MUSIC

Nico's second solo album, 1968's The Marble Index, & third solo album, 1970's Desertshore, have long been out of print. These reissues include audio mastered from the original tapes and previously unreleased photos of Nico by Guy Webster.

Nico's haunting vocals predicted the Gothic movement and co-producer and Velvet Undeground's band mate John Cale's startingly modern classical production ensured The Marble Index's timeless appeal. The iconic music journalist Lester Bangs wrote, “The Marble Index is the greatest piece of 'avant-garde classical', 'serious' music of the last half of the 20th century so far,” and the New Yorker recently hailed both records as “austere miracles of will and invention.”

A rare early album by Creation Rebel back in print for the first time since 1979. Rebel Vibrations was originally issued by the pre-On-U Sound label Hitrun. The rhythms stem from one of the first recording sessions organised by maverick producer Adrian Sherwood, taking advantage of ace Jamaican drummer Lincoln “Style” Scott, sticksman for the Roots Radics, visiting the UK for the first time.

Pairing him up with UK-based players such as Crucial Tony, Lizard Logan, Doctor Pablo and Clifton Morrison, the result is a set of tough and uncompromising dub tunes, or as Sherwood describes it: “a structure of suppressed rhythms and unique possibilities in sonic space.”

A sublime set of roots, vocal and dubbed out instrumental magic, Close Encounters Of The Third World is a real lost gem in the treasure-filled Creation Rebel back catalogue. A true cross-atlantic collaboration - initial rhythm tracks were laid down in London in 1978, with horns and vocals overdubbed at Channel One in Jamaica, before bandleader Crucial Tony returned to London with the tapes for the album to be mixed by a visiting Prince Jammy.

Originally released on pre-On-U Sound label Hitrun, and the second album released by the group chronologically. Unavailable for 45 years, it has been carefully pieced back together, for this new edition featuring extended 12” discomix versions of “Beware” and “Natty Conscience Free”, re-cut by Frank Merritt at The Carvery. Includes new sleevenotes by reggae scholar David Katz that tells the story of the album in full.

Original Rockers is a compilation of singles, all recorded between 1972 and 1975. It was originally released in 1979 on Greensleeves Records and was compiled by journalist and photographer Dave Hendley. It features Robbie Shakespeare and Aston Barrett on bass guitar, Earl "Chinna" Smith on guitar and guest vocals from Dillinger on the track 'Brace a Boy'. It was recorded at Channel One Studios and Dynamic Sounds in Kingston, Jamaica and mixed by legendary dub producer King Tubby.

Limited Clear Vinyl edition, 300 copies! Dorothy Ashby album from 1961 that also features female vibes player Terry Pollard. Comes with a version of The Skatalites 'Guns of Navarone' which is a pretty surreal listening experience. From the original liner notes: "Dorothy Ashby may not be the first jazz harpist (Caspar Reardon) or the first female jazz harpist (Adele Girard), but her good feeling for time and ability to construct melodic, guitar-like lines, mark her as the most accomplished modern jazz harpist (...) Accompanying her was another Detroit girl, Terry Pollard. Terry's main instrument is the piano and she is one of the best in the country, bar none. She is also a pretty fair country vibraharpist and in this set, Miss Pollard plays vibes exclusively. With them is still another Detroiter, Herman Wright, who like Miss Pollard has worked with Terry Gibbs and Yusef Lateef, and who also served as Miss Ashby's regular bassist. (...) Completing the quartet is Jimmy Cobb, drummer for the Miles Davis group. During the proceedings, Cobb travels between brushes and sticks without upsetting the equilibrium of this essentially quiet set. There is wide range of material presented here, from blues like Benny Goodman's title number, 'Soft Winds', and Miss Ashby's 'With Strings Attached', to movie themes such as 'Laura', 'Wild Is the Wind', and 'The Guns Of Navarone'. Then there are works by such superior writers of standards as Kurt Weill ('My Ship'); Gershwin ('The Man I Love' and 'Love Is Here To Stay')"

This record shows many different places, from some electronics, SambaJazz, Batucada, etc. Surprise. Perhaps almost unknown by many friends at Loronix. This is a work of a serious Jazz Band. This cover edition is sponsored by Varig Airlines that gave this album as a gift to their DC-10 passengers.

