Best of 2017
Chante
LP version. Sommor Records present the first reissue of Claude Lombard's Chante, originally released in 1969. Presented in the original French edition gatefold artwork. Produced by Roland Kluger (Chakachas, Free Pop Electronic Concept), arranged by Willy Albymoor and recorded at the legendary Madeleine Studios in Brussels. "If you know the 1968 Eurovision song, or the TV kids cartoons tunes which Claude Lombard sang, it will be hard to believe what's happening there... Beautiful pop songs sung i…
Erosion
Mental Experience present an expanded reissue of Ildefonso Aguilar's Erosión, originally released in 1985. Spooky, meditative soundscapes inspired by the desolate volcanic environment of Lanzarote (Canary Islands), created using Minimoog, Polymoog, vocal loops, and field recordings. Originally recorded in Germany in 1978 by Spanish painter/sound artist Ildefonso Aguilar, only a selection of the original recordings were released a few years later on a very rare limited edition cassette and LP. Er…
Orion Awakes
Mental Experience present a reissue of Golem’s Orion Awakes. Orion Awakes was recorded and produced circa 1976 by Toby Robinson, aka Genius P. Orridge, while he worked as second engineer at the famous Dierks Studio in Cologne. Memories from those hazy times are sketchy, but all evidence leads you to believe that the musicians featured here were well-known names from the kraut scene working under pseudonyms, recording 100% underground, non-commercial music under Toby’s guidance, just for fun. App…
Materia Oscura
Squadra Omega is one of the bands which best represents the vast spectrum of the Italian underground. Psychedelic, avant-garde, jazz-rock, improvisation, kraut-rock, rock in opposition and ethno-tribalism blend seamlessly into the work of a collective that moves and expands depending on the urgency of the moment, focused around a core that rotates around the two members OmegaMatt and OmegaG8. In the band's wide discography we find compositional freedom, improvised jam-sessions in and a am…
Klang Der Wandlungen
From the liner notes by Jakob Ullmann (translated by Peter Gebert and Molly McDolan): "It was during a break in the inaugural meeting of the East German section of the IGNM (International Society for Contemporary Music) in March of 1990 when Reinhard Oehlschlägel, the long-standing music editor of Deutschlandfunk in Cologne, suggested taking advantage of the fact that John Cage was to attend the summer courses in Darmstadt as a special guest by inviting John Cage to East Berlin. . . . Making Gia…
Il Mare - Musica Con Strumenti Elettronici
Edmondo Giuliani - "Il Mare: Musica Con Strumenti Elettronici", originally released in 1972 on the micro-label Dischi Egede. A Mega-Rare Italian Electronic Underwater music Library production conceived in Amedeo Tommasi' own studio and part of this impossible Library series titled "Brani Per Sonorizzazione". Insane vintage synthesizers vibes and electronic atmospheric trips, seminal Underwater music originally recorded for a obscure documentary on sea in early '70s by mysterious composer and orc…
Revolutions Per Minute (The art Record)
Restocked, reduced price. Bubbling below the surface of the sonic avant-garde - spanning art and music, lays the rarely observed context of the Artist Record - a field of recorded sounds stemming from, or attached to, the environments of fine art. Though expansive, elastic, and at times difficult to define, the largest body of its artifacts have been made by artists who are known for their work in other media - painters, sculptors, etc. These thrilling experimental gestures, draw on ideas which …
Divine Music
History can be a motherfucker - its authors vindictive and deeply unfair. Though Jazz - long heralded as the great American art form, got its due, buried within its canon are the legacies of systemic neglect. Its narrative is a mere shadow of the truth. Robert Northern is a lost giant - a name that almost no one has heard - a prodigy once recruited by Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Roland Kirk, Donald Byrd, Charlie Haden, Don Cherry, Freddie Hubbard, Eric Dolphy, and Sun Ra, who ve…
Hard Off
Against the odds of geography - continuously coming together within various collaborations and combinations of the three, Giovanni Di Domenico, Jim O'Rourke, Tatsuhisa Yamamoto have begun to assemble one of the most exciting bodies of organized sound to have appeared in recent years. The trio’s second outing under the moniker Delivery Health is no exception to the rule. Recorded in Tokyo between 2012 and 2013 and emerging on the ambitious Silent Water imprint, Hard Off sidesteps signifiers and e…
Music With Memory
** Small repress available. An essential entry, offering crucial insight into one of America’s most important composers. Beautiful, challenging, and visionary, this what music should always be - the heights of creativity bound to the specificity of time** Since they emerged just over twenty years ago, the Milan based imprint Alga Marghen has shown an unparalleled dedication to Post-War sonic avant-garde, assembling a catalog of reissues and archival releases which traverses a remarkable breath o…
Orgelkonzert Jesuitenkirche
