LP version. Haunting in situ recordings from Parchman Farm maximum security prison in Mississippi. Grammy-winning producer Ian Brennan (Tinariwen, Ustad Saami, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Zomba Prison Project) recorded the prison's Sunday gospel service and the results are unforgettable. The performances range from solo acapella to a floor-shaking electric band. The repertoire includes both traditional and newly penned spirituals. Some Mississippi Sunday Morning is an unfiltered and deeply resonant journey into a musical world rarely seen or heard. The notorious Parchman Prison has a rich musical history with Son House, Bukka White, Mose Allison, and Elvis Presley's father Vernon Presley having been former residents. Mississippi's oldest penitentiary, Parchman was founded in 1901 and has one of the highest prisoner mortality rates in the nation as well as experiencing ongoing riots. Due to restrictions on video and photos, the only artifact from this meeting are the sounds -- making the voices all the more ethereal and ghostly. One man's voice was so deep, it sounded like the Mississippi River singing -- as if Barry White were a soprano. Another freestyled a rap about the shame he feels for having caused pain to his mother and others due to his actions. Another was a 73-year-old, former "rock and roll" singer who'd survived prison, become a chaplain, and found God. A veil of sadness seemed to shroud. The singers' voices softened and textured by the inescapable regret that their environment confronts them with. Most songs were covers of Gospel standards, but delivered so imbued with subtext that they were transformed almost unrecognizably from the source material. One of the beauties of the experience was that it was a successful integration of white and black inmates, whose services are often held separately due to racial tensions. As the men beamed, hugged and hi-fived one another in celebration, Chaplain Sidney beamed, "The making of this record has brought much needed encouragement and hope to the men here at Parchman." These were voices unchained, if only for those few hours. Expressing a vocal breadth of freedom otherwise denied and restrained. Recorded 100% live without overdubs at Parchman maximum security prison's Sunday morning service.

In September 1968, Amon Düül played the "International Essener Songtage," Germany's first rock festival of five days duration, which was initiated by the later OHR label boss Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser. The Berlin hit producer Peter Meisel heard and saw the band there and spontaneously signed them, along with Tangerine Dream and Birth Control. Amon Düül was close to the Berlin "Kommune 1" and came together at a time when everyone was an artist who wanted to be one. Anyone who wanted to could also be a musician. As a collective, anything was possible. In Meisel's studio, Angelika and Helge Filanda, Wolfgang Krischke, Ulrich Leopold, Rainer, and Ella Bauer, Peter Leopold and Uschi Obermaier, sky-high as it was state of the art, recorded a session that broke every rule and turned all listening habits inside out. The recordings initially went into the poison cabinet; it was not before a year later that Meisel dared to publish them under the title Psychedelic Underground. Here's more: The double LP Disaster (Lüüd Noma) was released in 1972, when the group Amon Düül didn't exist anymore, and it presents further recordings from the same session. All titles are untranslatable surrealistic plays on words, the tracks, compared to the first LP, are better organized in terms of sound, less fragmentary, more clearly separated from each other and edited more sophisticatedly -- the note that all glitches and errors are intentional is meant tongue-in-cheek, of course, but nevertheless has an element of truth. Now these memorable recordings are available again, remastered from the original analog tapes. As already the first record, Disaster (Lüüd Noma) is a document of a zeitgeist that has remained unrepeatable. Anyone who is seriously interested in the beginnings of Krautrock cannot ignore this album -- disaster is waiting just for you!

LP version. Vladimir Lenhart will happily drop Ethno-Noise on you, then leave you to work out what that might mean. You'll have a pretty good idea after about a minute of this record -- or indeed if you've spent any time in the Balkans generally, surrounded by folk music in all its incarnations, and in Belgrade specifically, which yields up the ghosts of the Yugoslav punk and industrial scenes of the 1980s and the city's current experimental excursions to anyone with time to listen and explore. The interrogation of folk and the national songbook has gained considerable currency in the last several years (think Damir Imamović in Bosnia, Richard Dawson in the UK or labelmates Altın Gün), but Lenhart Tapes are taking a slightly different path. Vladimir Lenhart is only one half of the story here, however. Enter Tijana Stanković: singer, classically trained violinist, ethnomusicologist and Radio Belgrade music editor. By Vladimir's own admission, her encyclopedic knowledge of the music he had grown up with turned the project from something somewhat ironic to something very sincere. He recalls an immediate connection, over a shared love of that music, and it's a connection that has since developed in perhaps unforeseen directions, with Tijana herself pushing Vladimir into an even more uncompromising sonic stance. The slow burn of Lenhart Tapes' emergence has been built upon a set of scorching small-venue performances, with Vladimir's Walkmans laying down a collage of beat, noise and tune for Tijana's voice and violin to respond to and, at times, work against. A decade of sporadic releases, frequently on cassette, was followed by 2021's Duets. Now comes Dens, which hits a different kind of stride. The loops and samples of the previous record are still there, but are joined by an expanded roster of musicians and bolstered by the return of Tijana after a musical sojourn in Budapest. It's denser, more considered, but still spacious. There's a lot going on in this record, and you'll want time (and your biggest ears) to catch it all. Expertly produced and mastered, with superb vocal presence courtesy of Tijana Stanković, Zoja Borovčanin and Svetlana Spajić, it's an endlessly fascinating analogue journey that rewards repeated and close listening.

