Avant-Garde / Contemporary
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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.
Originally released in 1977 and expanded for a 1995 edition by Musica Elettronica Viva founder member Allan Bryant, 'Space Guitars' uses no electronics, Bryant instead prepares and plays his modified instruments to remodel the sound into unclassifiable waves, clusters of bleeps and insectoid chirps. Bryant wasn't averse to electronic music - he started an influential electronic improv act with Alvin Curran, after all - but he didn't want to rely on synths to make "fascinating new and completely different sounds." And 'Space Guitars' collects studies he made specifically for guitar, whether it immediately sounds like it or not. The title track alone is mindbogglingly unique, making Derek Bailey and Fred Frith's prepared jammers sound almost pedestrian in comparison. We're not completely sure what Bryant is doing, but using only amplification and his arsenal of instruments, he creates sounds with as much variance and texture as a room filled with synthesizers, constantly modifying the pitch and any identifying sonic markers to prevent us from hearing anything that might be too straightforward. It's hard to believe 'Bouncing People Planet' isn't firing from a rack of modules; the way Bryant stacks his ping-ponging string sounds is undoubtedly inspired by synth methodologies and the sound itself is confounding, dense and rhythmic in ways you struggle to comprehend. Best of all though is 'Space Train', where Bryant makes his guitar sound like one of Alan Lamb's legendary aeolian harps, stretching its strings to make it mimic train wheels moving across miles of track.
Originally released in 1977 and expanded for a 1995 edition by Musica Elettronica Viva founder member Allan Bryant, 'Space Guitars' uses no electronics, Bryant instead prepares and plays his modified instruments to remodel the sound into unclassifiable waves, clusters of bleeps and insectoid chirps. Bryant wasn't averse to electronic music - he started an influential electronic improv act with Alvin Curran, after all - but he didn't want to rely on synths to make "fascinating new and completely different sounds." And 'Space Guitars' collects studies he made specifically for guitar, whether it immediately sounds like it or not. The title track alone is mindbogglingly unique, making Derek Bailey and Fred Frith's prepared jammers sound almost pedestrian in comparison. We're not completely sure what Bryant is doing, but using only amplification and his arsenal of instruments, he creates sounds with as much variance and texture as a room filled with synthesizers, constantly modifying the pitch and any identifying sonic markers to prevent us from hearing anything that might be too straightforward. It's hard to believe 'Bouncing People Planet' isn't firing from a rack of modules; the way Bryant stacks his ping-ponging string sounds is undoubtedly inspired by synth methodologies and the sound itself is confounding, dense and rhythmic in ways you struggle to comprehend. Best of all though is 'Space Train', where Bryant makes his guitar sound like one of Alan Lamb's legendary aeolian harps, stretching its strings to make it mimic train wheels moving across miles of track.
Guess-again specialists Death Is Not The End reissue Earle Brown’s 1974 solo debut of otherworldly concrète, notably featuring piano by live electronics pioneer and Cage foil, David Tudor, contributing to its uncanny magnetic tape soundscapes. ‘Music by Earle Brown’ features compositions written 1952-1963 during the years after its maker moved to New York to be closer to kindred spirits Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and David Tudor, whom he met years prior when they performed in Denver where he was teaching the Schillinger technique of composition. In New York, his style of open form composition would influence Cage’s own developments guided by indeterminacy, which in turn exposed Brown’s music to Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderna, and whch led him to work with Morton Feldman, as heard on their 1962 split side - Brown’s first recording credit, for Time Records. The four works speak to the pivotal emergence of new music during that era. In chronological order, ’November 1952’ features a stop/start angularity, shards of keys and persuasive detonations precisely performed by David Tudor, gripping in its embrace of negative space, contrasting with the fractious concrète cut-up tones of ‘Octet I’, a 1953 piece composed and executed entirely by Brown and comparable as much with Stockhausen’s early electronics as the oddities emerging from Pierre Henry’s studio around that same time. Forward ten years to the album’s long-form bookends, where he conducts an acoustic octet in the fever dream-like play of dissonance and queered pitches on ‘Novara’ (1962), and conducts many of the same performers, and joins them on magnetic tape, for ‘Times Five’ (1963), a fascinating electro-acoustic whorl of rich colours and icicle rhythms that slips off the page into sustained, pitch bent notes with an effect that must have felt radical at the time, and still represents the curiosity and freedoms of the New York School of composers.
