AGUIRRE RECORDS - Forced Exposure

$17.50 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 4/26/2024

Står op med solen ("Rising with the sun") is the second album by Amalie Dahl's Dafnie. With this album, the band continues the exploration of their collective sound. There are influences from both old school free jazz, and contemporary Scandinavian jazz like Fire! Orchestra and Christian Wallumrød Ensemble, as well as clear connection to the Trondheim milieu, where the group was founded in 2020. The energetic and expressive band explores their more subtle side with this record. Står op med solen is an album longing for humans to be one with nature. The music comments on the world's ultra-capitalistic power structures of today. The band navigates like one organism through parts of organic free jazz, strict structures and composed cells. They start out where their first record ended, in the familiar free jazz sound with riffs and melodies, and go safely on their onward journey. Amalie Dahl's Dafnie brings together five well-known names from the Norwegian jazz scene, also known from other projects like Kongle Trio, Bliss Quintet, I like to sleep, Veslemøy Narvesen, Galumphing Duo, Treen, and Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, among others.

$26.00 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 4/26/2024

LP version. Står op med solen ("Rising with the sun") is the second album by Amalie Dahl's Dafnie. With this album, the band continues the exploration of their collective sound. There are influences from both old school free jazz, and contemporary Scandinavian jazz like Fire! Orchestra and Christian Wallumrød Ensemble, as well as clear connection to the Trondheim milieu, where the group was founded in 2020. The energetic and expressive band explores their more subtle side with this record. Står op med solen is an album longing for humans to be one with nature. The music comments on the world's ultra-capitalistic power structures of today. The band navigates like one organism through parts of organic free jazz, strict structures and composed cells. They start out where their first record ended, in the familiar free jazz sound with riffs and melodies, and go safely on their onward journey. Amalie Dahl's Dafnie brings together five well-known names from the Norwegian jazz scene, also known from other projects like Kongle Trio, Bliss Quintet, I like to sleep, Veslemøy Narvesen, Galumphing Duo, Treen, and Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, among others.

$28.00 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 4/26/2024

Originally released on tape by SicSic in 2014, Aprilnacht commemorates a decade of music from Brannten Schnüre and marked the spring in a tetralogy of albums about the four seasons when it came out. Back then the Würsburg-based project consisted solely of Christian Schoppik, who later welcomed Katie Rich to take over the vocals. He used to perform as Agnes Beil, but dropped the name when, while making this album realized his music was becoming "much gentler and more fragile." Aprilnacht already captured the particular musical ideas that Schoppik would thoroughly keep exploring, delving deeper and deeper into the use and manipulation of samplers from sources so diverging as to wander between the five continents to post-war German family television and cult cinema. Heir of the ritualistic intensity of Coil, of the intricate sampler assemblies of Ghédalia Tazartès', and of the dusty, dismal old ballads from around the world, Brannten Schnüre manages to make these paths cross in a territory that is as inherent as it is uncanny; sieged by the past and intimate as a hearth. An organic approach to folk, ambient, and sound collage, where ethereal yet thoroughly textured pieces coalesce in enthralling, delicate, and innermost musical rituals. Aprilnacht was inspired by the stories of German philosopher and writer Friedrich Alfred Schmid Noerr, whose work exhaustively examines the conflict between paganism and Christianity, safeguarding myth in a way that Schoppik describes as boldly modern, humorous and unpredictable in its variations of the Germanic folklore motifs. Do not succumb to the insipid howl of death, for nothing may last but mutability. You see, the rock has moved a little during the night; the rest is just wind fleeing from the void.

