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As radical and challenging as it is immersive and seductive, Room40's latest, ''Harbors'', a stunning a collaboration of composers Ellen Fullman (Long String Instrument) and Theresa Wong (cello), is a world of its own; two incredible artists in careful conversation, unfolding in the orchestration of shifting drones, aberrant melodies and glistening atmospheres, that shouldn't be missed.

Ellen Fullman and Theresa Wong

"Harbors" (LP)

Over the last 20 years, since its humble launch at the outset of the millennia, Lawrence English's Room40 imprint has grown into an unmistakable force in the landscape of experimental, electronic, and electroacoustic music, enveloping a vast global context that extends far beyond its Australian roots.

Somehow as humble as it is ambitious, with a catalog number into the hundreds - covering an incredibly diverse range of practices, as well as spanning numerous generations - it's impossible to sum the label up in any concise way, but their latest, Harbors, a stunning a collaboration of composers Ellen Fullman (Long String Instrument) and Theresa Wong (cello), takes strides toward illuminating the ethos at their core, and is easily one of the most striking and beautiful among their vast catalog of stunning releases. As radical and challenging as it is immersive and seductive, it shouldn't be missed on any count.

It's been wonderful, over the last decade or so, to witness Ellen Fullman emerge before new generations, settling into her rightful recognition as one of the most important composers working in the field of experimental music. A maverick and a singular thinker, having originally studied sculpture, Fullman first gained prominence during the early 1980s in NY for an incredible body of work created with a self-designed and build instrument - the Long String Instrument - consisting of dozens of metallic strings suspended across much a space, played with rosin-coated fingers, producing a chorus of percussive notes and extended modulations and drones.

While seemingly conceived in part to generate a remarkable range of sounds by single performer, collaboration - either with other Long String players or other instruments - has played a central part in her work and output from almost the beginning. This tradition continues with her latest - Harbors - a collaboration with the cellist Theresa Wong, who has gained considerable note for her solo efforts over the last two decades, as well for her collaborations and work with Fullman, Fred Frith, John Butcher, Gregg Kowalsky and numerous others.

As conceptually rich as it is intuitive and direct, Harbors draws inspiration from the soundscapes, stories and atmospheres that manifest around bodies of water that propagate exchange, drawing on the time the two spent near the foggy San Francisco bay during a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts.

Structured around the extended harmonics of the open strings of the cello, Wong and Fullman utilize subsets of these tonal areas to create distinct sonic environments within the piece. Against the droning, rich tonalities and percussiveness of Fullman's Long String Instrument, Wong pushes her instrument beyond its grounding in musical tradition, straying into territories of vocabulary that are closely aligned in the sounds of the natural world, generating an immersive field where figure and ground are in constant flux.

A wondrous world all its own, bristling with tension, Harbors is the most successful meeting of two incredible artists in careful conversation, unfolding in the orchestration of shifting drones, aberrant melodies and glistening atmospheres.

Unquestionably a high-water mark in the amazing Room40 catalog, Harbors has already added an incredible tone to the end of our summer. Issued on vinyl in a matte laminate sleeve with black inner reverse print, this one is not to be missed, and is not going to sit around for long. Don't sleep!

An absolute joy in listening, two new LPs from Unseen Worlds and Recital Program, respectively, draw us deep into the world of Philip Corner, collectively bridging rough 40 years of his astounding career. ''Chord / Gong!'' encounters him immersed at Charlemagne Palestine's B?sendorfer in 1978 in a thrilling effort of four-hand piano with the composer Carles Santos, while ''Through Mysterious Barricades with George Maciunas'' splices efforts from the late ''80s to 2020, via interventions by the Los Angeles based composer Sean McCann. Each is as stunning as the next and not to be missed.

A seminal figure in American experimental music, for more than half a century Philip Corner has rigorously pushed into uncharted creative realms, leaving a body of work in his wake that is as humbling as it is inspiring; fluid and organic - tapping something elemental and human - while endlessly reimagining the possibilities of organized sound. Despite being a continuous force in the landscape, for most of his career access to the scope and depth of Corner's efforts was limited to a small handful of independently released, often painfully rare, albums from the ''70s and ''80s. Fortunately this has begun to change in recent years via a steady stream of contemporary and historical releases, a movement that now continuous with two stunning LPs, collectively bridging rough 40 years of his astounding career.

The First, Chord / Gong!, encounters a meeting of kindred composers Corner and Carles Santos at Charlemagne Palestine's B?sendorfer piano in 1978, embarking on a thrilling effort of four-hand piano, issued by Unseen Worlds, and Through Mysterious Barricades with George Maciunas, via Recital Program, a body of work ranging from the late ''80s to 2020, with interventions by the Los Angeles based composer Sean McCann. Both are truly wonderful, send the seminal importance of Corner to the forefront of the mind, and are not to be missed.

Philip Corner and Carles Santos

"Chord / Gong!" (LP)

Born in 1933 and an intellectual radical of highest order, Philip Corner's life and career is a thread that winds its way through the histories of 20th and 21st century music, biding generational evolutions of creative practice within the contexts of avant-garde and experimental sound. A student of Otto Leuning, Henry Cowell, Olivier Messiaen, and Dorothy Taubman, Corner inherited John Cage's legendary Modern Music class at the New School for Social Research from Malcolm Goldstein in 1967, already a founding member of Fluxus who had emerged as one the most free thinking artists of the movement.

Even at its earliest stages, Corner's work pushed into subtler and more intimate expressions of sound and performance than most of his peers, seeking and tapping something authentically human. Whether created solo, collaboratively, or within ensembles like Gamelan Son of Lion and Tone Roads - founded with Malcolm Goldstein and James Tenney - his is a deeply personal and entirely singular body of expressive sound, standing apart within the history of experimental music, a truth drawn into sharp focus by Chord / Gong!, an album that encounters him collaborating with the Spanish composer Carles Santos.

Recorded in New York at Charlemagne Palestine's legendary B?sendorfer piano during May of 1978, but not issued until the 1980's when it emerged as a highly limited cassette via the Italian imprint, Exit & Exempla, Chord / Gong!, presents two long form, four-hand piano versions of Corner's pieces that bear the same names.

Each is quintessential Corner as he's rarely been heard; playfully melodic, while deploying a unique brand of avant-gardism that blends austere artistic devotion with the uncontainable imperfections of the human spirit.

Like so much of Corner's work, Chord / Gong! is elegantly natural and at ease. It forms before the ear as though it's been there all along, while managing to yield endless evolution and surprise by rethinking the terms of minimalism; shedding its signifying definitions with a blend of flowing repetition, deconstructed arpeggios, rubbling bass, immersive almost drone like tone, and ambient sound, partially and fully formed melodies, witty call and response, and a palpable nod to the idioms roots in Eric Satie.

Immersive and overwhelmingly beautiful, more than 40 years after it was recorded, Chord / Gong! feels like a missing link; more relevant than ever and a much needed breath of fresh air into the cemented pathways bound to the conceptions of minimal music. A truly stunning and remarkable body of work, filled with joy, hope, and creative rigour. It really is impossible to recommend this one enough.

Yet another seminal album emerging in the hands Unseen Worlds, presented in a new a limited, first time ever vinyl edition of 300. Needless to say, it's as essential as they come.

Philip Corner

"Through Mysterious Barricades with George Maciunas" (LP)

Through Mysterious Barricades with George Maciunas joins a long line of noteworthy actions embarked up by the Los Angeles based imprint, Recital Program. Venturing into unexpected territory through structure and approach, it joins Philip Corners sonorous past and present into a single, unified force of radical, collaborative conceptualism.

The LP draws its materiality from 2 seperate bodies of work by the composer, musician, and performer; recordings from a small performance of vocal works held in Italy during early in 2020, entitled Homages to/from George Maciunas, and a series of Corner's piano meditative playthroughs of Fran?ois Couperin's The Mysterious Barricades, from 1717, recorded between 1989 and 1992. Rather than present them as 2 distinct, freestanding entities as they were initially enacted, the composer Sean McCann edited and superimposed them into 2 side long works of entirely new form and invention.

As its title might suggest, Through Mysterious Barricades with George Maciunas, through its form, content, and process, nods back to Corner's roots as one of the founding members of Fluxus, a movement which, through radical interventions and new methods of collaboration - among other tactics - sought to uproot the orthodoxies surrounding the perceived nature of music, participation, authorship, and the centrality of the composer.

Encountered here, there can be little doubt that Corner's revolutionary spirits hasn't wained. As much sound collages as the splitting of temporality, the two sides of the LP encounter drifting, mediative melodies in collision with the gut wrenching and emotive expulsions from Corner's vocal chords, culminating as vibrant, surprising, and entirely new musical manifestation that reveal a composer with the better part of 3 quarters of century of work behind him, still creating on terms that set him far ahead of the pack.

Engrossing and challenging at every turn, Through Mysterious Barricades with George Maciunas is a thrilling immersion into active and brilliant creative mind.

A truly stunning effort, built from chance and sonic radicalism that channels the depths of the human spirit in ways that only Corner can. Not to be missed. It's not going to sit around for long, so grab it while you can.

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Aguirre's first-time reissue of ''Slow Music'', Lol Coxhill and Morgan Fisher's lone collaborative LP from 1980 - an improv/ambient album with almost no equivalent - is not only beautiful and visionary on creative terms, but stands as striking illation of the unexpected and ambitious bridges between creative worlds that helped define the British experimental scene.

Lol Coxhill, Morgan Fisher

"Slow Music" (LP)

Records are almost always more than they seem. For all the sound and joy that they bring, they are works of art in multiple that indicate vast networks of happening, history, and ideas; beacons to be chased, leading to understanding beyond themselves. Particularly in the case of historical works, whether they emerge from dusty crates or as reissues and archival releases, these objects can reveal unexpected creative intersections that defy our notions of what was.

Aguirre's first-time reissue of Slow Music, Lol Coxhill and Morgan Fisher's lone collaborative LP from 1980, is one such case. Beautiful and visionary on creative terms, it doubles as a rare artefact that bridges worlds in ways that would be unlikely to happen again.

Few fans of avant-garde music will need introduction to the work of Lol Coxhill. A true maverick of British improvised music, the saxophonist cut a wide path with roughly a half century of dense output.

Arguably best known within the contexts of free jazz, working in his own ensembles and those of others, notably Company, Spontaneous Music Orchestra, London Improvisers Orchestra, Trevor Watts'' Moir? Music, and The John Stevens Dance Orchestra, Coxhill was among the few members of his generation to push beyond the lines in the sand between genres, and worked regularly within the more ambitions zones of pop, notably with Kevin Ayers, Shirley Collins, The Damned, and Lindsay Cooper, among a near countless number of others.

With Coxhill's more liberated temperaments understood, his creative intersection with Morgan Fisher seems less incongruous. Unlike his collaborator, Fisher began his career within the popular world, first as a member of The Soul Survivors, before helping to found the progressive rock band, Morgan, and then finding even more fame as a member of Mott the Hoople.

While there were hints at what was to come, notably his brief tenure within the legendary Third Ear Band, by the late 70s Fisher had begun to veer far afield, ultimately leading to his move to Japan in 1985, and his full commitment to making ambient and improvised music, an ambitious temperament hinted at by his legendary compilation, Miniatures (A Sequence of Fifty-One Tiny Masterpieces Edited By Morgan-Fisher), comprised of 51 one-minute tracks by Robert Fripp, Gavin Bryars, Michael Nyman, The Pretenders, XTC, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Robert Wyatt, Ivor Cutler, The Damned, and great many more.

Coxhill and Fisher first came together in the studio when the saxophonist worked on Fisher's mutant electro project Hybrid Kids, but nothing about it, despite the two projects' close proximity, hinted at where the two would go on their own.

Issued on Fisher's own, Cherry Red backed imprint, Pipe, Slow Music is a remarkable meeting of sonorous words and creative ideas, and entirely unique improv/ambient album by two creative minds, that somehow seems to capture the zeitgeist of its moment while sounding not quite like anything else.

The project began with Fisher deciding to make an album of ambient music, a broader moment that was only then beginning to reveal cohesion among his peers via albums emerging on Brian Eno's Editions EG. Always a maverick that bucked intuition, rather than using synths, Morgan enlisted Coxhill to generate raw material which he then processed in various ways.

Slow music opens with Que En Paz Descanse, built from Coxhill's rendition of Handel''s Largo, sent spinning through tape delays, VCS3 filters, and octave shifts, resulting in what Fisher described as being like a Mexican funeral march. As the progressing pushes into steadily more ambitious zones, transforming the sound of the sax sound into everything from bells to lush orchestral soundscapes.

The 20-minute title track is based on the melody of the short closing track (which Coxhill sang, accompanied by church bells), to which Fisher added Morgan phrases from the melody using piano, guitar, bass, and voice, before snipping the beginning of each note to make the sounds less recognizable, then looped each phrase and recorded long stretches of the loops onto individual tracks, and then building work in real time by fading tracks in-and-out through long tape delays.

Stunning, incredibly immersive and beautiful, as well as remaining creatively challenging nearly 40 years after it first emerged, Slow Music is a truly visionary piece of work, pushing avant-garde and experimental practice into new realms of possibility at the dawn of the 80s, while channeling so much of where it had been over the previous decades.

One of the great artifacts of British underground music of its era, channeling the past, present, and future as a single force, while revealing rarely observed intersections of distinct creative world. Absolutely essential. We can't thank Aguirre enough for bringing this one back.

Issued on vinyl for the first time since its original 1980 release, and beautifully reproducing the original artwork, it's impossible to recommend it enough.

The long overdue reissues of Joshua Abrams'' groundbreaking LPs, ''Natural Information'' and ''Represencing'', lovingly produced by Aguirre, are rhythmic bodies of joyous sound and sublime artistry, that take us back to where the Natural Information Society began. As mind-bending and relevant as they were upon their release, each is an absolutely essential, stunning gem that can''t be missed.

Since his emergence on the Chicago scene during the 1990s, the bassist and composer, Joshua Abrams, has woven a quiet and incongruous path. He is one of those rare talents who seems to place himself entirely in the service of music. Remarkably prolific, creatively ambitious, and seemingly indifferent to categorization or genre, it is as likely to encounter him working in joint collaboration or helping realize the work of others, as it is to find him pursuing his own singular vision. While never lacking for a devoted following, it wasn't until Abrams' 2010 LP, Natural Information, and its follow up, 2012's Represencing - the beginnings of a new phase in his work - that wider audiences began to stand up and take note. Originally issued by Eremite Records in tiny editions, both vinyl pressings sold out almost immediately and have remained out of print ever since, frustrating fans far and wide. Now, thankfully, Aguirre has taken up the call and reissued both of these absolutely essential, stunning gems. Writhing with rhythmic joy and sublime artistry, neither can be missed.

The two albums are also available together at discounted price as a special bundle.

Joshua Abrams

"Natural Information" (LP)

Joshua Abrams began turning heads shortly after his arrival in Chicago, playing with Tortoise, Hamid Drake, Sam Prekop, David Grubbs, Brokeback, and within the groundbreaking ensemble, Town & Country, with Ben Vida, Liz Payne, Jim Dorling, as well as filling the slot as the house bass player at Fred Anderson''s Velvet Lounge, arguably the most distinguished free jazz venue in the city.

