Reissues
Ballads For Bass Clarinet
David Murray Quartet's 1993 Japan only CD release Ballads For Bass Clarinet (DIW/Disk Union) is issued for the first time on vinyl by Ko Ko Music. Comprising a couple of waltzes, a blues, a Monk-ish suite-like piece, a free-ish drums and clarinet interlude, and finally an elegy to civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer - David Murray leads on bass clarinet, managing to go both deep and soaringly high, it sometimes sounds like two different instruments are being played. But this is not a solo effor…
Configurations
Shasta Cults' Important Records debut is not to be missed. A self-titled Shasta Cults will be available later this year, also on Important Records. A ship sinks beneath the silver mirror of the sea-top, temple gongs ring through an empty valley, industrial machinery sputters, heaves, lurches forward, stops, falls apart... These sound events may be the most acute musical referents of Shasta Cults, the music project of Canadian synthesizer technician Richard Smith. Using obsolete electronics, Shas…
Inspiration Information
**2019 stock** "Information belongs to the mind. It can be gathered, coded, processed and decoded, and used for any number of purposes. Inspiration comes from the soul. It is an elusive spark, one that cannot be bought or sold, nor artificially triggered. It is a gift. That the two can be combined into something quietly exciting is proven by the music on this, Shuggie Otis's third solo album. There is some old (several of the basic tracks were recorded over the last two years), and some new (for…
Morse
A central figure of the New Zealand underground since his days in The Rip over three decades ago, Alastair Galbraith has worked alongside scores of Kiwi legends as a multi-instrumentalist and solo artist. Morse appeared in 1992, a Siltbreeze/Xpressway co-release, and despite Galbraith's centrality to the magical NZ mix, the record is an 'outsider' classic, a peerless piece of Antipodean collage, diverted folk, and minimal psychedelia.Galbraith plays almost everything on Morse, with periodic assi…
On Tour
In the original liner notes for Chuck Jackson's On Tour (1964), Bob King describes Jackson "a man with pent up talent." Consequently, this LP is the sound of that talent erupting all over the stage of the famed Apollo Theater, the same venue where Jackson had been discovered a few years earlier.Jackson leads the airtight band through raw, sweat-soaked versions of his hits I Wake Up Crying and Any Day Now, giving the audience their money's worth and more. He also includes well-chosen covers, like…
Retrospektywny (Retrospective)
Akuphone presents a compilation of Wladyslaw Komendarek, the Polish genius of synthesizers. This selection comes from tree albums released between 1987 and 1990, a very important political and social period in Poland, marked by the last convulsions of communism. Komendarek’s music offers a unique patchwork of synthesizer sounds, “art of noise” and cosmic flights far beyond the realm of conventions that dominated the Polish electronic music scene at the time. It brings a weird mixture of electron…
Abies Firma
**Last copies! Edition of 1000. 20-page pamphlet holding program notes, scores, & a new essay on American Gamelan by Jay Arms Complimentary CD version with additional 20-minute suite** The second album by the American Gamelan composer and instrument builder, Daniel Schmidt, following In My Arms, Many Flowers, his majestic debut on Recital. Abies Firma lies next chronologically, collecting works from 1976 to 1991, considered the second phase of his compositional form. “We were like children pla…
Let Night Come On Bells End The Day
**Second Edition of 500 LPs Three art prints of photographs by the artist Digital download coupon, containing extended final track**Recital present the newest record by Canadian composer Sarah Davachi. Currently working on her PhD in Musicology at UCLA, her trajectory has been unorthodox. Hailing from Calgary, Alberta, which, if you've never been there, doesn't really scream "avant-garde" (Calgary is the rodeo capital of the world). It is important and interesting that she chose to study esoteri…
Henry Cow: The World Is a Problem
In its open improvisations, lapidary lyrics, errant melodies, and relentless pursuit of spontaneity, the British experimental band Henry Cow pushed rock music to its limits.Its rotating personnel, sprung from rock, free jazz, and orchestral worlds, synthesized a distinct sound that troubled genre lines, and with this musical diversity came a mixed politics, including Maoism, communism, feminism, and Italian Marxism.In Henry Cow: The World Is a Problem, Benjamin Piekut tells the band’s story —fro…
Patagon
**500 copies** Juan Manuel Cidrón, from Almeria (Andalusia), is a legendary Spanish synthesist who started in 1985, a veteran of analog electronic sounds. His early influences were the Berlin School of the seventies (Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, etc.) and the American Minimal music. Before Patagon, Cidrón has released nine albums in limited editions on his own label Extraradio."Juan Manuel Cidrón has always been into music... As a child he fell in love with a radio that had flashing lights - …
Brian Auger
**180 gram audiophile vinyl** Replay presents a collection of 9 Brian Auger tracks recorded in London in 1965, during his early days with Rod Stewart, Julie Driscoll and John Baldry in Steampacket that built the foundation of his mod-jazz legend.This collection of retro instrumental Hammond music is still part of his set today; also includes The In-Crowd and Tiger.
