Avant-Garde / Contemporary

Originally commissioned by Walt Disney Concert Hall for the LA Philharmonic’s centennial festival, 100 cymbals is a study in restraint, space and subtle sonic transformation.

Following his 2017 orchestral work performed by 100 modified cars in Los Angeles, Ryoji Ikeda took an opposite approach: replacing overwhelming volume with near-silence, while retaining the number 100. Expanding an earlier composition for 12 cymbals into a work for ten performers and 100 instruments, Ikeda developed a choreographic composition in which the cymbals remain fixed in a 10 × 10 grid as the performers move between them.

Each cymbal is unique, struck with a variety of mallets to produce delicate, shifting textures. Slowly evolving and richly atmospheric, these sounds form a sonic landscape that envelops the listener—a forest of sound shaped by subtle changes in articulation, movement and dynamics.

A meditation on space, perception and the expressive possibilities of minimal sound, 100 cymbals reveals the extraordinary complexity that can emerge from the quietest gestures.

An album etched not only in the history of Japanese rock but also in the history of rock worldwide!A miraculous sound that never ages!Due to popular demand, re-released on clear vinyl!

●Why did the world's avant-garde musicians want to create "sound" with Conny Plank back then? The album "Phew" (released in 1981) was produced at the legendary Conny's Studio, which spawned masterpieces by Kraftwerk, Neu!, DAF, Eno, and others, with former Aunt Sally member Phew joining them.

●Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit, former members of the German rock band Can, who had a great influence on techno and post-rock, participated.

●Conny Plank's outstanding engineering and Holger Czukay's ingenious editing created a groundbreaking sound world that still resonates uniquely and never fades even today.

Reissue of this very rare French spiritual / political Avant-garde Jazz holy (moly) grail. An incredible record. The soundtrack of a cult play from the “Chêne Noir” theatre. A spiritual jazz work tinged with poetry and oriental music. A sonorous UFO of which only the 70s had the secret. To be classified between Brigitte Fontaine Marc Moulin’s Placebo and Strata East.

In their third collaboration, the shared project between Merzbow and Pedro Vian shifts towards less confrontational and more introspective terrain. Bardo Thödol, released as an LP, draws on The Tibetan Book of the Dead not so much as an explicit narrative framework but as a conceptual resonance: a passage, a suspension between states. Where Inside Richard Serra Sculptures and The Wheel of Mani foregrounded a relatively defined dialectic between Vian’s environmental restraint and Masami Akita’s impulsive, textural excess, that friction here appears to dissolve in favour of a more homogeneous mass. Noise, far from its most abrasive edge, is reconfigured as a continuous field — dense yet permeable. Within this flow, melodic structures emerge without assertion, surfacing almost incidentally as by-products of the accumulation of frequencies itself. The result is less a reconciliation of languages than a blurring of their boundaries: a space in which intensity is internalised and the radical gesture folds into a more sustained, contemplative mode of listening.

To celebrate 20 years of this incredible album by Masami Akita, we are doing a limited edition gatefold vinyl pressing on baby pink colored vinyl limited to 300 copies worldwide.

Limited edition of 200 copies. Merzbow is a Japanoise legend who has been advocating and practicing thoroughgoing ahimsa. This is the first analogue/cassette version of their very popular CD-only release "Door Open At 8 AM" released in 1999. Recorded at his home studio, Bedroom, Tokyo, in April/May 1998 using EMS VCS3, EMS Synthi 'A', Moog Rogue, Theremin, etc., this is a career-defining album. Recorded around the same time as one of Merzbow's most adventurous works, Aqua, it pays homage to the free jazz musicians he admires. Tony Williams and John Coltrane were also sampled. Remastered at Munemihouse in 2020. Remastered at Munemihouse in 2020 with new artwork by himself. Includes additional bonus tracks.