With a practice rooted in experimentation and improvisation, like many of his generation - particular those on the Chicago scene - Abrams has paid little mind to the lines that distinguish musical genres, applying his skills across numerous idioms and approaches, constantly adapting, evolving, and allowing the diversity of his collaborators to push his sounds into an endless series of new territories.

When faced with his work within Town & Country, his endeavors as a leader, and the remarkable array of jointly billed ensembles he's recorded with over the last 25 years, Abrams has covered a remarkable amount of territory, all of which is worthy of distinction, but it would be hard to point to any as intoxicating as the body of work that began with Natural Information in 2010, now, a decade on, extending across 5 critically acclaimed LPs and a jointly billed collaboration with Bitchin Bajas.

Recorded with Frank Rosaly, Noritaka Tanaka, Emmett Kelly, Jason Adasiewicz, and encountering Abrams on a startling array of instrumentation - Bass, Bells, Dulcimer, Guimbri, Sampler, Percussion, Harmonium, Kora, and Synthesizer - Natural Information's distinctive sound is rooted in the Guimbri - a North African three-stringed bass lute, which Abrams started to play following a visit to Morocco during the late ''90s - that lays the beating heart at the root of the album's two sides.

While very much belonging to the larger body of work that can roughly be aligned with Abrams' ensemble, the Natural Information Society - a music of intricate hybridity with an irresistible groove, rooted in the sinuous rhythms of the human body - as an album, Natural Information does stand slightly apart from what followed. It is an album rooted somewhere between explicate experimentation, the temperaments of jazz and free jazz, and a musical transnationalism that nods to many traditions while being entirely its own thing. Structure, form, and deep, rhythmic grooves flirt in and out of view, between passages of acoustic, tonal ambience, repetitive minimalism, and heavy jams, forming a totality that has very few equivalents in its diversity and joyous musical expressiveness, beyond, perhaps, the work of Don Cherry.

A music that challenges the mind and brings the body to ecstatic states, it's impossible to recommend Abrams' Natural Information enough. We've been waiting to see it come back since it first dropped, so we're incredibly crateful to Aguirre for taking up the task. Absolutely incredible and essential on every possible account. Released in an edition of 999 copies on 180gr. vinyl, we can't imagine it's going to sit around for long.

Joshua Abrams

"Represencing" (LP)

By the time Joshua Abrams' follow up to Natural Information, Represencing, dropped in 2012, things had really started to gel. Recorded in Chicago in the summer of 2011, enlisting saxophonist David Boykin, drummer Chad Taylor and guitarists Jeff Parker and Emmett Kelly, and Lisa Alvarado on harmonium into the ensemble, once again Abrams gives a key role to the guimbri into a kaleidoscopic interplay of rhythm and tone.

Represencing can be regarded as an unfolding bridge toward what has since become the signature sound of Abrams' ensemble, the Natural Information Society, which began to coalesce during the album's recording and subsequent tours. This is the sound of an adventure unfolding, hybridizing a near countless number of musical traditions and approaches into a single form - jazz, motoric rock, and minimalism, reconsidered through echoes of African musics and beyond.

Nearly a decade later, it remains a strikingly visionary body of creativity and sound, as well as a singular statement by an artist rapidly finding his own distinct voice beyond the territories that he had previously forged.

Ranging from minimal, meditative passages and hypnotic metronome, to outright ecstatic jams, Represencing is as intricate as it is intuitively direct, feeling entirely of the present, forward-thinking, and yet somehow like a music that has been with us all along. A truly visionary statement by Abrams that lays the groundwork for so much incredible music that has come since, and will continue to come and melt minds as it goes.

Like its predecessor, we've been waiting a long time to see this one come back and can't thank Aguirre enough for making it happen. Absolutely incredible and essential on every possible account. Released in an edition of 999 copies on 180gr. vinyl, we can't imagine it's going to sit around for long.

The two albums are also available together at discounted price as a special bundle.

A truly moments occasion, Superior Viaduct delivers a long awaited, lovingly produced vinyl reissue of Flaming Tunes' lone, self-titled album from 1985. One of the great artifacts to emerge from the ashes of the seminal post-punk outfit, This Heat, Gareth Williams' stunning duo with Mary Currie is an entirely singular rethinking of post-punk, bedroomy DIY, experimentalism, and pop, leaving little question why it's topped many a want list for many a year.

A truly stunning piece of work without parallel, this one is a long time coming and not to be missed.

Post-punk, rising like a phoenix during the second half of the 1970s, was a movement that few could have anticipated or foreseen. Sophisticated, and impossible to nail down, bands like Wire, P.I.L., The Pop Group, The Fall, A Certain Ratio, Pere Ubu, Throbbing Gristle, and dozens of others, wedded forward thinking radicalism and the focused energy of punk, with revitalized forms of experimentalism that rethought the terms and ownership of the musical avant-garde.

Of post-punk's first wave, few projects were as exciting and visionary as London based trio This Heat, comprising the unique voices of multi-instrumentalists, Charles Bullen, Charles Hayward, and Gareth Williams. Drawing on a diverse sonorous pallet and experimental approaches that have left a permanent mark on the musical landscape ever since, the group produced a small handful of albums and EPs between 1976 and 1982, before its members followed their own paths; Charles Hayward first within Camberwell Now and then under his own name, Charles Bullen as Lifetones, and Gareth Williams within his duo with Mary Currie, Flaming Tunes, whose lone, self-titled album from 1985, is the latest subject of Superior Viaduct's loving vinyl initiative to return the rare, ambitious, and often sinfully overlooked artifacts of 20th century music to our hands.

** Please note that the clear vinyl version of the LP is already sold-out at the label, we only have a handful of copies left. **

Flaming Tunes

"Flaming Tunes" (LP / Clear LP)

Gareth Williams, like each of the members of This Heat, represented a radical expansion of the notions of what the movements of punk and post-punk were all about, binding its sounds far more closely to the legacies of countercultural and avant-garde musics, rather than envisioning it as a logical, reactionary step within the history of rock and roll.

All of his work, regardless of who he was working with, was fueled by a deconstructive spirit that rethought the very notions possibly attached to a given idiom, imbuing it with a deeply personal temperament of emotional and creative authenticity.

An avid lover of music and record collector, William's boundless curiosity let to an extended period of studying Kathakali dance in southern India, following his departure from This Heat, as well as his co-authoring the first Rough Guide to India, and studying Indian religion and music at London University''s School of Oriental and African Studies.

The fruits of these interests and pursuits, among so many others, lay embedded at the roots of Flaming Tunes, the project started with his childhood friend, Mary Currie, upon his return to London in 1985.

Flaming Tunes' lone release, originally issued as hand-colored cassette on the tiny imprint, Contagious Tapes - not unlike Charles Hayward's Camberwell Now and Charles Bullen's Lifetones - bears the unmistakable imprint of the sonic tapestry that was woven within This Heat, appearing at the elemental level, rather than via any explicit aesthetic connection; stripped and isolated the core of Williams' pursuits, and then rebuilt into an entirely unique form of experimental pop song.

Recorded in an old Victorian house in South London, the duo, joined by Charles Bullen, Martin Harrison, and Rick Wilson, recorded during the day while Currie''s son attended school, before being pushed into final forms during the evenings by Williams' experimental tape treatments.

Among the great artefacts of 80s DIY / 80s home recording, using whatever instruments they had on hand (clarinet, piano, bells, etc.), Flaming Tunes stitched their brand of lo-fi melodies around simple arrangements, oblique rhythms, and a densely layered pallet of natural sounds, culminating as a mesmerizing collage of left-field instrumentalism and sideways pop.

Like almost no other that has been made before or since, not to mention an absolutely stunning and sublime piece of work, Flaming Tunes has sparked a true love affair for almost everyone that has encountered it over the years.

We can't thank Superior Viaduct enough for bringing this one back. Issued in two lovingly produced editions; the limited-edition clear vinyl with colour sleeve, and the black vinyl version, with black and white sleeve. This one can't be missed and is going to fly.

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Bristling with youthful innovation and rebellion that demands to be lived in and explored, this long awaited, first time stand-alone vinyl reissue of Vox Populi!'s legendary 1983 cult masterpiece, ''Myscitismes'', is easily one of the most exciting reissues of the year. Building aural bridges between various global traditions, punk, synths pop, industrial music, 60's and 70's luminaries like Areski, Brigitte Fontaine, and Jacques Higelin, musique concr?te, and the radical electronic and electroacoustic gestures emerging from studios like GRM, it truly can't be missed.

Vox Populi!

"Myscitismes" (LP)

The trajectories of avant-garde and experimental music tend to be perceived as straight lines; inherited legacies, tied up with tidy bows. In reality, as with all histories of creative activity, the whole things is a beautiful messy affair, within which the best of the best rarely fits.

There's no better example than the wilder territories of musical innovation that grew from the gestures and radicalism of punk, and of these there are few more striking than the French ensemble Vox Populi!.

Often cited as a foundational project in France's tightly knit movement of industrial music, even here the project defied easy definition, channeling a vast range of influences to create a singular form of avant-gardism that has retained cult loyalty ever since. We're absolutely thrilled to shine light on the long awaited, first time stand-alone vinyl reissue of the band''s great masterpiece, Myscitismes, originally self-issued on the band's own Vox Man Records in 1985, and now reemerging on Platform 23.

Highly sought after and virtually impossible to find in its original pressing, it's a truly mind-bending marvel that, even 35 years on, still manages to turn everything on its head. Bristling with youthful innovation and rebellion that demands to be lived in and explored, it's easily one of the most exciting reissues of the year.

Vox Populi! was founded in 1983 by brother and sister, Mithra and Arash Khalatbari, joined by Axel Kyrou, while all three were still in their teens. While deeply inspired by the emerging movements of industrial music and power electronics, even the project's earliest gesture - threaded their way across a single 7" and two cassettes - moved far beyond the perceptual boundaries of those idioms with idiosyncratic improvisational structures, marked by a youthful playfulness that still retained its edge.

Relentlessly pushing forward in their explorations, by the trio's third full length and first LP, Myscitismes, things had truly begun to cohere in around incredibly original forms.

The great leap in Vox Populi!'s artistry that is captured by Myscitismes is, at least in some part, likely due to the ambitious explorations of Axel Kyrou - son of Mireille Kyrou, the legendary Groupe de Recherches Musicales composer and musique concr?te pioneer - who had, on truly avant-garde terms, begun to utilize the band's Vox Man studio as an instrument, laying the groundwork to the albums dark ambiences and visionary temperaments.

Interweaving these elements with minimal synth, rhythm box, hand percussion and Persian poetry, they experimented with tape manipulation - layering the music with forward, backward and echo simultaneously, creating a body of remarkably singular aural bridges between varies global traditions of music that they had become enthralled with, punk, synths pop, industrial music, 60's and 70's luminaries like Areski, Brigitte Fontaine, and Jacques Higelin, musique concr?te, and the radical electronic and electroacoustic gestures that were still emerging from studios like GRM.

Like all great and visionary music, Myscitismes cannot be done justice with words. It stands on its own in the landscape like a shifting totem, never allowing itself to be entirely nailed down. Not unlike the efforts of Nurse with Wound, it establishes Vox Populi! as among the true inheritors of the territories concurred by the great avant-garde gestures of the 1950's, 60s, and 70s, wrestling them from the iron grip of institutionalization, and revitalizing them with rebellious energy of punk.

Threaded by pulsing electronics, shimmering drones, stunning vocals, and a constellation of stunningly structured abstract sound, it's impossible to recommend Vox Populi!'s Myscitismes enough. Finally reissued in this beautiful edition by Platform 23, it's bound to be a revelation for anyone encountering it for the first time, and a must have for anyone that knows its name. Truly stunning and not to be missed. The copies we have are going to fly.

A towering holy grail of Italian library music, Dialogo is proud to present the first ever vinyl reissue of Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai's astoundingly ambitious 10 LP, 1972 box set, Dimensioni Sonore, in two stunning, limited editions.

One of the most ''hidden'' and sought after releases of all times, and a work of epic proportions, Dimensioni Sonore has been eluding collectors and affectionate listeners for about 50 years. A rare example of Library Music created by the Maestro, the full series of 10 albums is going to be available soon as a deluxe limited edition box set.

This is your unique opportunity to grab one of the 200 copies of the Limited Collector Edition (see it in details here) which comes complete with 10LPs, 10CDs, a 48-page LP-sized book in English, a screen-printed tote bag, an exclusive large Poster and - to add an even more appealing dimension to the whole thing - is housed in a handmade (in Italy) custom lavish linen box.

The 10 LPs are also available separately as a bundle (edition of 300).

Ennio Morricone, Bruno Nicolai

"Dimensioni Sonore"
Musiche Per L''Immagine E L''Immaginazione

Limited Collector Edition: 10LP, 10CD, Book, Poster, Tote-Bag, Deluxe Linen Box

Among the most important figures in 20th century Italian music, Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai each forged distinct and unexpected creative paths that were entirely tuned to the eras through which they worked; radical and forward-thinking composers, who activated vast new worlds of possibility via the mediums of film and television. Morricone has long held legendary status for his soundtrack and library music work, as well as his explicitly avant-garde and experimental endeavours within the seminal collective, Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, but Dimensioni Sonore - a sprawling body of recordings originally issued by RCA in 1972 - holds equal distinction as a historically prescient illumination into the slightly lesser known efforts of Nicolai, and their groundbreaking importance of his work.

Regular collaborators over the course of their respective careers, Morricone and Nicolai met as students during the early 1950s at the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia in Rome, fostering a friendship that would yield, from the mid 1960s on, hundreds of albums that bear both of their names, in one role or another. Each of these is incredible and worthy of note, but none is as astounding, distinct, or ambitious as Dimensioni Sonore - issued as a series of 10 individual LPs, and as a deluxe box set comprising them all - regarded by many as the crown jewel in RCA's legendary library music series, Catalogo Di Musiche Per Sonorizzazioni.

To sum it up, the luxurious, highly collectible Dimensioni Sonore boxset includes:

- 10 vinyl LPs, replica of the original RCA albums
- 10 CDs
- a 48-page sewn-bound large book (LP size)
- 1 large poster on high-quality paper
- screen-printed tote-bag printed on an ethically-produced 100% natural cotton
- handmade linen box-set
- Original liner notes include writings by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Sergio Leone, Elio Petri, Giuliano Montaldo, and Gillo Pontecorvo and a new article by renowned musicologist Maurizio Corbella exploring this edition in detail.

Carefully remastered from the original analogue tapes and coming in a lavish presentation, this is an essential release which fully showcase the state of the art of Library Music in Italy during the early ''70s, and nothing less than a timeless masterpiece.

Almost entirely distinct in scale and content, Dimensioni Sonore (it could be translated as Sound Dimensions - Music for Images and Imagination) - towers in the history of library music; the intriguing and idiosyncratic realm that, particularly in Italy, offered a vehicle for a great many of the country's most radical composers to stretch their talents into wild and unknown territories, allowing them to infiltrate the public consciousness via the mediums of television and film.
Gathering 103 pieces - 5 LPs ascribed to works by Morricone and 5 to those of Nicolai - ranging from cerebral jazzy numbers to otherworldly avant-garde abstractions, it''s no surprise that these recordings feature members of Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza (in a sort of post The Feed-Back album line-up configuration).

