This special bundle collects Aktuala's complete discography on three coloured vinyl LPs:

Aktuala "Aktuala" (1973)

**Red vinyl reissue. Milestone! Faithful reproduction of the original release!** 1973 Aktuala debut, a stunning overall work where you can hear a lot of different musical influences : avant-garde folk, mediterranean blues ,jazz improvisation, minimalism, african percussions, indian ragas all played with a true psychedelic feeling. The album was recorded in a few days in a totally acoustic dimension and the line-up seems to be a quintet of contemporary music more than a progrock group (although this music is "progressive" in all the meanings of the word). The mergence of all these styles and the cleverness and the deep inspiration of the musicians managed to create a new kind of musical art, something located between Morocco and India, Sicily and Turkey, Balkans and Persia. The wide array of musical instruments used during the recording sessions of "Aktuala" is simply striking. Walter Maioli and Lino "Capra" Vaccina's Aktuala were leader.

"Their blissed, blasted and acutely attuned acoustic astral excursions tapping a vein of tranquil psychedelic knowing thats poised between the ethno-tripping end of the krautrock spectrum ala Embryo, Between and Agitation Free's Malesch and the exploratory acoustic probings of American outfits like Entourage Music and Theater Ensemble, Arica and Seventh Sons" Mutant Sounds

Aktuala "La Terra" (1974)

**Green vinyl reissue** Following the same path as Third Ear Band in England, Embryo or Gruppe Between (and even Limbus 4, Kalacakra and Popol Vuh), Aktuala tried to mix together the western musical tradition with african and asian instruments, rhythms, cultures and avant-garde forms, creating a pioneering new form of music that went beyond anything heard before. La Terra encounters Aktuala at their best, spinning a music which defies location, genre, and time. Wild sections are pregnant with references to North African ecstatic musics and the ancient traditions of India, played against gentler passages of meditative, repetitive guitar, hand percussion and flute, before rocketing into a hard blown fire which darts around the edges of free jazz and an unleashed imagining of European folk.

Immersive, fierce, and visionary, La Terra presents a fascinating parallel to similar gestures made on the other side of Europe by projects like the Third Ear Band and Gong, pulling the rug from beneath the accepted truths relating the adventurous highs of music during the first half of the 1970s. A rollicking preamble to the territories that would be further developed within Walter Maioli in his projects Amazonia 6891 and Futuro Antico Gruppo, as well as the roughly concurrent Gruppo Afro Mediterraneo, this is a record that has it all. Thrilling to ear from start to finish, and historically significant as they come. The ground zero from which so much sprang, and the absolutely essential key to understanding what makes Italian Minimalism so unique.

"Their blissed, blasted and acutely attuned acoustic astral excursions tapping a vein of tranquil psychedelic knowing thats poised between the ethno-tripping end of the krautrock spectrum ala Embryo, Between and Agitation Free's Malesch and the exploratory acoustic probings of American outfits like Entourage Music and Theater Ensemble, Arica and Seventh Sons." - Mutant Sounds

Aktuala "Tappeto Volante" (1974)

**Yellow vinyl reissue** Tappeto Volante finds the collective of Aktuala, taking on a new, expanded cast of contributors - Roberto Mazza, Filippo Monico, Kela Rangoni Mac and Fabrizio Cassano, stretching into geographical unknowns - departing their native Milan and relocating to Morocco to record their third and final LP. The influences of their temporary home can be heard throughout, sculpting a mediative patchwork, taking a heavy lean toward various folk traditions, particularly North African and Indian, which feels more at ease and balanced the achievements mounted across the band’s previous LPs. The avant-gardism, while unmistakable present, is less explicit, utilised as a guiding, subcutaneous force, rather an outright sonic confrontation.

An astounding, woven expanse of acoustic sound, Tappeto Volante takes the ear into some of Aktuala’s most genre defiant depths - wild psyche laden jams on an endless array of instruments, from countless origins, sprawl out and intwine themselves with a truly global and democratic impression of what music can be. Darting through  impressions of the ethnomusicological, a pan globalism which touches on the efforts of Alice Coltrane and Archie Shepp, etherial allusions to musique concrete through its diversity, transitions, and ambiguities of source - allowing to be seen as an unexpected foreshadowing for seminal works like Roberto Musci’s The Loa Of Music, to realm of rich hippie excursions like those of Edge of Time and Satwa. It’s impossible to recommend this one enough. For that it is and represents, the music takes hold and washes the ear the pure joys of exploratory sound. An absolute must! Grab it while you can!