Fuego Eterno, the new album by Merzbow (Masami Akita), incorporates various aspects of the project's sonic canon while bringing a unique and fresh perspective to the table. The album explores a wide range of experimental approaches to the noise genre, with compositions that expand the meaning of noise music and musique concrète in this day and age. Modular analog synthesizers fill out stream-of-consciousness passages, while electroacoustic pieces (such as “Guitar Rain”) evoke the project's early cassette-only days. A 2xLP of new compositions on beautiful hand poured and handmade vinyl done in collaboration with the undisputed kings of wax (Wax Mage). Fuego Eterno contains the essence of Masami's body of work while bringing a fresh sounding album. Fuego Eterno captures the defining elements of Masami Akita’s sonic language while continuing to explore the possibilities of noise as a compositional form. Moving between the dense textures of modular analog synthesis and more open-ended electroacoustic passages, the album draws connections between different facets of Merzbow’s extensive discography without simply revisiting familiar territory. There is a sense of continuity in the way sound is layered, manipulated, and pushed beyond conventional musical structures, yet the interplay of these elements gives the record its own character. Rather than relying solely on sheer intensity, Fuego Eterno explores the shifting boundaries between noise, texture, and abstraction, reaffirming Akita’s enduring ability to find new possibilities within a practice he has spent decades developing. All Music by Masami Akita Recorded 6 Mixed at Munemihouse, Tokyo 2021-2022 Album artwork by José Moreno Rahn. Limited edition of 300 copies worldwide.

Cassette comes in oversized black plastic case with silk screened covers and individual photographs. Each copy is unique. Hand numbered edition of 60 copies.

Originally released in 2004 by the American label Plan-DX17, Tamago is one of the distinctive works from Masami Akita’s prolific early-2000s laptop period. Recorded and mixed at Bedroom, Tokyo between April and May 2003, the album collects six pieces that explore repetition, digital processing, distorted textures and constantly shifting frequencies. Rather than relying solely on the overwhelming density often associated with Merzbow, Tamago develops its tension through loops, gradual transformations and recurring rhythmic fragments, creating a strangely controlled and hypnotic form of noise. The original edition was limited to 350 hand-numbered copies and came in a remarkable egg-shaped cardboard sleeve — an object whose physical form directly echoes the album’s title, Tamago, the Japanese word for “egg.”
 The album opens with “Bronzo Part.1”, a comparatively clean and sharply defined piece in which abrasive frequencies, electronic textures and almost melodic structures emerge from a tightly controlled loop. “Bronzo Part.2” extends this approach over fourteen minutes, gradually altering the density and character of its repeating materials. The sound becomes less a linear composition than a constantly shifting surface, with filters and processing slowly reshaping the same underlying elements. “Kangaroo Tracks Part.2” introduces a more pronounced rhythmic presence, its repetitive figures suggesting a mechanical pulse without ever settling into a conventional beat.
 “Bronzo Part.3” continues the series with another long-form study in repetition and transformation, balancing harsh electronic tones with passages of sparse, stripped-back electronics. Then comes the album’s title track, “Tamago,” a seven-minute piece built around one of the record’s most unusual sonic sources. Bird vocalizations are sampled and electronically manipulated, stretched and transformed until their original character becomes increasingly ambiguous. The sound comes from Yoshino, Akita’s pet bantam chicken, who is credited in the original release simply as “Chorus by Yoshino.” An everyday animal sound is pushed through Akita’s processing until it becomes something entirely new — an unexpected, vivid and unmistakable voice within the album’s electronic landscape.
 The closing “Kangaroo Tracks Part.1” returns to the rhythmic and repetitive language heard earlier in the album, bringing the record to a close without a conventional climax. Tamago reveals a different side of Merzbow’s noise practice: less concerned with simply overwhelming the listener than with repetition, microscopic variation and the gradual transformation of recognizable sounds into something alien. This digital edition also includes two bonus tracks from the same period as the original recording sessions, offering a further glimpse into Akita’s work around the time Tamago was created and expanding the original album with previously uncollected material from this particularly fertile period.

Portland’s Roman Norfleet (Cosmic Tones Research Trio, MerKaBa Brotherhood) and Be Present Art Group extend their incredible outpouring of spiritual, liberatory music. "The Remembering is sonic libation for those who came before us. Drawing from Black American history, revolutionary thought, and the enduring spirit of resistance, the music weaves in echoes of the figures, movements, and ideas that have shaped generations. It honors the past while carrying its spirit into the present."

Think about Can as performed by a shaman commune ! Two long LP-side size compositions, focusing on tribal rhythms (without real drummer), heavy-folk and electronic samples and loops. Takahashi Yoshihiro (Brast Burn) was the man behind this cultish project originally released in 1974. Buried deep in time, this obscure artifact is something of a revelation. No group information was ever given, and no production date or location is indicated, however, it would seem that this record and the "Brast Burn" LP (also reissued by Paradigm) are both by the same group of Japanese nutters and that they were both recorded in the mid seventies in Japan. But all you really need to know is that it is stone cold fantastic, a wild and manic trip full to the brim with hypnotic jams constructed from all manner of eclectic instruments.

