MUSIC

Stones Throw Records debuts new imprint Listening Position with the long-awaited reissue of Kelan Phil Cohran & Legacy’s spiritual jazz masterpiece African Skies.

A holy grail for jazz collectors, African Skies has been out of print since its initial pressing of 1000 vinyl copies in 2010. The thousands who’ve long sought their own copy will welcome this reissue as the definitive version of this profound recording. Used copies fetch over $500+ on the used market, and thousands of users “want” the record on Discogs.com.

Kelan Phil Cohran was a member of the pioneering afro- futurist Sun Ra Arkestra and appears on several of their most acclaimed recordings.

He released several albums of his own compositions in the 1960s with his band The Artistic Heritage Ensemble, including a revelatory tribute to Malcom X – a well-known collectible for jazz aficionados.

Cohran was a mentor to artists such as Earth, Wind & Fire, Chaka Khan and The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, a Chicago-based brass band whose members included 8 of his sons.

For anyone who still associates Oren Ambarchi exclusively with the clipped, bass-heavy tones of solo electric guitar works such as Suspension, this rhythmically churning one-man-band monster of an album-length piece might seem to come out of nowhere. However, listeners who have followed the breadth of his work for the last few years (solo and in projects with collaborators from Jim O’Rourke to Stephen O’Malley and Keith Rowe to Keiji Haino) will have noted how Ambarchi has allowed increasingly clear traces of his enthusiasms as a music listener (for classic rock, minimal techno and 70’s fusion, among other areas) to surface in his performances and recordings, all the time filtering them through his signature long-form structures and psychoacoustic sonics. Recorded in a single inspired studio session, Sagittarian Domain displaces Ambarchi’s trademark guitar sound from the centre of the mix, its presence felt only as an occasional ghostly reverberated shimmer. Endlessly pulsating guitar and bass lines sit alongside electronic percussion and thundering motorik drumming (familiar from his work with Keiji Haino) at the core of the piece, locking into a voodoo groove like Faust covering a 70’s cop show theme. The work is founded on hypnotic almost-repetition, the accents of the drum hits and interlocking bass and guitar lines shifting almost imperceptibly back and forwards over the beat as they undergo gradual transformations of timbre. Cut-up and phase-shifted strings enter around the half-way mark like an abstracted memory of the eastern-tinged fusion of the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s classic Visions of the Emerald Beyond, before returning for an extended, stark yet affecting come-down coda, equal parts Gavin Bryars and Purple Rain. While Sagittarian Domain contains traces of a diversity of influences, it mines all of them to uncover something that is clearly an extension of Ambarchi’s own investigations up to this point, exhibiting the same care for micro-detail and surrender to the physicality of sound that are present in all of his work, extending them in new ways to repetition, pulse and rhythm Francis Plagne

I've just released a collaboration CD album under the name of my Agencement with Masami Akita's Merzbow, which was recorded in autumn 2024.

I hadn't been in contact with him for a very long time, but we were recontacted and considered for a collaborative project for a few years, and we finally did it this time.
We also did the cover artwork for each side.

This is not a digital-only release, so please pick up the CD and listen to it.

Recorded in 1996, Merzbow’s The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue is one of a series of unique editions from his vast catalogue that reveals a side of his practice often under represented.

During the late 1980s and into the 1990s, Masami Akita was sometimes working on film and theatre music. In this space he created a series of recordings that capture the full scope of his sound worlds.

Given the nature of these settings, his compositional approaches were varied, seeking to create both intensely crushing walls of sound and more spatial, and at times rhythmic, pieces that plot out an approach to sound making which atomises his universe of sound, and uncovered the singular detail that is often consumed in the whole.

The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue is the soundtrack to the theatre piece 'Akutoku no Sakae/Bitoku no Fuko' by Romantica. Based on Marquis de Sades's 'Historie de Juliette ou les Prosperités du vice' & 'Les Infortunes de la vertu’, this recording was originally released with limited distribution and remains one of the lesser available Merzbow recordings.

This edition is completely remastered and contains an additional cut from those original sessions.

