Best of 2023
Puna
Huge Tip! Oiro Pena is a Finnish jazz collective helmed by prolific composer Antti Vauhkonen. Their last album, Puna, recorded in bedrooms, studios and other salubrious locations around Helsinki during 2022, is a mix of lo-fi spiritual jazz, experimental, and avant-garde music forms. It includes four vocal tracks recorded with Merikukka Kiviharju, which feature both original lyrics and those sourced from traditional Finnish folk songs. Vauhkonen first attracted attention as saxophonist in the gr…
Frans Zwartjes (2LP)
This special discounted bundle includes the latest Purge releases, the Mykolaiv Singers's LP, previously unreleased in any form - spare a few tapes distributed in the Mykolaiv region - these are old, old songs (of winter, weddings, war, sex, bread) predominantly sung by groups of women, and all from the villages of Mykolaiv, Ukrain. And the Frans Zwartjes's largely synthesiser-based improvisations for films either unmade or unfinished, played and recorded by Zwartjes between the late 1960s, thro…
Trad, Gras Och Stener: A Collective History (Book)
Huge Tip! 400 pages, 387 Images. The story of the legendary Swedish psych rock band Träd, Gräs och Stenar is also a defining story of alternative culture. Across multiple incarnations, the musicians of this iconic group (whose name translates to “Trees, Grass and Stones”) have drawn on their roots in jazz and the avant-garde, the iconoclastic art and theater of the 1960s, and the back-to-the-land “green wave” movement to blaze a pioneering trail across fifty years of endlessly improvisational, r…
Vida
Mega Tip! ** 290 Copies only. LP In gimmick poster fold-out sleeve ** Susana Baron Supervielle was born in Buenos Aires in 1910, but she lived in Brazil most of her life. Creation with electroacoustic means represented one more step in her search for renewal and a new articulation of her triple cultural horizon articulated between São Paulo, Buenos Aires and Paris. The results open a new dimension in the interstices of the sound montage. Susana had been a follower of Pierre Schaffer and his pee…
Osmose
LP version. Reissue of the 1970 krautrock classic. The timing was right: Five years earlier would have been too early, five years later would have been too late. But Annexus Quam from Kamp-Lintfort near Düsseldorf came along with the right music at the right moment. The seven-piece band formed in 1967 as Ambition Of Music; they were what was then called a "beat group." In 1970, working with a local trombone choir led to a dramatic change of direction. Trombone, clarinet, saxophone, scat-like voc…
Dance Of The Spheres
Rainbow Generator are Australia’s first true experimental electronic music group. Consisting of David Labuschagne aka Mojo, and Rob Greaves aka Ras. Starting in the mid-70’s, the pair took it upon themselves to begin exploring the possibilities of the sonic dimension and with an ‘open mind’ began investigating the interface between psyche and sound. In 1976 David established the ‘Lectric Loo’ studio in Woolloomooloo, Sydney. Known to the ‘heads’ as simply the “Loo”, the 3-story building was owne…
Kwaidan
** 5th Anniversary Edition, CD housed in a 140x140x 6mm customised case, obi, 8pp insert, offset printed, full colour on premium matt paper. Includes 2 previously unreleased bonus tracks. ** Meitei (冥丁) is a Japanese artist from Hiroshima, who started out as a freelance composer, making various kinds of music across genres. Having done it for eight years, his goal was to eventually release his own original music as an artist. Living in Kyoto for the past two years has deeply influenced his curre…
Sphæra
A 16-channel piece inspired by astrophysics, the mystery of the pre-Big Bang era and some of the uncanny motions of the unconscious mind, where strangeness meets the ordinary.
The Complete Obscure Records Collection
** Limited Collector Edition of 1.000 copies. Includes hand-numbered certificate, 10 LPs in faithful replicas of the original covers and polylined inner sleeves, a 80-page LP-sized book in English, all housed in a custom lavish linen box. ** We’re thrilled to announce the first ever box set gathering the entire ten album collection of Brian Eno’s Obscure Records, originally issued between 1975 and 1978. Containing the debut releases of Gavin Bryars, Michael Nyman, John Adams, David Toop, Max Eas…
Il Suono delle Api / La Vibrazione del Cosmo
An absolutely stunning effort from one of the great journeymen of Italian experimentalism, Walter Maioli's 'Il Suono delle Api / La Vibrazione del Cosmo', issued by Villa Lontana Records, is electroacoustic music at its absolute, vibrant best. Pressed in two extremely limited editions on black and transparent vinyl and laden with rich tonalities, deep drones, and hypnotic arpeggiations, it's a truly mind-melting, free-standing sonic world that encounters Maioli at the top of his game.