Required listening for computer music freaks, 'Synthesized Voices' originally appeared in 1976, collecting innovative composer Charles Dodge's prophetic vocal experiments - recordings of Mark Strand's surrealist poems recreated on Bell Laboratories' uncanny synthetic speech tech. If you're into Anton Bruhin's deranged 'Speech Poems', this'll hit the spot. You've got to applaud DINTE for the timing of this one. Right now, it's hard to tell what's a real voice and what's been cobbled together using LLM tech, Frankensteined from decades of scraped voiceovers and newsreels. Synthesized voices are stapled to short form content and used to provide an air of humanity to mass-generated robo-slop. And listening to Dodge's set of pioneering studies, it's remarkable how the technology has evolved in such a short period of time. In the early '70s, when Dodge began his investigations, heavily synthesised voices were terrifyingly mechanical, usually used to depict malign forces - just cop any of those vintage Doctor Who episodes that feature Cybermen. What's fascinating is that Dodge seems to understand its crucial limitation; he doesn't attempt to make the voice sound more human (and therefore more tolerable), but mirrors Strand's absurdist logic instead, going beyond the limit of the larynx. Dodge explains that he labels it computer music because it's the Bell Labs computer setup that analysed and synthesised the voices, but he's quick to say that it's not generative music. Each poem was recorded to tape first then fed into the mainframe, that was then able to recreate the language using a pre-loaded archive of words and phrases. This would have resulted in a dry study, so Dodge tested the limits of the system by reconfiguring the parameters beforehand, shifting the pitch contour, the formants and duration of the syllables to radically diverge from the way we actually speak. The eight-minute 'In Celebration' is a great starting point. Composed in 1975, it seemingly shreds Strand's poem of the same name, in actuality locating its spirit, hanging on the word "you" just like Strand does. Dodge works with speed and pitch radically, twisting the phrases into machine-gunned barrages or disorienting decelerated harmonies. The words are still there - "your lungs prepare themselves for an ashen feeling" is a banger - but they've become hoarse, noisy growls or synthetic cries. The four part 'Speech Songs' is lighter, rooted in poems that were intended to invite audiences to respond with laughter, yet there's something even more disturbing about a computerised voice noisily bellowing out the same word, stuttering and getting stuck on throwaway rhymes. Really, Dodge hits his stride with the ambitious 'The Story of Our Lives', an "operatic dialogue for male and female synthetic voices" that we'd love to think Robert Ashley heard. There's a similar commitment to breaking down the formula of theater and opera on display here as Dodge corrupts these mundane utterances, forcing out near-songs and high drama from soap opera-ready domestic situations. With Dodge at the controls, the words shift haphazardly from recognizable to horrifyingly alien for almost no reason whatsoever, adding a sense of danger to what might regularly be daytime telly. It's an astute skewering of American culture that's maybe more relevant now than it ever was.