It has been twenty-five years since the seismic events of 2001—when twin towers collapsed under terrorist attack and Coventry's sonic insurgent Russell Haswell launched his inaugural salvo on the original Mego label with Live Salvage 1997–2000. The intervening era has delivered unrelenting turbulence: protracted wars, institutional corruption, a global pandemic, the resurgence of fascist currents, rampant media distortion, and omnipresent surveillance. For Haswell, a lifelong admirer of 1970s and 1980s dystopian cinema, the verdict is unequivocal: "Science Fiction is now!" In the face of this darkening reality, LET IT GO arrives as both acknowledgment and antidote. This new full length on Editions Mego extends an olive branch through defiant sonic diversity—an unpredictable mosaic that embraces everything from propulsive rhythms to radical abstraction and enveloping ambience. True to Haswell's core practice, the material draws from the same tactile, free-improvised electroacoustic framework that powers his live sets: immediate, powerful and unscripted. The album weaves reverent echoes of 1990s Detroit techno's hypnotic pulse and the abrasive, metallic edge of the Birmingham sound into fractured generative territories. Haswell returns to his computer-generated origins while integrating his recent modular-synthesis experiments. During a residency at the Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts (BEK) in Norway, he harnessed the latest GRM Tools suite to conjure the volatile, "rapidly fluctuating pitched sounds" that characterized Iannis Xenakis' late electronic works—resulting in pieces such as Fall 3 and Fall 2, where instability becomes a form of vitality. The tracks Exit Downwards and The Anxieties Of Our Time whilst reflecting the currents of the release also offer surprisingly melodic patterns over jagged rhythms. The wryly titled Thu 25 Dec 2025, (recorded in Glasgow after a solitary post-Christmas-lunch walk home) is a vast drone which evolves according to the random walk model—known more evocatively as the drunken walk—each sonic step veering unpredictably, mirroring the disoriented lens of contemporary existence. LET IT GO is liberation. Amid the cacophony of crumbling certainties, Haswell deploys a full arsenal of resistance: kinetic drive, disorienting rupture, quiet refuge, raw aggression, and tentative hope. In an age where dystopia has shifted from fiction to lived fact, this music asserts that possibility endures.

When you’re creating something loosely referred to as “art” with another person, you’re mining the depths of minds and experience, searching connections with pasts, each of us producing from a different place. Communication exists as unspoken and simultaneous, more carnal than collaborative, and dwelling rather than saying. We all miss that, wrapped up fantasies of perfectness and lovesick doves. Youth, how fleeting and naive. "Created by commission for the University of California at Irvine as a sound companion for an exhibition of 13 different 14th Century manuscripts. The original pieces existed as 13 different parts for each individual piece of art." Or so the origins of the original release in 2009 on Students of Decay state. What seemed real was a myriad liquor haze, fabrication, or imagination. Embellishment is equivalent to invention, and that moment when you can’t tell the difference between dreams or reality (I surely can’t remember which is which now) is important - and must be noted. I remember pouring over 14th century art, utilizing unauthorized library passes, and being witness to the trajectories of two individuals on divergent but somehow-crossing timelines. Originally recorded in 2007-2009 (?) by Danielle Baquet and Will Long, with backpacked gear, garage photography, sleepless nights and skipped work. I brought the tape and made the loops, she brought the laptop and the pen and paper. Try to look at it like this. Recorded in stereo, then split into two tracks for each left and right channel, reversing one side and adding reverse reverb, and the other long reverb and then reversing. Making each stereo again, then putting back together and blending each left and right together to make a stereo track again. This was an age of hybrid experiments between analog tape loops and digital processing, to render a new path, for better or worse. Somehow this correlated with a pad of scribbled poetry - whether original or quoted (one can never tell), a few random phone numbers, and the omnipresence of long-toed shoes in the 14th century paintings. “How befitting, like Georgia O’Keefe’s flowers.” What all comes down to is this - that sometimes those paths of yours and theirs cross for a time - and only for a time, and in that time, you’re there in that same place. It doesn’t mean that you know the other person, or that you ever will. But maybe, just maybe, you’ll be looking for the same thing at that moment, and that’s what you’ve shared, in many different ways, in different directions; backwards, equivocally.

The Glitch hype was a rather short one. But it brought together different scenes; minimal techno, sound art and electronic minimalism. Then it hit a dead end and dissolved. In the centre of Glitch we found labels like Mille Plateaux (who released the formative ”Clicks + Cuts”) and raster-noton who especially with their static series formed a sound. The first release (2000) was by a young Andreas Tilliander who under his new moniker MOKIRA released the ”CLIPHOP” album. He had done synth and techno for years and then got his hands on an early COH CD on raster-noton in some Stockholm record shop and decided to send a demo to Carsten Nicolai and crew. They luckily decided to release it. I got my copy in the Wave record shop in Paris, as I knew Tilliander’s earlier techno and synth stuff. But this blew my mind. Sharp, funky (yes), static and it sounded like pure electricity. It still sounds great, and rather alien to me. I am proud to reissue this on iDEAL, and to dive even deeper into "CLIPHOP" - check out Johan Jacobsson Franzén's book on the album.

Joachim Nordwall, Gothenburg 29.10.2025.