The tribal blues sound is augmented with fascinating tape experiments, electronics, environmental sounds, moaned (howled) vocals and a host of musical delicacies, as dangerous as they are delicious. The influence of German bands such as Can, Faust and Guru Guru is evident throughout, so too is the influence of the good Captain (Beefheart that is) whose gut wrenching blues dirges find compadres in this unearthed swamp. Deranged psychedelic music for anyone with a passing interest in Kraut rock, the new Japanese psychedelic scene (most of whom owe these pioneers a great debt) or great music from the edge of the solar system. Recommended.<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6kWuJcXCYCM?si=qzWOtQkBPaAemmZ5" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>

A multifaceted artist between meta-theatre, music, and poetry. Toji Tojima builds "visible music" from voices, traditional instruments, and everyday objects. Modern folk infused with art wave and the apocalypses of the everyday.

Taco weaponise the very idea of “tako” - octopus, kite, bunion, drunk, bald head - into a mutating post‑punk organism, a rotating guerrilla cell whose songs behave like incidents rather than compositions. “Tako” is one of those Japanese words that refuses to sit still. It can mean octopus, kite, bunion; it’s also slang for bald men, shaved heads, red‑faced drunks staggering home. The term slips between bodies, objects and insults, picking up grime and humour as it goes. In the early 1980s it became something else again: the name of a loose music and performance collective whose shows felt less like concerts than controlled disturbances. Taco emerged at the start of the decade as part of Japan’s post‑punk alternative wave, a shifting network of players orbiting Harumi Yamazaki, ex‑member of Gaseneta and the group’s volatile core. Around her gathered friends, acquaintances and fellow travellers from the Tokyo underground, forming a band that refused fixed membership, fixed genre, fixed anything. From the outset, Taco behaved more like a guerrilla unit than a conventional group. Personnel connected, collected, interrupted, scattered; line‑ups changed from gig to gig, and sometimes from piece to piece. Sound and image were treated as transient weapons to be deployed and discarded. Performances could happen with or without Harumi - reinforcing the sense that Taco was as much an anonymous mercenary outfit as it was a band, a name that could mask any number of combinations and intentions. What remained constant was the drive to send out music and noise that felt like it existed only for that night, that room, that confrontation, and then evaporated. In 1983 Taco released its first album, an anomalous, collaborative document that detonated across Japan’s underground as something both of and against its moment. The record functioned as a kind of local all‑stars compilation: key figures from the scene dropping in to contribute, while Harumi supplied the lyrics that stitched the whole together. Each track sounded like the reverberation of a particular cluster of people and circumstances - a conglomeration of voices, instruments, mistakes and impulses. Yet running through all of them were Harumi’s words, delivered with a force that turned scattered pieces into a single, bristling wave. The album didn’t simply collect songs; it spawned an “incident,” a disturbance that spread by word of mouth, tape dub and rumour. Then, as suddenly, it was pulled back: a separate scandal over some of the lyrics led to the records being recalled, ensuring that only a small number of copies ever made it into private hands. A second release followed in 1984: a 12" EP built around a live recording from the end of 1982. If the debut was a collage of sessions and personalities, this document caught Taco as a unit on stage, and what it revealed was an unexpectedly coherent musical engine beneath the chaos. For a band of indeterminate membership that specialised in one‑off performances, the playing here feels locked in without being smoothed out - grooves, fractures and eruptions held in tense balance. The record captures the power of Taco’s legendary live shows, but it’s Harumi Yamazaki’s presence that sears itself into memory: inflammatory, sensational, masochistic. Her muttered phrases and sudden screams ride over, and often wilfully against, the beat, treating rhythm as something to be taunted rather than obeyed. The effect is of a voice confronting the audience like a groundswell, an undertow that doesn’t care whether or not you keep your footing. One of Taco’s members once described the project as “an alternative counter organization”: a setup in which indeterminate participants fan each other’s heightened desires for personal revenge and retribution. In their words, Taco is “an ecosystem of tangible and intangible mouldy slime which accumulates in order for emotions to be acted out, both indoors in the studio, or outdoors on stage. That’s why the avenger can often end up being the victim.” It’s a metaphor that fits the music: thick, unstable, mutating, made from residues and leftovers as much as from polished ideas. Emotions congeal, are performed, and then rebound on those who unleashed them. The “alternative counter organization” is not a party or a platform; it’s a fragile, dangerous zone where sound becomes a way to test how far you can go before your own force turns back on you. The Alternative Counter Organization brings this history into focus not by tidying it up, but by acknowledging Taco’s refusal to be pinned down. It honours a group whose performances really were “like nothing before or since,” born from a word that already meant too many things and happy to add a few more.