Hermann Nitsch playing the church organ in the Jesuit church of Vienna, November 20th, 2013. Four heavy drone pieces, mastered by Martin Siewert. Double LP version comes with an eight-page booklet with artwork and an essay by Nitsch about music (in German). These four tracks of Nitsch performing solo on organ are made of sustained drones that are soothing and intense. Music is beautiful and meditative, as it slowly evolves and transforms, full trills that shimmer with celestial light and glide s…
Il Cavaliere Azzurro
Limited clear vinyl, edition of 100. One of the many characteristics of Italian avant-garde theatre, from the seventies through the eighties, was the overlap of acting with the physicality of movement - reality with fiction and the stage with real life; it was a new poetic language for a multimedia representation. In this new language, the music composed for the stage was an active part of the performances, and the soundtrack from 1985’s “Il Cavaliere Azzurro” is one of its most significan…
Antibarbarus
A reissue of Antibarbarus, issued as a compact disc in 1998, was the first edition Walter Marchetti released on Alga Marghen. The Antibarbarus cycle of five pieces makes use of original tapes coming from the same recording sessions that originated some of Marchetti's major musical works realized in the '80s. This former series of works presented some homogeneous and untouched sound sources in the "concrete" status of their inner - and necessarily chaotic - level of entropy. Nevertheless this ope…
Crawling To Lhasa
**Picture Disc edition with an insert of 8 pages and is also limited to 1000 hand-numbered copies.** Against its remarkable, sprawling, and lasting influence, it is hard to image the 1960’s and 70’s German sonic counterculture as it was - a truly underground music, almost entirely unknown beyond the borders of the country from which it sprang. Across the ensuing decades, this scene - among the most ambitious, rebellious, and experimental of its day, has offered an unparalleled wealth of inspirat…
Look'n for Ya (1973-75)
In 1973, when Smegma (the band) was born they had only one rule: No Musicians! That way they could re-invent the musical wheel with a new primitive, suburban, anti-hippie approach. 44 years later perhaps the world is ready for the first full LP of this original, uncompromising sound. At the time, it seemed they thought they were on a solitary journey, but shortly after these recordings, it was discovered that there was another local group, The Los Angeles Free Music Society, that they shortly be…
Epitaph For Venus
Mental Experience present a reissue of Galactic Explorers' Epitaph For Venus. Another album from the Pyramid label shrouded in mystery and produced by Toby Robinson in Cologne, circa 1974. Kosmische and head sounds with plenty of Minimoog, analog synths/keyboards, effects, loops, tape manipulation, treated percussions, etc., courtesy of Galactic Explorers, an electronic, minimal, ambient krautrock trio featuring Reinhard Karwatky (Dzyan). Take a trip to the inner regions of your mind, see ancien…
La nuit est au courant
Souffle Continu Records present the first vinyl edition of Jac Berrocal's La Nuit Est Au Courant, originally released on In Situ in 1991. Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman" on the radio, Renaissance motets, his grandfather in a Zouave military band, Syrian deserts... Columns of tanks in the streets, the soundtrack to Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (1956), Juan Manuel Fangio's car, the fall of the Berlin wall: from the first and fantastic Musiq Musik (1973), this is where Jac Berrocal's trumpet com…
Conditions of the Gas Giant
Bureau B present a reissue of Conrad Schnitzler's Conditions of the Gas Giant, originally released on cassette in 1988. The Berlin artist first released these recordings on a small American cassette label. Admirers of the seminal artist Conrad Schnitzler can be found all over the planet, including the USA, of course. Matt Howarth, illustrator and independent comic artist, is one of them. He has been following Schnitzler's music since the early 1970s whilst drawing offbeat science fiction stories…
Un Giorno in una Piazza + Il Cerchio degli Antichi
Special bundle. In the late 70’s the Italian music scene recorded a renewed interest in a sound research involved to a stimulating fusion of popular elements, jazz improvisation and suggestions of the middle-oriental classical heritage. Starting from the experience of Aktuala the idea of a common "Mediterranean air", that could compare and harmonize rhythms and timbres of various regions, enlivened a large number of musicians. In this context, it also placed the short history of Zeit and of his …
Les Choses de la Vie
First ever LP reissue of this timeless masterpiece by Philippe Sarde, the most versatile and talented french film composer. Les choses de la vie, an outstanding score which offers both the wonderful « Chanson d'Hélène » and most of the musical features which appeared later in Philippe Sarde's musical career : Nostalgia, melancholy, experiment and sound discord. Les choses de la vie is the film which confirms Sautet as a genuine author and Philippe Sarde as a rising composer. This is also the st…