NEW ARRIVALS

ALIEN BABY 0 Rules for life 
A new vinyl record of music by Joanne Robertson & Sidsel Meineche Hansen. A limited edition 12” vinyl with 16 tracks in an edition of 250 copies with full colour sleeve.

A miracle excavation release of the phantom live sound of the masterpiece "A Love Supreme" by John Coltrane (1926-1967), a great talent in the history of jazz music. 180g heavy vinyl.

Todd Modes giving you soothing jazzy and soulful house cuts with an occasional nod towards hip hop and funk. A fixture in the Detroit DJ world, Todd Modes has spent the last decade quietly releasing music on FIT Sound, Golf Channel and Still Music to name a few. Inspired by the birth of his first son and the death of his grandfather, New Life is a deeply personal meditation on the cycles of life and time. An examination of the past and present assembled from recordings spanning the last 20+ years, this album is an outstanding representation of his musical depth and artistic purpose.

Donald Byrd's 1975 album is the culmination of his fusion era, including such hits as "Wind Parade" and "Dominoes". It was one of five albums in a row produced by Larry Mizell, and Bird's second-to-last album at Blue Note, where he had been since 1958.

First new title in two years! This is an important album for this year. HTRK (=Hate Rock) is an experimental unit from Australia that has produced a number of masterpieces in the past. Now a duo consisting of Jonnine Standish and Nigel Yang, released their latest album. From Dean Blunt to Gillian Welch to Slowdive fans, you're sure to be enchanted by the ethereal, nocturnal drone-folk sound of this superb album!

The second album of 2012's masterpiece has been repressed! From the opening vocals to the bass-heavy beat of the preceding track Numb, which leads into a dark world, all of these songs have a solemn worldview where ashes fall. This album features a female vocalist who sounds like a liquefied version of Sade, and the leaden industrial beat and jet-black ambience that accompanies the aesthetic sound is breathtaking. The artwork that perfectly matches the music is also excellent. Masterpiece!

'Faith In Strangers’ was recorded between January 2013 and June 2014, and was edited and sequenced in July 2014. Making use of on an array of instruments, field recordings, found sounds and vocal treatments, it’s a largely analogue variant of hi-tech production styles arcing from the dissonant to the sublime. The first two tracks recorded during these early sessions bookend the release, the opener ‘Time Away’ featuring Euphonium played by Kim Holly Thorpe and last track ‘Missing’ a contribution by Stott’s occasional vocal collaborator Alison Skidmore who also appeared on 2012’s ‘Luxury Problems’. Between these two points ‘Faith In Strangers’ heads off from the sparse and infected ‘Violence’ to the broken, downcast pop of ‘On Oath’ and the motorik, driving melancholy of ‘Science & Industry’ - three vocal tracks built around that angular production style that imbues proceedings with both a pioneering spirit and a deep sense of familiarity. Things take a sharp turn with ‘No Surrender’- a sparkling analogue jam making way for a tough, smudged rhythmic assault, while ‘How It Was’ refracts sweaty warehouse signatures and ‘Damage’ finds the sweet spot between RZA’s classic ‘Ghost Dog’ and Terror Danjah at his most brutal. ‘Faith in Strangers’ is next and offers perhaps the most beautiful and open track here, its vocal hook and chiming melody bound to the rest of the album via the almost inaudible hum of Stott’s mixing desk. It provides a haze of warmth and nostalgia that ties the nine loose joints that turn this album into the most memorable and oddly cohesive of Stott’s career to date, built and rendered in the spirit of those rare albums that straddle innovation and tradition through darkness and light.

Analogue bubblebath suds and chimes from multi monikered electronic maestro Ed Ruscha (Secret Circuit), wrangling his imaginary ensemble The Only Thingz for a full-length follow-up to his sought-after 2018 tape for the label.

‘Ed Ruscha V & the Only Thingz’ is exemplary of the sanguine, etheric spirit and bucolic nature that’s blessed all Eddie Ruscha’s body of work since the early ‘90s; from his earliest shoegaze work with Medicine, thru his lolling disco tracks as Secret Circuit with Beats In Space, to electronic pop with Scott Gilmore as Doctor Fluorescent. But it’s under his own name (which he shares with his pop-art pioneer father) that Ed really comes into his own, sketching out scenes flush with a colourful warmth and gentle headiness that effortlessly lends itself to Good Morning Tapes’ agenda.