LP version. Lucidvox's new album is vast-sounding. A collection of swirling ritual missives offered up in the hope of better times. Formerly based in Russia, for their new album That's What Remained, the all-female quartet has added additional sonic thrust (horns, keyboards, strings, atmospheric textures) to their already acclaimed and impassioned psych-rock. Here, style reveals the soul. That's What Remained cannot be anything other than a Lucidvox record -- that firebird quality they always had, the busy rhythms and spitting guitar runs, are still there. But it's a work with a considerable presence; much more so than their debut, We Are. When formulating this record they turned outwards, and asked trumpeter Timur Mizinov from Wooden Whales, violinist Dasha Avramova, guitarist Dmitry Chesnov and multi-instrumentalist Ella Bayisbaeva as a back vocalist to contribute; alongside a children's choir. Artfully and collectively constructed to convey their message, nothing here is wasted or done for the hell of it; but the band clearly hope that their new style can change their own narrative. Each track's DNA tries to persuade the listener that Lucidvox see this record as a launchpad for other iterations of themselves. Plotted and rehearsed a handful of times before the band left Moscow, and built online over a year, the swapped files and code of this album became the smaller particles of the (human) whole. The pathways these files negotiated also ran parallel to those trodden by the band members.

LP reissue of Collective Calls, the first duo LP from Evan Parker and percussionist Paul Lytton. Mythically alluded to as "An Improvised Urban Psychodrama In Eight Parts," Collective Calls utilizes electronics, pre-records and homemade instruments to wryly in/act self-investigation. On Collective Calls, only the fifth release to appear on the newly minted Incus label, percussionist Paul Lytton arrives with an arsenal of sound making sources to push Parker into ever new territory. Recorded in the loft of The Standard Essenco Co on Southwark Street by Bob Woolford (Topography of the Lungs, AMM The Crypt), Collective Calls has more in common with noise or music concrete than with jazz. Influenced as much by Stockhausen, Cage and David Tudor as he was by Max Roach and Milford Graves, Lytton's percussion is abstract, expressionist and at times totally mutant. Sometimes rolling extremely fast, then screeching almost backwards over feedback, Lytton gives Parker room to play some of his weirdest work. Parker is listed as performing both saxophones, but also his own homemade assemblages, including one dubbed the 'Dopplerphone' -- a length of soft rubber tubing (activated by a saxophone mouthpiece and manipulated to alter the rate of airflow) attached to a longer length of clear plastic tubing (whirled around the head whilst being played) ending in a plastic funnel. Thickening the brew even more, Parker would also add a cassette recorder, on which he would play back collected sounds and previous recordings of the duo. Imagining the set up in a 70s loft, it's an assemblage more akin to what today's free ears might see at a Sholto Dobie show, or spread out on the floor of the Hundred Years Gallery, the shadow of Penultimate Press lurking in a corner. It's a testament to Parker's shape shifting sound -- the ever present link to birdsong being at its most warped here -- terrifically free and unfussy, wild and loose from any of the dogma that might come in later Brit-prov years. This re-issue is presented in a specially made Wigston fold-over cover, litho printed with artwork from Alan Johnston and housed in a heavy polyurethane sleeve.

First vinyl re-issue of Evan Parker's duo with George Lewis. Transferred from the original masters, Otoroku has discovered that the original Incus LP was cut at the wrong speed -- and so, here is the first vinyl issue of the correct masters, or "mastas" as Adam Skeaping, legendary engineer who is also responsible for Six of One and Compatibles, fondly calls them. Skeaping, always working with the latest in recording technology for the time, has a knack for gaining access to remarkable spaces. Good spaces that were cheap because no one else had discovered them. The Art Workers Guild is a Georgian Hall in Bloomsbury, London, with lofty ceilings and hard wooden floors. It's the perfect room to exercise an instrument to its full length, to "run the full length of the staircase" in Parker's words. Two bells to ring off the floor and remain in dexterous, airy resonance. Recorded at 30ips on enormous reels, the recording captures all the fine filigree detail so celebrated on Parker's later Six of One, though here the listener is treated to tenor as well as soprano, plus, of course, George Lewis' trombone. Parker and Lewis first met at Moers festival, Lewis having just played excerpts of Coltrane's "Giant Steps" with Anthony Braxton. Living in Paris, it wasn't so hard for a young Parker to invite him for a session on his new imprint, Incus. Though having been part of the AACM, toured with Count Basie and made records for Black Saint, this would be Lewis' first foray into British improv, excited by the idea the Bailey and Parker were attempting to open up the notion of improvisation to include "the freshness of the immediate encounter." Lewis had not long recorded his solo, which mixes lively hints of Ellington and tender lyricism with total experimentation in three-part overdubbed trombone. From Saxophone to Trombone veers towards his wilder end of technicality, some of Lewis' rarer, starker improv -- all avant garde burbles and bubbles, breath control and scalar flights. It's a recording of two young masters, documented beautifully, and released for the first time on vinyl at its intended speed.

"Named after a run-down lodge in New Jersey near where he grew up, Solar Motel was the first full-band project from Chris Forsyth. Originally released in 2013, it was considered his most ambitious and sublime work of Cosmic Americana to date, and the idea of the motel also figured into a band where vacancies would open and close. 'Solar Motel is the first record on which I overtly took rock tropes and twisted them into new shapes, incorporating so many of my interests and influences -- the twin-guitar elegance of television, the boiled down rock minimalism of Rhys Chatham, the sprawl of West Coast psych, the abstract tangles of free improv, an undercurrent of ecstatic jazz energy, and the studio textures of Eno/Cale/Roxy '70s art rock. Solar Motel basically set the template for much of what I did for the remainder of that decade.'"

