Best of 2019
The Music Improvisation Company / Company bundle
Since 2017, Honest Jon’s, the London based record shop and imprint renowned for its forward thinking, democratic approach to music, has embarked on one of its most remarkable and ambitious projects to date - a close collaboration with Derek Bailey’s seminal record label, Incus, returning some of the most remarkable efforts in free improvisation and avant-gardism to the world. So far we’ve seen a stunning series of Bailey’s many solo and collaborative efforts reemerge, bringing his towering histo…
Jumping and Standing 1984
Limited edition pressing of 300 copies * Includes text insert by Akio Suzuki. Originally recorded in 1984, “Jumping and Standing” consists of a live performance at Musashino Art University by pioneering Japanese sound artist Akio Suzuki, accompanied by five toy rabbits. This long-awaited release epitomizes Suzuki’s approach to performance, imbued with a characteristic sense of humor and an organic interplay with his audiences, as evinced by uproarious laughter heard on the opening track. Now som…
The Antique Blacks
The vitality you hear on Antique Blacks is a testament to the unique energy of the community around The Foxhole Cafe in Philadelphia, as Ra honed his unique brand of Afro-Futurism through the late 60s and 70s. Cosmic theatre, spiritual chants, and experimental electronics make this record an essential document that was ahead of its time. Ancient to future! The 1970s saw change in Sun Ra's recorded output, and as far as we can tell, the content of his live performances. By the middle of the decad…
Ecstatic Computation
Caterina Barbieri is an Italian composer who explores themes related to machine intelligence and object-oriented perception in sound through a focus on minimalism. Following 2017's acclaimed double-LP Patterns Of Consciousness (IMPREC 449LP), Ecstatic Computation is the new full-length LP by Caterina Barbieri. The album revolves around the creative use of complex sequencing techniques and pattern-based operations to explore the artefacts of human perception and memory processes by ultimately ind…
River Without Banks
CD Edition. 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 accompa…
Shades of Blue
Due to overwhelming demand for our 5LP boxset which sold out on the day of release, here are the first ever official individual re-issues of all five of the iconic Lansdowne recording sessions by the legendary UK jazz combo, the Don Rendell/Ian Carr Quintet.The five albums; Shades Of Blues (1965), Dusk Fire (1966), Phase III (1968), Change Is (1969) and Live (1969), have reached almost mythical status in the collector's world. Regarded as holy grail artefacts for even the seasoned aficionado, th…
Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out
One part psychologist, one part psychonaut, and one part huckster, Dr. Timothy Leary was one of the most fascinating and enigmatic figures to emerge from the '60s, and the fact that he released a soundtrack to a film that nobody ever saw fits right in with his modus operandi. Indeed, mass confusion reigns as to the origin of the tracks found on Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out. First of all, Leary had released an album by the same name a year earlier on the ESP-Disk label; that one was a spoken-word r…
A Lifetime In Oriental Jazz
CD Edition. Jazzman presents the definitive anthology of pioneering ethno-musicologist, mystical adventurer and real life jazz guru Dr Lloyd Miller. This album tells the fascinating life story of one man and his journey through Europe and the Middle East, living off nothing but his wits, talent and an open-minded attitude towards music and jazz.Master of dozens of languages and hundreds of instruments, Miller has spent fifty years immersed in the music of Europe, Asia and the Middle East.Featuri…
Homotopy To Marie
Double-CD version includes 30-page metallic hardcover book (15 x 20 x 2cm) containing color and black-and-white art by Babs Santini (Steven Stapleton). Rotorelief present a reissue of Homotopy To Marie. the fifth album by Nurse With Wound, originally released in 1982. Music and sleeve created by Steven Stapleton. The album is "a step on from the Dadaist rock of Merzbild Schwet, with much use of tape manipulation and classical avant-garde techniques". The album, which combines tape edits with res…
Sensation's Fix
A monster rarity finally reissued: this is the very first album from Sensations' Fix - and together with "Portable Madness" and "Fragments of Light" one of the three titles published in 1974, a collection of psychedelic compositions, in which glimpses of 'cosmic' music can already be noticed; those elements would soon become a trademark in the group's repertoire. The twelve compositions present here were part of demos that Franco Falsini had sold to the record company, which decided to publish …
Live at IUCC
Available on vinyl for the first time in 40 years, Outernational Sounds proudly presents a crucial document from the Los Angeles jazz underground - the Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra at their most together, stretching out on home turf in 1979, with the legendary Horace Tapscott at the helm. Horace Tapscott is one of the unsung giants of jazz music. A gifted composer and arranger, a boldly original pianist, and above all a visionary bandleader, Tapscott’s recorded footprint is small, but his legacy…
In the past only geniuses were capable of staging...