$23.50 NOT IN STOCK

"Freeform, pigeon-hole dodging, stylistic merry-go-round, restless, weird and addictive -- the long-anticipated return of Nina Harker, three years in the works since their self-titled 2020 debut. Similar in vein to its polyglot predecessor, this is an extremely skewed trip to the unknown. The duo's chameleon-like musical world never misses an opportunity to shred its skin and reappear as something totally unexpected. Apolline's beautifully exposed, day-dreaming vocals on opener 'Le Pont à Voiles' cut deep, setting up a false sense of security before things take a dive into the underneath -- stuttering synths and garbled vocals brace an eerie up-right piano solo and agitated spoken/electronics piece. The sheer lack of cohesion and total disregard for an attempt at flow adds a tangible sense of surrealism. But it's no amateurish prank or way of disguising technical flaws -- it's clear these musicians can play, and there's a strong feeling of intent. The folkier moments, when they do decide to glisten through the gunk, are captivating and otherworldly, whereas the indifferent vocals and brittle drum machine tilt of 'Hin Und Her' or quivering electronics of "e" could easily be misplaced for an '80s tape piece from Vox Populi. Add in a drop of the unhinged weirdness of early Beate Bartel/CHBB, or scratchy Siltbreeze almost-songs and the collage-aesthetic of Enhet För Fri Musik, and it's clear this is something special. In an age of unashamed pastiche, it's so nice, almost refreshing, to be properly tangled up in something so genuinely other and intoxicating. No one does it better." --Tom, All Night Flight

$24.00 NOT IN STOCK

Apolline and Thomas have been performing since 2022 under the KOU guise with 24 electronic harmoniums. Producing dense layers of tones and overtones. On their debut album, KOU steers in another direction. The harmonium appears occasionally, but more prominent are delicate guitar pluckings, distant vocal effects, synths, flutes, piano strokes, a touch of musical magic and Apolline's jazz-not-jazz vocals. Recommended for fans of: Nina Harker, Le Diable Degoutant, Fiesta En El Vacio. Played, written, recorded and glued at home and on the road by Apolline Schöser and Thomas Coquelet.

$25.00 LOW STOCK LEVEL

As an important agent of Gothenburg's underground scene, Dan Johansson has been a member of several experimental harsh noise projects such as Sewer Election, and lo-fi indie folk bands like Enhet För Fri Musik and Amateur Hour. Ordeal is his latest solo output, and might as well be ashes stuck in the blast furnace's edges of his last longing career. Not by means of summing up genres or as a culmination of his musical development, but as a profound music piece weaved in his own household. With not much more than a synthesizer, Vätterns Pärla is built by trembling, dissonant drones stained in feedback and reverberation, thickly textured by the no-fi quality of the recording, depicting a menacing atmosphere congested with heavy fumes. In Johansson's words, Ordeal "takes inspiration from the early '80s albums of Maurizio Bianchi, filtered through a Gothenburgian no-fi bleakness. It's an album for inner voyage, childhood memories, and places that now lost purpose and meaning." There's certainly intimacy and nostalgia, yet a claustrophobic, hypnotic ambiance wraps it all up in a contained and narrow space. Emphasis is put on texture rather than on detail, on color rather than on progression, on suspense rather than on conclusion. Tension varies stiffly, sometimes a drone layer dismantles and the mood seems to filter, but ragged edges are never polished. We can feel the walls and the air, which although tarnished, can be breathed in somehow. It's as if waking up in a dark room and having to recognize it with our ears and tact, testing its dimensions and its surface. The stillness in the chamber is like the stillness between gasps of storms. Without visible stars, an enclosed share of night sky hides a heavy load of industrial debris underwater. These remnants are maybe the pearl regarding the album's title. It all can seem like a dream, a grim mechanical soundscape deafened by hefty, yet sporadic winds. Soil strives to make something grow, but sprouting is kept suspended, held by a dismal presentiment. Long shadows on the ground prove that darkness is about to befall. And as these shadows stretch, almost about to break up in a loud strike, the noise turns white.