Convergence is a new live album from William Hooker featuring guitarist John King. Recorded at the B10 Festival in Shenzhen, China on October 25, 2024, it captures an exhilarating set shaped by the audience’s energy and deep mutual connection. Hooker’s thunderous drumming meets King’s walls of distorted guitar in an expansive, hour-long performance of raw intensity, recorded direct from the soundboard. The music moves fluidly between intensity and restraint, structure and spontaneity. The album stands as a document of cross-cultural exchange and creative freedom, reinforcing Hooker’s decades-long legacy as a leading force in avant-garde music while showcasing a compelling collaboration with King.

September 23rd is the first release in William Basinski’s new Arcadia Archive series. Recorded in September 1982 in his first loft in the pre-gentrified DUMBO neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, September 23rd is a recently unearthed early entry in what has become a hugely inspirational and influential catalog. Built from a piano piece that Basinski composed in high school in the mid-1970s, September 23rd quickly evolved into a vastly different work. As Basinski explains: “The original piano recordings were made on on a piano belonging to my downstairs neighbor, John Epperson – later known more famously as world-renowned drag artist, Lypsinka – at 351 Jay Street aka Casa Degli Artisti, our first loft in New York. It was recoded with a little portable (probably Radio Shack) cassette deck sitting on the piano as I improvised a piece I had been working on since high school. It was pretty terrible, but when I did the John Giorno/William Burroughs cut-up technique, suddenly I had something to put through the Frippertronics loop and feedback loop tape delay system – and boy did I get results. A very prolific time for a young, wacked-out queen in NYC.”

Manon Anne Gillis has been creating music using primitive systems since the 1980s. Her ninth solo album weaves together her voice, breathing, words and sounds using ingenuous methodologies. She has remarked that her sound is not something conceptual and that feeling and immersion matter far more to her than understanding. Her latest collection consists of ten pieces that approach sound as a tactile, sensory experience. She transforms spoken word and singing into blurred noise and irregular repetitions, plunging them into rhythm tracks to create new inner worlds.

I Against I is the third studio album from Bad Brains, originally released in 1986 on SST Records. It remains influential to this day, inspiring countless punk, ska, reggae, and hardcore bands with its innovative sound and uncompromising attitude.

This reissue marks the eighth release in the remaster campaign, re-launching the Bad Brains Records label imprint. In coordination with the band, Org Music has overseen the restoration and remastering of the iconic Bad Brains’ recordings. The audio was mastered by Dave Gardner and pressed at Furnace Record Pressing.

20th Anniversary Repress! 
Merzbow's Merzbeat is one the most unique and legendary titles in the artist's vast archive. This 20th anniversary repress is being issued at the same time as CD reissue of his 1983 album Material Action 2 and a brand new collaboration with Arcane Device, all on Important Records....

Paulownia by Merzbow is a 2025 full-length statement comprising two lengthy compositions that fuse intense electronic manipulation with Merzbow’s enduring fascination for natural phenomena. Across both pieces, the album merges organic inspiration and harsh digital process, producing a hypnotic yet confrontational experience.​ **Edition of 200** With Paulownia, Merzbow (Masami Akita) delivers a formidable new addition to a catalog already legendary in the experimental music world. The 2025 release spans two extended pieces—“Paulownia part1” and “Paulownia part2”—each developing a dense matrix of sound where digital noise entwines with subtle references to organic structures. The album’s name, drawn from the paulownia tree, hints at Merzbow’s long-standing environmental preoccupations; here, they are rendered less as representational themes and more as evocative textures and forms. The compositions surge with layered feedback, haunting drones, and micro-rhythmic fluctuations, evoking an ambiguous, immersive environment that rewards attentive listening.​ What distinguishes Paulownia is its ability to generate tension and release from the interplay between ferocity and fragility. The music neither settles into a predictable assault nor dissipates into formless ambience; instead, it sustains a meticulously sculpted intensity. As always, Merzbow’s commitment to tonality, texture, and structure resists easy classification, maintaining a delicate balance between repetition and change, aggression and atmosphere. For those prepared to let sound define its own territory, Paulownia is a compelling testament to Merzbow’s ongoing innovation, fortifying his place at the core of the noise tradition while persistently opening new vistas for exploration.​