Music For a Film That Never Was
*limited edition in gatefold sleeve with 20-pages 12"x12" booklet This is the first in a series of limited edition LPs that brings to life an array of fictional cinematic auditory visions. All contributors were provided with the same brief – envisage and write an imaginary film scene then compose and record the piece of accompanying music.This project takes physical form in a strictly limited edition vinyl album. A concept was created that engages the final listener to visualise the fictional sc…
Bombscare
A bit of a missing link in Low’s discography, Bombscare has been unavailable for almost two decades, originally released in late 2000 on Tugboat (Glen Johnson’s Rough Trade subsidiary), it’s now been reissued on vinyl by John Coxon and Ashley Wales’ remarkable Treader imprint and provides a bit of context for last year’s roundly acclaimed Double Negative.It’s mostly about the title track here really, Coxon and Wales’ (aka Spring Heel Jack) provide the sublime, electronic backdrop, offsetting Mim…
Evan Parker With Birds
One of Treader’s most requested recordings sees the great UK free saxophonist Evan Parker on soprano and tenor saxophones, duetting with European birdsong. A fitting tribute to his friend, the celebrated soprano saxophone player Steve Lacy, who died in the year of its initial release. A titan of British free jazz, Evan Parker needs no introduction. His output, both as a bandleader and collaborator, are the stuff of legend. Within the history of the European improvised music, he’s everywhere - ha…
Hackney Road
2019 Small Repress Electronic duo Spring Heel Jack return with a collaboration with the legendary American trumpeter and Pulitzer Prize nominee Wadada Leo Smith. Wadada was born in the Mississippi Delta and became immersed in the music of the great blues masters as a young musician. He then moved to Chicago and became an early member of the AACM alongside the likes of Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, Malachi Favors and Roscoe Mitchell.Recorded last year in London, this LP sees Smith’s auth…
Felt
*In process of stocking.* For a decade, Maxine Funke has cut an idiosyncratic path as a singer-songwriter, all the while avoiding the parochial retreads of that worn-out label. Funke's music is intimate and deeply intelligent, buoyed by a sense of effortlessness that belies a scrupulous attention to the smallest of details.Felt appeared in 2012 in a vinyl edition of 100 on the Epic Sweep imprint. This album has an altogether more crepuscular feel, making slightly fuller use of the sonic palette …
Lace
*In process of stocking.* For a decade, Maxine Funke has cut an idiosyncratic path as a singer-songwriter, all the while avoiding the parochial retreads of that worn-out label. Funke's music is intimate and deeply intelligent, buoyed by a sense of effortlessness that belies a scrupulous attention to the smallest of details.Lace was originally released as a CD-R in 2008 on Alastair Galbraith's Next Best Way label. Imagine the just-so arrangements of Josephine Foster and the knowing quotidian eye …
Distance
Originally released on VHF as a CD at the end of 1994, this was the second Flying Saucer Attack album, compiling 5 tracks from impossible to get 7" with 20 mins of previously unreleased (and good) material.Similar in blend to the band’s first LP (also newly issued in the USA on deluxe vinyl), the songs hang together as a collection that improves on the individual singles. The two proper singles that make up half of Distance - Soaring High b/w Standing Stone and Crystal Shade b/w Distance were in…
L'Era Del Cinghiale Bianco (40th Remastered Edition) LP
L'Era del Cinghiale Bianco (The White Boar Era) marks the clamorous Pop turning point of Franco Battiato. Created with the fundamental help of violinist Giusto Pio, this work is widely considered a masterpiece, and in 1979 it changed the destiny of Italian music forever.Essentially, it is an album of transition: between past and future, between Prog experimentalism and a new intellectual form of Pop influenced by the New Wave.
The title of the album draws inspiration from a Celtic myth, accordin…
The American Metaphysical Circus
2019 Repress. New York avant-garde luminary Joe Byrd had been the leader of pioneering ’60s electronica band The United States of America until given the heave-ho by his own creation. His riposte was to create this in turns beguiling and bizarre album, which if anything is even further out on a limb than his previous band’s sole groundbreaking LP. While obviously a ’60s sounding record, its many unexpected twists and turns along with Byrd’s stunning production leave it sounding undated, existing…