Each of the eight pieces seamlessly caress stressed heads with a blend of electronic synthesis and field recordings, veering from groggy pastoralism to swaying ambient house, luring listeners into a sullied conception of ambient world building. The wilting chord petals of ‘Slumber Punk’ surely recall the most blissed of AFX’s SAW works, and the lilting triplets of ‘Frog Man’ feels like we’re in the Balearics, while ‘Tree Ring Circus’ and ‘Sight Gag Final’ offer a lush smush of raga-esque acid dub, into the gorgeous new age intentions and effect of ‘Waves Over Stones’.

Released in March this year, rare cassette is now available in analog format! X or Size" by Josiah Wolfson, who runs the niche antiquarian bookstore Aeon Bookstore in New York City, which also carries publications by Dick Higgins and Angus Maclise. Their debut title is now available in LP format. The publisher is Good Morning Tapes, a cult label with a long list of great talents including D.K., Anthony Naples, and Tapes. It has a dub ambient/techno vibe around West Mineral and Experiences Ltd. And the timeless charm of deep sea ambient that can be found in Gas and Biosphere. A masterpiece of ambient techno with an ethereal and emotional atmosphere. Limited edition of 500 copies.

Good Morning Tapes is a cult label in the current experimental scene, based in France. Nueen, a Barcelona-based producer/visual artist who recently released an ambient music masterpiece on Quiet Time Tapes, has now reissued the cassette released on the label in May in analog format! The first half of the album has a romantic and introspective ambient techno/dub feel, reminiscent of the air around West Mineral. From the middle of the album onwards, the world becomes more meditative and immersive. It's like watching Brian Eno & Harold Budd, Romeo Poirier, and Perilla on the docking live in underground of Madrid in the 80s. Mastered by the French genius, Krikor Kouchian (!).

An important title is coming from Constructive, a new offshoot of SN Variations, a hot label in the UK that includes Chris Watson, Richard Skelton, and Lucy Railton. The latest album released just a few days ago was one of the strongest of the year, and now we have another new release. Last Afternoon" is a masterpiece of this year by Japanese composer Takuma Watanabe, who is known for his many film scores and collaborations with big names such as Relativity, UA, and David Sylvian. This is a rework of that album by Vladislav Delay aka Delay. Against the backdrop of tranquil and languid ambience, a mass of intense sounds pours out. Designed by Joe Gilmore of SUPERPANG, a new sanctuary for current Italian experimentalism, and mastered by Joe Talia! Limited to 500 copies.

Charlie Nothing was the fractured-psyche pseudonym of author, father, horsekeeper, organic farmer, beekeeper, philosopher and clown Charles Martin Simon, inventor of the dingulator (guitar sculptures made out of the metal from American cars). Charlie's only visible offering to the record buying public was really anything but. Due to its rarity, The Psychedelic Saxophone of Charlie Nothing, issued by Takoma Records in 1967, has been a source of consternation for in-the-know types for years. Outside/Inside, the second and only other Charlie Nothing LP, originally issued by Everitt Enterprises, thematically follows with two sidelong flute-based instrumentals. Nowhere on wax will you find a more palpable preserved air of a real-time dropout scene than with these sides of Nothing. It is a wonder that these records circulated at all outside the vacuum in which they were created. Nothingness, a California existentiality looping back on itself, preserved and disseminated as evidence. There are indeed very few records like these. Fully authorized / fully legit."

Tender tonkori melodies, meditative dub excursions and hallowed folk vocals combine on Tonkori In The Moonlight, an 11-track collection of mostly traditional songs performed by indigenous Ainu musician OKI. Born on the Japanese island of Hokkaido in 1957, OKI's released his debut album in 1996 and since then he has recorded 11 studio albums both solo and with his Dub Ainu Band and toured internationally -- from WOMAD in the UK to the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington DC via festival appearances in Singapore, Australia and across Europe. OKI is one of only a handful of musicians who play the tonkori, a five-stringed Ainu harp, which is both the pulse of this record and the force that unifies the disparate sounds he introduces such as reggae, dub, Irish folk, throat singing, African drumming and music from Central Asia. Tonkori In The Moonlight features Umeko Ando and Kila. For fans of: Midori Takada, Siti Muharam, Minyo Crusaders, Les Filles De Illighadad, African Head Charge, Mamman Sani. "Supercool Japanese minimalism" --The Observer. "Like nothing you've ever heard before" --The Wire. "The edgy cool of Jamaica meets the kitsch cool of Japan... charming and compelling" --The Independent.