Considered by the Chicago Reader to be "one of the most gifted and innovative guitarists of the decade," Rafael Toral has developed a unique sound world, having been as influenced by Alvin Lucier and Brian Eno as by Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine. Using the guitar as part of a complex electronic instrument, Toral has collaborated with Jim O'Rourke, John Zorn, Sonic Youth, Rhys Chatham and Phill Niblock and played in many European countries. He's also a member of MIMEO, the electronic orchestra featuring Keith Rowe, Christian Fennesz, Peter Rehberg, Kaffe Matthews, and many others. Violence Of Discovery And Calm Of Acceptance is a collection of ten small pieces crafted by Toral with extreme precision and care through the last 7 years. Using guitars and analog technology, it can be described as Toral's best work, embodying all the directions he explored in his previous critically-acclaimed records, Sound Mind Sound Body, Wave Field and Aeriola Frequency but taking them into new dimensions. The highly evocative, intricate and subtle guitar drones are captured in the beautiful photography of Heitor Alvelos, a Portuguese artist, and in the artwork of Jon Wozencroft. The background noise on track 10 is a recording of silence during a Space Shuttle mission real-time webcast. All other sounds were made by electric guitars. The album was recorded between 1993 and 2000 and mastered at Noise Precision, Lisbon.

"PHONEMES (1981)" is newly added to the LP released in 1984 by Tudor when it is made into a CD. "PULSERS" that uses a composite modulator designed by Gordon Munma, Takehisa Kosugi's electronic violin, etc. as a sound source, and "UNTITLED" that has a strong electronic circuit in addition to Takehisa Kosugi's vocalization. You can enjoy your own analog electronic circuit.

A computer-based work by David Behrman, a major figure in American experimental music. An exceptional masterpiece that uses a computer to synthesize the sounds of musical instruments played by Rhys Chatham, Ben Neil, and Takehisa Kosugi, and develops a fantastic sound with sharp edges. Unlike the content received by core contemporary music fans such as "Wave Train", it is a comfortable and easy-to-listen content that appeals to ambient to club music lovers.

Matthew Herbert and drummer/ vocalist Momoko Gill announce the release of new album Clay via Strut in June 2025. A soulful, elastic collaboration, Clay treads nimbly between the dancefloor and the more introspective moods of the early hours, both reminiscent of Herbert’s iconic album Around The House while taking off in a compelling new direction. Agile and open-hearted, Clay is a thrilling, sonically adventurous record from two of the UK’s most forward-thinking artists.

Orbiting around Herbert’s fleet-footed productions and the ingenuity of Momoko Gill’s dexterous, melodic writing, Clay is at once stripped-back and rhythmically complex, drawing on a variety of found sources - from japanese kotos to basketballs - to give the sound an unmistakably organic feel.

Bringing together original sampling techniques, live improvisation and lush, expansive arrangements, Clay is lifted into higher realms by Momoko Gill’s intimate vocal performance, soaring wide-winged across the album’s eleven tracks, whether on the euphoric melancholia of ‘Mowing’ or the emotive duet ‘Heart’.

Clay follows the 2024 release of debut collaboration ‘Fallen’ and Momoko Gill’s remix of Matthew Herbert’s ‘The Horse Is Here’. And yet, although Clay marks the first full-length release between Herbert and Gill, the duo’s shared passion for pushing sonic boundaries has played a crucial role in their respective careers to date.

For Herbert that means treating the world as an instrument, making music using everything from the sounds of a bomb exploding in Libya, a horse skeleton, a tank driving over a meal made for Tony Blair, 20,000 dogs, 245 shops and countless other noises. His album ONE PIG – which follows the lifecycle of a pig from birth to plate – remains one of the most ambitious and provocative pieces of electronic music this century, cementing his reputation as an utterly singular composer, artist and producer.

Self-taught in drums and composition, Momoko Gill’s journey to Clay has been similarly experimental – cutting her teeth in South London’s multi-disciplinary music scene, embracing new challenges and collaborating with the likes of Coby Sey, Tirzah and Alabaster DePlume. Although drums and vocals are her mediums of choice, Gill’s multi-instrumental talents were on full show on 2024’s EP as An Alien Called Harmony with poet/rapper Nadeem Din-Gabisi, and she continues to hone her style in the frictions between genres.

With an intuitive feel for one another’s sound, Clay is a meeting of musical minds that resonates far beyond the sum of its parts - a startlingly fresh, beautifully conceived record from two artists who sound like they’ve been playing together all their lives.

A deluxe, embossed 2 LP box set. Alongside a remastered version of PHAROAH, his seminal record from 1977, are two previously unreleased live performances of his masterpiece, “Harvest Time." Includes a 24-page booklet with rarely seen photographs and ephemera, as well as interviews with many of the participants and a conversation with Pharoah himself.

Based in Hong Kong, vocalist and songwriter Anita Tatlow — also known for her work as Salt of the Sound and Narrow Skies — presents a delicate ambient work that gently draws the listener into its sound world.