The strength of the Akira soundtrack lies in its unique blend of traditional Japanese instruments and futuristic electronic sounds. Shoji Yamashiro weaves together an eclectic mix of influences, creating a sonic landscape that mirrors the dystopian and cyberpunk themes of the movie. The use of traditional chants, taiko drums, and Shakuhachi flutes alongside electronic synthesizers and orchestral elements generates a hauntingly mesmerizing atmosphere that perfectly complements the visuals on screen. The composer also drew from the chants of Noh, traditional Japanese theater. Combined with polyrhythmic drum machine beats and synths tuned to gamelan microtonal scales, these styles give a sense of ritualistic tension to the dystopian world of Akira.

A thrilling collaboration between major experimental maestros from slightly different sound worlds. Don Cherry, in the middle of a very free-ranging phase, plays his majestic trumpet over the shimmering organ tones of Terry Riley, while Karl Berger adds vibraphone. Heady stuff. Reissue of a rare concert recording from 1975, in an edition of just 500. On Modern Silence.

Recorded live in Austria in 1972 this outstanding document marks an important event such as the meeting between Don Cherry and Dollar Brand. Here, the modern jazz trumpet master and the great South-African pianist along with percussionist Nana Vasconcelos and bassist Johnny Dyani are caught in the middle of a sound ritual where jazz elements and world music echoes appear as fully integrated in some sort of visionary, organic music form. A deep sensorial experience based on human and artistic values and freedom principles. Personnel: Don Cherry (trumpet, vocals); Dollar Brand (piano, flute, vocals); Johnny Dyani (double bass, percussion, vocals); Nana Vasconcelos (berimbau, percussion, vocals).

‘Desire’ is the sophomore full-length album by TLF Trio. On ‘Desire’, the group presents their signature, contemporised chamber music through their main instruments: piano, cello and electric guitar; now enhanced by a pervasive use of sampling and a distinct use of silence as musical material.

The album is an aesthetic voyage in a musical landscape of minimalism, classical music, free improvisation, left-field-electronica, and references to pop and house music. It blends into a sound that is experimental and unpredictable – yet at the same time strangely familiar and self-explanatory.

The album’s ten pieces balance an open-ended improvisational intimacy with a tight compositional intention. Each track's repetitiveness operates as a trickling plateau of layered sentiments of times and spaces through the sampling of different acoustic rooms, the playing in specific styles and the curated selection of sounds and instrumentations; a collage of memories and associations patched together to create new meanings.

This is the first album by the improvisation group FuzzyToyShip.

The group was formed by Tomonao Koshikawa, a member of the legendary improvisation group Marginal Consort and a former member of East Bionic Symphonia.

Koshikawa has released two excellent works with ato.archives, and this time he presents his long-standing core practice of free improvisation. The work was created with musicians who had never played free improvisation before. Guided by Koshikawa, the musicians play with vigor, as the music flows from chaos to calm, presenting a fresh acoustic voyage.

Excerpt from the tape sleeve:

Beginning in 2022, I started conducting improvisation sessions in a workshop format, in which members of the audience would join the performance during the latter half. Over time, several people among the audience began to demonstrate an understanding of free improvisation, and I gradually developed the desire to form a group with them. Perhaps, in a sense, I was looking for a way to recreate East Bionic Symphonia, a group that I had not actively engaged with fifty years ago.

Roméo Poirier’s Off The Record (faitiche 39) transforms the overlooked detritus of recording sessions into intricate, surreal sound pieces. Across fourteen short works, Poirier builds from accidental studio captures — engineers’ instructions, idle chatter, mic checks, false starts — fragments never intended for release. Drawing on the visual art concept of “Accumulation” pioneered by Arman, Jean Tinguely and Daniel Spoerri, Poirier assembles more than a thousand found sounds from archival tapes. Voices from old shellac grooves meet digital snippets lifted from YouTube, warped and reconfigured into vivid, shifting collages. The result is a series of miniature worlds where the mundane mechanics of music-making become the raw material for new sonic narratives. By reframing the prelude to performance, Poirier crafts a universal story about creativity in the studio — one that’s at once playful, intimate, and strangely cinematic.