Like nearly all library music, the works of Dimensioni Sonore were not composed with any particular film or thematic association in mind, rather to be selected by filmmakers at a later date. This gave Morricone and Nicolai a remarkable amount of freedom to follow their creative intuition into strikingly uncharted realms. Deploying a starling range of acoustic and electronic instrumentation and techniques, and conceived in sequential order, across the 10 LPs Morricone and Nicolai - working far more like avant-garde composers than the creators of film scores - set out to create a body of expressive and dynamic work which explored constant timbric exploitations and multiform musical parameters, and their possibilities for utilization, titling each composition with no direct relation to its form, intentionally leaving the meaning entirely to the listener's mind.

While too varied to describe them in any detail, the organizations of sound encountered across Dimensioni Sonore are incredibly distinct within the music of its moments, and arguably any before or since. Sheets of pointillistic ambience bristle with details of synthetic and organic tones and textures, generating a fields of abstraction that could be mistaken for any number of avant-garde and experimental gestures of the 60s and 70s, were it not for the unifying, cracking rhythm section driving it forward and pushing into entirely unexpected realms, which gave Sergio Leone, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Elio Petri, Gillo Pontecorvo, all Giuliano Montaldo all plenty to explore in their original liner notes for their release.

A true genre-defying marvel, Dialogo's first ever vinyl reissue of Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai's masterstroke, Dimensioni Sonore, in two editions; 200 copies in a super deluxe box-set with 10 LPs + 10 CDs + Book and ephemeras, and 300 copies consisting of the 10 LPs alone.
Both reproduce the original liner notes by the incredible cast mentioned above.

Important: As you may know, we are based in Milan, one of the Italian cities more affected by the Coronavirus pandemic. The situation is definitely improving, but we still need to stay strong and follow all the restrictions and recommendations from the authorities. We're open and shipping, albeit very slowly as most of our staff is still working from home. Please be patient, we're doing the best we can.

Thanks for your support, we truly hope that you and your loved ones all stay safe and well.

Henning Christiansen has been one of the 20th Century's most striking and visionary composers. ''L''essere Umano Errabando La Voce Errabando'', a previously unreleased work from 1991, is now available along with ''Op. 41 Badet / Kom Frem For Satan / Min D?de Hest / Op.72 Bondef?reren Knud Lavard'', a compilation of four works from 1967-1972, and ''Save the Nature - Use Fluxus'', a double LP which documents a performance from the 2019 Henning Christiansen / Ursula Reuter Christiansen exhibition ''They Won''t Survive Without the Bird Songs''.

The impact of a handful of years and a few records on perception of history can be incredible. Less than a decade ago, for all but a few sound-art fans and scholars, Henning Christiansen ranked among the most obscure figures in 20th century music. Just a stone's throw down the road, thanks to the devotion of a small number of labels - Institut for Dansk Lydark?ologi, Holidays, Slowscan, Penultimate Press - each bringing forth reissues and archival releases of incredibly rare works by the Danish multi-disciplinary artist and composer, Christiansen has come into focus as one of the most important and distinct creators of experimental sound of the last half century or more.

Recently, rather than simply acting facilitator, the Henning Christiansen Achieve has entered the fold as an imprint in their own, adding depth and range to what we have thus far been able to glean from his vast and incredibly varied body of work. Their latest and third release, a beautiful LP comprising a previously unreleased work from 1991, L''Essere Umano Errabando La Voce Errabando (The Wandering Human Being - The Wandering Voice), takes this even further, offering yet another world of exploration from this singular mind.

Henning Christiansen

"L''Essere Umano Errabando La Voce Errabando" (LP)

Not only was Henning Christiansen (1932 - 2008) one of the 20th Century's most striking and visionary composers, he was also the most notable member of Fluxus' Danish arm.

A bridge between the world of fine art and realms of avant-garde sound, over the course of his career he continuously dismantled the standard terms for categorization and definition with the arts.

The purity of his work and ideas cast a long shadow, refocussing the ear on the truths at the heart of experimental and avant-garde practice.

He was a radical collectivist as much as an assertive individualist - contradictory and reactionary - theatrical and inward facing - possessed by a singular vision which drove him down uncharted paths that payed little mind to the expectations placed upon where music rests in our lives.

Like so much of Christiansen's work, L''Essere Umano Errabando La Voce Errabando, grows from, and blurs the boundaries between, of art and life. A piece for voice, featuring Carlo Quartucci, Carla Tat?, Ursula Reuter Christiansen, and Henning Christiansen, it grew from a series of conversations and previous collaborations between the two couples who retained a close friendship for many years.

Conceived on a beach on the island of M?n in the eastern sea in Denmark, the four mused on the sea as a connecting vehicle between their lives and those of others, laying conceptual root to finest in Henning''s vast catalog.

A mantra of four voices threaded by the sound of the ocean, a PVC tube, effects, and wind instruments, L''Eessere Umano Errabando La Voce Errabando rolls hypnotically like the sea, feeling as organic, matter of fact, and at ease, as it does radical and forward thinking. Phrases in various languages flirt with forms of sonic mysticism that touch the intuitive origins of music.

In Christiansen's hands, a conceptual bridge between the geographic points implied by the two couple's respective lives forms, allowing words and language to become a shared sound that eradicates identity, nationalism, and the very idea of difference.

Unlike anything else in Christiansen's output, L''Essere Umano Errabando La Voce Errabando is a meditative that wraps the listener in a melancholic mantra that doubles as a haunting and beautiful image of political hope. Issued by the Henning Christiansen Achieve as a limited LP in an edition of 500 copies with large bespoke fold out sleeve on grey board with white reverse, printed inner sleeve, and a 195 x 280 booklet.

Unquestionably one of the most beautiful, engaging, and fascinating archival releases by Henning Christiansen to emerge yet. Absolutely not to be missed.

Henning Christiansen

"Op. 41 Badet / Kom Frem For Satan / Min D?de Hest / Op.72 Bondef?reren Knud Lavard" (LP)

The second release on the Henning Christiansen Archive is a compilation of four works from 1967-1972, including a poem set in a bath, an unknown musical work, the musical backdrop to a horse sacrifice and a soundtrack to a school play. What binds these works together alongside the period when they were written is their basis in 'song' and some traditional 'musical' elements. What separates it them from said tradition is that they were composed by Henning Christiansen.

Op.41 Badat is a simple work featuring 3 elements: Charlotte Strandgaard reading her poem Badat (The Bath), Henning playing melodica and the sound of water splashing in a bath. The result is an unusual and evocative lo-fi setting to the resigned nature of the reading.

Not a lot is known about Kom Frem For Satan (Come Forward Satan). Possibly a soundtrack of sorts? It certainly carries that mood with its jazz inflicted interludes, melodic organ moments all interlaced with the diegetic sounds of cars, footsteps, gunshots, etc. The result comes across like a gangster tinged musique concrete radio play.

Kom Frem For Satan also shares musical motifs that appear in Op.72 on side two of the lp. Min D?d Hest was previously released as a single sided 10" under the name Hesteofringen, here restored under it's correct name. Min D?d Hest (My Dead Horse) was written to accompany the Bj?rn N?rgaard performance Hesteofringen (The Horse Sacrifice) on the 30th of Jan 1970, one of the most notorious performances in Danish art history. Featuring a poem written by Lene Adler Pedersen, this is a recording made after the performance with Lene Adler Pedersen singing, accompanied by Christiansen on piano (as opposed to the green violin he used in the performance), Min D?d Horse is a beautiful haunting fragile song laden with metaphor, a sad lullaby is as simple and unusual as anything in Christiansen's output.

Op.72 Bondef?reren Knud Lavard is a the soundtrack to a school play performed on at the Fanefjord School on the island of M?n, Denmark, where he lived, in 1972. Another surprising work in Christiansen's oeuvre, the 6 pieces that make up this work shift between the sinister and sweet, often in the same track. Falling within the same period Henning made the soundtrack to The Executioner, Bondef?reren Knud Lavard mixes the melancholic romantic mood of that soundtrack whilst deep organ chords, military drumming and an acoustic guitar solo (played by Henning's first son Esben Christiansen) all make an appearance.

This is an sublime collection from one the 20th Centuries most diverse composers at the bridge between his romantic and avant-garde phases.

Henning Christiansen

"Op. 41 Badet / Kom Frem For Satan / Min D?de Hest / Op.72 Bondef?reren Knud Lavard" (LP)

In November 17, 2019 a six hour performance was undertaken in the car park of The Box gallery in Los Angeles as a part of the Henning Christiansen / Ursula Reuter Christiansen exhibition They Won't Survive Without The Bird Songs. Thorbj?rn Reuter Christiansen, son of Ursula and Henning, developed a timeline for the performance which was essentially designed to encompass a contemporary community of like minded artists that spans generations and continents harnessing and continuing the work instigated by Henning during his lifetime. The resulting performance included archival recordings taken from the H.C. Archive, which houses a vast collection of compositions, scores and correspondence of the late Christiansen.

This limited edition 2LP collects edited highlights from the day capturing the unique and somewhat unsettling atmosphere provoked by a diverse range of performances. Thorbj?rn Reuter Christiansen developed a new action where he performed a sound piece on iconic instruments of Henning's alongside recorded sounds of his father. Father and son re-united again in performance. The New Sound of the Living Dead. Bj?rn N?rgaard presented two new iterations of some of his historical actions; Homage to Henning and Joseph, Manresa, a piece he first collaborated on with Henning Christiansen and Joseph Beuys at Galerieleri Schmela in D?sseldorf in 1966, and The Cake, a live construction of a monolithic yet impermanent sculpture meant to decay over time.

Mai Dengs?e Hansen performed Eurasienstab Fluxorum Organum Op. 39, a piece for organ that Henning scored and used as the soundtrack for the film Eurasienstab, with Beuys. The Box gallery founder Mara McCarthy, along with her father Paul McCarthy and Chiara Giovando performed Knock Harder, a 20 min. improvisation that loosely recalls Knocking, a sound scape Henning used repeatedly throughout many of his own compositions. Chiara and Mara can be heard singing and playing a selection of small instruments, while Paul methodically slammed the back door of the gallery with a piece of scrap 2?4 pinewood - a kind of dedication to the monotony of Fluxus.

Mark Harwood, the founder of the expansive experimental independent label Penultimate Press performed an improvised musical protest incorporating fire, rhythm and chaos alongside field recordings of the civil unrest in Chile that he collected just prior to the opening of this exhibition. Harwood's contribution speaks to Hennings political activism and dedication.

Throughout Save The Nature - Use Fluxus all came together to celebrate these great artists and to embody the same spirit of communal collaboration that has so thoroughly been a part of both Ursula and Henning's lifelong endeavors.

The albums are also available separately.

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Following on the rapidly vanished release of Marja Ahti and Niko-Matti Ahti ''Why Do Birds Suddenly Appear?'', Ouidah - the new imprint in the Blume family, offering a dedicated focus to artists working in the often less acknowledged corners of the globe - introduces its second release. Filled with life, vitality, and the curiosity that follows, Raven Chacon's ''An Anthology of Chants Operations'' presents a wildly expanded and revitalized notion of experimental practice.

Raven Chacon

"An Anthology of Chants Operations" (LP)

While often laying unobserved below a landscape of the seemingly unfamiliar, experimental music is the imagining of the future, embedded in a quest for fundamental truth. It is a music that attempts to speak of who we are, fueled by curiosity and formed into creative languages that seek new relationships to meaning and communication through organizations of sound.

New Mexico based performer, improvisor, composer, and sound artist Raven Chacon's latest LP, An Anthology of Chants Operations, the second outing from Ouidah - a new imprint in the Blume Editions family, dedicated to ambitious artists working in often overlooked geographies - is a shimmering window into the rigour, hope, and beauty of these pursuits; a body of recordings drawn from across the last decade of his output, that weaves the elemental and topical into startling abstract forms.

Raised in Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation, Arizona, and a student of James Tenney, Morton Subotnick, Michael Pisaro and Wadada Leo Smith at CalArts, for the last 20 years Raven Chacon has bridged the creative realms of chamber music, noise, site specific installation, and performance, building a body of singular solo efforts, as well as critically heralded collaborative works within the collective Postcommodity.

Deeply introspective, Raven Chacon's work rests at the root meaning and intention of experimental practice. It is the outcome of an action that, at its inception, responds to a question for which the answer is unknown. In his hands, sound is a raw, democratic material, with a near infinite number of possibilities and sources - sometimes found and encountered, others self-generated - reformed into an image that refract the notions of humanity and being outside of themselves.

An Anthology of Chants Operations comprises a body of 9 recordings created by Chacon between 2010 and 2020, capturing live performance, installation, and composition. Offering an expansive cross-section of the cohesive diversity that defines his practice, each is a free-standing encounter, drawing on the artist's deep sense of curiosity about the meaning that develops through a relation to history, happening, place, and environment.

Singing Toward the Wind Now / Singing Toward the Sun Now is a work that documents an installation staged at Canyon de Chelly National Monument in Chinle, Arizona in 2012, for which Raven Chacon created 4 metal sculptures that function as musical instruments - 2 wind harps and 2 solar-powered oscillators - played by the natural elements. Encountered here as a tapestry of drone, subtle electronic beating, and environmental sound, the work forms part of a multidimensional image, alluding to their unseen forms and countless experiences and phenomena, across the millennia, of the land where it was staged.

This navigation of the experiential manifestations of history's contemporary life, carries into MVHS, a work constructed from recordings of Navajo high-school students learning to play a 5-hole "Indian" flute in their music class. Forced upon them by their teacher as a "classical" instrument, despite lacking precedent in their own culture, Chacon unveils an unfolding simulacrum of Native American identity and heritage that amounts to garish clich?, reappropriating it as a raw material to indicate the complex alignment of meaning - both internal and external - connected to a people, place, and the nurture of their truth.

Raven Chacon's work is bound by the cohesion of his ideas, explorations, and the nature of his responses, rather a tangible loyalty to aesthetic appearance or form. The immersion into the dynamics of this approach, relating to action, place, and meaning that develops at their meeting, continuous to expand as his "Anthology" unfolds, blurring the line between the performative, chance encounter, and the composed.

The wondrously beautiful and aptly named Study for Human-made Bird Calls and Microphone out a Moving Car Window, Tyuonyi, a sound work deploying field recordings at the ruins of Tyuonyi, delve toward radically different depictions of the abstractions that develop between object and the occupation of place, weaving ambience and intervention into unexpected forms.

Chant, one of a larger body of performances for voice; Antler/Glass, capturing a live performance with amplified deer antler and a sheet of glass; and Pinefire Song, a piece made from shaken and processed shells from Zuni Pueblo, and a tape loop of a bonfire of pine needles, shift their materiality and actions toward signifier and sign, with Chacon's body channeling the historical and cultural potency that rests at the conjunction of sound and action.