For a decade, Maxine Funke has cut an idiosyncratic path as a singer-songwriter, all the while avoiding the parochial retreads of that worn-out label. Funke's music is intimate and deeply intelligent, buoyed by a sense of effortlessness that belies a scrupulous attention to the smallest of details. Felt appeared in 2012 in a vinyl edition of 100 on the Epic Sweep imprint. This album has an altogether more crepuscular feel, making slightly fuller use of the sonic palette -- an increase in dissonance, errant drum rumbles, and nigh-ambient instrumental murmurings around which flow Funke's basically perfect songs. The brevity, yet fullness, of the tracks and Funke's unadorned if oblique arrangements lend a sense not of sketches but of fields of color, the sensation of late fall foliage glimpsed through the window of a quickly passing train. Indeed, as much as these recordings suggest the close quarters and warmth of a small home, Maxine Funke makes music for traveling, providing accompaniment through the rough, unfeeling vectors of a disenchanted world and, as she does on the last song of Felt, imagining it differently. As the titles of these albums suggest, Funke's is a tactile art, as warm and tangible as the tape hiss bathing it, her words and music rescuing everyday moments from traps of distraction and defeat. Following limited edition vinyl reissues in 2016 -- a swansong for Nemo Bidstrup's sorely missed Time-Lag Recordings imprint -- we're happy to make Felt and Lace widely available. Maxine Funke's music, immediate and entirely unpretentious, suggests a world in which Katherine Mansfield rubs shoulders with Liz Harris, or Vashti Bunyan grows up on the Flying Nun catalog. Absolutely essential.iframe style="border: 0; width: 350px; height: 472px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=3969665761/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=333333/artwork=none/transparent=true/" seamless>FELT by maxine funke

For a decade, Maxine Funke has cut an idiosyncratic path as a singer-songwriter, all the while avoiding the parochial retreads of that worn-out label. Funke's music is intimate and deeply intelligent, buoyed by a sense of effortlessness that belies a scrupulous attention to the smallest of details. Lace was originally released as a CD-R in 2008 on Alastair Galbraith's Next Best Way label. Imagine the just-so arrangements of Josephine Foster and the knowing quotidian eye of Sibylle Baier meeting the realism of Funke's compatriots Turiiya or the acoustic textures of the Kiwi Animal and you're nearly there -- but in that gap lies the undeniable pull of Funke's music. Short songs for nylon string guitar, violin, piano, incidental snippets of bird song and furniture creaks, brief instrumental interludes in the vein of Funke's regular collaborator Galbraith: this is the realest of deals. The metaphysic of 'Second Hand Store' cuts to the uncompromised heart of this record, a rejection of the idea of ownership in favor of communal chance, the ragged comfort of things lived-in and passed on, a searching with no need to find, let alone possess. Indeed, as much as these recordings suggest the close quarters and warmth of a small home, Maxine Funke makes music for traveling, providing accompaniment through the rough, unfeeling vectors of a disenchanted world and, as she does on the last song of Felt, imagining it differently. As the titles of these albums suggest, Funke's is a tactile art, as warm and tangible as the tape hiss bathing it, her words and music rescuing everyday moments from traps of distraction and defeat. Following limited edition vinyl reissues in 2016 -- a swansong for Nemo Bidstrup's sorely missed Time-Lag Recordings imprint -- we're happy to make Felt and Lace widely available. Maxine Funke's music, immediate and entirely unpretentious, suggests a world in which Katherine Mansfield rubs shoulders with Liz Harris, or Vashti Bunyan grows up on the Flying Nun catalog. Absolutely essential."