Required listening for computer music freaks, 'Synthesized Voices' originally appeared in 1976, collecting innovative composer Charles Dodge's prophetic vocal experiments - recordings of Mark Strand's surrealist poems recreated on Bell Laboratories' uncanny synthetic speech tech. If you're into Anton Bruhin's deranged 'Speech Poems', this'll hit the spot. You've got to applaud DINTE for the timing of this one. Right now, it's hard to tell what's a real voice and what's been cobbled together using LLM tech, Frankensteined from decades of scraped voiceovers and newsreels. Synthesized voices are stapled to short form content and used to provide an air of humanity to mass-generated robo-slop. And listening to Dodge's set of pioneering studies, it's remarkable how the technology has evolved in such a short period of time. In the early '70s, when Dodge began his investigations, heavily synthesised voices were terrifyingly mechanical, usually used to depict malign forces - just cop any of those vintage Doctor Who episodes that feature Cybermen. What's fascinating is that Dodge seems to understand its crucial limitation; he doesn't attempt to make the voice sound more human (and therefore more tolerable), but mirrors Strand's absurdist logic instead, going beyond the limit of the larynx. Dodge explains that he labels it computer music because it's the Bell Labs computer setup that analysed and synthesised the voices, but he's quick to say that it's not generative music. Each poem was recorded to tape first then fed into the mainframe, that was then able to recreate the language using a pre-loaded archive of words and phrases. This would have resulted in a dry study, so Dodge tested the limits of the system by reconfiguring the parameters beforehand, shifting the pitch contour, the formants and duration of the syllables to radically diverge from the way we actually speak. The eight-minute 'In Celebration' is a great starting point. Composed in 1975, it seemingly shreds Strand's poem of the same name, in actuality locating its spirit, hanging on the word "you" just like Strand does. Dodge works with speed and pitch radically, twisting the phrases into machine-gunned barrages or disorienting decelerated harmonies. The words are still there - "your lungs prepare themselves for an ashen feeling" is a banger - but they've become hoarse, noisy growls or synthetic cries. The four part 'Speech Songs' is lighter, rooted in poems that were intended to invite audiences to respond with laughter, yet there's something even more disturbing about a computerised voice noisily bellowing out the same word, stuttering and getting stuck on throwaway rhymes. Really, Dodge hits his stride with the ambitious 'The Story of Our Lives', an "operatic dialogue for male and female synthetic voices" that we'd love to think Robert Ashley heard. There's a similar commitment to breaking down the formula of theater and opera on display here as Dodge corrupts these mundane utterances, forcing out near-songs and high drama from soap opera-ready domestic situations. With Dodge at the controls, the words shift haphazardly from recognizable to horrifyingly alien for almost no reason whatsoever, adding a sense of danger to what might regularly be daytime telly. It's an astute skewering of American culture that's maybe more relevant now than it ever was.
Guess-again specialists Death Is Not The End reissue Earle Brown’s 1974 solo debut of otherworldly concrète, notably featuring piano by live electronics pioneer and Cage foil, David Tudor, contributing to its uncanny magnetic tape soundscapes. ‘Music by Earle Brown’ features compositions written 1952-1963 during the years after its maker moved to New York to be closer to kindred spirits Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and David Tudor, whom he met years prior when they performed in Denver where he was teaching the Schillinger technique of composition. In New York, his style of open form composition would influence Cage’s own developments guided by indeterminacy, which in turn exposed Brown’s music to Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderna, and whch led him to work with Morton Feldman, as heard on their 1962 split side - Brown’s first recording credit, for Time Records. The four works speak to the pivotal emergence of new music during that era. In chronological order, ’November 1952’ features a stop/start angularity, shards of keys and persuasive detonations precisely performed by David Tudor, gripping in its embrace of negative space, contrasting with the fractious concrète cut-up tones of ‘Octet I’, a 1953 piece composed and executed entirely by Brown and comparable as much with Stockhausen’s early electronics as the oddities emerging from Pierre Henry’s studio around that same time. Forward ten years to the album’s long-form bookends, where he conducts an acoustic octet in the fever dream-like play of dissonance and queered pitches on ‘Novara’ (1962), and conducts many of the same performers, and joins them on magnetic tape, for ‘Times Five’ (1963), a fascinating electro-acoustic whorl of rich colours and icicle rhythms that slips off the page into sustained, pitch bent notes with an effect that must have felt radical at the time, and still represents the curiosity and freedoms of the New York School of composers.
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!
Solo, duo, orchestra. An extraordinary sonic spectacle exploring acoustic phenomena through three forms of performance. In early summer 2025, a collective sonic experiment took place deep within the vast reverberant space beneath the body of Uchinokura Dam, surrounded by the mountains of Shibata, Niigata, Japan. Led by two singular artists who continually transcend the boundaries of their respective practices—Otomo Yoshihide, whose work traverses diverse musical worlds, and Ami Yamasaki, a voice and visual artist whose practice extends beyond the conventions of voice into the realm of physical expression—the experiment unfolded across three distinct forms of performance. The album comprises solo performances by Otomo and Yamasaki, each engaging in a dialogue with the space; a duo in which voice and guitar set off a chain of musical responses; and Uchinokura Dam Orchestra, an ensemble of 45 participants recruited through an open call, transforming beyond their individual intentions into a single, immense living organism. Voices, breath, bodies, water, instruments, sound objects, and every kind of incidental noise are transformed by the unique acoustic properties of the space from the very moment they are set in motion. Through unpredictable reactions and interactions, these sounds develop into vast, surging waves of resonance. An unprecedented experimental document capturing the emergence, interference, amplification, and transformation of acoustic phenomena within a single space.