MSRC, a microtonal, collaborative improvisation with Marc Sabat on viola and Chacon on custom-tuned organ, and Operation, a chance-composition, through their own distinct notions of musicality, sculpt transient spaces of imagistic sonority, pointing to the depth at their source, given new life in the present by Chacon's deep sensitively to the effect of the place, and the contained elements and happenings that move him to act, respond, and explore.

Filled with life, vitality, and the curiosity that follows, Raven Chacon's An Anthology of Chants Operations presents a wildly expanded and revitalized notion of experimental practice that stretches far beyond the potentialities within which it is normatively conformed. A deeply human music, asking after the effects of place on who we are.

The album is issued by Ouidah in a beautiful edition of 200 copies on black vinyl, packaged in the label's signature monochrome triangular sleeve, a Nagaoka anti-static sleeve, and complete with two informative inserts.

A never before issued recording of Horace Tapscott leading his legendary Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, ''Live at Century City Playhouse 9/9/79'' documents the entirety of a 2 hours performance, sprawling across glorious 3 LPs, that rises as one of the most beautiful, striking, and historically important records of the year. A joyous explosion of sound, seeded by social, political, and community-based action, at the juncture of spiritual and free jazz, this one''s a 10 out of 10 and not to be missed.

Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra

"Live at Century City Playhouse 9/9/79" (3 LPs)

Certain bodies of music stand apart from the pack. This can be a consequence of critical or institutional neglect, the singularity of their creative proximity - rendering them beyond the accepted notions of a genre and categorisation - or remarkable artistic accomplishments that seemingly separates them from their peers. When regarding the work of the Los Angeles based pianist, band leader, and composer, Horace Tapscott, and that which sprung from his Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra across the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, all are unquestionable in play. A tour de force of sound, seeded by social, political, and community-based action, Tapscott and his Arkestra were among the most important groups working in the United States, not to mention jazz, during the years of their activity. They also remain among the most under-appreciated. Thankfully, the last few years has brought a number of reissues and archival releases by Tapscott, the Arkestra, and many of its members and associates like Linda Hill, Jesse Sharps, Adele Sebastian, Nate Morgan, Curtis Clark, and others, allowing the sprawling scope and astounding merit of their accomplishments to come into view for a broader audience.

Now we have yet another from Nimbus West - the imprint founded in 1979 by Tom Albach to support Tapscott and Arkestra's activities - Live at Century City Playhouse 9/9/79, a never before issued recording sprawling across three mind-bending LPs. Hugely historically important, and an absolute marvel of sound, this is West Coast avant-garde and spiritual jazz at its absolute best.

After Charles Mingus, it's hard to think of a more important and influential figure in the history of Los Angeles jazz than Horace Tapscott. He was nothing short of a visionary, leaving a decades deep body of work, fuelled by a singular social, political, and creative ethos, in his wake. If the East Coast of the U.S. had Sun Ra, the Midwest had AACM luminaries like Kelan Phil Cohran, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Muhal Richard Abrams, then the West Coast had Tapscott.

Tapscott began as a trombonist before switching to piano, playing with Frank Morgan, Don Cherry, and Billy Higgins while still in his teens, before hitting the road with Lionel Hampton during the late 50s and early 60s, an experience formative enough to push him down his own path as a band leader.

For most of his career, Tapscott remained one of the unsung giants of jazz; a gifted composer, arranger, and educator, as well as a remarkably original pianist and bandleader. In 1961 he founded the Underground Musicians Association (UGMA) - which morphed into the Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra roughly a decade later, a project which, despite Tapscott's untimely passing in 1999, continues to send ripples across the world improvised music to this day, both through its own activities and through the individual gestures - past and present - of the hundreds of talented voices who have passed through its ranks (Arthur Blythe, Azar Lawrence, Jimmy Woods, John Carter, Bobby Bradford, Sonny Criss, Ndugu Chancler, Nate Morgan, Jesse Sharps, Adele Sebastian, Dadisi Komolafe, Gary Bias, to mention only a few).

While Tapscott recorded in numerous configurations (almost always as a leader) and solo over the many years of his activity, from its inception UGMA / the Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra remained his central focus. A radical band, creating revolutionary music that channeled Afrocentric and self-determinist philosophies, it was a community band that lived communally. In Tapscott's own words, the project hoped to act as 'a cultural safe house for the music.' - an Ark, stating, "This is your music. This is black music,. a panorama of the whole thing right here".

Playing fundraisers, organising teach-ins and workshops for young and old, all the while integrating their efforts with radical theatre groups and poets, political revolutionaries, Black separatists, community groups and churches, it drew on its own culture and the immediate community from surrounding Los Angeles neighbourhoods for talent and creative inspiration, producing a totality of sound and action that has few equivalents in the history of American music.

Like Sun Ra, from whom he borrowed when naming his own Arkestra, and Kelan Phil Cohran working during the same period in Chicago, Taspcott showed deep dedication to possibilities and inclusiveness presented by working in large ensembles. Attempting to remain as free from the restrictions of the white run music industry, the Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra only began to document their efforts toward the end of the 1970s - always placing community work and political consciousness at the heart of the project, preferring to play in the street, parks and coffee houses, over traditional venues.

Live at Century City Playhouse 9/9/79, issued by Nimbus West - the imprint with which the Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra and its members almost exclusively worked during the 70s, 80s, and 90s - takes us into the heart of this remarkably fertile period and its incredible sounds and ideas.

Never before issued, capturing the entirety of a 2 hour live concert with a band on fire, featuring the stellar playing of Horace Tapscott, Adele Sebastian, Linda Hill, Sabir Matteen, Desta Walker, Billie Harris, Lester Robertson, Johnny Williams, Conga Mike, Daoud Woods, David Bryant, Alan Hines, and Billy Hinton, Live at Century City Playhouse 9/9/79 has few equivalents in the band's historical output, not to mention the entire market of contemporary archival releases.

An explosion of joyous music, threaded with the warmth of Taspcott's introductory voice - giving context and insight into the compositions and the band's mission - the album's rough creative proximity falls somewhere between spiritual jazz and free jazz, but within its makeup numerous discrete musics and cultural traditions - be bop, big band swing, gospel, and soul - percolate just at and under the surface, contributing a truly singular temperament of color and range, almost as though Taspcott and the Akrestra have distilled the entire history of African American music into a powerful and deeply emotive whole.

Live at Century City Playhouse 9/9/79 is one of those rare documents of avant-garde jazz that, even 40 years after it was laid to tape, challenges the mind and creative sensibilities, while promoting the body to dance. The band is locked in and loud - rattling, rhythmic, and tonally complex - met by wild exclamations of an ecstatic audience taken to the brink. This is what music is all about - by the people and for the people, bringing us together and fuelling the forward march - the sounds of hope and change, locked in mesmerising creative exchange. Few records to have emerged this year can claim these heights. An absolute masterpiece that once heard will leave you wondering where it's been all these years.

Unquestionably one of the best records of the year, cut directly from the original master tapes with no process, and issued in a gatefold tip-on sleeve, featuring archival photos and a beautiful essay by veteran writer Mark Weber, it doesn't get any better than this. Nimbus have only pressed 500 copies, so this one isn't going to sit around for long. A 10 out of 10 and as essential as records come.

A mind-blowing series of revelations, Recital''s latest, ''America Lament'', a stunning collection of archival works by the American sound artist, composer, conceptualist and performer, Charlie Morrow, culled from over 50 years of his archives, is an absolutely essential body of glorious sound that can't help but rewrite how we understand the past.

Charlie Morrow

"America Lament" (LP)

From its origins in the early 20th century to the present day, avant-garde sound practice - music, sound art, sound poetry, etc - has been carried by a relatively small, close knit community of artists and fans; overlapping and passing legacies and practices from one generation to the next. Yet, despite the diminutive scale and interconnectedness, these histories have consistently suffered from the burden of loss. Major contributions, artists, and works from one era are all too often forgotten or unobtainable by those that follow in the next.

This is precisely what projects like the Los Angeles based imprint, Recital - run by the composer Sean McCann - endeavors to amend. Having already dropped incredible releases by R.I.P. Hayman, Daniel Schmidt, Philip Corner, Adriano Spatola, Geoff Hendricks, and numerous others in the last year or so, their latest LP, America Lament, an absolutely stunning collection of archival works by the American sound artist, composer, conceptualist and performer, Charlie Morrow, takes these activities toward astounding depths.

A mind-blowing series of revelations that deftly builds on the ground covered by Recital's 2018 release dedicated to the artist, Toot! Too, it's a glorious listen that can't help but rewrite how listeners understand the past.

Given the incredible quality of his work, and the list of accomplishments that flows behind him, it's a confounding wonder that Charlie Morrow isn't a household name among fans of avant-garde and experimental music. Born in 1942, Morrow attended Columbia College working under the composer Otto Luening and the ethnomusicologist Willard Rhodes, who introduced him to oral cultures and shamanic traditions, before, during the early 1960s, encountering notable figures from the New York avant-garde like John Cage, Alison Knowles, and Philip Corner, the later with whom he began a lasting, productive working relationship.

During the same period, he also met the poet Jerome Rothenberg, with whom he founded and ran The New Wilderness Foundation, staging concerts and releasing the legendary New Wilderness Audiographics cassette series between 1974 and 1989, as well as publishing EAR Magazine, run by Beth Anderson, Laurie Spiegel, and R.I.P. Hayman.

Always a facilitator and a collaborator, as much as a singular artist in his own right, during the mid-1960s Morrow also helped Charlotte Moorman organize her acclaimed annual Avant Garde Festival in New York City, as well as organizing a Summer Solstice celebration that ran between 1973 and 1989, giving platform to innumerable experimental artists. Scratching at the surface, he's everywhere you look.

Over the years, Charlie Morrow's projects have included chanting and healing works, museum and gallery installations, large-scale festival events, radio and TV broadcasts, film soundtracks, commercial sound design and advertising jingles, performed using conch shells, cow and goat horns, Jew's harp, ocarina and homemade electronics, with a focus on breath, vocalization, gesture, and mental dream states.

It is into these worlds that America Lament delves, pushing his know sonorous pallet by deploying electronics, Irish lap pipes, ambient flutes, a string quartet, and great deal more, to create a beguiling, jubilant body of sound that stretches over 9 freestanding works spread across its two sides.

Ranging from the astoundingly beautiful and the minimal, to funky excursions in jazz and explicit avant-gardism, America Lament - building on the back of the ground covered by 2018's Toot! Too - takes a deep dive into Morrow's expansive and diverse practice, and in so doing follows a widely unacknowledged trajectory in experimental practice, moving far beyond the notion of any single aesthetic into the rich realm of raw and direct conceptualism that feels vital, relevant, and timeless as it reaches our ears.

Culled by the artists and Sean McCann from 50 years of Morrow's bottomless archive, covering the period from 1970 to 2020, America Lament is a towering accomplishment of astounding scope, issued by Recital in a limited edition of 300 LPs, complete with a beautiful 20-page booklet, containing program notes, scores, and an interview between Morrow and McCann.

Yet another in the long line of the important historical / archival work being done by Recital, it's not to be missed and isn't going to sit around for long. Grab it while you can.

Easy Like Sunday Morning.

10% Off our entire stock for regular customers, and 15% Off for members. From now until Monday, at Midnight.

As easy as that.

We are glad to announce our participation to SPRINT - Independent Publishers and Artists's Books Salon, a non-profit event happening in Milan, Italy, and online, starting today 27.11.2020 and continuing until 31.01.2021.

Among the many lectures, events and happenings we''d like to mention at least a couple of them.

Today at 6:00 p.m., Pascale Georgiev from Atelier ?ditions (Los Angeles / London) will have a talk entitled From a Mycological Foray to an Antlas of Rare and Famliar Colour about the book John Cage: A Mycological Foray.
This publication draws readers across the idiosyncratic, mushroom-suffused, innermost landscape of celebrated American composer John Cage.
Upon the remarkable journey with Cage, the reader encounters assorted photographs, compositions, and contemplations; all in the very same unexpected fashion various flora and fungi species are encountered while mushroom foraging. Volume I encompasses Cage's mycological-oriented Indeterminacy stories, Diary excerpts, and essays; and the complete transcript of Cage's 1983 performance, Mushrooms et Variationes. Volume II offers the inaugural reproduction of Cage's 1972 portfolio, Mushroom Book; authored in collaboration with illustrator Lois Long and botanist Alexander H. Smith.

On Sunday 29 at 4:00 p.m. we recommend you a visit to the Sprint website main page to enjoy the presentation of Soft Need #23 with Udo Breger and Luzius Martin (Basel) in a conversation about counterculture, the dreamachine, random-sequence generators and cut-up techniques by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin.
Even if only 3 issues were published in the ''70s, Soft Need, quickly became a legendary publication. Planned as the 4th issue of the serie, SN#23 ended up as a book of 260 pages with more than 80 contributors from all over the world.

Don''t forget to check the complete program on sprintmilano.org.

A truly mesmerizing and immersive body of sound, Tomoko Sauvage's latest, ''Fischgeist'' - issued in a limited edition by the German imprint, Bohemian Drips, takes us deep into the site-specific, environmental, and intimately responsive aspects of her work. A truly divine work of artistry that encounters one of the most interesting and engaging experimentalists of her generation delving forward, we couldn't possibly recommend it enough.

For more than a decade, the Paris-based Japanese experimental musician and sound artist, Tomoko Sauvage, has been dazzling us with her entirely singular approach to sound. Harnessing her unique 'natural synthesizer' by combining water, hydrophones and glass or ceramic bowls, she slowly built a body of work in live, installation, and recorded contexts that has almost no parallel.

Her latest and third solo outing, Fischgeist - building on the ground explored within her acclaimed 2017 Shelter Press LP, Musique Hydromantique - takes us deep into the site-specific, environmental, and intimately responsive aspects of her work.

It's is a truly mesmerizing and immersive body of sound, issued in a limited edition by the German imprint, Bohemian Drips, that leaves you longing for more.

Tomoko Sauvage

"Fischgeist" (LP)

Tomoko Sauvage has followed a fascinating path through music. Born and raised in Yokohama, Japan, Sauvage moved to Paris in 2003 after studying jazz piano in New York, where she began to develop her interests in Indian Classical music. In 2006, she attended a concert of Aanayampatti Ganesan, a virtuoso of Jalatharangam - the traditional Carnatic music instrument with water-filled porcelain bowls - and began to develop her approach to this realm of sonority, first with China bowls and chopsticks in her kitchen, before utilizing underwater microphones and a radically expanded range of vessels, to develop her own world of electro-aquatic instruments.

Sauvage's music has historically grown from a live / performance-based practice, centered around improvisation and interaction of sound with an environment; the acoustic space and medium affected by architecture, temperature, humidity and those who occupy a given space, activated by the artist's strikingly sensitive sense of touch, focus, and responsiveness, a deep devotion to chance, and a channeling of ceremonially performative.

Each of these elements manifest within her latest, Fischgeist, with masterful grace. Recorded in a former water tank in Berlin, a building with a special architecture and acoustics, Sauvage further expanded her interests and pallet by taking on inspirational nodes from the building's history, discovered by chance during her recording sessions from a passerby, who explained that it had once been filled with fish. The vision preoccupied her over the course of the recording process, guiding the generation of her sounds in a space that was marked by an astoundingly long reverberation of up to 20 seconds.