Karina Gill. She became a musician only recently, having sat on the sidelines while ex-partners and friends made their stabs at it. Gill describes a chance encounter with an abandoned Squire Strat left in the basement by a previous tenant, “mummified in electrical tape with the remnants of a burrito on the head stock”, that led her to begin carefully strumming her way through simple chords and making her own songs. After one interesting self-released LP, still finding their footing, the band made the masterful and buzzed-about Free Advice, which went from a limited cassette on local SF label Paisley Shirt to vinyl pressings on Tough Love (UK) and Mt St Mtn (USA). Cindy’s third LP arrives in quick succession, the quietly devastating 1:2. Jesse Jackson on bass, Simon Phillips on drums and Aaron Diko on keyboards weave the perfectly thin web behind Gill’s slow Velvety strums and murmured melodies. The rhythm section brings the crude flow, while the keys add subtle and surreal counterpoint to the withering world Gill depicts in her lyrics. “Songs tie together seemingly disparate things by the logic of mood,” Gill tries to explain. This isn’t dream-pop sunshine bliss; half-closed black drapes hang on the window where the narrator stares into the middle distance. “Sometimes you say you’re feeling small/You plan all day for your own funeral”, she intones in Party Store. Gill has a way of halting her phrasing that makes it feel like her thoughts are gently tumbling into the abyss. It’s this unsettling quality mixed with the hazy atmosphere that makes Cindy’s new LP 100% addicting and the perfect antidote to comfort listening. - Glenn Donaldson, 2021

We Release Jazz announce the official reissue of Ryo Fukui's only solo piano album, recorded live, June 4-5, 1994 at The Lutheran Hall in Sapporo. Originally released on CD only by Sapporo Jazz Create in 1994, My Favorite Tune is a beautiful bop adventure which includes two superb compositions that Ryo Fukui wrote as an homage to his beloved Hokkaido region, the fan-favorite "Nord" and "Voyage", a tribute to his mentor Barry Harris ("Nobody's"), alternate versions of his mega classics "Scenery" and "Mellow Dream", and, last but not least, bewitching takes on timeless gems by Sonny Clark and Avery Parrish. My Favorite Tune plays like a cool summer night, full of contemplative notes and deep feelings, with Ryo Fukui baring his heart on the piano and displaying the soulful sophistication he is loved for. A true masterpiece completing his amazing discography. Comes with liner notes by Yusuke Ogawa. Sourced from the original masters. LP version comes on 180 gram vinyl mastered at half speed for full audiophile sound.

CUGATE CLASSICS proudly presents: “Works For Choir” by ARVO PÄRT, one of the most important and influential composers of our time. Remastered by HELMUT ERLER at D&M Berlin and available as 180gr LP, CD and DL.ARVO PÄRT (born 1935 in Paide, Estonia) doesn’t need to be introduced to anyone who has the slightest interest in classical music, and his audience reaches far beyond the regular attendants of symphony halls. After first serialistic compositions, “Credo” (1968) was a turning point in PÄRT’s life and work, being the first piece carrying a religious title and expressing a creative crisis that PÄRT answered by lesser compositions and studying medieval and Renaissance music in search for a new musical language. In 1976 PÄRT returned with “Für Alina” and introduced his new (and self-developed) style that should become his trademark sound which made him the famous and honoured composer he is now: the so-called tintinnabuli. In 1984, after the Estonian composer and his family emigrated from the USSR and settled in Germany, the album “Tabula rasa” opened the next important chapter in PÄRT’s career: the ever continuing close relation to Manfred EICHER and his ECM label where many of the composer’s works have been released since. “Works For Choir” presents several compositions for choir from the period from 1989 to 1991, recorded in Vilnius with the aweard winning Vilnius Municipal Choir Jauna Muzika under the artistic direction of Vaclovas Augustinas. For this reissue, all tracks have been remastered at D&M Berlin for best possible sound.