2023 repress. "Cultural phenomena streak through popular consciousness like meteorites. There's a significant, even life-changing, impact made somewhere, but for many it's only a moment that flickers by, soon to be swallowed back into the cosmos. Chicha might have been like that. Instead, a once-obscure music that enjoyed a fanatic embrace in the Peruvian slums of the 1970s has become a full-fledged global occasion -- thanks to the stunning success of a 2007 CD called The Roots of Chicha. The album, released by the Brooklyn-based Barbès Records, was a passionate act of cultural appreciation: a heartstrong effort to turn the world on its ear with something it had never expected to hear. It took listeners back to the late 1960's, when a number of Peruvian guitarists from Lima and the Amazon created a new electric hybrid, which mixed cumbia, surf, Cuban guaracha, rock, Peruvian folklore, and psychedelic touches. This new wave of Peruvian cumbia came to be known as chicha. Scorned by the middle-class and the official tastemakers, chicha remained mostly associated with the slums of Lima, where the ever-growing population of Andean migrants embraced the music and its players as their own."

LP version. 25th anniversary release of the album from 1998 as expanded special limited edition. It is the eighth Dub Syndicate studio album mixed by Adrian Sherwood. Originally released as catalogue number Lion & Roots 002 in 1998 on Style Scott's own label, here's the expanded and remastered collectors limited edition as double LP set including additional tracks not available on the original vinyl release (a total of 15 tracks on vinyl) and also as 16-track CD release (also included in the vinyl package), with the booklet including excerpts from an unpublished interview. Main vocal contributor is the legendary artist Big Youth plus Little David courtesy of J.R. Productions (Junior Reid's camp), backing vocals by Skip McDonald and Style Scott's inimitable laughter. The basic tracks were recorded in Jamaica, with some of the pals from the Roots Radics days (i.e. Flabba Holt, Steely Johnson) at Studio 2000 (Steely & Clevie's studio) and the legendary Tuff Gong Recording Studio, followed by overdubbing in the USA at Greenpoint Studios (Bill Laswell's studio) and Playroom Studios in New York, with additional overdub and final mix at On-U Sound (London) by Adrian Sherwood.

Nearly ten years in the making, The Task Has Overwhelmed Us is the long-awaited fourth volume in The Jeffrey Lee Pierce Sessions Project series. Conceived in 2006 by the late Gun Club titan's guitarist Cypress Grove, the Project has always aimed to highlight Pierce as one of America's most fascinatingly influential singer-songwriters of the last century while propelling his outpourings into modern times by placing it in the hands of former collaborators, friends and fans. Following 2009's We Are Only Riders (GR 702CD/LP), 2012's The Journey Is Long (GR 762CD/LP), and 2014's Axels & Sockets (GR 796CD/LP), The Task Has Overwhelmed Us presents stellar interpretations of tracks from Pierce's Gun Club and solo canons along with fresh works constructed from rehearsal skeletons, previously unheard lyrics, songs only performed live. Taking song ideas without lyrics and words looking for musical settings gave rise to what Cypress Grove calls "Frankenstein songs". The stellar roll-call of contributors features the Project's original recurring core including Nick Cave, Debbie Harry, Mark Lanegan, Lydia Lunch, Youth, Jim Jones, Warren Ellis, Mark Stewart, Hugo Race, Cypress himself plus Mick Harvey and J.P. Shilo as The Amber Lights, even Jeffrey himself from original tapes. These are joined by new bloods including Dave Gahan, Suzie Stapleton, Duke Garwood, Pam Hogg, The Coathangers, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club's Peter Hayes and Leah Shapiro, Humanist, The Walkabouts' Chris Eckman, Jozef van Wissem, Jim Jarmusch, Chantal Acda and Welsh space-rockers Sendelica with US vocalists Wonder and Dynamax Roberts. Like Pierce's beloved jazz, the cast often spill into each other's tracks. The mood throughout the eighteen tracks is of rare gems crafted with love, respect and the energy of committed fans, even obsessives channeling whatever facet or fragment of Pierce's unruly muse fires their creative juices.

Four dazzling, extended engagements with mbalax master-drumming. The contribution from Holy Tongue is chase-the-devil steppers -- thumping, clangorous, reverberating -- super-charged with energy and atmosphere. From the off, drummer Valentina Magaletti detonates a hard rain of small bombs, rounds of fire, ticking fuses. Musical co-ordinates are somewhere between classic On-U Sound crew like African Head Charge, The Mothmen, and Creation Rebel, and the experimental funk of the Pop Group and 23 Skidoo, at their funkiest. Thrillingly, the two dubs are increasingly deranged. Adjusting the same wavelengths as her superb Workaround LP, Beatrice Dillon plays spaced-out, abstract synth-work against the bodily physicality of the ancient, shifting mbalax rhythms. The music is poised, mindful, tentative; but also limber, fleet, and magical. Phantasmagorical and efflorescent, Lamin Fofana's one-two is simply stunning. Both excursions are wide-open, beautiful, epic, and propulsive -- the first mix is banging and headlong, the second more syncopated and serpentine -- teeming with freshly sublime, funkdafied updates on Jon Hassell's Fourth World possible musics. The two parts of LABOUR's "Etu Keur Gui" engage the same sequence of drum patterns (called bakks) from different perspectives. The duo performed portions of this piece at the opening ceremony of the Dakar Biennial in 2022, at the Grand National Theater, with thirty sabar players from the family of Doudou Ndiaye Rose. This Wolof phrase for the inner-court of a home -- a meeting-place -- doubles here as a metaphor for inner space on a metaphysical level; and Pan Sonic, Muslimgauze, Zoviet France, early Shackleton -- all ghost across the threshold.

