Avant-Garde / Contemporary

Avian Hydraulics was originally released by the German label Frei zum Abriss Kollektiv as a limited edition of 50 copies, pressed on a liquid-filled lathe-cut 10-inch. A liquid-filled record is a curious object: colored liquid or oil is sealed between two layers of transparent resin, so that when the record is moved, the fluid drifts and blooms into ever-shifting patterns. The concept first surfaced in 1978, when a prototype was developed for a Disney film — but the sealing technology of the era could not keep the liquid from leaking or evaporating, and the idea was abandoned before it ever reached the market. Since 2015, however, development has advanced toward resins that resist leakage and evaporation, bringing the format to where it stands today — though even now it remains an imperfect thing. The imperfections lie chiefly in the sound. By its very structure, room must be reserved inside the disc to hold the liquid, which means the grooves cannot be cut deeply, driving the playback volume to an extreme faintness — for the liquid itself absorbs the vibration of the stylus. In the case of lathe cutting, the grooves are even shallower because the cutting is performed directly onto a rigid resin—such as polycarbonate—rather than vinyl. The result is a double diminishment: the sound vibrations transmit poorly, and both the sonic pressure and the volume fall away. As an art object, the liquid-filled record is a singular and beautiful thing. But to hear the music as it was truly meant to be heard — at full volume, at full pressure, down to the finest detail — the digital version is the honest answer. Since Frei zum Abriss Kollektiv holds to a policy of no digital distribution, we have chosen to release it here, on Bandcamp. This work began, first of all, with the idea of the liquid-filled record itself. From that single image, the artwork and the titles of the songs were gradually drawn out and refined. Masami Akita

Folded cover sealed with hand numbered sticker. Edition of 50 hand-numbered copies. Recorded & Mixed at Munemihouse March 2026.

Blue Abstraction compiles a selection of Jessica Williams’ lost prepared piano recordings. These recordings document the beginning of a vital, solitary phase in her career: a period of intense sonic experimentation that began with physically altering a 6’4” grand piano—creating a new instrument, and from there, creating a new music. The results are breathtaking; from melancholic soundscapes with Satie-esque lyricism to forcefully controlled cacophony, always grounded by the distinct emotional voicing of her melodic lines. Jessica Williams (1948–2022) was a pioneering trans jazz pianist and composer from Baltimore, where she studied at the Peabody Conservatory. Among countless other greats, she gigged with Philly Joe Jones, Dexter Gordon, Stan Getz, Tony Williams, Charlie Rouse, Jackie McLean, Roy Haynes, Charlie Haden, and Bobby Hutcherson, and recorded with Eddie Henderson, Eddie Harris, Leroy Vinnegar, Victor Lewis, and Ray Drummond. She received accolades from piano greats McCoy Tyner and Dave Brubeck. Williams could play anything and knew the standards deeply—expanding from there through her composing and arranging. Her first LP, The Portal of Antrim (Adelphi, 1976), included six solo piano improvisations, four pieces as a trio, and “Plath’s Return,” where she played all the instruments. After finishing her second album—a double LP of solo piano improvisations titled Portraits (Adelphi, 1977)—she moved to San Francisco and became the house pianist at the city’s premiere jazz spot, Keystone Korner. Thelonious Monk was one of Williams’ biggest influences. Her fifth LP, Update (Clean Cuts, 1982), features a take on “Ruby My Dear” and her sixth LP, Nothin’ But the Truth (BlackHawk, 1986), includes “’Round Midnight,” “Ugly Beauty,” and her tribute, “Monk’s Hat.” In a 1997 interview with Terry Gross, she recalled first hearing It’s Monk’s Time (Columbia, 1964): “[It] sounded like he was wearing boxing gloves, because I had heard all this precision piano playing—like Oscar [Peterson]—and this was a totally new thing for me. I grew to love Monk’s music, and I still do, but I had some questions about how he would do certain things.” Monk’s famous maxim—“The piano ain’t got no wrong notes”—opened up something essential for her. In 1985, with a head full of Monk’s dissonant harmonies, Williams began her prepared piano project. She altered the piano by placing vibrating and/or muting elements on top of and between the strings at varying distances across the harp—some sounding like bells or gongs (screws, bolts), others like percussion instruments (clothespins, hairpins, washers, erasers). The effect radically expanded the instrument’s possibilities, sometimes making it sound metallic or ghostly, other times muted, tactile, almost broken. Though pioneered by John Cage—who embraced chance and a sparse, meditative atmosphere—Williams brought an entirely new sensibility to the prepared piano, forging a personal musical language grounded in improvisation, nuanced timbral control, and compositional precision. Even the most dissonant elements land precisely within the parameters of her tonal framework. The resulting beauty and listenability of these works are a testament to Williams’ vision and mastery. The recordings on Blue Abstraction came out of three years of experimentation. She recorded at her own Quanta Studios and at Moon Studios (both in Sacramento), and two live performances at Noe Valley Ministry in San Francisco, on January 11 and May 10, 1986, as part of the Noe Valley Music Series. For Williams, these recordings were a personal transformation through the musical process. She described them as “temporal arrangements of sound and timbre... my self encoded on a chrome oxide surface [audio tape].” The process of listening back, she said, was “further investigation into my becoming.” The prepared piano gave her a language beyond technique—a direct link between sound, sensation, and the shifting contours of identity. She never returned to the prepared piano but continued to adopt its techniques—for example, emulating a koto on “Toshiko” from Songs for a New Century (Origin, 2008), or depressing multiple keys and reaching into the piano, strumming the strings to create a chord, on her compositions “Soldaji” from Live at Yoshi’s Volume Two (MAXJAZZ, 2005) and “Love and Hate” from Unity (Red and Blue, 2006). Though known for her recordings and live performances—especially of Monk tunes—Williams made some of her most forward-thinking music privately. Describing her childhood connection to the piano, she said, “I hit the notes, and I saw colors.” This immediate, sensorial relationship to sound persisted throughout her career, whether she was playing bebop standards or muting strings with hairpins. The music on this record disappeared for almost four decades. Perhaps the few who encountered it back then couldn’t fully understand what she had made. I’m excited to see what happens this time around. –Kye Potter Los Angeles