From its earliest utterances, experimental music has been particularly disposed to transnational and cross-cultural collaboration. Seeking the answer for a fundamental problem - how to transcend the boundaries of difference, distance, and time - it presents a means to find common ground and communicate through the elemental form of sound. Over the last 5 years, this precisely what the duo of Félicia Atkinson & Jefre Cantu-Ledesma has achieved, intertwining sublime sonorities across the geographic expanses between their respective homes in France and the United States. Their third album for Shelter Press, ‘Un hiver en plein été’ (‘A winter in the middle of summer’) - the first to have been largely recorded by Atkinson and Cantu-Ledesma together in the same space - distills a mesmerizing pallet of acoustic and electronic sources into an open discourse of radically poetic forms, offering glimpses of warmth and intimacy waiting in the post-covid world to come. Both veteran experimentalists with celebrated bodies of solo work behind them - each traversing the challenges of electroacoustic practice in their own singular ways - prior to their first recorded outing in 2016, Félicia Atkinson and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma had only crossed paths in person once, initially meeting in San Fransisco during 2009. The mutual bond formed during that brief encounter flowered into their first LP, ‘Comme Un Seul Narcisse’, followed two years later by 2018’s ‘Limpid As The Solitudes’. Both recorded remotely - sending files back and forth, fortified by conversations on a vast range of subjects - these two albums were guided by impassioned conceptual nods to Guy Debord, Baudelaire, Brion Gysin and Sylvia Plath, while seeking resolutions for the challenges and unique possibilities that working at a distance provoked. Where the triumphs of its predecessors rose from the bridging of disparate moments and divergent spaces, ‘Un hiver en plein été’ culminates as a celebration of closeness, a result of Atkinson and Cantu-Ledesma working together in the studio, responsively in real time, for the first time. Recorded in Brooklyn during August of 2019 - a handful of months before the pandemic would impose chasmic distances across the globe - its six discrete works, carefully crafted and finalized over the ensuing year, evolve seamlessly across the album’s two sides, weaving a sprawling tapestry of sonority, within which both artists retaining their own voices and visions, while drawing each other towards uncharted ground. Atkinson likens the recording of ‘Un hiver en plein été’ to have been akin to “a playground”, each artist “hungry for each sound, a bit like the rush in the Louvre in Godard’s Bande à part”, to which Cantu-Ledesma adds that the process seemed to have had “a mind of its own”, with both “along for the ride”. This organic sense of entropy and enthusiasm - a joyous exploration of the unknown - guides the momentum of the album’s evolving arc, as unfolding chasms of ambient space ripple with humanity, life, and fleeting glimpses of the actions that led to its material core. Crafted from deconstructed melodic elements and drifting long-tones - laden with subtle nods to Indian classical ragas and free jazz - searching patterns of speech, textural elements captured within the studio and the outside world, and searching tonal and percussive interventions, ‘Un hiver en plein été’ coheres as a multi-faceted series of electroacoustic dialogues; nesting conversations between two artists working at the juncture of abstraction and narration, field recording and harmony, and the philosophical and phenomenological, in search for the meaning of friendship, and its manifestation in pure sound.

New sides of blown-out, prismatic synth ambiance from idiosyncratic Estonian artist Mihkel Kleis aka Ratkiller! Someone once wrote that Kleis “listens to music on the edge of human perception”; in this spirit, buckle up for vast backdrops to weird films never seen, punctuated by melted VHS idents, aqua-industrial meltdowns, and Dadaist jazz-prog interludes. Ears, Brain and Soul are going to need a three day rest after this one!

Les Éditions Vermillon stem from virtual friendships built around forgotten music. Navigating an aesthetical repertoire ranging from funk to soul, gliding by jazz and reaching toward the birth of electronic music, the friends’ musical exchanges transcend egotistical visions in the hope of shared emotions. Théo (G2S), Hugo (Tiny Albert), Baptiste (Acquired Taste) and Elise Kravets decided to embody this feeling in a record label. Choosing Lyon as their starting point, the desire to appreciate a forgotten musical legacy quickly extended to a regional scale with the aim of shedding light on the diversity and effervescence of local scenes. With the goal of reproducing the fullness of these sounds and textures, the search and selection of titles quickly gave way to the hunt for original tapes and sources. Several stages of audio restoration and digitization were undertaken to deliver a compilation of the highest possible quality. For its first release, the label offers a stroll along the Rhône river to discover, through forgotten songs, the funkiest sides of the Provençale and Rhône-Alpes 80’s scene. Although the music portrays a diverse palette, from Digen, with its meticulous Jazz-Funk straight from Lyon’s heart, the clubbesque rhythmic section and cheeky bass of Dans Tes Bras (VCA Mix), and the summer balearic anthem Tropique Du Cancer, to the soft “French Boogie” theme of Fun Safari, the soul-filled choirs of Patchwork, the pastoral getaway that is L’Anthropofemme, the scathing ode of prehistoric reptiles in Fill Le Crocodile and the Jazz-Funk incantation Fai Tira Marius; they all sweat funk. Having not known the top 50 in their first lives, this compilation aspires to bring these pieces of music to the top 8.