"High-octane tour-de-force by legendary post-punk group, INU. Widely considered in Japan to be one of the all-time greatest punk records, 1981's Don't Eat Food! remains shockingly unknown to the rest of the world. Led by literate but unhinged Machida Machizo, a magnetic stage presence who sang in a thick Osaka dialect that sounded like nothing else at the time, INU took Japan by storm in the late '70s with their powerful and often belligerent live show. Their membership changed frequently but INU's final lineup -- the group that recorded Don't Eat Food! -- was sharp as a knife, and the band's airtight debut still wows forty years later. This first-ever fully-licensed edition has been remastered from the original tapes and cut by Kevin Gray and includes an eight-page booklet with never before-seen photos, lyrics in English and Japanese, and liner notes by Syojiro Ishibashi in English and Japanese. Limited edition to 1000."

New 2023 repress; LP version. "Originally released in 1982, Kakashi is another high water mark in the 80s Japanese underground. This album, which has gathered cult status in recent years, is the project of musical visionary Yasuaki Shimizu, and considered to be a highlight of his solo career. Shimizu was the bandleader of Mariah, who also saw their album Utakata No Hibi reissued by Palto Flats in 2015. Kakashi offers a similar blend of saxophone experimentations, jazz fusion and ambient dub excursions."

"Palto Flats/Putojefe Records present the first ever reissue of the work of American composer Dorothy Carter, master of the hammered dulcimer, zither, and other instruments of the hammer chord zither/psalterium family. A true musical vagabond, Dorothy was born in New York in 1935, though her spiritual pursuit of an expansive musical knowledge would take her to monasteries in Mexico, conservatories in France and London, and the founding of the Central Maine Power Music Company (CMPMC), with new-age/minimalist luminaries such as Constance Demby and Robert Rutman. Dorothy Carter was many things - a virtuoso player, storyteller, historian of Celtic and Appalachian folk music, avid lifelong busker, avant-garde musician, and itinerant troubadour, laying a framework for music that existed both within and outside of standard folk idioms -- never better represented than on her 1978 masterwork, Waillee Wailee. Underscored by Bob Rutman's cavernous bowing of the steel cello, the richness of Waillee Waillee's sound produces an album unlike any other in her discography. Carter counted musical colleagues as diverse as Constance Demby, Einstürzende Neubauten, and Laraaji, as well as her lifelong artistic partner and friend Bob Rutman, whose imprint is felt throughout the grooves of this record. The master tapes for this recording were fortuitously discovered in Rutman's Berlin studio, many, many years later. As recounted in Laraaji's contribution to the liner notes, Dorothy was 'someone who really influenced my early zither exploration and vocabulary and inspired my shift toward hammered zither performance and recording,' after encountering him busking on the sidewalk one day in the 1970s. Later, when living in Berlin in the early 1990s, Dorothy would begin work on manuscripts detailing the history of the dulcimer family and providing extensive sheet music, selected material of which is reproduced in the twelve-page booklet included with this release. Dorothy would find later success touring and performing in the late '90s with the ensemble Mediæval Bæbes, which she led with British musician Katherine Blake, playing a prominent role on their first four albums. The recording of Waillee Waillee would mark the end of an era for Dorothy: leaving behind the familiar confines of the northeast, she embarked to New Orleans, settling with her family there."

Psychedelic, progressive folk-rock masterpiece from 1971, recorded in London by John St. Field aka Jackie Leven (of Doll by Doll fame) but only released in Spain back at the time. Before becoming a cult singer/songwriter in the '90s, Scottish musician Jackie Leven debuted in the early '70s with Control, issued under the John St. Field pseudonym due to "problems with the forces of law and order." Recorded in London and helped by musicians from MAN and other friends (Phil Ryan, Juliet Lawson, Jesse Ballard, Joe Kucera...), the album featured a collection of wonderful songs written by Jackie after his experiences wandering away and taking copious amounts of LSD. Unlike previous reissues, this one features the complete tracklist in original running order and also a new insert with previously unseen photos/memorabilia and recollections from some of the musicians involved. Remastered sound with original artwork in gatefold sleeve. Insert with liner notes and rare photos/memorabilia.

"This issue features a major cover story on British Mod R&B heroes the Artwoods by Mike Stax, while Pop Art paintermen the Creation are the subject of a brilliant new fact-finding mission by Peter Stanfield. Doug Sheppard reveals the true story of '70s hard rock mystery group Stonewall and their mega-rare private press tax scam LP, Moby Grape's Don Stevenson shares photos and secrets from his early history, and there are interviews with pre-teen pop prodigy Mark Radice, and UK label head and A&R genius Andrew Lauder. Also: '60s Miami garage girls the Belles (of Melvin fame), Minnesota psych monsters C.A. Quintet, sublime singer-songwriter Fred Neil, a Doors/Sons of Adam love triangle, Laurie Anderson on Lou Reed, Cyril Jordan on the Yardbirds, and much more including our remarkable review sections, covering all the latest vinyl and CD reissues, and rock and roll-related books."