While Fischgeist incorporates and build upon the elements that defined her two previous solo efforts, particularly her long-standing research into hydrophonic feedback, the album encounters her taking on additional new gestures of stroking bowls' surfaces to imitate the voices of sea mammals (Metamorphosis), drawing dots and circles by rubbing stones against stones underwater (Exit). The underwater amplification of quasi-inaudible sound is even more magnified in the air by the echo of the water tank. Not only tiny bubbles, but also micro-movements of the bones and veins of the hand holding the sonorous objects in the water, are intensely amplified - sounding like a tempest on the opening Deluge.

Fischgeist, in truly striking ways, accomplishes what it set out to; before and around our ears emerge the images of a remarkable convincing, and dynamically abstract, aquatic world.

As immersive and densely populated as its subject, the interplay of detail of a vast range sonorous objects is truly startling.

A truly divine work of artistry that encounters one of the most interesting experimentalists of her generation delving forward, creating something without precedent as all avant-garde music should hope to do, we couldn't possibly sing its praises enough.

Absolutely stunning, this one is going to be in the listening pile for month to come. Not to be missed on any count.

Smalltown Supersound''s latest from their new series, Actions For Free Jazz, an insaley good science fiction inspired epic from Joe McPhee and Lasse Marhaug, can not be missed. Unquestionably one of our favorite records of the year, and nearly impossible to get off the turntable once the needle drops, it''s a breath of fresh air that stands as a thrilling reminder of what experimental music is all about.

Joe McPhee, Lasse Marhaug

"Harmonia Macrocosmica" (LP)

For nearly 30 years, the Norwegian imprint, Smalltown Supersound, has ridden the razors edge of adventurous sound, issuing startlingly ambitious release that span a diverse number of musical idioms, from Neneh Cherry, Arp, The Thing, Lindstr?m, Dungen, Merzbow, Kevin Drumm, Mats Gustafsson, Paal Nilssen-Love, Ken Vandermark, and near countless number of others.

Last year the imprint launched a brand-new series, Actions For Free Jazz, with two killer LPs, Mats Gustafsson & Christian Marclay's Link and Joe McPhee & Paal Nilssen-Love's Lift Every Voice and Sing. Now they're back with a third which might just be our favorite to date, Harmonia Macrocosmica, a killer collaboration from Joe McPhee and Lasse Marhaug. It's been nearly impossible to get off the turntable since it fell into our hands; a high-water mark for 2020 that's not to be missed.

At 80, Joe McPhee needs little introduction. Since his early appearances with Clifford Thornton during the late 1960s and his iconic launch as leader via albums like Underground Railroad, Nation Time, Trinity, and Pieces of Light, the multi-instrumentalist has forged his own path through the territories of freely improved and avant-garde music.

While unquestionably one of the great contemporary torchbearers of the African American tradition of free jazz, of any member of his generation McPhee has arguably proven to be among the most willing to venture far from the idiom's perceived boundaries, collaborating prolifically and fiercely with an astoundingly diverse range of artists over the years; Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening Band, Graham Lambkin, Konstrukt, John Snyder, Chris Corsano, Mats Gustafsson, Susan Alcorn, Ken Vandermark, Arto Lindsay, Paal Nilssen-Love, Decoy, The Thing, John Butcher, Eli Keszler, Steve Lacy, Thurston Moore, Bill Nace, Peter Br?tzmann, Michael Zerang, and so many others that it would be nearly impossible to list them all.

In light of his long dedication to the practice of collaboration, McPhee's latest, Harmonia Macrocosmica, a duo with the Norwegian electronic musician, Lasse Marhaug, comes as little surprise. Active and incredibly prolific since the 1990s, like McPhee, Marhaug's practice feeds off of creative interplay with a radically diverse range artists, practices, and ideas.

His catalog is sprawling, peppered with thrilling efforts with Paal Nilssen-Love, C. Spencer Yeh, Okkyung Lee, Otomo Yoshihide, Merzbow, Jim O''Rourke, Mats Gustafsson, and a slew of others. Friends since the early 2000s, the pair initially came together within a quartet that also included Michiyo Yagi and Nilssen-Love back in 2015, the same period during which Harmonia Macrocosmica was recorded. Positioned face to face, the conversation between them truly comes into its own and is filled with an astoundingly singular force.

Despite the density of its structures and tonal interplay, Harmonia Macrocosmica feels like a breath of fresh air, fearlessly skirting the line between creative rigor and focused interplay and a playful irreverence in ways that leave you wondering where the hell you are.

Conceived by the duo as a science fiction work, Harmonia Macrocosmica draws inspiration from early electronic music, vintage science fiction films, and McPhee's lifelong love of cosmic music that began in the 1950s with a childhood encounter with Forbidden Planet and its electronic score, transforming it all into something entirely new and unheard. As a complete, freestanding effort, the album joins two arcs of each of artists practice; belonging to McPhee's decades deep linage of practice that began in the 1970s with the synthesist, John Snyder, as well as collaborations with Pauline Oliveros and the Nihilist Spams Band, and Marhaug's long standing devotion to the wilder realizations of electronic music.

A truly thrilling exchange of far out sounds, vacillating between kitsch, the austere, and boundary pushing structures, all played against and pushed onto the next level by McPhee''s sax and voice, Harmonia Macrocosmica completely defies genre and definition, rising as a wonderful reminder of what experimental music is all about. A truly radical zone of creative sound that renders an engrossing listen that you can't pull out of once you're in. Unquestionably one of our favorite releases of the year. This is a stone-cold killer that can't be missed.

Issued in a limited edition of 500 on copies on vinyl with no repress and no digital, so don't sleep this one is going to go fast and once it's gone, it''s gone for good.

A joy in listening from one of the giants of experimental sound, Room40 brings us a long overdue reissue of Akio Suzuki's seminal first cassette, ''Zeitstudie'', originally issued in 1985, in its first ever vinyl release. Just about as essential as any record could be, it can't be missed.

During one of the most collectively challenging years in living memory, Lawrence English's Room40 has managed to beat the odds and consistently deliver rays of light through the darkness, reminding us of what great art is all about and its importance in times like this. 2020 has already seen the label drop incredible albums by Werner Dafeldecker, Rafael Toral, David Toop, Phill Niblock, Ellen Fullman & Theresa Wong, Merzbow, Beatriz Ferreyra, and handful of others. Now they're at it again with what is unquestionably among our absolute favourites of the lot, Zeitstudie, a body of recordings that encounters the legendary sound artist, Akio Suzuki caught in a whirlwind of creativity during the mid-1980s.

Originally issued as a cassette - his first - by the tiny German imprint, Edition Giannozzo Berlin, out of print ever since, the Room40 edition, complete with a new cover by Hiromi Miyakita, selected by Suzuki, is its first ever vinyl release. Unquestionably among his most important and seminal early works, it's hard to imagine anything being a more welcome comfort to our ears.

Akio Suzuki

"Zeitstudie" (LP)

Since the early 1960s, Akio Suzuki has carved an entirely singular creative path, falling in liminal zones between music, sound art, performance, visual art, and environmental intervention, building a practice that is rooted in the acts of listening and observation, as much as generative action.

During the late seventies and through the eighties, he developed a form of performance referred to as Conceptual Soundwork, subsequently leading his widely regarded contemporary practice that utilizes objects assembled on site.

For much of his career Suzuki worked with a number of instruments that he invented and built himself, notable the Analapos - an instrument developed during the 1970s that creates echoes through the acoustic transmissions of a spiral cord stretched between two metal cylinders, and the De Koolmees - consisting of hollow glass tubes suspended over a frame, and an ancient stone flute (Iwabue) passed down through his family for many generations.

It is these instruments that feature across the two sides of Zeitstudie, a body of work recorded in Germany and issued in 1985.

Zeitstudie comprises 4 works from an incredible period in Suzuki's career - Standtype "Analapos -b", Suzuki type Glashamonika "De Koolmees" (Wet hands Method), "De Koolmees" (Stick Percussion Method), and Voice "Analapos -a" - each sculpting an entirely freestanding world of sonority, in careful discourse with the next, shifting fluidly between the vast textural and reverent zones that emerge across Standtype "Analapos -b", the careful and delicate harmonics of the central works for glass harmonica - the first an interplay of long tone and the second percussive - to the final of Voice "Analapos -a".

A truly mesmerising and immersive body of work that is bound to be a true revelation to most, offering crucial access to one of the most important periods in Suzuki's career. Just about as essential as any record could be.

A joy in listening from one of the giants of experimental sound that's not to be missed.

Long been heralded as an important forerunner of ambient and new age movements, the first time ever vinyl reissue of Gail Laughton's stunning lone LP from 1969, ''Harps of the Ancient Temples'', is an immersive journey through space and time with almost no parallel in its moment. Truly visionary, it's impossible to express how excited we are to finally have copies in our hands.

Very often, the greatest artists just don't fit. They stand out there on their own, and fall in strange, unexpected zones, often occupied only by themselves. This is was certainly the case for the American harpist, Gail Laughton, who's lone, the 1969 LP, Harps of the Ancient Temples - long championed and hunted by record collectors - is finally receiving the vinyl reissue treatment after roughly a half century out of print.

A truly stunning and visionary piece of work with almost no parallel in its moment, it's impossible to express how excited we are to finally have copies in our hands thanks to Pleasure For Music.

Gail Laughton

"Harps of the Ancient Temples" (LP)

Gail Laughton was born in Oklahoma to a family with a deep relationship to the harp, his mother as a teacher and his father as a builder of the instrument. As a young child, he played with his family''s orchestra, touring Cuba and Panama, before joining the Oklahoma City Symphony in 1937, hired through the WPA at the minimum age of 15.

Like so many musicians of the era, Laughton followed the call of the west, and went to work in Hollywood, playing on many film and cartoon soundtracks for years before endeavouring to produce a work of his own, the 1969 LP, Harps of the Ancient Temples, issued on the tiny imprint Rapture.

Channeling the ancient, mystical roots of his instrument, Harps of the Ancient Temples comprises 11 works for harp with aligned places, cultures, far gone dates.

Standing on the verge of both modern classical and the space age - looking forward through visions of the past - the album has long been heralded by collectors ad fans as an important forerunner of ambient and new age movements, with tracks appearing on both the highly influential compilation, I Am The Center: Private Issue New Age Music In America, 1950-1990, issued to great acclaim by Light In The Attic in 2013, and the soundtrack of Blade Runner, making this a rare chance to immerse ourselves in the singular world of an artist who so many of us have appreciated, without rightful celebration, for so many years.

Airy and mediative, marked by complexity, creative sophistication, and a stunning mastery of its primary instrument - the harp - Harps of the Ancient Temples defies easy description.

It renders a striking form of transportation, across the ages, through sound, leaving flirting images of the lost within shimmering, ethereal tones that shift toward blankets ambience, rising from the rhythmic striking of strings.

An absolute must for any fan of ambient and new age music, Laughton's lone LP transcends the bounds of any genre and helps us rethink the possibilities of music emerging at the end of the 1960s.

A truly wonderful and overwhelmingly beautiful immersion into a tragically under-celebrated artist, reissued for the first time on vinyl by Pleasure For Music in an edition of 300 copies, Harps of the Ancient Temples is an absolute must.

ZOVIET FRANCE

"Ch?sse Vol.2 - 17LP bundle"

Accompaning the release of the second ''Ch?sse'' box-set, which sold out in just a few hours from its announcement, Vinyl-On-Demand has also made the single LPs available as 300 copies standalone limited editions.

This newest episode in the highly acclaimed Zoviet France retrospective, consists of 17 LPs covering the years 1988-1993, featuring at least two completely unreleased works and offering many CD-only releases on vinyl for the first time.

The lavish wooden box-set is gone, but here before us stands a collection of groundbreaking and essential works which we are glad to offer as a special bundle with reduced price!

The UK collective Zoviet France is a strong contender for the ultimate cult electronic band. For nearly 40 years, they have explored and reported back from the liminal areas of music and composition, walking the margins where little is easily located and consensus reality melds with the hypnagogic and half-heard.

Having wilfully obscured themselves in Newcastle upon Tyne since their inception, Zoviet France has grown a loyal and obsessive fan base since the original lineup of Ben Ponton, Peter Jensen and Robin Storey made their recorded debut in 1982 - developing a radical relationship with cheap technologies, homemade acoustic instruments, primitive looping and sampling techniques, and basic dub trickery from which the group has crafted a distinctly unique vocabulary of sonic hypnosis.

With VOD''s typical attention to detail, the 17LPs offered in this bundle includes the entire Zoviet France discography covering the years 1988-1993:

"The End of Nothing, the Beginning of Everything" (LP, unreleased) / "Shouting at the Ground" (2LP) / "Just an Illusion" (2LP) / "Russian Heterodoxical Songs" (LP, unreleased) / "Look into Me" (2LP) / "Shadow, Thief of the Sun" (2LP) / Collusion (2LP) / Vienna 1990 (LP) / What Is Not True (2LP) / "Further Collusion" (2LP)

All albums were fully remastered by Sam Grant for the vinyl format and are pressed on 180 gram vinyl.

With all copies of the box-set gone for good, and due to the limited pressing of the standalone LPs, this is probably the last chance to grab these Zoviet France albums in the renewed glory of a top audio and overall quality.

Two absolutely stunning and essential new volumes from Blank Forms, Maryanne Amacher's ''Selected Writings and Interviews'' and Thulani Davis' ''Nothing But the Music'', each radically readdressing, in very different ways, the perceptual boundaries between sound, text, and thought. Truly astounding accomplishments that are essential for any fan of music, the written word, or interdisciplinary practice, once again, Blank Forms has proved themselves to be among the most important initiatives in publishing working today.

Just over a month ago, with their release of Unbegrenzt, Catherine Christer Hennix's singular rendering of Karlheinz Stockhausen, we made mention of what an incredible year the New York based curatorial platform, publisher, and record label, Blank Forms, is having. They had already dropped stunning releases by Still House Plants, Exotic Sin, Masayuki Takayanagi New Direction Unit, and Judith Hamann. Now they're back again, raising the bar with two incredible books that rest at the vanguard of musical thinking, Maryanne Amacher's Selected Writings and Interviews, and Thulani Davis' Nothing But the Music. Not unlike 2019's incredible suite of books from the publisher - Joseph Jarman's Black Case Volume I and II: Return From Exil, CC Hennix's Po?sy Matters and Other Matters, and Loren Connors' Autumn''s Sun - both, albeit in very different ways, radically readdress the perceptual boundaries between sound, text, and thought.

Truly astounding accomplishments and absolute must reads for any fan of music, the written word, or interdisciplinary practice, regardless of taste, these volumes are yet another proof that Blank Forms is one of the most important initiatives in publishing working today.