The long-awaited CD version of the album includes two newly remastered bonus tracks that were only included on the cassette tape version! Japan’s KAKUHAN deliver a futureshock jolt on their incred debut album ‘Metal Zone’ - deploying drum machine syncopations around bowed cello and angular electronics that sound like the square root of Photek’s ‘Ni Ten Ichi Ryu’, Arthur Russell’s ‘World of Echo’, Beatrice Dillon’s ‘Workaround’ and Mica Levi’s ‘Under The Skin’ - or something like T++ and Errorsmith dissecting Laurie Anderson’s ‘Home Of The Brave’, her electric violin panned and bounced relentlessly around the stereo field. It really is that good - basically all the things we love, in multiples. While "Metal Zone" might be their debut, KAKUHAN are hardly newcomers. Koshiri Hino is a member of goat (jp), releasing a run of records under the YPY moniker, and heading up the NAKID label, while Yuki Nakagawa is a well known cellist and sound artist who has worked with Eli Keszler and Joe Talia among many others. Together, they make a sound that’s considerably more than the sum of its parts - as obsessively tweaked, cybernetic and jerky as Mark Fell, frothing with the same gritted, algorithmic intensity as Autechre's total-darkness sets, stripped to the bone and carved with ritualistic symbolism. The album’s most startling and unexpected moments come when KAKUHAN follow their 'nuum inclinations, snatching grimey bursts and staccato South London shakes and matching them with dissonant excoriations that shuttle the mind into a completely different place. It's not a collision we expected, but it's one that's completely melted us - welding obsessive rhythmic futurism onto bloodcurdling horror orchestration - the most appropriate soundtrack we can imagine for the contemporary era. By the album's final track, we're presented with South Asian microtonal blasts that suddenly make sense of the rest of the album; Nakagawa erupts into Arthur Russell-style clouded psychedelia, while wavering flutes guide bio-mechanical ritual musick formations. It’s the perfect closer for the album’s series of taut, viscous, and relentless gelling of meter and tone in sinuous tangles, weaving across East/West perceptions in spirals toward a distinctive conception of rhythmic euphoria with a sense of precision, dexterity and purpose that nods to classical court or chamber music as much as contemporary experimental digressions. Easily one of the most startling and deadly debuts we’ve heard in 2022; the louder we’ve played it, the more it’s realigned our perception of where experimental and club modes converge - meditative, jerky, flailing genius from the outerzone. Basically - an AOTY level Tip.

By the early '70s, Milford Graves had more or less stopped gigging. Having learned his lesson the hard way in multiple-night runs like a legendary Slugs' residency with Albert Ayler, he knew that the level of energy that he put out during a performance would be difficult to sustain over the long haul. A concert was a kind of absolute ritual for him, after which he would be totally spent, emotionally and physically. Graves rarely left anything on the table. Any musical performance was an opportunity to present an amalgamated version of all the things he had learned. He was an innovator and a teacher at his core, and the concert venue was one of his first classroom settings. In March 1976, Verna Gillis invited Graves to perform on WBAI's Free Music Store radio show. For the date, he chose to present a trio lineup which he had been occasionally playing – featuring two saxophonists who were dedicated to the drummer's vision. Hugh Glover is almost exclusively known for his work with Graves, while Arthur Doyle would gain exposure later for an obscure record that he made two years later, Alabama Feeling, which would become a highly collectable item among free jazz enthusiasts. Originally released in 1977, Bäbi remains one of Graves' most seminal recordings. The music played by the trio was ecstatic. Extreme energy music, buoyant and joyful. It relied on Graves' new way of approaching the drum kit, in which he had opened up the bottoms of his skin-slackened toms and eliminated the snare. Graves' art was always unblemished by commercial interests, and this album is its finest mission statement. First-time vinyl reissue. Sourced from the original master tapes.