A pure shakuhachi work by Katsuya Nonaka, a shakuhachi player and organic rice farmer whose deep relationship with nature forms the very foundation of his musical express

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.

On Revolutionary Pekinese Opera, Ground Zero - under the ferociously precise direction of Otomo Yoshihide - detonates a cut‑and‑splice orchestra where free improv, noise, opera and plunderphonics collide with undimmed urgency. With the blessing of Otomo Yoshihide himself, Revolutionary Pekinese Opera returns to vinyl as one of the defining artefacts of 1990s avant‑garde music, sounding less like a period piece than a live explosive smuggled into the present. Originally conceived as a hypercharged reimagining of revolutionary opera through the cracked lens of sampling culture, the album captures Ground Zero at the height of its powers: a band that refused to respect borders between genres, media or histories, instead treating them all as combustible material. Three decades on, these compositions still feel like they might slip the stylus off the groove through sheer centrifugal force. At the core of the record is Otomo’s role as a kind of Deus ex machina from Fukushima, orchestrating a dense, unruly melting pot of musicians, sounds and strategies. Turntables, guitars, horns, rhythm section and electronics are marshalled into a constantly shifting field where nothing is allowed to remain stable for long. Fragments of Peking opera collide with free jazz eruptions; abrupt cuts splice militant fanfares into stretches of near‑silence or sandblasted noise; cartoonish samples and solemn themes rub shoulders, unsettling each other. What could have been a mere collage becomes, in Otomo’s hands, a tightly argued montage, where each juxtaposition pushes the music into a new, volatile state. The album’s power lies in how it weaponises experimentation without losing a sense of structure. Ground Zero operate like a rogue theatre troupe and a demolition crew at once, pulling recognizable motifs out of the wreckage only to shred them again seconds later. Passages of almost symphonic weight flare up out of scratchy loops and feedback, while sudden drop‑outs expose tiny, nervous details - a stray cymbal brush, a voice buried in the mix, a tape wobble - before the full ensemble slams back in. The result is a music of permanent revolution in miniature, forever overthrowing its own premises, yet somehow coherent in its manic logic. What is striking today is how little of Revolutionary Pekinese Opera’s allure has faded. In an era when sampling, hybridity and “experimental” tags have been thoroughly domesticated, this record still feels genuinely disruptive, its raw drive undiluted by time. The vinyl reissue not only restores one of Ground Zero’s keystone statements to its proper physical scale - with all the crackle, impact and dynamic extremes that implies - it also reasserts the album’s place as a key node in the global avant‑garde of the 1990s. Heard now, these pieces continue to strike with the same force they had on first release: unruly, subversive, and rigorously constructed, a reminder of how dangerous a band can sound when the studio, the archive and the stage are treated as one continuous battlefield.

code name: A-Z by Ryoji Ikeda comprises 26 sonic frequencies which form an audio conversation derived from the US military use of Morse code. Pressed on clear 12" vinyl with 13 locked grooves on each side and the title of each hand etched into the grooves.

Initially released on the occasion of Elevation 2017, an arts festival in Gstaad produced by LUMA Foundation, where Ryoji presented a site-specific installation of Test Pattern.

Japan’s leading electronic composer and visual artist, Ryoji Ikeda collaborates with The Vinyl Factory on a 12” vinyl-only release housing 10 locked grooves each consisting of a unique sine wave with a different frequency correlating to a different planet in the solar system.

Pressed on 180-gram heavyweight vinyl, housed in a bespoke screen printed sleeve, this unique edition has been produced in celebration of UK premiere of Ryoji Ikeda’s supersymmetry installation, showing at The Vinyl Factory Space at Brewer Street Car Park from 23 April - 31 May 2015.

Ikeda's supersymmetry is a fully immersive auditory and visual experience - an artistic vision of the reality of nature, an interpretation of quantum mechanics and quantum information theory from an aesthetic viewpoint. The work draws on his exchanges with scientists and engineers during his stay at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the world’s largest particle physics laboratory.