Maryanne Amacher

"Selected Writings and Interviews" (Book)

At the time of her passing in 2009, the American composer and artist, Maryanne Amacher, remained shockingly under-acknowledged, particularly when faced the towering importance of her contributions within the history of experimental sound practice and music; seemingly yet another woman relegated to the shadows of her male peers. Fortunately, this has slowly begun to change, helped considerably by the dedication to her work and legacy shown by Blank Forms via the presentation of numerous live performances of her works, talks, and the release of the stunning LP, Petra, in 2009 (only the third album in a remarkably distinguished career to entirely feature her music), an initiative now furthered considerably by the publication of Selected Writings and Interviews.

While by no means the limit of her output, Maryanne Amacher is best known for her extensive work with psychoacoustic phenomena, working heavily with the nuanced characteristics of time and space. A student of George Rochberg, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and numerous others, before her graduate work in the then emerging fields of acoustics and computer science, early in her career she became a regular collaborator with many of the 20th century avant-garde's most noted names - John Cage, Max Neuhaus, Merc Cunningham, etc, but it didn't take long for her to begin to delve toward realms almost entirely her own, pioneering, during the 1960s, what she designated as ''long distance music'' - telematic, site-specific sound works that would later crystallize into her renowned City-Links series (1967 - 1980).

The lack of available recordings of Amacher's remarkable efforts has a simple logic. Most of her major works were site specific, installational, and / or related to the family of psychoacoustic phenomena referred to as auditory distortion products (sometimes described as combination tones) - sounds generated inside the ear. In the simplest terms, Amacher's works are difficult to reproduce and stage, making access to her remarkable ideas that much more important for understanding her monumental contribution, freed from parameters and imitations imposed by time and space, and thus why Selected Writings and Interviews is that much more important than similar books of its sort.

Drawing on a vast, often rebelliously unorthodox and idiosyncratic selection of largely unpublished documents, compiled by Amy Cimini and Bill Dietz across the breadth of the papers collected and housed within the Amacher Collection, Selected Writings and Interviews delves into the life, work, and ideas of Maryanne Amacher like no volume before it. Allowing intimate access to the composer and artist in her own word, the chronologically grouped documents, ranging from private writings and letters to program notes, manifestos, and proposals for unrealized projects, are framed by interviews in which Amacher discusses corresponding periods of her life, unveiling her thought process as it develops and transforms over time. It is a volume comprising staggeringly rich primary documents, as a mean to uncover the mysterious world artist herself, while challenging the orthodoxies of music, sound, or media studies that have yet to acknowledge her remarkable work and contribution to the fields of music and sound art.

A truly monumental accomplishment, assembled with care, sensitivity, and conceptual vision on the part of Cimini, Dietz, and Blank Forms, Amacher's Selected Writings and Interviews is just about as essential as texts come within the field of experimental music, while, via the vast range of media format she worked across, being equally important for theorists and practitioners of urban design, contemporary art history, media and communications, music and sound studies, film, radio, art criticism, and performance studies. Clocking in at an incredible 398 pages, published as a cloth hardcover with dust jacket in a limited edition of 1,000 copies, this one is not to be missed.

The voice of one of the most important artists of the last century delivered at long last.

Thulani Davis

"Nothing But the Music" (Book)

Particularly in the field of music, writers get the short end of the stick, often lost in the shadows of the sounds they serve. For this reason, among numerous of others, this reality underscores the seminal importance of Blank Form's publication of Thulani Davis' Nothing But the Music. It foregrounds an artist of remarkable breadth and vision, who, for decades, has bent her talents writing both for and about music, while remaining widely under-celebrated for those efforts within a practice that also spans theatre, journalism, fiction, poetry, and screenwriting. Even more remarkably, it delves from the predictable path. It is a work built of the musicality of the spoken and written word - a book of poems - where music is the subject as much as the form.

Thulani Davis (b. 1949) is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar whose work includes works of poetry, theater, journalism, history, radio, and film. Her documentary about the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Fanfare for the Warriors, received the National Association of Black Journalists'' First Place in Radio award. She has collaborated with her cousin, composer Anthony Davis, writing the libretti for the operas X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X and Amistad. In 1993, her writing for Aretha Franklin's Queen of Soul - The Atlantic Recordings made her the first woman to win a Grammy for liner notes. Her bibliography includes My Confederate Kinfolk, novels 1959 and Maker of Saints, and several works of poetry. She is also an ordained Buddhist priest in the Jodo Shinshu sect, founded the Brooklyn Buddhist Association with her husband Joseph Jarman.

Born in Virginia, Davis first emerged in San Francisco during the early 70s, already 'schooled', while a student at Barnard College, in spoken word performance by Gylan Kain and Felipe Luciano of the original Last Poets. While working as a reporter for the San Francisco Sun-Reporter, notably covering the Soledad Brothers trial and subsequent persecution of Angela Davis, she became a respected poet and performer, collaborating with musicians and other writers in the city - notably the Filipino artist, Jessica Hagedorn, and Black feminist writer, Ntozake Shange, with whom she formed the trio, The Satin Sisters, a group that performed the poetry of each, danced, sang, and co-authored theatre - and joined the Third World Artists Collective, a ground-breaking initiative that supported the creative community of color, notably publishing the anthology of writings by women of color, Third World Women, which included Davis' early poems.

During late 70s, Davis moved to New York, joining the staff of the Village Voice, for which, in addition to the Nation and the New York Times Book Review, she wrote for 13 years - covering a broad range of topics, including race relations and the arts - eventually becoming the paper's senior editor, all the while continuing to work in performance, and craft poetic and theatrical works. In addition to all of this, among the most fascinating of her endeavors included regular collaborations with jazz musicians, including Cecil Taylor, Joseph Jarman, Juju, Arthur Blythe, Miya Masaoka, David Murray, Henry Threadgill, Tania Le?n, and others. It is this intimate relationship with music and its creators that underscores the works comprised by Nothing But the Music.

Nothing But the Music is, in the simplest sense, a book of poems by a profoundly talented artist. But, perhaps more importantly, it is a body of writing that, while entirely sculpted by a singular mind, is a consequence of collectivism, collaboration, community, and culture. Many of the poems collected across the volume have, over the course of their lives, been performed within a musical context by different improvising configurations that have include, among others, Pheeroan Aklaff, Dwight Andrews, Kelvyn Bell, Arthur Blythe, Ronnie Burrage, Marilyn Crispell, Anthony Davis, Marty Ehrlich, Henry Grimes, Fred Hopkins, Joseph Jarman, Oliver Lake, Myra Melford, David Murray, James Newton, Jeffrey Schanzer, Bernadette Speach, Cecil Taylor, and Phillip Wilson. As such, in addition to being free-standing poems, they offer crucial insight into the broader African American creative context, first emerging during the 1960s and 70s under the banner of the Black Arts Movement, from which Davis sprang and continues to exist within, forging strong collaborative bonds across different disciplines within the arts, in this case the spoken word / poetry and music, but also dance, theatre, and visual forms.

Across the breadth of 22 poems, written between 1974 and 1992, we encounter luminaries and spaces from across numerous genres of music and dance, including Cecil Taylor, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Bad Brains, Henry Threadgill, Thelonious Monk, The Revolutionary Ensemble, The Commodores, MFSB, Dianne McIntyre, Ishmael Houston-Jones, and many more in performances at historic venues such as The Five Spot, The Village Vanguard, The Apollo, Storyville, and Club Harlem, amounting to a collection of synesthetic, transportive documentary poems, imbued with a sonic-social history, the likes of which have been rarely encountered. Anecdotal and impressionistic, leaps off the page, taking free flight in a series of odes recorded music, its sacred spaces, and the the encounters and experiences within; the raw feelings, smoke, dawn drunks, and impulsive energy of her moment, all imbued with a sense of social, political, creative, and cultural urgency.

A truly stunning body of work, Nothing But the Music offers the most anthologized pieces of Davis' work, having appeared in numerous collections of writing on black music, collectively assembled for the first time. The volume offers further proof of Davis' place as a crucial figure, alongside poets Jayne Cortez, Sonia Sanchez, and Ntozake Shange, in the cultural landscape surrounding the Black Arts Movement. Beautiful, immersive, and rich with history and bubbling life, assembled with conceptual rigor and vision, it's an absolutely wonderful way of experiencing music on singular and visionary terms, through the lens and voice of a true treasure of American cultural life, accented by fantastic introductory texts by Jessica Hagedorn and Tobi Haslett.

Issued in a paperback, perfect bound edition of 2,000, it''s absolutely essential on every count. Blank Forms has done it again!

Encountering two veteran artists at the peak of their game, pushing the possibilities and perceptions of experimental music into endlessly exciting new zones, Fern''s latest, ''Strat?gies Obliques ?'', a split LP from Steve Roden and Small Cruel Party - released in 200 copies only - takes us to the outer reaches of perception and experimental sound.

Steve Roden / Small Cruel Party

"Strat?gies Obliques ?" (LP)

Over the last few years, we've been graced by a steady trickle of material from Steve Roden and Small Cruel Party, each drawing to power and creative rigor of both artists into the forefront of our minds and hearts. Now, the French imprint, Ferns, delivers an incredible split LP, Strat?gies Obliques ?, encountering these two veteran experimentalists weaving startling tapestries of sonic abstraction, created by deploying Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's "Oblique Strategies" deck.

Creatively challenging and a joyous, stunning adventure in listening from start to finish, once again Steve Roden and William Ransone take us to the outer reaches of perception and experimental sound.

Both located on America's west coast, Steve Roden and Small Cruel Party - the working moniker of William Ransone - emerged within the shadowy realms of the 1980s experimental scene. Roden is a pioneer of Lowercase music, a movement which uses amplification as a means to address the quiet and unheard sounds of objects and environments, whose practice - in addition to music - spans the fields of painting, drawing, sculpture, film/video, sound installation, and performance.

Ransone, on the other hand, graced a number of Seattle's more interesting experimental ventures - Blowhole (with Jeph Jerman, etc), Yeast Culture, and Gamelan Pacifica - before venturing into the rich experimental territory - largely defining his solo practice since the late ''80s and early ''90s - of non-instrumental sound sources / physical objects manipulated in acoustic space, focused on provoking the mysterious through his emphasis on the raw materiality of sound and its environments.

Roden and Small Cruel Party's work has existed in close proximity since the ''90s, often being supported by the same record labels and concert bills, as well sharing space on two self-titled CDs documenting a small number of live sets by the artists, in connection with Toy Bizarre, that were issued by G.M.B.H., the precursor of Ferns, in 1999. More recently, both graced the Bid?daren compilation.

While not an explicit collaboration - offering one side the LP to each artist - Strat?gies Obliques ? encounters Roden and Small Cruel Party in closer dialog than has previously been heard on record, each working within the same set of perimeters of chance via Eno and Schmidt's legendary "Oblique Strategies" deck. With the titles of each respective work referencing the chosen card, the distinction between each comes into sharp focus, highlighting the breadth of possibitliy activated within a fairly narrow field of experimental practice and approach, as well as the originality of each voice.

The first side ofthe LP, comprising 5 works by Roden, is nothing short as astounding. Within each gesture, rich sonorities of tone and dissonance bristle against the next within astonishing structures and arrangements; objects appearing as unnamable totems in a series of discrete landscapes joined as single force, conversing with remarkable musicality across the spaces which they fall.

Small Cruel Party's 4 efforts, gracing the second side, while belonging to roughly the same sonic universe, venture further toward ambiguity and spacial ambience, with almost imperceptible shifts of texture and tonality taking on a monumental presence through the subtle delicacy of their interactions, each tense and challenging, while feeling entirely so at ease and natural that might have appeared without the intervention of a human hand.

Resting within a near indefinable creative space of its own, Strat?gies Obliques ? is an endlessly surprising body of sound, encountering two veteran artists at the peak of their game, pushing the possibilities and perceptions of experimental music into endlessly exciting new zones. Highly recommended on every count.

Out via Ferns in very limited edition of 200 copies on white vinyl. It's not going to sit around for long. Grab it while you can.

An absolute revelation, Soave brings us one of the most historically important, musically engrossing, and enjoyable archival releases to emerge in recent years: Arturo St?lteri''s ''From Ajanta to Lhasa'', a body of recordings produced in 1979 and issued here for the first time.

This is Italian minimalism at its best!

Over the last few years, the Milan based imprint, Soave, has taken great strides toward illuminating Italy's historically singular movement of musical minimalism. Working at an incredibly high bar, with a catalog of works made up by artists like Riccardo Sinigaglia, Roberto Musci, Giovanni Venosta, Pier Luigi Andreoni & Francesco Paladino, Roberto Mazza, Giusto Pio, Egisto Macchi, Sandro Mussida, and numerous others, they have cast crucial light on an astounding body of unheard or under-appreciated sonic artifacts, stretching from the 1970s into the present day.

The label returns with what is easily one of their most beautiful and important records to date; a series of recordings gathered under the title From Ajanta to Lhasa, made in 1979 by the composer and pianist, Arturo St?lteri. Remained unreleased until now, the album is nothing short of a truly stunning revelation from start to finish.

Arturo St?lteri

"From Ajanta to Lhasa" (LP / Red LP)

Musical minimalism, a movement which first emerged in the United States during the 1960s via the innovations of composers like Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich - sprouting unique iterations in nearly every corner of the globe - has almost always been understood as idiom located within the confines of Western Classical music.

Among the rare exceptions, was the context of this music that developed in Italy. While many of its artists - Arturo St?lteri being one such case - were classically trained, most began their musical endeavors within the realms of popular music, moving increasingly toward more experimental pursuits. In addition to its artists' draw to vast range of references and cultural tradition, this, in part, accounts for the movement's incredibly unique and diverse make up of sounds, often straying far from what we regard minimal music to be.

Arturo St?lteri's career began as a founding member of seminal prog duo Pierrot Lunaire, while still in his teens, before graduating as conservatory trained pianist in 1979, the same year that he launched his solo pursuits with the LP Andr? Sulla Luna, an album that hybridized elements of progressive rock, minimalism, and explicit avant-gardism into entirely unexpected forms.

The album's follow up, ...E il Pavone Parl? alla Luna, issued in 1987 and reissued by Soave in 2017, has been long regarded as the composer's most significant contribution to the canon of Italian minimal music, a consideration that may change following encounters with From Ajanta to Lhasa', a body of recordings made the same year as his debut, and 8 years before its more famous follow up.

Seeing the light for the first time in 40 years, From Ajanta to Lhasa is a work of rare intensity, internalising a diverse number of cultural and mystical references, as well creative strategies. Recorded on wide range instruments - Farfisa Organ, Arp Synthesizer, Piano, Guitars, Balalaika, Bouzouki, Percussion, Sitar, Flute, Vocals, Tape, etc - upon his return from a two month trip to India, the album internalized St?lteri's numerous experiences in a musical quest "for an inner dimension free from the conditioning of Western civilization."

Containing some of St?lteri's most explicitly experimental gestures, From Ajanta to Lhasa ranges from lush ambient passages, experimental dissonances, meandering melodies and long tones, and sweeping stretches of hypnotic arpeggiation and cycling repetition that collectively culminate as what might just be among the most thrilling efforts of musical minimalism of the era, not to mention one that has never before been heard.

It would be impossible to sing the praises of St?lteri's From Ajanta to Lhasa enough. Unquestionably among the most historically important, musically engrossing, and enjoyable archival releases to emerge in recent years. Whatever you know of its composer, get ready to have your mind blown.