On May 28, 1969, four American musicians -- reed/wind players Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman, bassist Malachi Favors, and (accompanied by his wife, singer Fontella Bass) trumpeter Lester Bowie -- boarded the ocean liner S.S. United States, bound for Le Havre, France. After landing five days later, they moved on to Paris, where they got to work. On August 22, 1970, in the waning days of their stay overseas, the group, with Bass on vocals, would record their second release for EMI's Pathé Marconi: the movie soundtrack Les Stances à Sophie. The record, an exciting, eminently listenable combination of soul, classical, and jazz strains that survives as the Art Ensemble of Chicago's most stylistically diverse album, has long been admired by a devoted cult. Its durability is largely due to the popularity of its "hit": Over the years, "Theme de Yoyo" has been covered repeatedly, essayed by acts as varied as German funk band the Boogoos (and the offshoot Deep Jazz, both featuring singer Julia Fehenbeger), British nu-jazz combo the Cinematic Orchestra, Polish jazz man Wojtek Mazolewski, Norwegian rockers Motorpsycho, French dance music artist Étienne Jaumet, and London-based remixer, Shall I Bruk It. More than half a century later, "Theme de Yoyo" and Les Stances à Sophie still bring it. Limited-edition LP reissue from play loud! Productions, supplemented with new notes by U.S. music journalist Chris Morris.

Stuart Dempster created Underground Overlays From The Cistern Chapel in the same cistern where the legendary Deep Listening album was recorded. Reverberating with powerful, deep tones, this double LP is intended as a companion to the acclaimed Oliveros/Dempster/Panaiotis album Deep Listening. Underground Overlays From The Cistern Chapel is one of the deepest drone albums ever recorded. Nine trombones, didjeridu and Tibetan bells fill the massive two million gallon cistern with dense sonic reverberations that are both haunting and healing. Packaged in a heavy duty paper sleeve printed with metallic gold ink to match the Deep Listening design.

Buh Records presents Anthology 2: Works for the Experimental Orchestra of Native Instruments, a double album that deepens the exploration of the work of Bolivian composer Cergio Prudencio (La Paz, 1955) and his inseparable bond with the Experimental Orchestra of Native Instruments (OEIN), the project he co-founded in 1980 and of which he is now emeritus director. Like Anthology 1, widely praised by the international music press, this second installment continues to reveal the conceptual, aesthetic, and sonic magnitude of one of the most radical contemporary-music endeavors to emerge from Latin America. The OEIN is a unique ensemble within the international musical landscape. Its approach begins by embracing the traditional instruments of the Andean highlands in all their dimensions: their materiality, modes of sound production, tuning systems, cultural contexts, and the Indigenous philosophies that sustain them. It is grounded in central principles of Aymara music—arca-ira alternation, the formation of large “troops” of instrumentalists, and the communal energy of wakiña—integrating them into a creative process that articulates both tradition and contemporaneity. For Prudencio, these foundations are living structures that allow for the projection of an ever-expanding musical thought. Anthology 2 brings together works composed between 1989 and 2014 and performed by the OEIN and its chamber ensemble. Cantos crepusculares (1999), written for the Donaueschingen Festival, unfolds a sonic continuum in which successive atmospheres evoke the shifting light of twilight. Cantos ofertorios (2008), conceived during residencies in Bellagio and completed in La Paz, incorporates multiphonics, massive textures, and a performative gesture referencing the prayers and offerings of Aymara yatiris.

Hanne Lippard and Renato Grieco bring language and composition into close conversation on Today’s Special. Lippard’s playful spoken-word pieces meet Grieco’s viola da gamba, piano and Wurlitzer, with the music mirroring the pitch, rhythm and inflections of her voice. Rather than improvisation, the duo use strict rules and compositional structures, drawing on wordplay, anecdotes, nursery rhymes, colour and borrowed language. Developed through residencies in Rome, Naples and Berlin, the result is sparse, witty and meticulously constructed, with every voice, note and pause serving a purpose.

Takashi Kokubo, one of Japan’s leading ambient musicians and sound designers, is best known for creating sounds such as the Earthquake Early Warning alert and payment confirmation tones. From his “Aeon Series” released in the 1990s, the highly popular title *Wind Oasis II: A Tale of Forest and Water* is finally being reissued!

Takashi Kokubo, one of Japan’s leading ambient musicians and sound designers, is best known for creating sounds such as the Earthquake Early Warning alert and payment confirmation tones. From his “Aeon Series” released in the 1990s, the highly popular title *Wind Oasis II: A Tale of Forest and Water* is finally being reissued!