Sabattis were an underground hard-rock band from New York formed in 1968 by Jim Marvin (guitar & lead vocals), Gary Culotta (keyboard and vocals), Larry Wegman (drums) and Rocky Kaler (bass). Influenced by bands like Deep Purple, Mountain, and Grand Funk, they gigged around town playing lot of psychedelic clubs and venues. In 1970, they recorded a demo with the intention of securing a record deal which never came. The demo tape was in fact a fully finished album recorded and engineered by a friend from the band, Mick Gauzaski, who despite using a homemade studio, managed to obtain a real pro sound. No wonder Mick is now a multiple winner Grammy award! The Sabattis demo remained unreleased until 2011 when Jargon Records discovered the tapes and put out a CD edition with the band involvement. So Guerssen is proud to present a new reissue of Warning In The Sky, remastered from the original tapes and including an insert with rare photos and liner notes by Klemen Breznikar (It's Psychedelic Baby). Sabbatis sound is powerful heavy-psych sound with swirling Hammond organ and hard guitar which brings to mind other obscure acts like Jungle.

Musician, writer and filmmaker, Sunik Kim follows up The Bent Bow Must Wait to Be Released (Takuroku 2021) with their second LP -- a deadly serious dismantling of the limits of contemporary computer music, delivered with playful dexterity and a touch of slapstick humor, a la Henry Cow. Enlisting General MIDI to create frenetic, vital patterns of dis-organization made up of gleeful synthetic trumpets, wry orchestral sweeps and brutal key clusters, Sunik Kim explodes a kind of simplistic sound into complex, beautifully uncertain structures. Readers may laugh, but Potential is calmer than Kim's previous offerings. Rather than attempting to overwhelm or stun the listener into subjectivity, Potential is ever shifting; regularly breaking form and unfolding, discreetly nibbling at the concept of the spectacle and un-doing fatally closed systems of cyclic music. Reminiscent of Cecil Taylor's Unit Structures, Stockhausen's Gruppen, and even those weirdo attempts at making music from inside the world of Animal Crossing, Lil Jürg Frey. The overflowing ideas of Henry Cow (to which Kim dedicated a fantastically blended mix for the Wire in 2021) never drift too far from view, but contemporary counterparts lay few except for Yorkshire's most eminent polyceleratrix, Gretchen Aury, who was asked to write the liners. Gretchen's words are unsurprisingly as extraordinary as the record itself, so the label will close out the call to elicit a media response to possibly the wildest OTOROKU yet with their words: "Potential reads as a rare honest response to the disaster capitalist era of the apparent nearing end of the anthropocene, a cyborg music which is not hopelessly psychotic like so much contemporary and especially computer-requiring music, but lucidly possessed with rapture, pain, madness, empathy, ecstasy, torment, fragility; all those vital feelings and incentives which our atrociously depressing times seem engineered to quash and bleed out of us. This sound is a blistering electromagnetic pulse wave of revolutionary hope, exclaiming defiantly that history is not over, that the future is not 'history,' that there is still a vast multitude of ideas and identities burning brightly and resiliently, despite the fact that they are inconceivable to the tyrannical hegemonic axis of global capitalist tech-culture. I ask of you, listener, if you truly wish to plunge beyond the known, give yourself over in full to this record.'"

Previously unreleased archival studio/live recordings from 1970-1971 by this lost Bay Area band. A superb cool blend of acid-rock, psychedelia and brass-rock with some outstanding guitar leads, Hammond organ and a tight rhythm section. Stow Lake was a seven-piece group (named after the lake in Golden Gate Park) comprised of well-seasoned musicians from the original San Francisco psychedelic/fusion scene. Among them, we can find ace guitar player Bob Hardy (previously of hard psych group The Osgoode/Asgard); the tandem of Jeff Ervin (sax, flute) and Jean Hintermann (trumpet), both later on Aura, Bill Whiter's backing band and Hot Cider (with Dennis Geyer of A.B. Skhy); child prodigy Larry Mallarino on trombone and bass player Dave Dunaway (later of jazz fusion band Listen). Not forgetting powerful singer/organist Bob Staley. Unreleased until now, the recordings contained here were registered at top studios like McCune and Golden State Recorders. Also included are a couple of excellent quality live tracks recorded at the legendary Fillmore West in 1971, showing the band at their peak with an impressive jamming/acid-rock sound.

"Let`s go back to the pre-orthodox world, the ancient one, which gave us mythology, extreme experiences, congealed in stories. Echo was a storyteller herself, distracting from what was going on around her, up to the point when she got punished, and from then she was only able to repeat the last words spoken to her, to her, to her... A loop is a loop is a loop and it`s all about roses. A rose is arrows, is errors... Echo -- is a potential, endless space. We need this construction towards an actual eternity we cannot grasp. This layer was up above the countless expressions. I could hear it from the very first moment to the last. Searching in transitions, lost in transitions. The idea of a space behind the next space helps us get through, in order not to get lost in such constructions. If We Could Hear has seven pieces, a beginning, and an end. It`s a poem and not a Matryoshka even though it sounds like one. 'A strange footprint on the shores of the unknown, out there extending from nowhere, turning in on itself to a place which is both an ending and a beginning." --Robert Smithson