Issued in a tiny edition of 200 copies on black vinyl and 100 copies on orange vinyl by Soave, this one isn't going to sit around for long. Don't Sleep!

The album is also available on black vinyl.

A body of truly visionary sound that helps reimagine the French underground during the 1970s, ?tats-Unis delves into the early catalog of Pascal Comelade, offering the first time reissues of his debut, issued under the moniker Fluence in 1975, and his seminal LP, ''Sentimientos'' from 1982. Seamlessly bridging the realms of Prog, Kosmische, experimental electronic music, and minimalism in a way that few ever have, these two are singular journeys with almost no equivalent anywhere in the history of late 20th century music that can't be missed.

The two albums are also available together at discounted price as a special bundle.

Among the most fascinating avenues of exploration within the history of music, are artists and objects that sidestep standard notions of genre, category, and idiom, forging their own singular path. More often than not, few are willing to approach and attempt to understand these outliers in their own moment, and on their own terms, relegating them to obscurity and the shadows of time. This is the wonderful realm that Superior Viaduct's sub-imprint, ?tats-Unis, has chosen to dive and explore, bringing us incredible, limited edition reissues of LPs by Tod Dockstader, Die T?dliche Doris, Le Forte Four, Joe Jones, Remko Scha, John Duncan, Annea Lockwood, Terry Fox, and others, since its launch in 2017, and in so doing taking great strides to rebalancing our vision of adventurous music during the second half of 20th century.

Now their gaze falls on visionary work of Pascal Comelade, with two beautiful reissues from his early catalog; his first solo venture, originally released in 1975 under the moniker, Fluence, and his incredibly rare 1982 album, Sentimientos. As important and thrilling as reissues come, it's impossible to express how excited we are to have these two in our hands.

Fluence

"Fluence" (LP)

Pascal Comelade emerged within the French musical underground during the mid 1970s, first working under the under the moniker Fluence, producing only one stunning, self-titled LP, before reverting to his own name.

Easily one of the most noteworthy creative outsiders and visionary minds, he has quietly occupied the outreaches of sonic exploration for almost 5 decades, issuing countless challenges and changing the face of music as he went, first effortlessly bridging the realms of Prog and ambitious electronic music, before, during the early ''80s, veering toward the DIY spirit of Punk, creating a subtle, intricate, and abrasive body of work which would lay groundwork for the coming movement of industrial music, and bedroom electronics, all of which eventually led to remarkable collaborations with everyone from Robert Wyatt and Faust, to David Cunningham, Jac Berrocal, Pierre Bastien and P.J. Harvey.

Fluence, originally issued on P?le Records - the legendary imprint run by seminal outfit P?le - comprises three works that stand apart from each other; fixed points in a vast world that falls somewhere between the realms of Prog, Kosmische, explicitly avant-garde / experimental electronic music, and the irreverent.

The first, A Few Reasons To Stay / A Few Reasons To Split - a title inspired by Swiss conceptual artist Urs L?thi - offers a fascinating rethinking of what minimalism might be conceived as, featuring kaleidoscopic arpeggios created by Comelade, and the sounds of frequent collaborator Richard Pinhas' howling guitar, often resembling a cello and a vocal moan, over its true source.

Remarkably, even before concluding the first side, Comelade veers away and shifts the ground with the playful, Barcelona Tango's, flirting with off-kilter exotica of pocket trumpet and looping drum beats that foreshadows his later work, and created a stir in avant-garde circles upon its release for the use of unorthodox instruments (plastic saxophone, toy piano, etc.).

Unquestionably the most striking and ambitious venture on the album is Schizo, gracing the entire second side. A vast, dreamy soundscape that recalls the best of Kosmische in the vein of Popol Vuh, but pushes further on with Comelade''s electric organ rendering shimmering arpeggios and ambiences that collide with Gabriel Ibanez''s thick, reedy buzz on guitar, creating something that stands entirely apart from the pack.

A body of truly visionary sound that helps reimagine what was transpiring within the French underground during the 1970s. Built from a remarkable emotional, conceptual and textural range of materiality - remarkably experimental and progressive - that sounds both timeless and contemporary.

Any first encounter with Fluence leaves little wonder why collectors and fans have been hotly chasing this one for years. ?tats-Unis' long awaited reissue, the first to appear since its original 1975 release, is limited to 750 numbered copies, and absolutely not to be missed. An absolute gem!

Pascal Comelade

"Sentimientos" (LP)

Sentimientos, originally issued in 1982, is one of the great artifacts from the early phase of Pascal Comelade's incredible career. Released on LP by the tiny, but seminal imprint, Dys, run by William Sharp, it has remained, until now, one of the most elusive and sought after LPs in the French composer''s vast catalogue, fiercly hunted by fans and collectors across the numerous genres it bribes.

Recorded on a two-track Revox machine, Sentimientos is an interwoven series of poetic and imaginative, incidental works - only two of the twenty tracks pass the four minute mark - spanning a striking range of creative territory.

Earthbound and organic, melodic fragments of piano, organ, plastic saxophone, vibes, guitar, toy piano, ukulele and synthesizer stitch a patchwork vision of Comelade''s boundless creative spirit that traverses bedroomy pop, rethinking Eric Satie and Brian Eno - bringing out remarkable depths of the compositions, and meandering instrumental passages that border on ambient and new age, imbued with darker tones of the industrial world.

An aural bridge, offering rare connections between underground music and unconventional notions of the avant-garde, Pascal Comelade's Sentimientos is a singular journey with almost no equivalent anywhere in the history of late 20th century music. Incredibly seductive and listenable, while never failing to levy quiet challenges at every turn, it's an album of anarchic energy that radiates mystery, while being unapologetically whimsical.

An absolutely essential, first time reissue, limited to 750 numbered copies by the always incredible ?tats-Unis, this one is not to be missed on any count!

The two albums are also available together at discounted price as a special bundle.

The third in Blank Forms' ongoing series of previously unreleased music by the Swedish composer, musician, poet, philosopher, mathematician and visual artist, Catherine Christer Hennix, ''Unbegrenzt'' - a singular rendering of Karlheinz Stockhausen's composition, recorded in 1974 with Hans Isgren - delves into territories that reveal this seminal artist in ways that she's rarely been heard.

Despite the incredible challenges we've all faced, the New York based curatorial platform, publisher, and record label, Blank Forms, is having a pretty remarkable year. With plenty more in the works, they've already dropped killer releases by Still House Plants, Exotic Sin, Masayuki Takayanagi New Direction Unit, and Judith Hamann. Now they're raising the bar on 2020 once again, with one of the imprint's most exciting releases to date.

Unbegrenzt is the third in their ongoing series of archival records of previously unreleased music by the Swedish composer, musician, poet, philosopher, mathematician and visual artist, Catherine Christer Hennix, building on the ground already covered by Selected Early Keyboard Works and Selections from 100 Models of Hegikan Roku. An absolutely astounding body of delicately organized sound, it delves into territories that reveal this seminal artist in ways that she's rarely been heard.

Catherine Christer Hennix

"Unbegrenzt" (LP)

Catherine Christer Hennix is a legend within the field of experimental music, first emerging in global consciousness during the late 1960s and early ''70s. She began her creative career playing drums, before going to work at Stockholm's pioneering Elektronmusikstudion (EMS), where she helped develop early synthesizer and tape music. In 1968, she traveled to New York where she met Fluxus artists Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles, and developed fruitful collaborative relationships with numerous luminaries associated with the movement, notably Henry Flynt and La Monte Young, the later of whom would introduce her to his teacher Pandit Pran Nath.

Despite the fact that Hennix has worked steadily across the last half-century, remaining highly regarded over the breadth of that time, until the last ten years her recorded output has remained largely unreleased, making Blank Form's standing dedication to her work, and the issue of Unbegrenzt, that much more important, allowing us to fully grasp how significant her contribution has been.

Recorded in February of 1974, featuring Hennix (recitation, percussion, and electronics) and Hans Isgren (bowed gong), the LP comprises Hennix's mind-bending realization of Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Unbegrenzt" from Aus den Sieben Tagen. Both rigorous and radically different from the canonical recording of the work issued by Shandar and Deutsche Grammophon, not only does it reveal of different side of Hennix than has been previously heard, but also of Stockhausen as well.

Adding to its historical significance, is the fact that it is among the earliest recordings of Hennix's to so far appear, predating the recordings on Die Schachtel's 2010 release, The Electric Harpsichord, Important Record''s 2016 release, Central Palace Music, and Blank Form's Selected Early Keyboard Works and Selections from 100 Models of Hegikan Roku, by 2 years.

Unbegrenzt belongs to Aus den Sieben Tagen, a collection of 15 text pieces written by Stockhausen in Paris during the turbulent uprisings of May of 1968, and embraces that moments spirit of freedom by denying its performers notated direction in favor of poetic cues that hinge upon the composer's conception of "intuitive music," a Eurocentric perspective on improvisation that is notably antithetical to the vernacular forms Hennix had engaged with as a young drummer performing in Stockholm jazz clubs.

Taking a mature, minimal iteration of Stockhausen's compositional method of "moment-forming" to heart - seeing it as a productive development of and beyond La Monte Young's event scores - Hennix's rendering of Unbegrenzt is equally loaded with her own ideas, culminating as a sound that is far removed from the previously available recordings of the work.

Marked by dark, controlled feedback and amplified bowed gong that subtly shift through the score''s stages, threaded by moments of bubbling computer noise, percussion, additional sound sources, and text fragments from Hevajra Tantra, Hennix and Isgren deliver Stockhausen's score into remarkable and newly visited states of creative openness and psychological depth.

An absolutely stunning record of profound historical importance, Blank Form's releases of Catherine Christer Hennix''s Unbegrenzt is nothing short of revelation and true marvel in listening that bridges the territories of minimalism and the ''60s and ''70s European classical music avant-garde in ways that few artifacts can.

Issued on vinyl with liner notes by Bill Dietz, as well as a conversation between Dietz and Hennix about the record and her thoughts on Stockhausen, this one is sure to top all the year-end lists. As essential as they come and not to be missed.

''Mi Specchio e Rifletto'', a truly stunning and inspiring solo debut from the Italian Violinist, performer and improviser, Silvia Tarozzi, skirts any easy location; rising as a singular vision of balladic, experimentalism that has kept us coming back for more since falling into our hands. Yet another absolute must from the venerable Unseen Worlds.

Silvia Tarozzi

"Mi Specchio e Rifletto" (2LP / CD)

Since their launch in mid-2000s, the New York based imprint, Unseen Worlds, has continued to set an incredibly high bar through the earth-shaking quality of their releases. As dedicated to historical artists and works as they are to those emerging in the present, they've always taken their time, slipping things into the world with remarkable care, that leave humble tectonic shifts in their wake.

After an absolutely incredible couple of years with brilliant albums from Laurie Spiegel, Sam Ashley, Werner Durand, "Blue" Gene Tyranny, Leo Svirsky, Carl Stone, Robert Haigh, Philip Corner, and others, their latest, Mi Specchio e Rifletto, a stunning body of solo work from the Italian Violinist, performer and improviser, Silvia Tarozzi, keeps the fire burning. Truly inspiring, it's an album that skirts any easy location, has kept us coming back for more since falling into our hands, and is an absolute must.

A talented free improvisor and shining light of Italy's incredible avant-garde and experimental music scene, Silvia Tarozzi is one of those rare and wonderful artists who spent the majority of her career channeling her sensitivity and remarkable talents behind the rendering of the work of others, notably, as longtime collaborator, Eliane Radigue, as well as Pauline Oliveros, Pascale Criton, Cassandra Miller, Martin Arnold, Philip Corner, J?rg Frey, Michael Pisaro, Catherine Lamb, S?bastien Roux, and many others.

Remarkably, for all her years in the game, Mi Specchio e Rifletto is Tarozzi's first full length to entirely comprise of her own compositions, and what a debut it is! Astoundingly ambitious and visionary - pushing well beyond comfort zones and easy categorisation - it's hard to imagine she won't stay locked in every listener''s mind after the first turn.

With sonic touchstones in ambitious efforts like Scott Walker's first 4 LPs, Franco Battiato's Fetus, Maria Monti's Il Bestiario, and Caterina Caselli's Primavera, coupled with a deep sense of intimacy that bears relation to the ideas of Pauline Oliveros and Eliane Radigue, Mi Specchio e Rifletto is a towering piece of work.

Initially inspired by the poet Alda Merini and Tarozzi's studies with composer Garret List, over the course of nearly a decade, Tarozzi practiced setting the poetry of Merini to music, before replacing it with her own to reflect her own life experiences; her words touching on the subjects of love, motherhood, and the mystery hidden behind the curtain of everyday life. The result is an interplay and balance of vocals, instrumentation - acoustic and electronic - and ideas the likes of which have rarely been heard.

Sprawling in scope, Mi Specchio e Rifletto might be most easily regarded as an effort of experimental, balladic pop that eludes to infinitely more. Deeply emotive vocals dance with a vast spectrum of sounds, from minimal, ambient, and discrete, to symphonic in density and scope, rising a gripping journey of sonorous experience - an inner world with the windows thrown wide open - that transcends the limits of the spoken word, mirroring a deeply feminine, mystical, and sometimes psychedelic vision of the world.

A profoundly inspiring and truly singular piece of work that sets new bars for what we might imagine is possible in the contemporary landscape of sound, Mi Specchio e Rifletto continues to unfold in creative scope and intimacy with every listen, and has left our jaws on floor at every turn.

An absolutely stunning debut by Tarozzi, and yet another high-water mark to emerge from the hands of Unseen Worlds. This one is making waves and not be missed.

The album is also available on CD.

The first ever survey of the seminal British experimental music collective, Gentle Fire, ''Explorations (1970 - 1973)'' offers a remarkable and previously unavailable glimpse of their activities during the early ''70s, spanning their crucial interpretations of scores by Stockhausen, Brown, Cage, Ichiyanagi, and Wolff, as well as an incredible deep dive into their own works and "Group Compositions". Unparalleled and historically important work, stretching across the length of 3 CDs, from Paradigm Discs, meticulously culled from Hugh Davies'' archive, it''s among the most important missing links within the history of British experimental music to have emerged in living memory, and not to be missed.

Of all the contexts of avant-garde and experimental music that emerged during the 1960s and 70s, few were more radical and actively forward thinking than Great Britain's. Often principled, ideological, and politically minded in their relationship to improvisation and musical interaction and freedom, a vast number of its members, spanning numerous discrete practices, came together to work collectively in projects like AMM, The Scratch Orchestra, Company, Spontaneous Music Ensemble, London Jazz Composers Orchestra, The Music Improvisation Company, and a near countless number of jointly billed projects. Of these, among the most exciting and least discussed was Gentle Fire, a group comprised of Graham Hearn, Hugh Davies, Michael Robinson, Richard Bernas, Stuart Jones, and Richard Orton, that ran from 1968 to 1975.

Having only produced one LP, 4 Systems, Music For Amplified Toy Piano, Music For Carillon, Edges, for EMI Electrola in 1974, the oversight can be understood. Thankfully, Paradigm Discs now endeavours to change the tide, bringing this seminal outfit long overdue attention with an absolutely astound 3 CD survey, Explorations (1970 - 1973), almost entirely comprised of never before issued recordings produced during the early ''70s. Creatively thrilling and as historically important as they come, it's almost impossible to believe this one hasn't been with us all along.