Luke Fowler and David Grubbs meet for the first time on J’ai pensé sans paroles, a work that brings together two artists whose practices have long moved between experimental music, composition, film and sound. Glasgow-based Luke Fowler is an artist, filmmaker and musician whose work explores the relationship between documentary, experimental cinema and music. His films have often taken the form of portraits of composers and musicians, including Cornelius Cardew, R.D. Laing and Brunhild Ferrari, and his practice has been recognised with the inaugural Derek Jarman Award and a Turner Prize nomination. Based in Brooklyn, David Grubbs has been a central figure in experimental music for more than three decades. A founding member of Squirrel Bait, Bastro and Gastr del Sol, he has since developed an extensive body of solo work as a composer, pianist and improviser, alongside collaborations with artists including Pauline Oliveros, Tony Conrad and Susan Howe. His work also extends into writing and teaching, reflecting a sustained interest in the intersections between music, literature and the visual arts. The album’s first piece, J’ai pensé sans paroles, was created in the wake of Fowler’s two portrait films about French-German composer Brunhild Ferrari, N’importe quoi (for Brunhild) (2023) and N’importe quoi (Extérieur Jour) (2024). Ferrari is a composer of electroacoustic and musique concrète whose work developed in close proximity to the Parisian musique concrète tradition. She was also the longtime collaborator and partner of composer Luc Ferrari, working alongside him for more than four decades before developing an increasingly independent body of work. The piece incorporates sound material provided by Ferrari, as well as field recordings made by Eric La Casa during the production of Fowler’s films in Paris and Montreuil. These materials are joined by an excerpt from Wolfgang Meyer Tormin’s Vom Klavier für’s Klavier IV – Sieben Stücke (1987), alongside newly recorded piano and electronics by Fowler and Grubbs, recorded in Glasgow, Brooklyn and at La Muse en Circuit in Alfortville, France. Mixed by Fowler and Grubbs with Samuel J. Smith at Green Door Studio in Glasgow, the piece unfolds as a fluid assemblage of archival material, field recordings, voice, piano and electronics. Rather than functioning as a documentary record of Ferrari or Fowler’s films, J’ai pensé sans paroles transforms these disparate materials into a new compositional space, where memory, place and sound continually overlap. The processes of listening, recording and recontextualising become part of the composition itself, extending Fowler’s engagement with portraiture while opening it into a collaborative musical language with Grubbs. The album is completed by Verbal Equinox, recorded between Glasgow and Brooklyn. More direct and open-ended, the piece extends the dialogue established in J’ai pensé sans paroles, foregrounding the intuitive interplay between the two musicians and their shared interest in the unstable territory between composition and improvisation. Together, the two works mark the beginning of a collaboration between Fowler and Grubbs, bringing their distinct but closely connected practices into a shared space of listening, transformation and encounter.
Originally created in 1987 as an image album for a luxury Sanyo air-conditioner, Get at the Wave stands as one of the most surprising and enduring works of Japanese ambient music. Recorded using synthesizers and natural field recordings, the album was designed to transport listeners far from the heat and noise of urban life — into open water, gentle wind, and unhurried space. Kokubo's mastery as an acoustic environment designer is present in every texture, blending electronic composition with an almost physical sense of atmosphere and place. Intimate, expansive, and quietly radical, Get at the Wave is an essential document of kankyō ongaku — and one that sounds more necessary than ever.
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.
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 Vinyl Factory presents a brand new Ryoji Ikeda release. music for strings comprises three works written between 2020 and 2023, commissioned by Ensemble Modern, Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ, and DTzM, and built entirely around the physical behaviour of bowed strings.
“In 2016, I had a series of audiovisual concerts at a festival in Kyoto. Ensemble Modern from Frankfurt was there, performing a large piece by Heiner Goebbels. We became friends, and years later, in 2021, they commissioned me to create a new piece for their 2023 season,” Ikeda explains. “Through a workshop with their players, I decided to focus exclusively on strings”.
REFLECTION [for string nonet], op.13 has all nine players locked into a seven-eight rhythm, but staggered so the parts seem to answer each other.