9 CD with 9 composers of electroacoustic music who did work at INA-GRM.Ludger Brümmer, “Deconstructing Double District” (2011), “Xronos” (2002), “Glasharfe” (2006), “Spin” (2014).Philippe Leroux, “La guerre du faire” (1992), “M.É” (1998), “Objets trouvés… posés” (2009).Diego Losa, “Cronicas del tiempo” (2005), “Historias de dos mundos” (2007), “Sortie d’un rêve dans une nuit étrange très loin d’ici…” (2012), “Horizons ou le récit d’un voyageur” (2015).Mario Mary, “Signes émergents”v (2003), “2261” (2009), “Une bouffée d’air” (2006), “Portraits témoins” (1997).Luis Naon, “La sphère et la pierre” (1993-94), “Perspectives” (2004 – 2017), “Lascaux rbana” (2004).Ake Parmerud, “Les objets obscurs” (1991), “Renaissance” (1994), “Dreaming in darkness” (2005), “Electric birds” (2012).Elzbieta Sikora, “Axerouge V” (2011), “Chicago Al Fresco” (2009), “Flashback” (1968-1997), “Derrière son double” (1982-83).Kees Tazelaar, “Chatoyance” (2013), “Chroma” (2006), “Sternflüstern” (2003), “Sérénade” (2016).Hans Tutschku, “Extrémités lointaines” (1998), “Distance liquide” (2007), “Monochord” (2008), “Migration pétrée” (2001).

A 14-disc box set tracing the discography of Eliane Radigue, the Tibetan-meets-electronic music guru, is now available Box with a gorgeous booklet! Having studied at RTF Studios in France under music concretists such as Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, Eliane Radigue has been creating profound electronic music for decades, and now her historical archive is here! This 14-disc box contains many of her masterpieces released in CD format, including some that are now hard to find, and even includes Metamkine's mini-CD "Biogenesis.

lovesliescrushing's Bloweyelashwish is an ambient masterpiece, originally recorded in 1992 with a 12-string guitar, 4-track recorder, looping pedal, and boundless reverb. Scott Cortez’s project, alongside the haunting vocals of Melissa Arpin Duimstra, transformed bedroom daydreams into a serene, moonlit journey on a timeless sea. This expanded and remastered double album features five additional tracks, each distortion-laden and hypnotic, alongside lyrics and a replica postcard to guide listeners deeper into its world. Blindness, not eyewash, is the intended experience.

“How to begin? No beginning... never ending reverberation,” Antoine Beuger writes in the accompanying notes to Leo Svirsky’s River Without Banks. Dedicated to his first piano teacher Irena Orlov, River Without Banks is a mesmerizing, emotional collection of pieces that are simultaneously complex and fluid. The title River Without Banks comes from a chapter of musicologist Genrikh “Henry” Orlov’s profound work Tree of Music. In said chapter, Orlov traces the history of sacred music from the Western and Eastern tradition and how the forms (of the chant, raga etc.) sought to eliminate the division between the physical and the spiritual--the bank and the river.

Arranged for two pianos with accompaniment from strings, trumpet, and electronics, this is Svirsky’s first piece to approach the history of the piano and the possibilities of the recording studio, and his deepest dive yet into exploring the instability of listening and its transformation of musical semantics and affect. Like Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas project, Svirsky overlays romantic musical gestures to create a lush unfamiliarity. No sooner than each track begins the next moment unfurls beneath it, cascading time and blurring perception of past and present.

Akin to a multidimensional Rzewski thematic interpretation, Svirsky’s music defies genre-classification or classical ideology while its virtuosity clearly stems from somewhere from within disciplined traditions. Continuously revisiting, revising, and renewing its emotional core, River Without Banks is less an album of songs than songs of a singular, unlocatable album. Performed by the composer with assistance from Britton Powell, Max Eilbacher, Leila Bordreuil, Tim Byrnes, and recorded by Al Carlson.

A new album of piano driven ambient music from British composer Robert Haigh. Following in the path of his albums for the Japanese Siren label, Creatures of the Deep is an underground vantage of a meeting between the musical worlds of Harold Budd and Erik Satie. With a storied musical career that has ranged widely in style ― from his industrial-avant-garde works on Nurse With Wound’s United Diaries label as SEMA to his legendary ambient drum and bass records as Omni Trio on Moving Shadow ― Robert Haigh's work occupies a space between music and mystery. With Creatures of the Deep, Haigh is at the peak of his powers. Among noir, minimal, neo-classical landscapes are robust scatterings of bright reflection and a musical expression that is subtle and elusive yet uniquely Haigh’s in its voice and masterful execution. The closer we examine, the more is revealed, and the less is defined.