Best of 2019
Cyro
When Cyro Baptista moved to New York in 1980 from his home city of São Paulo, he brought with him an arsenal of percussion instruments, including the cuica (friction drum), surdo (the booming bass drum associated with samba), berimbau (single-string bow with resonating gourd), and cabasas galore, in the next few years deploying them most notably in numerous ensembles curated by John Zorn, who helped set up this studio session in 1982.As you might expect from someone whose infectious grooves have…
Time
Multi-reedist Tony Coe was born in 1934, four years after guitarist Derek Bailey. He cut his teeth as a career jazzman with Humphrey Lyttleton, before an extended stint with the Kenny Clarke/Francy Boland Big Band. On this rare 1979 duo outing, he sticks to clarinet. And though that instrument has an illustrious jazz pedigree, Coe’s playing here is something else. It’s worth noting that the clarinettist has also played under the baton of arch-modernist Pierre Boulez, the kind of composer Derek B…
Trios
For the 1983 edition of Company Week held at London's I.C.A. in May of that year, guitarist Derek Bailey once more invited a typically eclectic collection of guests. Cellist Ernst Reijseger is a mainstay of Dutch new jazz (ICP Orchestra, Clusone Trio...), American wind virtuoso J.D.Parran a veteran of the Black Artists' Group and Anthony Davis and Anthony Braxton ensembles, while saxophonists Evan Parker and Peter Brötzmann, as titans of European free improvisation, need no introduction. French …
Conversations With the Anthony Burgess Cassette Archives
Double LP version. Includes color insert. Double LP/CD curated by Alan Dunn in collaboration with the International Anthony Burgess Foundation and Sub Rosa. Anthony Burgess's second wife Liana carried a cassette recorder with her at all times to capture her life with the author and their son Andrew. This extraordinarily intimate audio archive of over 1,000 cassettes now sits with the International Anthony Burgess Foundation and artist Alan Dunn has been granted access to select excerpts from it …
Broken Music
**Much needed small repress avaiilable** Milan Knizak 1979's masterpiece never re-released before. Presented as a gatefold with the original design. Before everyone else - Christian Marclay, Philip Jeck, eRikm, Martin Tétreault, Otomo Yoshihide - there was Milan Knizak. In 1964, Milan Knizak, a member of Fluxus from behind the Iron Curtain, sat down on a sidewalk near the Charles Bridge in Prague, laid down a paper carpet right into the street, and starts tearing pages out of books and burning t…
Crone music
2019 repress on CD; 1990 release. Commissioned by Mabou Mines, the experimental theater group from New York, for their interpretation of King Lear, Pauline Oliveros's Crone Music is a subtle and haunting electronic music endeavor. Interfacing an abundance of digital delay processors, reverb effects, and foot pedals to bend pitches from piercing to twisted, sonorous tones, with her one-of-a-kind expanded accordion, Oliveros produces rich, eerie textures. Personnel: Pauline Oliveros -solo accordio…
Het Jakoba Prieel
**CD edition** While the Sound Reporters imprint, which ran intermittently between the early 80s and 90s - specializing in the sounds of anthropology, ethnomusicology, religion, travel and history, hailed from Amsterdam, those aware of this obscure cassette label will probably only be the most developed fans of Italian avant-garde. It was Sound Reporters that issued the incredible collaboration between Pit Piccinelli, Fred Gales, and Walter Maioli, Amazonia 6891, reissued by Black Sweat in 2016,…
The Call
** 20220 ** Available on vinyl for the first time in 40 years, Outernational Sounds is proud to present a masterpiece from the Los Angeles jazz underground – Horace Tapscott’s burning, spiritualised 1978 set, The Call. One of the unsung giants of jazz music, the composer, bandleader, arranger, pianist and community activist Horace Tapscott was the undisputed keystone in the grassroots Los Angeles jazz scene. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, his radical community arts and music formations the UGMA…
River Without Banks
Enchanting, gorgeous works for solo piano, strings, organ and Eastern percussion by preeminent composer Leo Svirsky. Seeming to unravel and weave simultaneously in mid-air, ‘River Without Banks’ is a significant new opus that taps into a rich vein somewhere between Charlemagne Palestine’s sustained ecstasies, the phasing pulses of Steve Reich, and the beatific glory of Alice Coltrane... ““How to begin? No beginning... never ending reverberation,” Antoine Beuger writes in the accompanying notes …
Institute of Sonology 1959-1969
This is a collection of electronic works composed between 1959 and 1969 at the Institute for Sonology in Utrecht, Holland. Once again, Sub Rosa offers a chance to reflect upon a rare lineage of electronic music's origins, a revolution of the fifties and sixties when an art form was emerging without a base -- ex nihilo -- a new music produced by machines designed to construct the new. Utrecht University's large complex of studios that comprised the Philips laboratories housed an extensive collect…
Architettura Sussurrante
