Reissues
Rainy Day Raga
Peter Walker was the quintessential psych-folk guitar player to come out of the '60s. Revered by Timothy Leary, who had him program the music for his TURN-ONS, Walker was one of the first to take the Indian tradition of ragas and channel them through the guitar into a sound that is pure heaven. His exotic, state-of-the-art finger-picking transcends description and has influenced such artists as Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance.Vanguard Records originally released the record in 1966, …
The Death of Don Juan
CD debut of this 1985 post-minimal landmark by Elodie Lauten, featuring performances by Arthur Russell and Peter Zummo. Lauten has been active in the downtown New York classical and punk scenes since moving from France in the 1970s. The Death of Don Juan is a breakthrough for its bold, lyrical minimalism in concert with a dramatic sensibility that is deeply faithful to the modern existential emotional experience. Originally self-produced and released as a small LP edition on her own label, it ha…
135 Grand Street, New York, 1979
AMAZING!!! Dug out of storage after 30 years in a basement, Soul Jazz present '135 Grand Street New York 1979', Ericka Beckman's thrilling document of downtown New York during the infamous No Wave period of late 1970s. Over 60 minutes she features better known names like Rhys Chatham and the legendary Ut next to lesser known but no less intriguing acts like A Band, Chinese Puzzle and the brilliant Youth In Asia. On 8mm film she captures the raw energy of a scene in the ascendant, in flux b…
Life Review (1993-2003)
The Shadow Ring formed in the seaside town of Folkestone, England in 1993. Over the course of a decade, and through eight LPs, Graham Lambkin, Darren Harris and later Tim Goss scraped out a unique musical pathway for themselves, armed with only the barest of tools. With each release the Shadow Ring presented themselves as a group in constant flux. Naive acoustic improvisations, dour bedroom sci-fi epics, cryptic D.I.Y. theatre and glacial electronic soundscapes all became fair game in the…
An Attempt To Record Coincidence
Pictured in all its tantalizing, eye-popping glory in Hans Pokora's 1001 Record Collector Dreams, this hellishly-rare Austrian avant garde LP from 1972 is nothing short of astonishing. There are no instruments, but rather varying configurations of solo, duo and ensemble vocal improvisations, presumably informed by the aforementioned (and nearly impenetrable) code (or "charts"). Although this might be seen as part of an interesting continuum, this unique and prescient music will stun even the mos…
Wayfaring Strangers: Guitar Soli
another gem, a wonderful collection of obscure solo acoustic guitar tunes from the mid 60s up to the dawn of the 80s -- beautiful work from a slew of players we've never heard of -- but we'd put right up there with Fahey and Basho in the way they reach from the back porch to the cosmos with just their fingers and some strings! One thing we love about this set, and the Numero Group releases to date, is how deep they dig and what beauty they unearth, somehow with impeccable sound quality. Some tun…
Thaumogenesis
"Limited to 1000 copies. Double LP packaged in a gatefold LP jacket. Designed by Seldon Hunt. Bonus D side of James Plotkin's exclusive 'ThaumoRemix.' and bonus live CD." "One single 62 minute long track, bass, guitar and drum machine, all woven into a slowly undulating soundscape of blissy drone and monstrous pummel...It's like some Frankensteinian collage of Godflesh, Jesu, Sunn O))) and old Swans. It's heavy and bleak and doomy, but like Jesu, the sound is imbued with a strange warmth,…
Normal Music
Early merzbow works featuring Masami Akita and Kiyoshi Mizutani. Recorded & Mixed at Various Studios on 1982. Remixed by Masami Akita at Lowest Music & Arts Studio, Tokyo. Remastered from Original Master Tape on Jan 2010. Originally Released on Lowest Music & Arts 1982.
Collection 4
Limited 150 copies, Early Merzbow works featuring Masami Akita and Kiyoshi Mizutani. Recorded & Mixed at Gap Works, Tokyo on 16 June 1981. Remixed by Masami Akita at Lowest Music & Arts Studio, Tokyo. Remastered from Original Master Tape on Jan 2010. Originally Released on Lowest Music & Arts 1982.