2023 repress! Saltern's latest offering marks the first-ever release of "lost minimalist" Terry Jennings' visionary 1960 composition, Piece for Cello and Saxophone, as arranged in just intonation by legendary composer La Monte Young for renowned cellist Charles Curtis. Born in Los Angeles in 1940, Jennings was a close associate of Young, Terry Riley, and Dennis Johnson, and an early adopter of minimalist tendencies, creating slow, sustained music, influenced by jazz, modalism, and late romantic classical music. Jennings died tragically in his early forties, most of his work lost to a chaotic life; however, his forward-looking music quietly exerted a lasting influence on composers including Young and Harold Budd. Composed over sixty years ago, Piece for Cello and Saxophone, foreshadows a number of movements in postwar avant-garde music. Despite the title, there is no saxophone on this album. At over eighty minutes, La Monte Young's justly tuned realization of Piece for Cello and Saxophone for cello alone unifies and extrapolates Terry Jennings' dense harmonies, creating an extended field of complex sonorities in motion, all brought to life by the immaculate playing of Charles Curtis. The recording captures Curtis in a performance from 2016 reflecting more than twenty-five years of dedication to the piece. Piece for Cello and Saxophone is released physically on double-LP. Mixed by Anthony Burr, mastered by Stephan Mathieu, and cut to vinyl via direct metal mastering by Hans Jörg Maucksch at Pauler Acoustics. Pressed at RTI and printed at Stoughton. Includes a four-page insert with liner notes by Young, Curtis, Burr, and Tashi Wada, and a download of the full recording.

Psych Funk á la Turkish is a welcome addition to the many reissues and comps of Turkish psych and funk that have been released in the last years (some of them strangely just dropping the same well-known songs again). Diggin' deep in Turkish sounds from the '70s and '80s, Turk-A-Disk presents an "all killers-no fillers" selection of tracks taken from original 45s and LPs. If you go crazy about Erkin Koray, 3 Hur-El, Baris Manço, Cem Karaca and the likes but need to know more, there is a LOT more, you need to hear this. A real fest of danceable exotic rhythms, fuzzy riffs, heavy percussion and male/female vocals, including killer psychedelic 45s by Şakir Öner, Iskender Doğan, Hakki Bulut and many more. Detailed liner notes, insert with pictures. Expertly remastered sound. Also featuring Meral Zeren, Hayko, Serter Bagcan, Aydın Tansel, Melih Kibar, Rüya Çagla, Ercan Turgut, and Esin Engin Orkestrasi.

Psych Funk á la Turkish drives you again through the Turkish '70s psychedelic funk heritage, with another incredible collection of rare and unknown tracks for your groovy eastern dance sessions. You got your wig jumping with Volume 1 so you know what to expect! Comes with detailed liner notes and an insert with pictures. Expertly remastered sound. Featuring Rana & Selcuk, Nese Karaböcek, Semiramis, Hayko, Seyhan Karabay & Kardaşlar, Nil Burak, Selçuk Alagoz, Serter Bagcan, Gülden Karaböcek, and Ali Kocatepe.

2023 restock. One of the holy grails of heavy psychedelia, originally released in 1969 by this Canadian band. Basement garage-psych meets heavy rock. Echoing vocals, crashing drums, ultra-raw distorted guitar. Bent Wind formed in Toronto in 1969. Discovered by producer Merv Buchanan while they played at a 12-hourPop Festival in York, he signed them to his Trend label. A single was soon released, followed by the Sussex album in 1969. Titled after the street where the band had a rehearsal space in a building where local hippies and freaks hang out, Sussex was released housed in a cover designed by guitar player Gerry Ribas. According to band member Marty Roth, no more than 200 copies were pressed, making one the most sought-after psych albums ever. Original artwork in hard cardboard sleeve; remastered sound; insert with liner notes by Klemen Breznikar (It's Psychedelic Baby) and photos. "For intense guitar action I never tire of LPs like Bent Wind" --Paul Major. "One of the last gasps of garage-psychedelia" --Richie Unterberger (All Music Guide). "Monstrous heavy psych from Toronto. Great plodding songs and recorded-in-a-barn ambience" --Wayne Rogers (Twisted Village).

Essential '60s British beat, R&B, mod album from 1966 by this band fronted by Art Wood (elder brother of Birds/Rolling Stones/Faces guitarist Ronnie) and featuring a young, pre-Deep Purple Jon Lord on organ, plus Keef Hartley (John Mayall's Bluesbreakers) on drums, Derek Griffiths on guitar and Malcolm Pool on bass. Now reissued for the first time ever in MONO, just like the 1966 original. Original artwork in hard cardboard sleeve plus OBI. Includes insert with detailed liner notes by Mike Stax (Ugly Things) and photos/memorabilia.