CD Version. The peculiar and relatively unknown musical experiment by Alessandro Mendini, crafted together with a strange company that included supposedly distant outfits like Matia Bazar (chart-topping Italian pop band) and Magazzini Criminali (experimental, highbrow theater collective) and released by a major label that printed a tiny amount of copies.The opening track “Casa Mia” included random quotes from Cinismo Abitativo, a “poetic” editorial written for the design magazine MODO exactly 40…
Lokale Musik
Despite having an undeniable canon, the minimalist music movement which developed during the 1960s and continues to flourish and evolve today, is defined by a remarkable breadth in ideas and compositional approach. Particularly in Europe, it rapidly took on a diverse number of influences and became very much its own thing. Of the composers who proposed an alternate reality for this territory of sound, there have been few more accomplished than the German composer, Walter Zimmermann.All too often…
Little Red Record
**Edition of 500 copies, pressed on color vinyl LP with a bonus track** From the 70's Canterbury scene, one of the greatest pieces of work in the genre. Matching Mole was the first band formed by Robert Wyatt after the seminal Soft Machine experience. An incredibly tight unit featuring Phil Miller (Hatfield and the North) on guitar, Dave McRae (Nucleus) on keyboards, Bill McCormick (Quiet Sun, 801) on bass and Wyatt himself on drums and vocals. Released in 1971 Little Red Record was Mole's secon…
Water Music
Nice Price! Recorded in 1985, Water Music is the first "Japanese" solo album by Mott The Hoople keyboard player Morgan Fisher, released on Satoro Takazawa aka Pneuma's label LLE. Six mesmerizing ambient tracks are played out as a multi-sensorial improvisation on a Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer plus grand piano, tape delays, bowed guitar and shell chimes. The result is an highly contemplative album that flows as a powerful yet ethereal journey through the element of water. Completely remastered …
Pale Bloom
**Black Vinyl LP edition** Pale Bloom finds Sarah Davachi coming full circle. After abandoning the piano studies of her youth for a series of albums utilizing everything from pipe and reed organs to analog synthesizers, this prolific Los Angeles-based composer returns to her first instrument for a radiant work of quiet minimalism and poetic rumination.Recorded at Berkeley, California's famed Fantasy Studios, Pale Bloom is comprised of two delicately-arranged sides. The first – a three-part suite…
Petra
Last copies. The first time Maryanne Amacher's music has ever been available on vinyl. Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009) was a composer of large-scale fixed-duration sound installations and a highly original thinker in the areas of perception, sound spatialization, creative intelligence, and aural architecture. She is frequently cited as a pioneer of what has come to be called "sound art", although her thought and creative practice consistently challenge key assumptions about the capacities and limit…
The World of the Doubling Riders
**The definitive Doubling Riders box set with a load of previously unreleased material is finally here. Complete discography, remastered from the original tapes. 6 x CD boxset includes 1 disc of previously unreleased material, plus 24-page booklet of liner notes and never-before-seen photographs.** From its earliest days, Italian avant-garde and experimental music has always been a fascinating world of intersecting lines, unexpected meetings, and networks of conversation and collaboration. This …
Strain, Crack & Break: Music From The Nurse With Wound List
Temporary Super Offer! **A dream come true** After years of mythology, misinterpretation, and procrastination Nurse With Wound's Steven Stapleton finally chooses Finders Keepers as the ideal collaborators to release "the right tracks" from his über-legendary psych/prog/punk peculiarity shopping list known as The Nurse With Wound List, commencing with a French specific Volume One of this authentically titled Strain Crack Break series. Featuring some Finders Keepers' regulars amongst galactic Gall…
Werewolves On Wheels
Temporary Super Offer! B-movie junkies, gather round and prepare yourselves for what could only be described as a cinematic speedball. Take a combined hit of two of the most potent strains of toxic cinema, dress it up in ritualistic robes, and make it dance to the beat of a stoned, motoric, country commune soundtrack. Like an exploit-o double-bill where both films merge into a single feature, this directorial debut by an ex-Roger Corman protégé and future Russ Meyer art director (another heady c…
Paint A Lady
Temporary Super Offer! A mythical and misplaced masterpiece of lost soft rock and acidic folk funk by a one-hit wonderer lost in the wilderness for four decades. From the producer of Margo Guryan, writer behind Wool, Gerry Mulligan collaborator, Tarantino sound tracker, and Wendy & Bonnie confidant, Paint A Lady now emerges from folkloric obscurity. Within certain record collecting circles, especially those who gather under the umbrella that covers fragile niches like "acid folk" and "soft rock"…