Greek harpist and composer Sissi Rada interprets the music of Richard Wagner and Johannes Brahms with unfathomable levels of detail and charm, resulting in one of the most gorgeously executed records of the year. Trust - it’s fully essential listening FFO Joanna Newsom, Svitlana Nianio, Kate Bush, Delphine Dora, Nikos Mamangakis…​ Sissi Makropoulou has been pinging our radar for a while now, but especially hard since 2024's Stroom-released 'Aporia' and that dazzling ‘Demeter In Aexone’ album that properly locked us in to her brand of uncanny avant dream-folk, a highly distinctive signature sound she developed even further on the fantastic 'Nana Butu' earlier this year. She’s a serial collaborator - with Lena Platonos, Brian Eno, Christina Vantzou, Jay Glass Dubs - even Lee "Scratch" Perry - all the while composing chamber music on the side. And It's that latter practice that comes to the fore on ‘Serious Songs’ singing in German while attacking Wagner's chilly 'Fünf Gedichte für eine Frauenstimme' (Five Poems for a Female Voice) on the A side, and Brahms' pious 'Vier ernste Gesänge' (Four Serious Songs) on the flip. As you'd expect, it isn't just a simple recital; with harp and voice the focal points, packed out with winding, nebulous arrangements and perspicacious references to avant-garde musical history, integrating dissonant orchestral elements, prepared piano, opera, classical guitar, environmental sounds and foreboding oscillations - with an exquisite ear for detail. Oddly for music this tranquil, it benefits from increased volume - at least a level where you can marvel at the array of tiny, unusual production flourishes. And it's a suite that grows and grows. On 'Wesendonck 1’, she opens with voice and harp recalling Joanna Newsom's folk-inspired song cycle 'Ys'. But as the piece develops, she begins to slowly show her hand, introducing harmonic, hypnotic effects to blur the edges. The result is discombobulating in the best way, sounding as dreamy as Julee Cruise's 'Floating into the Night' while somehow still remaining true to the source material. The drama continues to build on 'Wesendonck 2', her delivery of the words - written by poet Mathilde Wesendonck who Wagner was famously besotted with - fittingly dramatic, assisted by brass and grinding drums broken occasionally by moments of ineffable beauty. On 'Wesendonck 4', Makropoulou augments the production with metallophone chimes, fixing sequences with growling synths and heavily processed cries. Sissi plays a remarkable sleight of hand on the flip. Beginning conservatively, she introduces Brahms' cycle of Lutheran biblical readings with a celestial harp and a gently experimental vocal, pitch shifted to a screwed conclusion. On 'Brahms 2', her performance is kinked by disorienting concrète-style operatic spools that pull us into another musical timeline entirely. She is so confident with her subject matter - whether it's the classical canon, folk, electronic or neue musik - that it all sounds like a natural extension of her practice, converging into something that fully defies categorisation. Anyway, words don’t really do it for this one. Just give it a spin and you’ll soon melt into it, one of the most quietly startling albums released this year.

CHBB was a project by Beate Bartel and Chris Haas that developed from their collaboration in 1981, while working on the self-titled album 'Liaisons Dangereuses‘. They released their music only on four limited cassettes. This compilation presents the complete works of CHBB, including all recordings from their original cassettes alongside previously unreleased tracks produced by both artists.

In 2000, Henri Pousseur was asked by Philippe Samyn, a Brussels-based architect who liked to work in collaboration with other artforms, to lend his support to the plan for the construction of a business complex by one of the most important building enterprises in the country. There were four low buildings arranged like different parts of a medieval castle-village, grouped around a kind of large open central court. Leaning on the suggested image, Pousseur immediately suggested that the first spinal-column be composed of an electronic carillon, sounding in variations every hour, thus marking the hours between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. Henri Poussuer imagined then a connection between Nivelles-time (a city 40 km south of Brussels, where this large project would be situated) and the time of the entire planet and the more or less metaphoric sonic and musical realities attached to it. He made on the one hand the 16 hours of a theoretically complete day of work (from the cleaning service up to the last research in the office) correspond to the 24 hours of a complete terrestrial revolution. He then divided the globe into eight large north/south "slices," themselves divided into three perpendicular "rings": north, center, south, with the understanding that only inhabited lands were taken into consideration. To each of the 8 "great hours" of the total duration, Pousseur associated three regions, one of each ring (north/central/south) set out as far apart as possible on the terrestrial globe. Over a background of a fairly continuous variety of noises which are perpetually evolving: sea, fire, city, swamp, industry, forest, etc., there are ethno-musical samples from one region or from several regions involved, more or less worked over by all sorts of numerical methods which vary their capacity to be recognized as quasi-traditional music. This work once finished (realized in the studio of the composer's son Denis), Pousseur made a synthesis on three discs by superimposing the landscapes (a bit in the manner of the previous Etudes paraboliques) in 16 Paysages Planetaires. The titles of the landscapes express by their contraction the simultaneous or alternate presence of several regions; for example, "Alaskamazonie" is self-explanatory. Something like "Gamelan Celtibere" is a sort of play on something between the West Coast of Europe with the Indonesian archipelago and even the northern part of Australia. Continuing like this you could find it amusing to reconstruct the circumplanetary movement of the work. Michel Butor wrote the luminous prose-verse alternating poetic structure which accompanies these landscapes. His text is included in the 60-page documentation booklet, also featuring two long essays by Henri Pousseur: "Paysages Planetaires" and "Atmospheric and Cultural Sources for Each of the Landscapes." Finally, with this work, Henri Pousseur makes an homage to all the singers and instrumentalists, sound engineers, ethnic musicologists and editors who have either produced, or gathered and transmitted, all the marvelous musical invention which inspired and nourished the work and which, with the sounds of the world, of nature, of society and of industry, are supposed to represent a kind of formal summing-up of life's multiplicity. All the images, obtained through extensive digital treatments, were conceived and manipulated by Henri Poussuer. Housed in a heavy cardboard slipcase with 3CDs and a 60-page booklet.