Gentle Fire

"Explorations (1970 - 1973)" (3CD Box)

Formed in 1968 by Graham Hearn, Hugh Davies, Michael Robinson, Richard Bernas, Richard Orton, and Stuart Jones, Gentle Fire have largely been regarded over the years for their renderings of the works of Christian Wolff, John Cage, Earle Brown and Karlheinz Stockhausen, largely because this is all that has been publicly available to date.

While realizing the works of others was a central component to ensemble's practice and the attention there is justified, a substantial amount of their endeavours centred around the works of its members and the collective, now delivered to our ears for the first time by Explorations (1970 - 1973), culled meticulously from material held in Hugh Davies' archives since first laid to tape. As a totality, they represent what is arguably the greatest missing link in the history of the evolution of British experimental music to have emerged in living memory.

Explorations (1970 - 1973) is divided into 3 sections, one per CD. The first, recorded between 1970 and 1971, logically begins within the realm that the ensemble is most well know. Containing 4 studio and 2 concert recordings of graphic and text scores, it presents astounding renderings of 2 parts of Stockhausen's Aus den sieben Tagen, and one piece each by Earle Brown, John Cage, Toshi Ichiyanagi and Christian Wolff. All, as thrilling as the next, illuminate the groups lasting disposition for text and graphic scores that have large elements of interpretive freedom to them, and thus where the composer provides a skeleton and steps back allowing the players to take the reins.

Perhaps most importantly, Gentle Fire holds distinction for having been one of the few ensembles of their moment to have been in regular communication with the composers of each piece, making these recordings of their interpretations especially precious, and arguably among the closest to their initial conception of those available.

The 2nd and 3rd CDs of Explorations (1970 - 1973) take us deep into previously unavailable realms, focussing on Gentle Fire's own absolutely singular and astounding works.

CD2 dates from 1973 and was recorded during a 2 day residency at Radio Bremen. Containing 5 pieces that cover a wide variety of styles, especially notable of which is a 23 minute version of Group Composition VI which is their only text based piece and uses processed and filtered speech, as well as 4 key works that utilized graphics, and symbols, tape-loops and other physical apparatus devised to shape the unfolding of the musical material, and defined the ensembles astounding approach and sound.

CD3 is comprised of a recording of their appearance at ICES 72, a legendary festival that took place at the Roundhouse in London, miraculously capturing its entirety. It consists of a performance of their Group Composition IV, centred around a large metal sculpture that all members of the group played simultaneously, each moment sounding fresh and undated, as though it had been recorded in the present day.

An absolutely overwhelming accomplishment on the part of Paradigm Discs, Gentle Fire's Explorations (1970 - 1973) is a incomparable revaluation, offering the first ever available glimpse of the breadth of this seminal ensemble's activities, spanning their own work and their interpretations of scores by some of the 20th century's most important composers, and with it offering the opportunity of deliver them into their proper place in the history of live experimental / electronic music as well as indeterminate and intuitive composition.

Truly remarkable on historical and creative terms, and a thrilling listen from start to finish, we couldn't possible recommend it enough.

An absolute must, issued in a limited edition with a 48 page booklet, that's going to fly out the door. Don't sleep!

Arguably rawest and most emotive releases issued during the rawest and most emotional year in memory, Blank Forms has done it again with the latest in their dedicated effort to Masayuki Takayanagi and his New Direction Unit; reissuing the seminal 1975 LPs, Axis/Another Revolvable Thing 1 & 2. An astounding force set freee upon the world, heaving with life and fire, we couldn''t possibly reccomend it enough.

Masayuki Takayanagi

"Axis/Another Revolvable Thing" (2LP Bundle/ 2CD)

For the last few years, the New York based curatorial platform, Blank Forms, has been towering pilar in the cultural landscape. With a decidedly international gaze, they've waded into publishing, ambitious presentations of live music music and performance, and realized an incredible, evolving series albums. In the current climate of the global epidemic and political upheaval, Blank Forms has continued to adapt and preform vital functions, bringing ideas and sounds of hope into our lives despite our not be able to gather and commune as we once did. These gestures continue with their last release Masayuki Takayanagi New Direction Unit''s Axis/Another Revolvable Thing 1 &2, comprised of recordings of a September 5, 1975 concert in Tokyo, issued as two freestanding LPs, or joined in double CD edition. The second instalment of the imprint's archival reissues of the music of Japan's eternal revolutionary Masayuki Takayanagi, following last years reissue of April is the Cruelest Month, it's an astounding force set free upon the world, heaving with life and fire, bound to stop even the most seasoned listener dead in their tracks.

Between his emergence on the scene during the early 1950s, until his passing in 1991, Masayuki Takayanagi remained one of the great visionaries of Japanese guitar - cutting his teeth with Lennie Tristano, before turning his back on traditional forms jazz during the late 60's - departing into a territory which ran roughly parallel with the innovations of Sonny Sharrock, Keith Rowe, and Derek Bailey.? One of the first players on the international scene to deploy tabletop guitar for pure noise improvisation, it was Takayanagi, arguably more than any other, that laid the groundwork for the distinct sound and approach which would be built upon by players like Keiji Haino and Otomo Yoshihide, imagining a blueprint from freemusic as it only happened in Japan.

Recorded on the 5th of September, 1975, at Yasuda Seimei Hall in Tokyo's Shinjuku district, Masayuki Takayanagi New Direction Unit''s Axis/Another Revolvable Thing 1 &2 encounters Takayanagi backed by the same, isnanely good ensemble from April is the Cruellest Month, Kengi Mori on reeds, Nobuyoshi Ino on bass and cello, and Hiroshi Yamazaki on percussion. The two volumes showcase Takayanagi in deep pursuit of what he began calling "non-section music",? deftly exploring the twin poles of Takayanagi's spacious "gradually projection" and explosively virulent "mass projection" concepts - full form freak-outs - across six pieces, titled Fragments I - VI that sprawl across the the two LPs / CDs.?

It's hard to offer a better description than that offered by Japanese free jazz critic Teruto Soejima in his newly translated liner notes; "New Direction Unit performances always emit the smell of blood. Fresh blood, never blood that is old or crusted. This is not the desiccated shell of music, it's sound through which pumps the blood of living human beings.. For these four musicians, playing together means feasting on each other's blood. It is also a summon- ing to a secret blood oath, to the creation of solidarity with the audience. In the moment, truly, the situation and beauty are instanta- neously unified. To borrow the title of a movie by Koji Wakamatsu: blood is redder than the sun."

Absolutely incredible and stunning on every count. A four man revolution that offers a way forward, 45 years, in these difficult times. Issued as two free standing LPs, or in a double CD edition, Blank Forms has done it again, bringing the seminal importance of Masayuki Takayanagi rocketing into our minds.

Arguably rawest and most emotive releases issued during the most awest and most emotional year in memory, these one can't be missed!

Important: As you may know, we are based in Milan, one of the Italian cities more affected by the Coronavirus pandemic.

The situation is definitely improving, but we still need to stay strong and follow all the restrictions and recommendations from the authorities.

We're open and shipping, albeit very slowly as most of our staff is still working from home. Please be patient, we're doing the best we can.

Thanks for your support, we truly hope that you and your loved ones all stay safe and well.

The venerable Alga Marghen, long recognized for their important work at the intersections of sound, text, and the contexts of visual art, takes a deep, ambitious dive into the work of William Burroughs with ''Soft Need 23'''', a remarkable publication that takes incredible strides to return the poet''s incredible history and lasting legacy into the contemporary consciousness.

Produced by Expanded Media Editions and dedicated to Ian Sommerville, the collection includes exclusive material by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, as well as contributions by diverse range of seminal figures from across numerous creative fields, such as Allen Ginsberg, Louise Landes Levi, Gregory Corso, John Armleder, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Sonic Boom, Robert Wilson and many others.

Available in two very special editions - a 260-page art book issued in an edition of 431 copies, and a deluxe edition limited to 69 copies ehich includes two 7" records and two Baryt Fine Art photo prints - Soft Need 23 is a truly stunning effort of astounding contemporary and historical importance.

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"Soft Need 23" (Art Book)
"Soft Need 23 - Deluxe Edition" (Art Book + 2 x 7" records + 2 x signed prints in stamped box)

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For more than 100 years, small press and DIY publishing has been a lifeline for the countercultural pursuits within the arts, distributing radical ideas, images, words, and sounds that few others would support or approach. Through their artifacts, tracing from the early presses associated with cubism, dada, futurism, constructivism, and surrealism, there is an observable thread that extends through punk record labels and zines, into 21st century efforts in experimental sound, image, and text, that binds each of these movements within a continuum of progressive action and reaction.

Among the most important and influential of these, are the independent publications that emerged during the 1950s around the Beat Generation. Arguably more than any other, these presses can be understood to have laid the crucial groundwork that has endured within the contexts of independent publishing and music ever since.

Soft Need, founded in 1973 by Udo Breger, occupies the liminal zone between artists edition / multiple and periodical / magazine. Pushing the boundaries of senses and possibility possessed by each, its inception was a reaction to the immediate aftermath of a three weeks' stay that the publisher had with William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Expanding the purview of Beat associated presses from previous two decades, Soft Need, which ran at a regular pace until later part of the ''70s, helped sparking new initiatives that began to emerge during that decade.

Rather than simply publishing new, cutting edge works, it also incorporated a dedicated investment to building the context and to create a more expansive vision than the perspective presented by associated countercultural production across the arts. A modus operandi that is incredibly clear throughout the breadth of the relaunched presses' latest and last edition.

The primary body of Soft Need 23 is a 260-page art book that captures an expansive understanding of the historical and contemporary relevance of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin within the frame of the Beat Generation. In addition to drawing much needed attention to the important English electronics technician and computer programmer, Ian Sommerville - responsible for seminally influential calibrations with Brion Gysin, including the development of the Dreammachine and programming the random-sequence generator used by the writer in his cut-up technique - it features the work of 80 contributors, including 190 illustrations, literary essays, photographs, poetry, visual art, caricature, memories, and a vast array of ephemera by William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Allen Ginsberg, Louise Landes Levi, Gregory Corso, Jean-Jacques Lebel, John Armleder, Paul-Armand Gette, Peter Weibel, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Sonic Boom, Papiro, Robert Wilson and many, many others, cumulating as a dazzling, multimedia journey that offers a rare and creatively engrossing vision of the Beats as a free-standing culture unto themselves, as well as a more detailed understanding of their influences upon the generations that have followed in their wake.

In addition to the primary book / magazine edition, limited to 431 copies, Soft Need is also issued in a deluxe edition of 69 copies that includes two 7" records and two Baryt Fine Art photo prints (18x24cm) - William Burroughs in the Bunker, NYC 1981 and Ian Sommerville at 8, Duke Street, London 1973 - signed by Udo Breger.

The first 7" contains William Burroughs' previously unreleased A Top Level Conference is in Progress, as well as Brion Gysin's Junk, while the second contains Papiro's Dream Journal (for Udo); and Sonic Boom's Just a Little Piece of Me.

For the primarily musically minded, the Sonic Boom / Papiro split 7" is also available as a free-standing release.

A truly stunning and long overdue body of work, Soft Need 23 is a multi-media journey into William Burroughs and Brion Gysin worlds, an absolute must for all fans of underground / countercultural publishing, radically expanding historical understanding of the historical connectedness of each.

So step right in, and beyond! Grab it while you can. Stocks are incredibly limited and won't sit around for long.

With all pre-orders finally shipped, we were lucky enough to get from the label, Dialogo, the very last bunch of copies of their incredible vinyl box set, ''Dimensioni sonore'', by Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai. The first ever reissue of one of the towering holy grails of Italian Library music, issued in a super deluxe fabric-woven box-set with 10 LPs + 10 CDs, reproducing the original liner notes, it has quickly become one of the most celebrated releases of the year and is already selling for twice the original price on Discogs... This is a final call, once these last copies are gone, they''re gone for good.

Ennio Morricone, Bruno Nicolai

"Dimensioni Sonore
Musiche per l''Immagine e l''Immaginazione"

Limited Collector Edition: 10LP, 10CD, Book, Poster, Tote-Bag, Deluxe Linen Box

2020 has been a wild and challenging year. Every step of the way, it's served as a potent reminder of the humanity and inspiration that music brings into our lives. We've been so thankful for all the incredible records that have crossed our paths, lifting our spirits and helping us along the way. Among the most exciting of these, is the astoundingly ambitious 10 LP box set, Dimensioni Sonore, by Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai, originally issued in 1972 and reissued in a limited edition by Dialogo. Announced back in August, and initially burdened with uncontrollable pressing delays, copies are finally reaching listeners'' hands. Thankfully, we were lucky enough to obtain a few more: these are the very last copies of this towering holy grail of Italian library music, and an absolute must for those who were unable to grab one until now.

Almost entirely distinct in scale and content, Dimensioni Sonore, originally issued by RCA in 1972, towers in the history of library music, gathering 103 works by two of the most important figures in 20th century Italian music, Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai, offering 5 LPs of material to each.

Regular collaborators over the course of their respective careers, Morricone and Nicolai met as students during the early 1950s at the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia in Rome, fostering a friendship that would yield, from the mid 1960s on, hundreds of albums that bear both of their names.

Each of these is incredible and worthy of note, but none is as astounding, distinct, or ambitious as Dimensioni Sonore - issued as a series of 10 individual LPs, and as a deluxe box set comprising them all - regarded by many as the crown jewel in RCA's legendary library music series, Catalogo di Musiche per Sonorizzazioni.

Deploying a startling range of acoustic and electronic instrumentation and techniques, and conceived in sequential order, across the 10 LPs Morricone and Nicolai - working far more like avant-garde composers than the creators of film scores - set out to create a body of expressive and dynamic work which explored constant timbric exploitations and multiform musical parameters, and their possibilities for utilization, titling each composition with no direct relation to its form, intentionally leaving the meaning entirely to the listener's mind.

Sheets of pointillistic ambience bristle with details of synthetic and organic tones and textures, generating a fields of abstraction that could be mistaken for any number of avant-garde and experimental gestures of the ''60s and ''70s, were it not for the unifying, cracking rhythm section that drives it forward and pushes into entirely unexpected realms, which gave Sergio Leone, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Elio Petri, Gillo Pontecorvo, and Giuliano Montaldo plenty to explore in their original liner notes for the release.

A true genre defying marvel, Dialogo's first ever vinyl reissue of Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai's masterstroke, Dimensioni Sonore, comes in a super deluxe fabric-woven box-set with 10 LPs + 10 CDs, reproducing the original liner notes by the incredible cast mentioned above. This is the last chance to grab a copy of one of the seminal documents of Italian library music and avant-garde exploration, by two of the most important composers the country has ever produced. Don't sleep, these are going to fly!

This special box-set deserved appropriate packing materials, and is actually shipped using a specially designed ''air-columns protection bag'' housed in a strong oversize corrugated carboard box for safe transportation and delivery.