cage match of no-holds-barred signal processing. Cross-multiplying tape manipulation and software, each processing the other into a writhing feedback loop, creating a volatile ouroboros of sound. Cut at 45 RPM for maximum fidelity.
Zoomachia Disc 1
*Edition of 200* First emerging during the mid 2000s in the field of experimental electronics, the Italian born, Berlin based artist, Francesco Cavaliere captivated us back in 2021 with ‘Viridescens’, his brilliant duo with Tomoko Sauvage issued by Marionette. With a handful of noteworthy releases having appeared since, he now returns with ‘Zoomachia Disc 1’, a remarkable fable bridging the territories of spoken word and electronic and electroacoustic composition.
For the better part of the last…
Il Calore Animale
*Edition of 200* Ginevra Bompiani is most likely unknown for fans of experiential music. In Italian literature and thinking, however, she is highly regarded writer, editor, translator, essayist, and academic, whose fiction, particularly, is informed by linguistics, feminism, and literary theory, and verges on the surreal and the fantastic, making her interdisciplinary effort, ‘Il Calore Animale’, collaborating with two of the most singular voices in contemporary experimental music - Caterina Ba…
Sound Plantings
Jonas Gerigk is a double bass player who is active as a composer/performer in the fields of improvised music. In addition, he collaborates in projects of contemporary composers and is involved in the realization of their works. A main focus of his work deals with the term Explorative Music. He is doing intensive research on the expansion of the sound spectrum of the acoustic double bass. With a physical as well as technical approach and the use of objects he explores the variety of timbres of hi…
Exotic Dreams – Martin Denny Presents The Enticing Voice Of Ethel Azama
Exotica masterpiece finally re-issued ! Which record is produced by Martin Denny, arranged by pianist Paul Conrad and features vintage Exotica's second lady who is only outclassed by the Peruvian chantress Yma Sumac? It's Exotic Dreams, released in 1958 that puts – so tells the cover artwork – "the enticing voice of Ethel Azama" (1934–1984), a Hawaiian Jazz singer, into the spotlight. Martin Denny discovered her a few years later and was able to negotiate with his house label Liberty Records, wh…
Mganga
Japan goes to Africa ! It's more than a bit ironic that Tak Shindo's most "exotic" album, the superb Mganga!, boasts no connection to his own Japanese heritage, instead focusing on the primal rhythms and tribal chants of Africa. Rooted largely in the arranger's experience on the Latin jazz circuit, its Afro-Cuban rhythms, sampled animal sounds, and chants capture an African musical culture based far more in fantasy than reality, much as rival exotica maestros like Martin Denny and Les Baxter con…