PRISM [for string nonet], op.14 takes the idea of white light splitting into a spectrum and applies it to sound, with Ikeda working through almost the entire pitch range of the ensemble, pulling out clusters of notes the way a prism pulls out colour.
MIRROR [one for two], op.12 is built on a sheet of music where the staff notation is mirrored, allowing it to be read simultaneously from both the normal and opposite directions. As a result, two players share the single notation, performing together while reading it in opposite directions.
“For many years, I had ideas for MIRROR [one for two] that exists only as a dream. It seems simple, but it is extremely difficult to make sense of due to its very restricted rule. At the start, I decided to tackle this piece,” says Ikeda.
“Another dream of mine was to form a string ensemble arranged linearly on stage. Usually players perform in a semicircular formation to see each other. A linear formation, however, denies this visual connection. The challenge was implemented with PRISM [for string nonet] and REFLECTION [for string nonet].”
Performed by Ensemble Modern and recorded by SWR, the work premiered in Amsterdam on 8 February 2024 before its UK premiere at the Barbican on 20 February 2026.
Ryoji Ikeda, Japan’s leading electronic composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda focuses on the essential characteristics of sound itself and that of visuals as light by means of both mathematical precision and mathematical aesthetics. Ikeda has gained a reputation as one of the few international artists working convincingly across both visual and sonic media.
He elaborately orchestrates sound, visuals, materials, physical phenomena and mathematical notions into immersive live performances and installations.
Eklekto Eklekto is a contemporary percussion collective founded in 1974 in Geneva. Constantly seeking to reinvent percussion music, the group collaborates with living composers and contemporary artists through concerts, multimedia projects and artistic events that question the listener’s expectations towards new musical forms.
Eklekto has premiered over 100 new works and performed hundreds of internationally acclaimed shows.
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.
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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Reona is the debut album on Kou Records by REONA — tap dancer, metal percussionist, improviser, and one of the most viscerally original sound artists working anywhere in the world today. Recorded over two days in January 2026 at Studio Dede and produced by Randall Dunn, the album captures REONA's full-body practice in real time: tap shoes and wooden board as rhythmic foundation, layered against metal sheets, chains, stainless steel bowls, plastic bags, loudspeakers, and an arsenal of found and handmade objects accumulated across years of performance. The instruments carry their own histories — a signboard from Okinawa stamped with the warning of unexploded bomb disposal, a transportation company sign from the Jingisukan Pot Museum in Iwamizawa, a festival bell acquired at the start of the COVID era, South Indian meal plates, an oil pot from Taiwan. Stomp, scratch, touch, strike, blow, groan — REONA makes full use of everything from her legs to her mouth, collapsing the boundary between dance and percussion, body and instrument. Her practice sits at a rarely occupied intersection: the Japanese noise tradition of Merzbow and Otomo Yoshihide on one side, the percussive physicality of Milford Graves and Han Bennink on the other — with no precedent for what happens when those two worlds meet in a single body. Track 7, M108, features a guest appearance by Atsuo — drummer of legendary Japanese rock band Boris — in a collision of two distinct but kindred approaches to rhythm and noise. Recorded, mixed, and produced by Randall Dunn. Mastered by Ben Greenberg. Dolby Atmos mixes by Ben Greenberg. Lacquer cut by Paul Gold at Salt Mastering. Front cover artwork Legend of the Snow Spirit by Kazuki Tomokawa; back cover portrait by Allison Brant.
Altarpiece H. af K. by Eric Wubbels - composer, pianist, co-director of New York's Wet Ink Ensemble, and 2023 recipient of the Ernst von Siemens Composer Prize. "An entirely acoustic spectral work for three bassoons, the piece draws its name and spirit from Hilma af Klint's Paintings for the Temple. Written for Dana Jessen, Ben Roidl-Ward, and Katherine Young, it exploits the bassoon's capacity for multiphonics and microtonal inflection to build dense, vibrating spectra from the instruments' fundamental acoustic properties alone — no electronics, no processing — occupying a rare space between the spectral worlds of S celsi and Dumitrescu and the sustained physical weight of Sunn O))). Across two long movements, the music moves between stasis and propulsion, arriving at transformation through sustained attention . Recorded at Power Station Studios and produced by Randall Dunn."