Last heard on Black Truffle as one quarter of the joyously anarchic Bergisch-Brandenburgisches Quartett, Hans Reichel (1949-2011) is one of the great figures of experimental guitar music. Though perhaps lesser known than peers like Derek Bailey, Fred Frith and Keith Rowe, Reichel’s rethinking of the instrument was in some ways the most radical of all. Early on, he dispensed with existing guitars to build a series of his own that explored the use of additional strings and fretboards, moveable pickups, extra bridges, special capos, and other innovations documented in the extensive booklet accompanying this release.

What strikes the listener right from the opening selection on Dalbergia Retusa—‘Return of the Knödler show’, from 1987’s The Dawn of Dachsman—is the extraordinary beauty of Reichel’s music, at once alien in the shimmering sonorities and unconventional pitch relationships made possible by his invented instruments, and deeply lyrical, even romantic in its harmonic content. Growing up in West Germany in the 1960s, Reichel’s formative influences were mainly British and American rock bands, a background that shines through in many of the pieces included here: ‘An old friend passes by’ is haunted by the ghost of Hendrix’s rhythm guitar, and the wild closer ‘Heimkehr der Holzböcke’, taken from a rare 1975 7” and the only piece to use overdubbing, layers errant hammer-on and slide tones over a Canned Heat boogie chug.

Reichel was an important source for the development of Oren Ambarchi’s own extended approach to the electric guitar. Appropriately enough, his selection opens with the very first piece by Reichel he ever heard, on a flexidisc included with a 1989 issue of Guitar Player magazine. Though Reichel collaborated with others extensively in many settings and also performed on violin and his other major contribution to instrument invention, the daxophone, his music for solo guitar remains at the core of his oeuvre.

Focusing exclusively on solo pieces recorded between 1973 and 1988, the 23 pieces on Dalbergia Retusa showcase the range and consistency of Reichel’s work, allowing the listener to see how his performances developed hand-in-hand with his instrumental inventions. On a piece from his very first LP, played on an 11-string instrument (partly strung with piano strings and using a schnapps glass a slide), we hear his intensive exploration of fret-hammering to create zither-like, chiming tone, which Reichel would hone further in later years with a double fretboard guitar specifically designed to be hammered rather than fretted and picked. On a piece from 1979’s Death of the Rare Bird Ymir, Reichel uses two steel-string acoustic guitars at once, with beautiful results: ‘some even say too beautiful’, he jokes in the interview included here. Many of the pieces from the 1980s make use of varieties of the ‘pick behind the bridge guitar’, instruments of uncanny harmonic richness primarily designed to be played on the ‘wrong’ side of the bridge. At times the unexpected behaviour of attacks, resonance, and decay can almost seem electronic, conjuring up the technology-assisted work of Henry Kaiser or even Fennesz, but realised solely through Reichel’s unorthodox techniques on his invented instruments.

Two days after his 100th birthday, Marshall Allen started recording New Dawn, his debut solo album. A member of Sun Ra’s Arkestra since 1958, Allen assumed leadership of the band in 1995. Throughout his nearly seventy-year career, Allen has never released a solo album under his own name, and yet, instead of capping such a legendary output, New Dawn seems to herald a new beginning. A love letter to spacetime, it channels a century of musical intelligence into seven tracks, showing Allen at his most protean — freely moving from relaxed, transdimensional palettes to bluesy big band and beyond.

One of music’s vanguard avant-saxophonists, Allen continues to deliver durational feats during the Arkestra’s gigs. Still, the compositional energy contained on New Dawn is striking. Allen was approached with the idea of a solo record by Week-End Records’ Jan Lankisch. The Arkestra’s Knoel Scott — who has lived with Allen at the Arkestral Institute of Sun Ra since the 1980s — worked with Allen to pore over the archive of unrecorded material and develop this debut. Scott assembled some of Philadelphia’s brightest jazz stars as well as some Arkestra veterans for the sessions. New Dawn was then recorded over a couple of days in Philadelphia, with additional recordings added in the following weeks and months.