Fully licensed and ltd to 1000 copies on clear vinyl ! Vintage Collection! The Queens of Lover’s rock Louisa Mark, also known as "Markswoman" (and) the Creator of Lover’s Rock Clem Bushay as producer Featuring Aswad, Zabandis, The Heptones, Rico and Don Drummond Jr. , Dennis Bovell, The In Crowd, Dave Barker, Owen Gray..and more

Hermeto's first album recorded in Brazil, and his second solo album (the first one was recorded and released in the USA). Performs as composer of "Bebê" "Plin" and "Serearei", arranger, conductor and instrumentalist. The most experimental record of the master where he shows from beautiful themes like the choro Bebê, which is already a classic of his authorship to deconstructions of well-known themes like Asa branca and Carinhoso. On the track Sereiarei you can even hear an "orchestra" of pigs, geese and other animals. The opener track Bebê was sampled in 1994 by Japanese acid-jazz group United Future Organization.

This is a limited edition 2x7" edition of a wildly experimental and unique gem from 1981 (originally released on Japan's Pinakotheca). Spread over two records packaged in a bubble wrap outer sleeve - , the set features unreleased full length takes and unheard material from the band's master cassettes. All transferred and mastered with the blessing of the original musicians. The release features heavy involvement from Morioka based musician, Onnyk (key member of the near mythical The Fifth Column group) , an underground behemoth who's released music on seminal labels such as Vanity Records (JP), Insane Music (BE) & Thirdmind (UK) to name a few. 2 discs. 26 minutes of incredibly forward thinking music from 43 years ago... Ships with a scan code to liner notes - the information is as intriguing as the music.

Repress! Vinyl LP presented in a deluxe edition with printed innersleeve and a special transparent obi strip; the cover is also printed internally. Hand numbered. Making music is trying to start over again every time. It’s a matter of questioning and approaching. It’s never settling for the sound that fills the world around. It’s looking for a door in the sky. And maybe find it, open it, go beyond it. Rod Modell and Gigi Masin, this time together, are offering each other vibrations and insights. The former lives between two lakes, the latter between the Venetian lagoon and the sea. Everyone on their own shore, building electronic bridges in semi-darkness to allow us to cross too. No words would be needed to explain this work... It is the meeting of two people, an exchange of different points of view. A way to meet and then break up. Rod has reworked a piece of Gigi making it his own... and so did Gigi with a piece of Rod. A magnificent intersection of sounds and thoughts... remaining suspended to watch the passing of time, to listen to the noises and silences of life that passes inexorably around us.

Subtropic Cosmos is the international debut album by Japanese artist Hitomi Moriwaki. Composed and recorded at her Fukuoka home during the worldwide pandemic between 2020-2022, the album was produced by Hideki Urawa, who has also worked with Kikagaku Moyo and other musical acts on Guruguru Brain. "Subtropic Cosmos" in particular is a wonderful work that conveys the "joy of making things" to listeners, as it is filled with various influences from her diverse activities. As suggested by the album title, most of the songs were created under the unprecedented conditions of corona--and as a result, were inspired by the consciousness of traveling through imaginary foreign lands and nature. As if adventuring through the universe inside of her own mind, Moriwaki's versatility is best experienced through her fearless fusion of hip-hop, pop and experimental music. Through a lens of psychedelic production by Hideki Urawa, this album is a truly special, one-of-a-kind space experience for listeners to enjoy and embark upon.

Two lost & found lofi nuggets from the Jahtari vault, appearing on 7" floppy disc for the very first time. "Arcade Addict" is the original Dub cut of Mikey Murka's "Sensi Addict", a version of the sweet Ujama classic that came out as a Jahtari Net-7" in 2006. Sprinkled with field recordings from early 80s Arcade Halls (done by kids with a walkman) this little oddity never made it to vinyl until now. "Proper Tings" on B is taken from a home made video from 2012, originally made to show the capabilities of a DIY Synth project using a Commodore C64 home computer sound chip, the growly SID synth. Sounds are made from scratch, sequenced out on a MPC - and the ensuing Dub jam turned out to be a lucky shot, eventually shaping up as Paul St. Hilaire's "Who Goes There". There's a raw, beautiful 8bit magic to this Dub, finally making it to wax for the first time. Check the video above to see how it was made.