Clyma Est Mort/Tentative
'Clyma Est Mortr' is the super-rare album by New Zealand avant-rock legends, the Dead C. It's been the preserve of eBay fiends until now (who'll all be crying when they see this), but here everyone gets a chance to witness the group in deadly form, playing to an audience of one (Siltbreeze's Tom Lax) for release on the mythical Proletariat Idiots Productions label, with fake audience noise dubbed over from a gig by the Renderers. The other half of the split is given to…
After Before
Fantastic document of higher-minded drone ritual from a trio that features Taketo Shimada. Shimada is a shadowy figure in fringe minimalism. He worked as Henry Flynt’s assistant, put together the Yoshi Wada week at the Emily Harvey Foundation, was involved with Herbert Huncke, Alison Knowles and a bunch of other Fluxus artists. Messages is an extended investigation into the eternal music concepts of Wada, LaMonte Young, Charlemagne Palestine, Pandit Pran Nath et al, with Shimada on bass a…
Guitares Derive
A host of independent labels sprang up in France during the pivotal period of the 60s and 70s in the course of the cultural and musical revolution then unfolding; labels like the legendary Saravah, BYG, Futura, but also Shandar, a cult label par excellence set up in 1971 by gallery owner Chantal Darcy in collaboration with the journalist Daniel Caux (1945-2008) as artistic director. Just a glimpse at the Shandar catalogue makes one’s head spin, as all of its productions have become key musical r…
Tranquilles Impatiences
Alga Marghen proudly presents the first record edition ever by Brunhild Meyer-Ferrari, a very refined and talented german composer, wife of Luc Ferrari with whom she collaborated for over 40 years in creating some of the most beautiful sound works ever created in the past decades. First there was "Et tournent les sons dans la Garrigue" that Luc Ferrari composed in 1977 before "Exercises d’Improvisation" in the same year (a previous unreleased work, soon to be issued on the Planam label). These t…
Ephemere I & II
Alga Marghen presents Éphémère I & II (for tape, or to be played with various instruments) -- two previously-unpublished masterpieces which represent for several reasons a very specific moment in the creative life and catalog of Luc Ferrari. Even if Ferrari's perfect skill in creating some of the most beautiful sonic works ever is now well known to the large audience appreciating his music, the undetermined character marking the two works presented here is quite surprising. Luc Ferrari was tempt…
Relationship Studies
Relationship Studies" LP includes 2 seminal electronic music radical realizations by Charlemagne Palestine, or "Relationship Study No. 1" (1967) and the generally titled "Electronic" from the same year.Sounds in motion like race cars, motor cycles, war planes, rocket ships excited Charlemagne sonic imagination when we was still a young teenager. Then came the experience of listening to the electronic music of Tod Dockstader, Alwyn Nikolais, Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaffer, Xenakis and "Poeme El…
Didascalies 2
Vinyl-only release. Performers: Jean-Philippe Collard-Neven (piano); Claude Berset (piano); Vincent Royer (viola). Sub Rosa presents the first release after their Luc Ferrari trilogy. Didascalies 2 is not to be confused with 2007's Didascalies (SR 261CD) -- this is another composition entirely, never published before. "The other day I found a file from 1993, a score for two pianos entitled 'Revenir à la Note de Départ' (trans. 'Getting Back To The Initial Note'). So I decided to turn it i…
as/if/when
Sub Rosa presents works by industrial music pioneer, Z'EV. The physical vibrations of the objects in his works with both text and sound has been influenced by the Middle Eastern mystical system best known as Kabbalah, as well as -- but not limited to -- African, Afro-Caribbean and Indonesian rhythms, musics and cultures. He has studied Ewe music, Balinese gamelan, and Indian tala. From 1959-1965 he studied drumming with Arnie Frank, then Chuck Flores and then Art Anton at Drum City in Van …
Necro Acoustic
The gold-embossed box has been compiled by Norway’s Lasse Marhaug for release on his Pica Disk imprint, and is comprised of the albums Lights Out, Malaise, Decrepit, No Edit and Organ, each housed in individual CD wallets, together with a 24-page wallet.The laptop guitarist and all-round prodigious noise-maker is best known for his game-changing drone and dark ambient albums Sheer Hellish Miasma (Mego, 2002) and Imperial Distortion (Hospital Productions, 2008). Necro Acoustic’s contents are a li…
Starsailor
180 gram audiophile vinyl. Starsailor is a culmination of Buckley's experiments and with
former Mother of Invention Bunk Gardner on sax and alto flute, the story
is complete. This album endures as one of the most legendary albums
ever made by a singer/songwriter. Tim Buckley's most experimental album and one of his most artistically successful. Buckley's recorded output was uneven; he never quite comfortably fit into the singer-songwriter mold and tried out all sorts of musical personas durin…
Pieces for Khon - Formal & informal music
Reissue of 2 out-of-print works originally released on the artist's own Somnath label. Formal and Informal Music contains the title piece Formal and Informal Music (1980) and Crimson Sterling (1973) for electronics, winds and percussion, and also features JD Parran, woodwinds and saxes, and Rich O'Donnell, percussion. Pieces for Kohn is comprised of four electronic pieces, musical responses to four paintings by artist Bill Kohn. Tom Hamilton as been composing and performing for over 40 years, an…