Best of 2018
Whirled Music
Black Truffle present a reissue of a landmark UK release, Max Eastley, Steve Beresford, Paul Burwell, and David Toop's Whirled Music, originally released on Quartz in 1980. Remastered and cut at 45RPM by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering Berlin.…
The Art Ensemble of Chicago and Associated Ensembles
The Art Ensemble of Chicago and Associated Ensembles is a 21-CD limited and numbered edition issued as the standard-bearers of Great Black Music prepare to celebrate their 50th anniversary. Both the Art Ensemble of Chicago and ECM Records were founde…
Capra Black
Capra Black remains one of the seminal recordings of jazz's black consciousness movement. A profoundly spiritual effort that channels both the intellectual complexity of the avant-garde as well as the emotional potency of gospel, its focus and assura…
Clic
There is no figure in Italian music, nor within the country’s shimmering, expansive avant-garde, who demands the respect and awe offered to Franco Battiato. He is the beginning and the end. An artist whose output, stretching across six decades, is so…
Eros In Arabia
This year has been an incredible period for avant-garde, Minimalist, New Age, ambient, and electronic reissues. One after another, many of the most coveted and rare LPs from these movements have emerged from the shadows. While each of these movements…
Music in Twelve Parts
Incredible lost recordings by Philip Glass from 1975, released at ORTF Sextet at La Maison de la Radio, Paris. The sextet is comprised of a stellar cast of musicians with Philip Glass, Jon Gibson, Dickie Landry, Michael Riesman, Joan La Barbara and R…
Composiciones Nativas
Subtitled "Music for Native Peruvian Instruments and Magnetophonic Tape (1978)" this is a wonderful collection of pieces composed between 1976 & 1978 at the Royal College's EMS by Peruvian composer Arturo Ruiz del Pozo. Ranging from extended tape-loo…
Don't Look Back
For a label that wasn't around long, Strata East achieved the same sort of label recognition that Impulse! or Blue Note managed to build. In other words, you knew what you were getting when you bought a record on the label, even if you didn't know th…
Musique Con Crete
Starting with an artist residency Tasos Stamou visited the Greek island over the course of three summers, collecting field recordings, performing with local musicians, producing electronic compositions and gathering old records and tapes of tradition…
dR
"By the time you read this Jerome Noetinger is no longer the boss/face/director of Metamkine, the French mail-order for all sorts of unusual music, music along the lines of what we write about, in case you might be wondering where to purchase any (ht…
Hi-Fi Is Sweeping the Country
Populäre Mechanik is an improvisational group from Berlin playing a unique amalgam of Fluxus-inspired garage rock, free jazz, and live electronics. It was originally founded in the early 1980s by Wolfgang Seidel who had previously been the original d…
Oryantal
** Edition of 300 copies ** Istanbul based multi-instrumentalist Umut Çağlar founded the Turkish free jazz band Konstrukt at the beginning of 2008. Since then the band went through many line-up changes and collaborated with with the likes of Peter Br…
Pass The Distance
Few albums define a genre as succinctly as Simon Finn’s Pass The Distance does for psychedelic folk. Not even landmark recordings by Pearls Before Swine or Skip Spence can stand up to the sheer madness of Finn’s sole LP, originally released in 1970. …
Nu jungle dances
Souffle Continu presents a reissue of Nu Creative Methods' Nu Jungle Dances, originally released in 1978. When the second Nu Creative Methods album was released, New And Rediscovered Musical Instruments (1975) by Max Eastley and David Toop had alread…
Venus in Cancer
Though frequently overshadowed by his contemporary and Takoma Records labelmate John Fahey, the compositions and performances of Daniel R. Robinson Jr., best known by the stage name Robbie Basho, were integral in the development of the American primi…
Unburdened Light
**Unreleased recordings: 2001 – 2004. Includes 8-page 9″x9″ booklet. Edition of 300** The Ivytree, as some may know, is the project of San Franciscan musician Glenn Donaldson. In the early 2000s Glenn was a founder of the Jewelled Antler Collective, …
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Edition of 200. An immersion into Classics. That kind of Classics which holds in his pantheon Pierre Henri and Pierre Schaeffer, even though I should maybe refer to Michel Chion, given the powerful dramatic intensity displayed by these two compositio…
Your Own Self
Garrett List’s work for Opus One, in 1972, was a remarkable creative effort, conceived like a celebration of a higher self-consciousness. The context is avant-garde minimalism, but the music is enriched by a deep spiritualism; it echoes the most medi…
Ajatuslapsi
Esa Kotilainen’s Ajatuslapsi was a very moderate success at the time of its release in 1977 (on Love Records label, also responsible for the Sperm releases), but over the years its cult status has become immense. Svart Records presents the first ever…
Canaxis 5
CD Edition. A few months after the foundation of Can, Holger Czukay recorded his first solo album ‘Canaxis’, in conjunction with producer/engineer Rolf Dammers, this album was assembled from thousands of snippets recorded from short wave radio, a lon…