Best of 2019
Signals Bulletin
Faitiche releases a new collaboration between the Japanese sound artist Asuna and Jan Jelinek: the album Signals Bulletin brings together joint improvisations and compositions made over a period of three years in Berlin, Kyoto and Kanazawa. Asuna’s meandering organ drones merge with Jelinek’s pulsating synthesizer and field recording loops to create dense superclusters that span broad harmonic arcs."Watching the Japanese sound artist Asuna playing the organ, some people might be surprised. Asuna…
Vampir-Cuadecuc
**130 copies. Art Edition** Carles Santos was a multi-disciplinary artist, perhaps best known outside of Spain as a composer of scores for his lifelong collaborator, radical Catalan filmmaker Pere Portabella. Made in 1970 during the final years of Franco’s dictatorship, Vampir-Cuadecuc is an astonishingly creative assault on the regime and, arguably, Portabella’s most influential work. Filmed behind the scenes during the production of Jesús Franco’s Count Dracula (1970), Vampir-Cuadecuc is a hig…
Inside
The saxophone is most often associated with jazz, a lead instrument that’s strong on melody and a potent vehicle for improvisation. Urban Sax puts all those ideas to bed. For those unfamiliar, Urban Sax is the creative outlet of composer Gilbert Artman, who started the group back in the mid-70s, and composes and arranges all of the group’s material. The “group” in this case is over 75 performers, consisting mostly of saxophones (the entire family from sopranino to bass), but also including clari…
Scenes From the South Island
Expanded reissue of New Zealand guitar pioneer Roy Montgomery's rare and revered full-length debut, Scenes From The South Island, originally released in 1995 by West Coast experimental / space rock label Drunken Fish. Recorded on both coasts on a pair of Tascam 4-tracks, the album is alternately wistful, windswept, skeletal, shredded, and strange. Solo guitar figures flow and fray through echo and empty space, evoking loss, long roads, and low-lit landscapes.Montgomery's own memories of this era…
Geelriandre / Arthesis
**Edition of 1000 copies**Eliane Radigue's Geelriandre / Arthesis is named for the pieces that fill its two sides. Geelriandre, realized on an ARP 2500 synthesizer in 1972, features Gérard Fremy on prepared piano. Arthesis, realized using the University of Iowa's Moog in 1973, comprises the full duration of side B. Eliane Radigue has received much deserved praise for her transcendent composiitions for tape, synthesizers, and acoustic instruments. Her work is deep, slowly changing, and timelessly…
Death And Spring
We live in a musical era defined by historical reappraisal - a noble moment which has rescued a near countless number of incredible albums from lingering neglect and loss. As wonderful and exciting as this is, it has come with an unexpected, but increasingly acknowledged consequence. With so many eyes on what was, we risk allowing history to repeat, subjecting today’s artists to the same forms neglect which plagued the past. It’s becoming increasingly rare to encounter record labels which entire…
Plains
**Limited to 100 copies only**Two Plains & A Fancy, the third film by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn, was hailed by The New Yorker as “the most imaginative and visionary” Western of recent years and is now receiving a theatrical release. Central to the film’s atmosphere is its arid yet spacious score, a collaboration between Talya Cooper (previously of Household) and John Atkinson (of Aa), whose soundtrack for Asasin in Lege was the inaugural Florabelle release. As an LP, Plains grows out of elemen…
Balaklava
A record that virtually defies categorization, Pearls Before Swine's 1968 epic Balaklava is the near-brilliant follow-up to One Nation Underground — and second masterpiece from Tom Rapp's merry band. This quasi-historical mystery album featuring a lisping songwriter who was recording 78 RPM cylinders and talking about Florence Nightingale existed, if not in the middle, then somewhere over there. It was fitting that the album had a home on ESP Records then—and now it has one on Drag City. A host …
Baroo
"I have always been searching for a way to articulate the intangible area between the recognizable and the unfathomable, a feeling perhaps informed by some long-abandoned experiments with psychedelics. This has been a continued pursuit starting with my tape experiments in the 1970’s until the present, with technological evolution driving new ways of expression.With the exception of Xé May, which is performed on an Elektron Octatrack, these pieces were constructed for live performance using a lap…
The Book Of Sounds