Orange color vinyl version. Berlin party series and label AWAY Music continues its limited vinyl series called Reissued, dedicated to re-releasing iconic cuts from the vast collaborative catalog of Move D & Pete Namlook. The third installment Reissued 3, which follows the series' first two EPs from previous years, features again some exceptional pieces that were previously only available on CD. Move D and Pete Namlook are electronic visionaries whose 26-album relationship explored and intertwined psychedelic synthscapes, deep house and techno, future jazz, and downtempo on Namlook's cult imprint Fax Records. Their innovative and influential works keep inspiring electronic music producers today, showcasing their willingness to collaborate and push the boundaries of electronic music. First up on the A side, "Der Strahlender Verlierer", from the 2006 Album Let the Circle Not Be Broken, begins atmospherically before pushing subtly into open filter and undulating synth territory. Introspective and accepting, the piece gradually lets the sum of its parts coalesce into a peaceful whole with sustained chords and the flicker of played steel strings. "Hardwired Tangent" from the 2001 Album Wired rounds out the first side with edgier and more ominous tones. Brooding and bubbling its way through artificial textures absorbed by carefully weighted rhythmic tension. Shuffling jazz electronics. The moody low-mid hum providing buoyancy throughout. Also from the 2001 album, the B side's "Hardwired Hypotenuse + Asymptote" is a synthetic journey. Textural, pseudo-organic, pulsating with urgency. The motoric percussion imparting structure to the sonic alchemy. Tactile yet integrated components offer the listener (or dancer) multiple entry points into the music. This is both artful and kaleidoscopic -- a treatise on contemplative and psychoactive house music. Reissued 3 is a true testament to the innovative spirit and pioneering work of Move D and Pete Namlook. With these tracks now available on vinyl for the first time, AWAY's limited series is a must-have for old and new fans alike.

Synth pioneer and musical polymath, Wally Badarou is a genius. A vinyl version of his majestic Colors Of Silence has been craved by the Balearic cognoscenti ever since its low-key 2001 release. Colors Of Silence is ostensibly a new age album. As ever though, Wally's sophisticated synth textures and expressive keyboard runs are so full of character, so full of life, that this work of art transcends any easy genre categorization. It sounds like A.r.t. Wilson or Suzanne Kraft, with traces of CFCF and Jonny Nash. But it was made a good decade earlier than the work of these modern giants. It's understandable why Colors Of Silence remains somewhat of a lost gem. Over the years, it has become a true cult record for the ambient/Balearic heads. There can be few artists more under-appreciated given their vast influence than Wally Badarou. His solo work practically defined the sound of the Balearic DJs of the 1980s, and thus the more sophisticated sound of dance culture thereafter. A synth specialist, Badarou was the long-time associate of Level 42. He was one of the Compass Point All Stars (with Sly and Robbie, Barry Reynolds, Mikey Chung, and Uziah "Sticky" Thompson), the in-house recording team of Compass Point Studios responsible for a series of albums in the 1980s recorded by Grace Jones, Tom Tom Club, Mick Jagger, Black Uhuru, Gwen Guthrie, Jimmy Cliff and Gregory Isaacs. Badarou's keyboard playing could also be heard on albums by Robert Palmer, Marianne Faithfull, Herbie Hancock, M (Pop Muzik), Talking Heads, Manu Dibango, and Miriam Makeba. He also produced Fela Kuti. Meticulously remastered and cut by both Simon Francis and Cicely Balston respectively, it has been pressed to the highest possible quality at Record Industry in Holland.

2023 repress as double heavy weight black vinyl, with original artwork and gatefold sleeve. Originally released in 2006. Even though 5:55 isn't technically Charlotte Gainsbourg's first solo album (that would be Charlotte for Ever, which was released [in 1986] when she was 15), it is her first solo album as an adult and, with the help of a dream team of collaborators, it's a fittingly sophisticated set that touches on her father Serge's brilliantly louche, literate pop without being overshadowed by it. Air's Jean-Benoit Dunckel and Nicolas Godin (who paid tribute to Serge Gainsbourg particularly well on 10,000 Hz Legend's Wonder Milky Bitch) wrote 5:55's delicate music, while Jarvis Cocker and the Divine Comedy's Neil Hannon penned its lyrics. This mingling of French and English influences is mirrored in Charlotte Gainsbourg's subtly expressive voice and accent, which provides the perfect complement to the album's lush sounds and vivid imagery.

10th anniversary reissue of this 12-track album, which was written and produced in 2013 and mixed with Erol Alkan at "The Phantasy Sound," the label's own studio in London. A difficult trick to master but like Carl Craig's More Songs About Food And Revolutionary Art, Plastikman's Consumed or more recently the work of Four Tet, the album works as a cohesive whole rather than a disparate collection of tracks. Innovative and forward thinking, Drone Logic manages to draw influences from beyond the dancefloor via My Bloody Valentine, NEU! and Chris Carter while still having the techno pulse to scale the walls of any club. The wide array of plaudits and early adopters of Daniel Avery's music is proof of this, ranging from acid house legends like The Chemical Brothers, Andrew Weatherall, and Richie Hawtin to the best of the new breed in Maya Jane Coles, James Holden, and Factory Floor. Firmly established as one of the UK's most exciting new DJ/producers having cut his teeth in Weatherall's Shoreditch studio bunker, Drone Logic follows up Avery's universally acclaimed mix CD for London clubbing institution Fabric where he remains a resident, recent remixes for Primal Scream, The Horrors, and Django Django. On Drone Logic there are no set piece vocals; when voices emerge on tracks, they are invariably disembodied, odd. And as distortion whips across techno-based backing tracks, it splices modern club music with the kind of sounds that forward thinking guitar bands might conjure up. The result is wholly compelling, gloriously transcendent and, yes, trippy.