Restored and re-mastered from the original tapes comes Gigi Masin’s much sought after first album ‘Wind’. Never commercially released the LP was in fact only given away at a number of small concerts, with many of the remaining copies destroyed during floods in the Venice based musician’s house. 

Quickly becoming seen as something of a landmark ambient album in recent years, ‘Wind' is now lovingly presented again in it’s entirety. True to it’s original private issue it is once again being made available through Gigi Masin’s very own ‘The Bear On The Moon’ label.

Acclaimed guitar duo Loren Connors and Alan Licht celebrate their 30-year collaboration with release of their eighth album — At The Top Of The Stairs.Across the decades, their improvisations turned increasingly abstract and atonal, while still maintaining complex, ethereal arrangements. The harmonious blend of Licht's meticulously crafted feedback and harmonic patterns with Connors' ghostly blue tones remains the core sound of this partnership. At The Top Of The Stairs was recorded live in 2018. Across two side-long pieces, the duo ascends slowly, through layers of atmospheric tension punctuated by thunderous waves of Connors' effects.For fifty years, Connors's adaptation of acoustic Delta blues has transmuted into miniature gray scale compositions and howling riffs. His collaborators include Oren Ambarchi, Keiji Haino, and Kim Gordon. Rock/experimental musician Alan Licht was a member of the bands Love Child, Run On, and Lee Ranaldo & the Dust, and has released a range of acclaimed rock and experimental albums. He is an author with books published by Rizzoli, W.W. Norton, Faber & Faber and Blank Forms.

In 1998, Carsten Nicolai, also known as Alva Noto, visited a sound installation created by Robert Lippok for a group exhibition in Weimar, Germany. Soon after, he invited Lippok to release music on his label raster-noton. »Open Close Open« was released in 2001 and marked the beginning of Lippok's solo career. Before, Lippok had already played in Ornament und Verbrechen (with his brother Ronald Lippok) and To Rococo Rot (with Ronald Lippok and Stefan Schneider). The title of the EP is a linguistic reference to the instructions found on everyday objects. In fact, the sound of birds or a closing door can be heard. Besides field recordings, cultural fragments were used – including the sample of the famous Adagietto from Gustav Mahler's Symphony. No. 5. – and integrated into three loop-based pieces, that have been praised by Fact Magazine as »a masterclass in collage, looping and tactile processing.« The source material for »Open Close Open« initially served as a soundtrack for a video by Takehito Koganezawa, a visual artist from Japan. For this remastered vinyl reissue, Lippok revisited the original sound material and produced a new track called »Licht.«