The title track “New Dawn” is the centerpiece of this impressive album and the arranger Knoel Scott wrote the lyrics himself. We are thrilled to have the incomparable Neneh Cherry, stepdaughter of legendary jazz musician Don Cherry, lend her unmistakable voice to this song.

Though greatly informed by the philosophy of Sun Ra and his Saturnian teachings — traverse jazz’s traditions, dig deep into spiritual geographies — New Dawn signals Allen as his own singular voice, one that’s swinging and bopping and reflecting into the future, with no sign of stopping. Week-End Records is proud to release this debut solo album by Marshall Allen.

“The one thing that I'm really looking forward to, and I think this is the best thing ever, is the fact that Marshall Allen is about to release, at the age of 100, his debut album under his own name. There is no greater feat of durability, working at your craft, and putting your ego to the back of the room while you're supporting other artists and performers.” – Gilles Peterson

“New Dawn is clearly an extension of Ra’s legacy and sound, but it’s also a masterful endeavour filtered through Allen’s tastes and approach.” – John Morrison, The Wire 

Black Truffle is thrilled to present a previously unheard performance by rudra veena master Ustad Zia Mohiuddin Dagar, recorded in the North Indian city of Vrindavan at the Druhpad Samaroh festival in 1982. Z.M. Dagar was a nineteenth-generation descendant of the Dagar family of musicians, famed for their profoundly meditative approach to the tradition of Hindustani court music. Perhaps the most revered members of the family were the brothers Mohinuddin and Aminuddin Dagar, who played a key role in reawakening interest in dhrupad in the mid-20th century. The great exponents of the tradition from whom Z.M. Dagar descended were all singers, and dhrupad is essentially vocal music. However, as Z.M. Dagar explained, the veena family of instruments plays an important role in the education and practice of dhrupad singers, especially as an aid to mastering the fine microtonal nuances of pitch essential to the genre. Introduced as a child by his father to the rudra veena, a large and low-pitched veena amplified by two enormous gourds, Z.M. Dagar became the first modern dhrupad musician to perform with it as an instrumental soloist, giving his first recital at the age of 16. Devoted to the instrument throughout his life, he made innovations to its design and materials, as well as introducing novel techniques (such as playing without the use of the traditional wire plectrum, resulting in the remarkable warmth of his tone). In the great Dagar family tradition, his approach to the various ragas that make up the dhrupad repertoire was stately, slow, and considered, with a great emphasis on the alap, the heavily improvised exposition section. True to form, in this recording of Dagar performing the night raga Yaman Kalyan, the alap section stretches out to more than forty minutes of slow-motion bliss, a frozen tanpura drone hovering above Dagar’s gracefully bent notes and elegantly twisting phrases. In the alap’s first half, Dagar’s figures are so intently focused on the lower reaches of the rudra veena’s range that they register more as shudders and moans than melodic patterns. As the performance continues, he slowly climbs in pitch, though continuing with the same intent focus on the articulation of single notes and subtle microtonal variations. This leads to the jod section of the performance, which, though still accompanied only by the tanpura, gradually takes on a more rhythmic character. Developing almost imperceptibly over the course of nearly thirty minutes, the jod moves from the stillness of the opening alap to a rapid pulse that announces the closing section of the piece, where Dagar is joined by Shrikant Mishra on the pakhawaj (a double headed hand drum). Where many performers use the final section of the raga as an exercise in unrestrained virtuosity, Dagar and Mishra subtly weave a web of finely shifting accents and hypnotic melodic variations, bringing the recording to a fitting conclusion while remaining within the meditative space occupied by the performance as a whole. Adorned with beautiful archival photographs of Dagar taken by Swedish percussion legend Bengt Berger and accompanied by detailed notes from Bradford Bailey, Vrindavan 1982 is a stunning document of music unmatched in its patient focus and mysterious emotional depth. .

Etherworld is proud to announce a new Merzbow album, "Vapor Hoof" on CD. Our previous Merzbow album, "Electric Salad" came out on the Etherworld label in 1996. Now taking preorders for "Vapor Hoof" [Catalog No. EtW007]. This pulse-warping, mind-smashing new release by Masami Akita is coming to stores on Friday, July 17, 2026. Preorder your CD today. Find out what noise really sounds like after 30 years of silence.