Pharoah Box Edition
Deluxe 2CD boxset with 70-page booklet. Alongside a remastered version of Pharoah, his seminal record from 1977, are two previously unreleased live performances of his masterpiece, “Harvest Time.” Includes a 24-page booklet with rarely seen photographs and ephemera, as well as interviews with many of the participants and a conversation with Pharoah himself. With Pharoah Sanders’ blessing, we present the definitive, remastered version of Pharoah, his seminal record from 1977, in an embossed 2 L…
Sometimes It Degenerates Into Music (Book)
Unquestionably one of the most exciting books to emerge this year - filled with revelation, insight and surprise, finally offering Conrad Schnitzler the attention and recognition he’s always deserved. An unparalleled survey of his work in music, sculpture, video, performance and installation.
Superlike
Edition of 300 copies. Giovanni Di Domenico has now achieved a personal and unmistakable style within contemporary minimalism. His music always expresses a state of concentration, of recollection and contemplation toward a focal node. Repetition is experienced as alchemical state, as truth contained in the small nuances of change, in a crescendo that never reaches a climax. The atmosphere is intuition and is made up of a few compositional touches. To compose is to make synthesis, to unearth puri…
Jazz Al Folkstudio + I Tarantolati
Huge Tip! **300 copies, comes with a printed insert** Back in 2021, we bore witness to the reissue, by Dialogo, of the Rome based ensemble Spirale’s lone 1974 self-titled LP, a towering obscurity of 1970s Italian jazz. Made of up Gaetano Delfini (wind instruments, vocals, percussion), Giancarlo Maurino (saxophone, flute, percussion), Corrado Nofri (piano, marimba, mbira, siren, Jew’s harp), Giuseppe Caporello (contrabass, guitar, percussion) and Giampaolo Ascolese (drums), the band ranks among t…
Kou
New project by Apolline Schöser (half of Nina Harker) & Thomas Coquelet. Apolline & Thomas have been performing since 2022 under the Kou guise with 24 electronic harmoniums. Producing dense layers of tones & overtones. On their debut album Kou steers in another direction. The harmonium appears occasionally, but more prominent are delicate guitar pluckings, distant vocal effects, synths, flutes, piano strokes, a touch of musical magic and Apolline’s jazz not jazz vocals. As soon as the needle dro…
Piece for Cello and Saxophone (2LP)
Much-Needed repress * Limited edition. Gatefold Cover, quality vinyl pressed at RTI. Includes a four-page insert with liner notes by La Monte Young, Charles Curtis, Anthony Burr, and Tashi Wada * Saltern's latest offering marks the first-ever release of "lost minimalist" Terry Jennings' visionary 1960 composition, Piece for Cello and Saxophone, as arranged in just intonation by legendary composer La Monte Young for renowned cellist Charles Curtis. Born in Los Angeles in 1940, Jennings was a clos…
Conspiracy
** 100 copies limited edition cassette with j-card (with ltd edition poster by Shabaka Hutchins) ** Jeanne Lee (1939-2000) was an African-American vocalist, poet, composer, improvisor, activist and educator. In her 40 year career she performed with Archie Shep, Marion Brown, Gunter Hampel, Frank Lowe, William Parker, Andrew Cyrille, Anthony Braxton, Ran Blake, Billy Bang, Cecil Taylor, John Cage, Rashsaan Roland Kirk, Pauline Oliveros, Reggie Workman, and many others.
"Jazz is a music that comb…
Smartwoods
Yellow vinyl edition. Piotr Kurek’s new album “Smartwoods” is a sprawling root system of tiny melodic phrases that loop and curl around subtly evolving instrumental thickets. The Warsaw-based producer and composer takes his cues from early music, baroque music and experimental jazz, entangling his influences with filigree traces of contemporary computer music and fueling it with sonic vapors from the near future. Made up of seven distinct segments, the album blurs its acoustic and electronic ele…
Inspiración
This top-notch spiritual jazz album from Argentina will leave fans of Pharoah Sanders and John Coltrane astonished. Recorded in 1975 and still surprisingly off the radar, this is one of the deepest jazz albums from South America. Inspiración is the meeting of two generations united by music: Ara Tokatlian and Guillermo Bordarampé, members of the influential 70s rock band Arco Iris (which Tokatlian cofounded with the now Oscar award-winning composer Gustavo Santaolalla), join forces with Enrique …
On a Day of Crystaline Thought
Beyond rare private press album from 1974, a fantastic mix of progressive rock with acid-folk, spaced-out psychedelia and cool conceptual / soundtrack vibe. Pete Fine is a virtuoso acoustic and electric guitarist and also a self-taught composer and orchestrator. After playing with psychedelic hard-rock trio Flow in the early 70s in New York, Pete, influenced by classical composers like Anton Bruckner, started to focus on his 12-string guitar, composing music in a symphonic style.
“On A Day Of Cr…