Following on from last year’s acclaimed Vrindavan 1982 by rudra veena master Z.M. Dagar, Black Truffle is thrilled to present a pair of archival releases from the Dagar Brothers, among the most revered 20th century exponents of the ancient North Indian dhrupad tradition. The vocal duo of Moinuddin and Aminuddin Dagar (sometimes referred to as the ‘senior’ Dagar Brothers to distinguish them from their younger siblings, Zahiruddin and Faiyazuddin Dagar), belonged to the nineteenth generation of a family of musicians in which dhrupad tradition has been kept alive through patrilinear transmission, each generation undergoing a rigorous education of many years’ duration that can include singing up to twelve hours each day. Famed for the meditative purity of their approach to dhrupad, the Dagar Brothers helped to keep the tradition alive in the years after Indian independence in 1947, when the royal courts that had traditionally patronised dhrupad musicians were abolished. Many Western listeners were first introduced to dhrupad by the Dagar Brothers’ tour of Europe in 1964-65 and their LP in UNESCO’s ‘Musical Anthology of the Orient’ collection, both organised by pioneering musicologist and scholar of Indian culture Alain Daniélou. Documents from this tour are especially precious, as Moinuddin Dagar passed away in 1966. Berlin 1964 – The Lost Studio Recording (released alongside BT115, a newly discovered concert recording from the same trip) presents two unheard side-long performances in crystalline fidelity, recorded at the International Institute for Comparative Studies and Documentation in Berlin headed by Alain Daniélou. These stunning recordings were consigned to the archive because, as Peter Pannke explains in his liner notes, which recount his meeting with Danielou many years after these recordings were made, the tape ran out during ‘Raga Jaijaivanti’, which terminates abruptly soon after the entry of the pakhawaj. Accompanied only by Moinuddin’s wife Saiyur on tanpura and Raja Chatrapati Singh on pakhawaj (a large double-headed drum), the brothers present stunning performances of the severe, serious midnight ‘Raga Malkauns’, set to a ten beat cycle once the pakhawaj enters, and the complex early evening ‘Raga Jaijaivanti’, set to a fourteen beat cycle in its rhythmic section. True to the traditional dhrupad structure, both performances are dominated by the long free-floating alap section, where the notes of the raga are gradually introduced, slowly climbing in pitch and intensity as the two singers trade improvisations that display a stunning range of vocal tones and remarkable subtlety in mictrotonal nuance. The performance of ‘Raga Malkauns’ is divided roughly in half, with the pakhawaj and unison singing entering around thirteen minutes through; Raja Chatrapati Singh’s performance is particularly striking in its endlessly inventive metrical nuance within the overall crescendo and acceleration. On ‘Raga Jaijaivanti’, the alap lasts almost twenty minutes, with Singh joining only for a few minutes of sparse pakhawaj hits before the tape cuts off, the absence of the more active concluding section serving only to magnify the mystical calm the Dagar Brothers establish in this setting of a 16th century love poem. Illustrated with a striking full colour concert photograph, Berlin 1964 – The Lost Studio Recording is accompanied by extensive liner notes by Peter Pannke celebrating musicologist Alain Daniélou, whose study, documentation and promotion of dhrupad was so important for spreading awareness of this great musical tradition, ready to be discovered anew in this stunning recording from two of its master exponents.

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

Elders is the debut release from Ensemble Nist-Nah, a nine-piece percussion group led by Nantes-based Australian drummer and percussionist Will Guthrie. The diverse group of French musicians that make up Ensemble Nist-Nah – whose collective experience encompasses traditional Gamelan performance, contemporary composition, noise, jazz, and everything in between – perform on drum kits, traditional and junk percussion, and a complete set of Javanese Gamelan instruments. Though building on the foundations of Guthrie’s solo work with Gamelan instruments (Nist-Nah, BT057) and primarily performing his compositions, Ensemble Nist-Nah is a collective endeavour, propelled by a breathtaking enthusiasm that has seen the ensemble manage to rehearse, perform, and even tour Europe during the Covid-19 pandemic. From the first seconds of opening track ‘Geni / Tirta’, it becomes immediately obvious that this is no dry academic exercise or exotic indulgence. Rapid arpeggiated figures are propelled by manically busy kit drumming while slow-motion melodic lines float above. After a series of abrupt tempo changes and fragmented unison passages that crossbreed the rhythmic intensity of the Balinese Kecak with the joyride of an Ornette Coleman head, the music slows to a monumental groove, equal parts Javanese court music and Dark Magus. Another sequence of thrilling divagations leads us to the unexpected guest appearance of acclaimed vocalist Jessica Kenney, who elaborates a haunting Javanese Bedhaya across a spacious backdrop of massive gong hits, shimmering cymbals, rustling bells, and gritty textures. The remaining pieces that make up Elders explore a dizzying variety of approaches, from the shifting rapid-fire muted textures of ‘Overtime’ to the ghostly bowed tones and ominous swells of the title piece (developed from a track on Guthrie’s solo Nist-Nah release), which gradually builds into waves of shuddering low resonance and asynchronous percussive clicks like a haunted clock mechanism. On the aptly titled ‘Rollin’, virtuosic twin drum kits criss-cross errant metallophone patterns in propulsive polyrhythms, while ‘Planeker’ manages to achieve a bizarrely effective fusion of Harry Partch and Autechre. Arriving bedecked in beautiful monochrome images of gongs drawn by ensemble member Charles Dubois, Elders is a feast for the ears: music that burrows deep into timbral and rhythmic possibility while possessing an intoxicating physicality and revelling in the joy of collective performance.