Paradigm-shifting percussionist Valentina Magaletti stops time on 'La Tempesta Colorata', a long-form set that rolls thru tempos and time signatures with gymnastic flexibility, offering another spectacular entry to A Colourful Storm’s gravity-defying recent run of releases. Magaletti is a regular and constant presence on these pages as a member of Moin, Vanishing Twin, Tomaga and CZN, as well as thru endless collabs with everyone from Floating Points to Nicolas Jaar, Jandek to Helm. For our money, though, she's at her most arresting when operating in solo mode. "La Tempesta Colorata" was recorded at Cafe Oto in October 2021 and follows her astonishing 2020 solo set "A Queer Anthology of Drums” with a virtuoso performance that never drags for a moment, fluctuating from ASMR scraping to angular post-punk rhythmic pulsewerk. With a full drum set, a handful of additional small instruments and a delay pedal, Magaletti somehow captures a full spectrum of sound, employing only minor additional elements to flesh out her sound. From the dewdrop swagger of the opening minutes, thru rolling tom-led seismic activity - complete with customary screams - and into echoing industrial dub-improv experimentation, she's able to assemble her rhythms with metronomic accuracy, but with enough space in the gaps to enhance inherent human qualities - a far cry from fully electronic studio productions. It’s a spellbinding display of polymetric complexities where no two seconds repeat themselves, persistently pulling patterns apart and restitching them in diffractive slow-fast-slow temporalities that arc from showers of cascading hi-hats, to pugilistic breaks, to an unexpected trough of Twin Peaks-y drones around the mid-section, only to climb out of it via icicles of melodic chimes and into more humid areas of her imagination, ultimately shoring up in pitch black Amazonian zones. If you're into anyone from Autechre to Eli Keszler, Milton Graves to Han Bennink, this one's a mindmelt.

XKatedral Anthology II is the second installment in a series of archival releases dedicated to presenting music by composers affiliated with XKatedral working within the realm of slowly evolving harmonic and timbral music. This double-vinyl set contains an array of pieces written from 2018 to 2020 by composers Kali Malone, Jessica Ekomane, Mats Erlandsson, Theodor Kentros, Wilma Hultén and Maria W Horn. This collection of pieces focuses on the use of synthetic sound and algorithmic composition languages as tools for precise work within the realm of spectral exploration. In addition to this, the electronic instrumentation in many of the pieces is augmented by acoustic instruments.

XKatedral Anthology I is the first in a series of archival releases dedicated to presenting music by XKatedral affiliated composers working within the realm of slowly evolving harmonic and timbral music. This double-vinyl set contains an array of pieces dating from 2010 - 2020. Four of the works included here were originally released on cassette early on in the label's history, while the two remaining pieces are presented by the label for the first time.

To be an attentive listener to the world as it stands is to be saturated with language. Speech resounds through nearly every space that features human beings, whether unwanted or desired, mundane or profound. Words sit on the page and in the ear, proliferating endlessly. This superabundance has long been a point of fascination for composer and musician Ben Vida, but over the past several years it has led to a new method of music making that simultaneously exalts and interrogates the primacy of language in our sonic and cultural environments. Gently, playfully, Vida breaks down language’s hierarchy of meaning and sound until they exist in egalitarian harmony. Oblivion Seekers is Vida’s newest album in this mode of composition, following 2023’s collaboration with new music ensemble Yarn/Wire The Beat My Head Hit. Like its predecessor, the music’s focus is on coordinated duets of spoken word in a neutral tone, the variable cadences of the words in motion creating complex internal rhythmic structures. He is joined by the voices of Nina Dante, Christina Vantzou, John Also Bennett, and Félicia Atkinson, creating a singular tone that is neither theirs nor his, fluid in its gender presentation, accent, and diction. The instrumental compositions that form the album’s understory have the casual flow of dialogue, conversational but subdued, rarely the agent of change. Here, Vida likewise called upon an accomplished community of players to accompany him: Dante on harp, Bennett on bass flute, Matt Bauder and Will Epstein on saxophones, Henry Fraser on bass, Cleek Schrey on violin, and Booker Stardrum on percussion. These elements form lattice-like structures that the text darts in and around, often adhering to downbeats but otherwise moving freely within each lilting phrase. A tranquil, focused temperament persists, enhanced by the reserved cadence of the voices that makes it feel as if the music is one long mantra that never quite reaches back to its genesis point. The effect is entrancing, equally soporific and gripping, implying repetition without ever moving exactly the same way twice. The instrumentation on each of the album’s four pieces varies; “Be Yr Own Abyss” is defined by the wave-like counterpoint of saxophones, while the ambiguous chime of vibraphone floats over “Oblivion Seekers” and Fraser’s swelling bass provides the album’s sole dramatic entrance. The music shifts in the ear as the text constantly redefines and recontextualizes the composition’s form and movement, even as it remains consistent in its otherworldly glow. The text is often drawn from snippets of language that Vida encountered throughout his life as he was composing: overheard mumblings from the supermarket line, impactful phrases from a novel he was reading, impressions of the music that wouldn’t leave his turntable. Small details, otherwise insignificant, accumulate not to form a narrative, but an impression of the complex meaning-making process that happens as one lives day to day. Characters and scenes flicker in and out of the frame, and phrases that beg to be unpacked are allowed to glide by. In “Be Yr Own Abyss” something like a thesis appears without fanfare: “Her tongue was out to kill her / all hail this mental space / constructing ambiguity / and the endless stream.” On two separate occasions the listener is told that waves are heading our way. There are many predecessors to these types of novel confluences of music and speech. Vida’s love of Robert Ashley is well documented, but perhaps even more significant are Mark E. Smith and The Fall, Neil Tennant and the Pet Shop Boys’ spoken verses, the entire history of hip hop, Meredith Monk. The way the words are delivered matters just as much as the words themselves, revealing an intentionality and directness that Vida highlights and subverts with the text’s abstract construction patterns. On Oblivion Seekers, the omnidirectional din is the marble Vida chips away at to illuminate the way we process the vast strangeness of the world. Its triumph is that we lose none of the beautiful mystery of how these signs bridge our external and internal worlds.