Nicolas Gaunin is the moniker of Nicola Sanguin, a musician from Padua, Italy known for his fourth world electronics, rain-soaked tropical sounds and his woody, experimental polyrhythms. After two cassettes and a compilation LP, Hulahula Kāne is Gaunin’s first full length is a fully-realized trek into bizarre, uninhabited terrain. Gaunin’s palette ranges from kalimbas, hand drums, miniature gongs, flutes, bass, all manners of field recordings, distinctive synthesizers and natural sounds stretched and warped until they’re alien. The rhythmic compositions and sonic world-building is thrilling and peculiar. Gaunin’s approach to music making is all his own and sculpts a hallucinatory headspace; transporting the listener into his imaginary far-off land.

A Colourful Storm presents Tangerine, a collection of songs by Reiko and Tori Kudo. Recorded at Village Hototoguiss, Japan, during autumn, winter and spring 2011 and 2012, the makeup of Tangerine is the culmination of over thirty years of experimentation, improvisation and intimacy between Reiko Kudo and Tori Kudo. Beginning their collaborative musical activities in the late 1970s and documenting their movements as Noise, it would be an earlier Les Rallizes Dénudés gig that would prove influential in shaping the duo’s lifelong impulse for collaboration and free play - it was, after all, where they first met. Over the course of a decade, they became associated with Hideo Ikeezumi’s seminal PSF (Psychedelic Speed Freaks) scene, Tori playing with the likes of Ché-SHIZU and Fushitsusha and self-releasing cassettes before forming the first incarnation of Maher Shalal Hash Baz. Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Tori’s storied musical ensemble of an ever-rotating cast of contributors, would perhaps find difficulty with Tori if called his own. First surfacing in 1985 on a Shinichi Satoh-released cassette compilation, the group would spend the next thirty years playing live and recording, their sound finding solace with labels as far-reaching as Geographic and K. Tori would welcome local amateur and professional musicians, neighbourhood children, friends and passersby on stage, while in the studio, the likes of Ikuro Takahashi (LSD March) and Takashi Ueno (Tenniscoats) have joined him and Reiko on seminal sides such as Return Visit To Rock Mass and Blues Du Jour. A deeply human, deeply romantic recording, Tangerine shines as a touchstone of contemporary Japanese folk minimalism and is significantly the last recorded appearance of Reiko and Tori Kudo as a duo. Reiko's voice, plaintive yet playful, quietly commands centre stage and resonates perfectly with Tori's crystalline instrumentation: bass guitar, euphonium, violin and piano evoking echoes of Enka blues. Glacial soliloquies ’The Deep Valley of Shadow’ and ‘When Seeing the Setting Sun Alone’ bare isolation and restlessness before evolving into profoundly welcoming works. A dedication to playwright and former collaborator Jacob Wren, ‘The Swallow II’ struts confidently while ‘Homeless’, delicately adorned and desirous, addresses themes of universal vulnerability: “Will you give me bread when I’m hungry? / Please stay by me like my mother”. A beautiful accompaniment to the intoxicating swirl of ’We May Be’, recorded live by John Chantler at a Cafe Oto concert in 2009. Originally released on CD by Hyotan in 2013, Tangerine is presented for the first time on vinyl by A Colourful Storm with an exclusive alternate digital version of ‘Homeless’. It stands as the final documented interplay of this enchanting, invigorating duo.

2021 reissue! Don't miss it. Arthur Russell (1951-1992) is a cellist, a composer of contemporary music, a devotion to disco music and a variety of faces. The unreleased / demo sound collection released in 1993, the year after he died of AIDS, is still a masterpiece that still fascinates many fans, "Another Thought" is trusted. The long-awaited CD / LP reissue from . This album was released as the first collection of Russell's works, and although it has been reissued many times due to its popularity, it is a gem that is now rare. A masterpiece full of masterpieces with timeless charm that will not fade, such as "Another Thought", "A Little Lost", and "This Is How We Walk On The Moon". Gatefold sleeve specifications with insert / original liner notes. Of course, it is a fierce recommendation for this person's introduction.