"The first vinyl release of Charlemagne Palestine's Godbear, a 1987 solo piano recording originally scheduled to sit alongside Sonic Youth and Swans in the catalogue of Glenn Branca's Neutral Records but eventually released on CD by the Dutch Barooni label in 1998. Although Palestine has worked in an enormous variety of media, his long form performances for solo piano are perhaps his most acclaimed works. Palestine immersed himself in the study of overtones throughout the 1960s, working first with carillons and then with electronic synthesis, searching for the 'golden sound'. Beginning in the early 1970s he continued his exploration of the complexities hidden within seemingly simple tones and intervals on the Bösendorfer Imperial Grand Piano, the 'Rolls Royce' of pianos. With the piano's sustain pedal constantly depressed, Palestine hammers out rapidly repeated notes, allowing a complex cloud of overtones to rise above the percussive texture of the struck keys. Initially working with simple intervals such as octaves and fifths, Palestine gradually expanded the harmonic range of his piano performances over the years, while still retaining their ecstatically single-minded nature. Revisiting his signature piano style in 1987 after several years focusing on visual art, Godbear presents three distinct variations that demonstrate the development of his piano music after the classic recordings of the early 1970s. Occupying the entire first side, 'The Lower Depths' stages a slow descent from the piano's mid-range to the Bösendorfer's cavernous additional low octave, building into a thundering swarm of booming overtones. Breaking entirely with the stereotype of clinical minimalism, Palestine's journey to the depths embraces passages of darkly romantic melody before slowly ascending to its starting point. The version of 'Strumming Music' performed here condenses the developmental arc of the piece into eleven minutes, fanning out from a single octave to a complex harmonic wash that calls to mind Palestine's enthusiasm for Debussy and Ravel. 'Timbral Assault' is like an evil twin of 'Strumming Music,' transforming its insistency and harmonic complexity into aggressive intensity and creeping dissonance, foreshadowing Palestine's later collaborations with Christoph Heemann. A classic release, and one that, because of the variety of approaches surveyed within, serves as an ideal introduction to Palestine's ecstatic and mysterious sound world" --Francis Plagne. Remastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Presented in a deluxe gatefold sleeve designed by Stephen O'Malley.

First vinyl reissue of the landmark 1967 debut album by AMM, AMMMusic. Remastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Exact replica sleeve by Stephen O'Malley. "Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of its recording in 1966, this reissue makes one of the cornerstones of the experimental music tradition available again in its original form, replete with Keith Rowe's beautiful pop art cover and the terse aphorisms by the group that served as its original liner notes. A testament to the interaction between the experimental avant-garde and the countercultural underground, the album was originally released on Elektra, recorded by Jac Holzman (the label's founder, responsible for signing The Doors, Love, and The Stooges) and produced by DNA, a group that included Pink Floyd's first manager, Peter Jenner (the title of Pink Floyd's 'Flaming' is a tribute to AMM's 'Later During a Flaming Riviera Sunset'). Formed in 1965 by three players from the emerging British jazz avant-garde -- Keith Rowe and Lou Gare had played with the great progressive big band leader Mike Westbrook and Eddie Prévost played in a post-bop group with Gare -- AMM quickly evolved from a free jazz group into something decidedly more difficult to categorise. By the time these recordings were made, two more members had joined the group: another Westbrook associate, Lawrence Sheaff, and the radical composer Cornelius Cardew. Then at work on his masterpiece of graphic notation Treatise, Cardew brought with him extensive experience of the post-serialist and Cageian currents in contemporary composition. Using a combination of conventional instruments and unconventional methods of sound production (most famously Keith Rowe's prepared tabletop guitar, but also prepared piano and transistor radio), the group performed improvised pieces often running for over two hours and ranging from extended periods of silence to terrifying cacophonies. On AMMMusic, long tones sit next to abrasive thuds, the howl of uncontrolled feedback accompanies Cardew's purposeful piano chords, radios beam in snatches of orchestral music. AMM's clearest break with jazz-based improvisation concerned the idea of individuality. Initially through an engagement with eastern philosophy and mysticism and later though a politicized communitarianism, AMM sought to develop a collective sonic identity in which individual contributions could barely be discerned. In the performances captured on AMMMusic the use of numerous auxiliary instruments and devices, including radios played by three members of the group, contribute to the sensation that the music is composed as a single monolithic object with multiple facets, rather than as an interaction between five distinct voices." --Francis Plagne