Where Ben Vida’s music has previously explored the sound of text at the outer register of electronic composition, here, in collaboration with the Yarn/Wire quartet and the vocalist Nina Dante, the voice and the words it works to inhabit are placed back at the time-scale of a song. There is a familiarity to this music’s combination of restrained melody and heightened atmosphere. It feels, softly, like it’s made by a band: piano, percussion, voice. A composition kept aloft and even by its four stewards through a simultaneity of effort. The pace, across five pieces, hurries and relaxes but never outruns or distends language. You could find a story in the words being sung, if that’s what you need. But there are unfamiliar dimensions too. So many threads, so many timelines. A story or a thousand, or a litany of scraps: language complete but raw, language that can or cannot be translated. Singers fused at the breath. Oppositions or dualities—a question and an answer, two sides of a conflict, the sense of being here or over there—are drawn together into a single sentiment, plural with feeling. Voices negotiating in unison how to articulate a stance. Musical cues doling out tension as needed. The five pieces that make up The beat my head hit were developed with Yarn/Wire over the last four years, with roots in Vida’s 2018 performance for four voices and electronics “And So Now” at BAM in Brooklyn. The Yarn/Wire ensemble, founded in 2005, has been collaborating with a broad range of experimental composers and sound artists since its inception: most recently, they have performed work by the likes of Sarah Hennies, Annea Lockwood, Catherine Lamb, and Alvin Lucier. Vida, meanwhile, has maintained a practice as both a musician and a visual artist, which has included drone-leaning solo work for electronics as well as improvisatory collaborations with musicians including Martina Rosenfeld and Lea Bertucci. Working with Yarn/Wire, for Vida, was something like joining a band. Following a few early live performances, the material was worked through in the studio across many permutations, a process during which Vida, Dante, Russell Greenberg, Laura Barger created what Vida calls “a meta-voice out of the blending of our four voices.” Sustained presence—language bringing a group to the place of breathing in unison—becomes the backbone of the piece. That presence is an engine, but it's still full of negative spaces and exhales. It's thrilling, for example, to find oneself disarmed by the subtle harmonies introduced by the inevitable but infinitesimal distance between Vida and Dante’s voices. Or the introduction of subterranean bass on “Drawn Evening”: breath trapped? When ambient stillness steps in out of nowhere to replace fast talk on the title track, the evacuation of language is some other form of breath, too. The beat my head hit finds not just truth or reality in what happens at the periphery, but a kind of peace.

Received an 8.1 rating from Pitchfork. Since its original release in 1977, RAGNAR GRIPPE's seminal debut album entitled Sand has been adorned with immense praise and influenced a myriad of ambient musicians and minimalist composers. Grippe’s unique approach of bonding post-modern classical composition into the tape techniques of musique concrète allowed him to be one of the leading experimental electronic musicians of the late 20th century.  Originally trained as a classical cellist, Grippe had relocated to Paris in the early 70’s to study at the famous Groupe de Recherches Musicales (more commonly known as GRM) founded by musique concrète pioneers Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry and Jacques Poullin. Around the same time, Grippe had struck up a close friendship with French avant-garde minimalist Luc Ferrari. It was under Ferrari’s direction and guidance that the young Grippe started to build a shared experimental music studio, aptly named l’Atelier de la Libération Musicale (ALM), in which Ferrari shared his knowledge and instrumental supplies, thus forging Grippe’s implementation of harmonic tone within the confines of musique concrete.  After a brief stint of electronic music study at McGill University in Montreal, Grippe returned to Paris in 1976 to compose with Ferrari at the now fully-realized ALM studio. One of the visiting artists passing through the creative epicenter of the Cité Internationale des Arts during this time was the painter Viswanadhan Velu. Velu’s recent works consisted of various Sand paintings which were to be exhibited at the Galerie Shandar, the avant-garde art gallery and home to the Shandar record label which was the home to minimalist composers Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Cecil Taylor and Charlemagne Palestine.  Grippe was asked to compose a composition that was to be played during the Sand painting exhibition and was then to be released on the Shandar imprint in 1977. This release would be the first official album that would start Grippe’s career as a modern avant-garde composer and electronic musician. After a celebrated release, “Sand” has since been out-of-print on its original vinyl format for four decades and original copies fetch high prices amongst minimalist listeners and collectors.

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