2023 restock; LP version. Bureau B present a reissue of Heldon's 6 - Interface, originally released in 1977. A brilliant moment occurs right at the end of Heldon's sixth album, Interface. The album's final song, its side-long title track, builds up slowly into a roaring tornado of fiercely mutating drum patterns, effervescent synth work, and guitar licks that wail into the atmosphere like an abandoned astronaut. Then, after nearly 19 minutes of highly futuristic avant-garde space rock, this ultramodern music fades out and is replaced by a concluding few seconds of traditional blues-rock guitar. "We were finishing the track, the tape was rolling, and I started to play a normal boogie or whatever," remembers Heldon leader Richard Pinhas. "I think it was a good idea to keep it. It just came naturally, at the end." This event acts as a reminder of just how far rock n' roll had been transformed since its earliest incarnations. This blueprint had been jolted and nudged down all kinds of unexpected avenues after players like Chuck Berry and Bill Haley first found fame. The genre had branched out into every manner of mutated form. It had given rise to misshapen clones and had shifted into unrecognizable shapes, like a beautiful alien creature from one of the science fiction tales that were fondly admired by so many experimental rock musicians, Pinhas included. Heldon, surely, represented one of rock n' roll's most distant relatives; an innovative fusion of avant-garde rock sounds and synthesizer pulsations. At the same time, Interface's unexpected ending also tells us that such music, however improvisatory or fused with electronic elements, will forever have its roots in those early rock n' roll records that are responsible for so many varieties of aural exploration. Thanks to the increased presence of drummer François Auger and synth/Moog man Patrick Gauthier, Pinhas's project had solidified into a harder and heavier unit. Around the time of the album's release, the musician and composer Jean-Philippe Goude told Pinhas that because of its merging of synthesizer sounds with "real" instrumentation. Despite its often warm and near-funky feel, Interface has been cited as an influence on key industrial and noise musicians including Wolf Eyes and Merzbow.

"1983 reggae album from Earl Sixteen pressed on vinyl."

James Ray kickstarted his career as a teenager in 1959 after he left Washington DC for New York, but debut single "Make Her Mine" flopped. Two years later, songwriter Rudy Clark discovered Ray and got him signed to the Caprice label, the resultant "If You Gotta Make A Fool Of Somebody" a top-30 hit that the Beatles covered in early live sets. Ray's self-titled debut album had that hit and the equally appealing follow-up, "Itty Bitty Pieces," as well as "I've Got My Mind Set On You," later successfully covered by George Harrison. An overdose would tragically cut short Ray's career, this sole LP a testament to his enduring talent.

When Billy Eckstine's band dissolved in the mid-1940s, adventurous drummer Art Blakey spent two years in Africa, where he briefly converted to Islam; back in New York, he gigged with Miles and Monk, before fronting his own Jazz Messengers. 1957's Orgy In Rhythm drew on the sounds of North Africa and the Middle East, Blakey's unfettered drumming accompanied by Latin percussionists such as Potato Valdez and Evilio Quintero, with Herbie Mann on flute. The musical arrangement is stunning, at times melodic or primordially rhythmic, but never short of pure brilliance. Overall, an excellent and astounding release!

Recorded Live in Italy in October 1985 and mastered directly from the old dusty cassette, here's a previously unheard Steve Lacy recording from a rare duo appearance with pianist Martin Joseph, a little known yet fascinating British musician who had worked with Harry Beckett, John Surman, Ian Carr, and Tubby Hayes, among others, and who later became a regular presence on the Rome mid '70s creative Jazz scene. This recording presents an opportunity to listen to the soprano sax giant in a repertoire not frequently found on his other duo recordings with pianists. The set list includes some of Lacy's finest compositions like "Prospectus," "Flakes," and "Coastline," plus Thelonious Monk's classic "Bemsha Swing," a tribute to Monk's visionary mastery where Joseph's contrapuntal response to Lacy's angular lines leads the music towards a multidimensional space, a quality to be found throughout the whole album. This is a wonderful discovery, and a significant addition to Lacy's discography and legacy. Contains printed inner sleeve with archival photos and extensive liner notes by two Italian soprano saxophone specialists Roberto Ottaviano and Eugenio Colombo, and pianist Martin Joseph himself.

"Agitation Free was one of the leading representatives of German experimental rock music in the early 1970s. The Berlin band developed long, for that time unusual, free instrumental improvisations from the end of 1967. They achieved cult status as early as 1972 with an independent mixture of improvised rock paired with electro, ethno, jazz and trance elements. Extensive live activities gave the band a steadily increasing level of recognition throughout Europe. For example, the group performed in the cultural program of the Olympic Games in Munich in the summer of 1972, toured France for two months in early 1973, performed at the 'German Rock Super Concert' in Frankfurt in May, produced the second album 2nd and then went on tour through France and major German cities. In 1974, the band began to show signs of fatigue, which led to their temporary breakup at the end of the year after a farewell concert. In retrospect, it became clear that the experimental circle Agitation Free was one of the important bands of the 'Berlin School' and furthermore a career springboard for several German musicians. Christopher Franke, for example, helped the band Tangerine Dream achieve worldwide recognition. Michael Hoenig worked with Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream before he became known as a film composer in Hollywood after a solo album (among other things, the film music for the blockbuster 9 1/2 Weeks with Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke). Axel Genrich moved to Guru Guru, Burghard Rausch became a founding member of Bel Ami. Gustl Lütjens toured with Shirley Bassey and Nena and later found a large audience with his new age band Living Mirrors, especially in the USA. Lutz 'Lüül' Ulbrich joined Ashra, worked with ex-Velvet Underground singer Nico, produced solo records in addition to theater music, and has enjoyed success with the 17 Hippies since the late 1990s."