An interest in ancestral Latin American cosmology has always run right through the music of Ecuadorian music producer Nicola Cruz. His creative process involves an attentive, careful search for the living roots and rituals that are part of South American identity—its Andean and African origins in particular—valuing its rhythms, its oral traditions, its instruments and the energy they transmit. His first record, Prender el Alma (2015) explored the development of the consciousness and spirituality, and how they connect with music. In Siku, his most recent production, Cruz continues this exploration, expanding his vision towards new stories and other cultures as sources of inspiration. A crucial aspect on this journey is his collaboration with other artists from around the world. The siku is a wind instrument of Andean origin, highly symbolic in ancestral rituals, made up of two separate, complementary parts, the arca and the ira. It is a representation of duality, an essential element of the indigenous world view, associated with involvement and complementarity, far from the binary thinking typical of western societies. That duality is reflected on this record in the coming together of sounds, whether electronic or organic, past or present, local or global. On Siku, Nicola Cruz combines instruments with symbolic, spiritual connotations, such as the sitar, the siku, and the balafon with hints of electronica. Studies of the samba, cumbia and rhythms of African, Andean and Hindu origin are combin

Written and recorded with the goal of creating a one-movement suite in the least amount of time possible, "Succo di formiche" reflects the archetypal joy of music making, the spontaneous impulses underlying its formation, and a love of the record album form.

Presented together for the first time, American composer John McGuire’s Pulse Music series (1975-1979) blurs the popular narrative that Minimalism was a reaction against Europe’s angular, intellectual, inscrutable high-modernism. McGuire, born in California, studied at Occidental College in Los Angeles and UC Berkeley before going to Europe to study with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Gottfried Michael Koenig. His compositions lock serialism’s warped geometries onto an evenly spaced grid, perfectly preserving serial music’s multi-dimensionality while smoothing its wildest disjunctures and sharpest angles. If serialism is Montreal’s Habitat 67 modular housing complex, McGuire’s Pulse Music compositions are the primary-colored grids of Le Corbusier’s L’Habitation apartment complex — an exuberant expression of the same materials and principles. Every layer of pulses is made distinct through its timbre, register, and tempo. We hear them as a plurality, organized like stars in the sky. Every so often the sky rotates and the stars appear in a different arrangement. Our ear naturally starts to draw connections and, as it sweeps between one layer and another, what was discrete becomes continuous. Pulses become flows; quantitative reality becomes qualitative experience. McGuire’s pulse pieces were realized electronically, in the newly built Studio for Electronic Music at the State University of Cologne and WDR, but Pulse Music II adapted his ideas to an orchestral canvas. Commissioned retrospectively by the composer and radio producer Hans Otte for his Pro Musica Nova festival at Radio Bremen. Alongside the Bremen orchestra, conducted by Klaus Bernbacher, were four pianists—Christoph Delz, Herbert Henck, Deborah Richards, Doris Thomsen—and McGuire himself playing a series of twelve drone-like chords on the organ. The techniques of the electronic Pulse Music pieces required a speed and precision too great for live musicians, so for Pulse Music II McGuire adapted his method to an expanding progression of durations; this had the advantage of being much slower and requiring none of the carefully calibrated tempo changes of Pulse Music I or III. It was still based, says the composer, “on what seemed to me an interesting foray into a completely different kind of time structure. Complex time structures had, by 1975, become a condition for me in two senses: a compositional requirement and maybe an illness.” The present recording was made by Radio Bremen at the work’s first and only performance, and has been held in their archive until now. “108 Pulses” – originally composed a proof-of-concept piece and realized as a single, repeating loop in a 20 minute tableau – is also presented here for the first time.

Operating in the farthest margins of L.A.'s cutthroat music business from 1961-1991, Mel Alexander's Consolidated Productions was among the longest running Black-owned independent record conglomerates of the 20th century. Caught up in a confusing web of imprints—including Ajax, Angel Town, Car-A-Mel, Emanuel, and Kris-this first volume gathers 28 smoldering R&B cuts by the likes of Lee Harvey, B.B. Carter, Marilyn Calloway, Del Reys, Deb Tones, De Velles, Gene Russell's Trio, Jimmy "Preacher" Ellis, and Ty Karim. Remastered from the original 1/4" tapes, Consolidated Productions Vol. I includes carefully researched annotation, discography, and photographs from a vital producer.