CD Edition. Full title: In the past only geniuses were capable of staging the perfect crime (also known as a revolution) Today anybody can accomplish their aims with the push of the button. For its 50th release, Black Truffle presents the ninth album from one of the label's core ensembles, the power trio of Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke, and Oren Ambarchi. Drawn from a November 2015 performance at Tokyo's now-defunct SuperDeluxe, the record's opening piece drops us immediately into the maelstrom, ab…
Taraxacum
LP version. Incredible 1986 lost recordings, an amazing adventure of a musicological and botanical research on the psychoacoustic qualities of the green world. Black Sweat has always focused its gaze on a diverse series of genres, from an equally diverse number of geographies and eras. Equally, the label represent one of the great, focused efforts in illuminating the output of the Italian avant-garde - an endlessly exciting, but all too neglected vein within the history of recorded sound. Centra…
Lady Maid
CD version. WRWTFWW Records present the reissue of impossible-to-find cult album Lady Maid by Japanese outfit Normal Brain. Originally released in 1981 as a limited vinyl pressing of 300 copies on Agi Yuzuru's fabled experimental label Vanity Records (R.N.A. Organism, Dada, Sympathy Nervous, Tolerance), Lady Maid is a testament to the creativity of the early '80s Japanese electronic and experimental scene, encapsulating a prolific era when audio gear became affordable for musicians to explore so…
Ricochet Lady
The recently composed "Ricochet Lady" (2016) is the only work for solo acoustic glockenspiel by the American experimental composer Alvin Lucier. Following in the manner of his pieces "I Am Sitting In A Room" and "Vespers", "Ricochet Lady" embodies Lucier's approach toward sound's individual function and mobility within space. This CD defines this approach through four realizations recorded in four dissimilar spaces, ranging from the standard to extraordinary: a university rehearsal hall with wal…
Brainwave music
Small repress available. Black Truffle present the first ever vinyl reissue of David Rosenboom's legendary Brainwave Music, originally released on A.R.C. Records in 1975. This is an expanded double-LP edition with over 40 minutes of additional contemporaneous material. Pioneer of live electronics, innovator in music education, collaborator with artists as diverse as Jon Hassell, Jacqueline Humbert, Terry Riley, and Anthony Braxton, Rosenboom is renowned for his ground-breaking experiments with t…
Small Worlds
Edition of 300. Small Worlds (2004) is a 42-minute composition for improvising sextet by Austrian double bassist, composer and improviser Werner Dafeldecker. The score is written for any instrument and divides the players into two virtual trios whose constellations change every three minutes. No restrictions are made regarding material or playing techniques, the only specification is that in each three-minute trio, one player has the role of the "dynamic leader" which means that no other player …
Alchemy
**180 gram vinyl edition is a faithful reproduction of the original 1969 gatefold LP release. It has been re-mastered from the original Harvest master tapes and has been cut at Abbey Road studios for this definitive edition vinyl reissue." Formed in 1968 around a nucleus of Glen Sweeney (percussion), Paul Minns (Oboe), Richard Coff (Violin, Viola) and Ursula Smith (Cello), the Third Ear Band were unique in their exploration of exotic baroque music fused with experimental rock. Signing to Blackhi…
Komachi
**Finally repressed on cream coloured vinyl, now includes a 12-page booklet!** Meitei considers himself an old soul, often preoccupied with the customs and rituals of the past. Recently Meitei lost his beloved 99-year-old grandmother, a woman who he considered to be one of the last remaining people to have experience and understanding of traditional Japanese ambience. His music and art is driven by a desire to cast light on an era and aesthetic that he believes is drifting out of the collective …
An Anthology of Greek Experimental Electronic Music
**Double-CD version includes 20-page booklet. Sold out at source** An Anthology of Greek Experimental Electronic Music 1966-2016 aspires to map the heterogenous landscape of Greek experimental electronic music in all its contextual, sociopolitical, geographical and aesthetic disparity. With a single exception: it zeroes in on post-80s music. It comprises works of very different kinds by composers of all sorts of backgrounds that, still, can be thought of, as both "Greeks" and "experimentalists".…