Last Copies. Edition of 500 copies. "This work, a masterpiece of restraint, reflects the musical imagination of someone who has spent long periods in the quiet recesses of the mind." (Terry Riley) Beacon Sound present a reissue of Hans Otte's The Book Of Sounds (Das Buch Der Klänge) originally released in 1984. Hans Otte (1926-2007) was a multifaceted artist, poet, pianist, composer, and promoter who synthesized the strands of minimalism, Eastern spirituality, and radical art into his own unique…
Architettura Sussurrante
Clear vinyl, edition of 300 copies. 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 …
Neighborhoods
Ernest Hood’s Neighborhoods was released some two decades after the Portland, Oregon born and raised musician’s first forays into field recordings. These very recordings, and those captured over intervening years, define the universal sound and aural images of childhood, a theme memorialized by Hood’s privately-pressed opus of 1975.Sprawling through a haze of zither, synthesizer melodies, and foraged pedestrian sound, Neighborhoods is both a score and documentary composed and directed by Hood to…
Gruppo d'Improvvisazione "Nuova Consonanza"
**400 copies, pressed on 180g black vinyl housed in its faithfully restored original packaging and newly remastered from the original reel-to-reel tapes.** First ever vinyl re-issue of the incredibly rare Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza 1975's album, which comes in a fully remastered version with new sequence / structure as per recently discovered original tapes. Copies purchased from Soundohm also include an exclusive 30x30cm 12-page booklet with never seen before pictures and essays…
Memória das Águas
Selva Discos returns to the LP reissue game with a bang – by giving a new life to the stunning and very sought-after Memória das Águas album by Fernando Falcão. Originally recorded in 1979 in Paris but only released independently in Brazil in 1981, the album comes complete with genre-hopping explorations that swirl around ambient soundscapes, lively jazz, experimental-leanings, Afro-rhythms and a unique blend of Latin grooves and French pop with a Brazilian accent, but it also comes with a story…
Polynesia
The rarest of all exotic LPs, like Eden Ahbez but with extra added death. This bizarre, rarely heard masterpiece brings together jazz, ancient manuscripts, and a convicted murderer... Issued originally in 1959 it originates from Phoenix, Arizona. The concept behind the recording was unusual -- to bring together two unconnected worlds: the jazz genius of Buddy Collette with the academic oriental studies and translations of A.I Groeg. Little can be found of A.I. Groeg, but before the LP was record…
Ikiru Or The Wanderer
Samll repress finally available. We welcome Louise Landes Levi to the Oaken Palace Records family and invite you to join her on a musical journey through the life and fate of the Monarch butterfly. Ikiru, which is Japanese for "to grow", starts with "Butterfly Graveyard", a musical assessment of the current state of the Monarch butterfly, whose population has declined by over 80% over the past 20 years. On "Butterfly Brain", this worrying development is contrasted with the bravery and wonder of …
Conversations With the Anthony Burgess Cassette Archives
Double CD 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 …
Extract From Field Recording Archive
Japanese sound artist Toshiya Tsunoda is a master of the art of field recording who discovers the hidden properties of sound and vibrations in the material world, from road surfaces to the sea. Through acute mic placement, field recordist Toshiya Tsunoda captures the unusual vibrations of everyday spaces. The recordings contained in this amazing box open up an expansive soundfield of subtle modulating frequencies and dramatic suspensions of time and space. Sounds such as these would be the envy …
Dome 4
With the demise of the group Wire in 1980, founder members Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis joined forces to create Dome. With the assistance of engineer Eric Radcliffe and his Blackwing Studio Dome took the ethic of "using the studio as a compositional tool" and recorded and released three Dome albums on their own label in the space of 12 months: Dome (July, 1980), Dome 2 (October, 1980), and Dome 3 (October 1981). A final fourth album, Will You Speak This Word: Dome 4 was released on the Norwegi…
Dream Character
**300 only, this is stunning** Matt Jencik is back on Hands in the Dark with his new album, 'Dream Character', the follow up to his first solo record 'Weird Times' back in 2017. Whilst all the songs on his debut album were created using the same sampling method on the same instrument, this time the Chicago artist’s approach is slightly different. Using a combination of 4 track cassette, digital recording & sampling, he added live improvisations and a wider selection of instruments including gui…