$25.00 IN STOCK

Recorded in Brussels in 2019, Feral Lands and Forbidden Cities is Timelash's second delivery of a four-album projected series. In their debut, A Morphology of Wonders (Aguirre Records, 2021), the duet formed by Embassador Dulgoon (Nonlocal Society, Archimboldos) and Corum (Psychic Sounds, Million Brazilians) revealed a unique musical journey that unfolds and expands like a cluster of organic matters and mechanical dialogues lit by iridescent fluorescences. Timelash's musical proposal is firmly rooted in retrofuturism, reminding us of exotic and library music artists such as Martin Denny, Egisto Macchi, Bernard Fèvre, and Eric Vann, reaching up to Mark Dwane's cinematic soundscapes, or Constance Demby's Novus Magnificat. Feral Lands and Forbidden Cities digs precisely into what the title indicates: civilizations not yet explored, untraceable ruins, and the unknown. Digital synthesizers, samplers, flutes, percussion pads, and effects are assembled as stirring sprouts of life and evolutionary dream cycles. Spacecraft bustles, strange body noises, tolling bells, plasticine murmurs, and boiling potions ring under harmonic synth soulful crescendos, building up a sense of both machinery and wonder; the emotional significance that the mechanical contains. The tactile quality of detail and the flourishing motifs join and bloom in poignant, even epic manners, as in "Outside Grottos of Time." A mood more dizzying and suspenseful speeds up "Sandrunner's Pass" until the puzzling closing track "Shadows of the Skyfish" wraps it all up. Chromatic glares, mechanical abstractions, and multicolored visions emerge like fumes radiating from electric dreams; melodic layers drift, rise, and finally lay down subtly. There's a feeling of mystery and motion in several directions, sometimes even simultaneous, although limited, all of them equally full of meaning, since this is a coherent musical tale. The Great Nebula of Andromeda swims like a phosphorescent amoeba. Far away yonder in forbidden cities, foreboding creatures are planning to abduct us while we sleep. In the dark, we cook our macaroni and eat by lantern light. Stars cluster all over our table like fireflies. We watch the turning moon through our little telescope. The unknown stumbles around the dying campfire. As breaths gather firm, an auroral stain illuminates the sky once again. Great geometrical winter constellations lift up over sinuous litmus gleams. We walk under the stars, our feet on the unknown round earth. Our eyes follow the lights of a deep glowing spaceship. Engine tones rise, shrill, faint, finally inaudible, and its lights go out in the southeast haze beneath the feet of Orion.

$25.00 LOW STOCK LEVEL

In addition to the unique musical proposals and the large body of work that they have developed separately, Amelia Cuni and Werner Durand have been performing together as a duo as well as in collaborations (Tonaliens, Born of Six) for more than 20 years. Fusing her Indian Raga singing in the Dhrupad style with his minimalist and experimental approach, they have expanded the reach of their soundworlds as well as proposed new paths for contemporary music. In this occasion, Uli Hohmann joins them in a range of hand drums from the Middle East and North Africa, plus a dulcimer-sounding hammered guitar. Durand's various self-made wind instruments, soprano sax, and blown kalimba shine along with Cuni's astounding vocals, which are sometimes sung through a mirliton (a medieval type of kazoo). Clearing is the trio's first published recording. With a condensing sound going from Buddhist morning chants down to Indian festive traditional music, the title track, which closes the album, is the most vibrant of all, permeating a bit of commotion through buzzing drones and galloping percussion. Without disorder, yet without measure. Clearing is therefore this shuttle into the distance, this space that weaves, unites, and tenses the different cords that we are made up of. When the clouds advance silently, gray, until they become dark in a few minutes, it means that the monsoon is coming. It reaches us without apparent noise, but then resounds in its images, leaving behind lightness, freshness, clarity, and a tremendous luminosity that comes from so far away: from the Himalayas, from so ancient, from Sanskrit, from a sound where the darkness and the divine, where the concrete and the landscape, where the rock and the humidity leave a mark that brings together and ties a sky loaded with new clouds.

$28.00 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 6/16/2023

"Early European composers felt that their work reflected in its structure the divine nature of the material world. Via tuning, form, and contrapuntal alchemy, these musicians sought to illuminate and edify the complex and perfect order of existence. The music recorded here also reflects the contours of an ordered world, but it is no place any of us has ever visited. By assembling far-flung building blocks from the detritus of a 21st century musical vocabulary, Orlando Furioso brings the listener into a bizarre new cosmos. The result is deeply expressive music that speaks not with the voice of a narrator or memoirist, but with that of a cartographer. Like a science-fiction Dante, the listener is taken on a tour of many diverse and colorful provinces of an alien world. Though each composition references its own set of real-world musical locales (from the Andes to Indonesia to Italy to New Orleans), they are bound by stylistic consistency into a coherent, continuous geography. Permeating this world is an uncompromising commitment to microtonal harmony, rhythmic intensity, and an ability to deploy the esoteric (Nicola Vicentino's notorious 31-tone temperament) and the head-smackingly obvious (a surprise djent breakdown) with equal conviction. Though Atria Vicente's compositions are steering the ship, serious recognition is due to all the players on the record for their ability to meet these demands. Our omnivorous musical diets offer real abundance. They enrich our craft by providing access to limitless approaches from which to choose -- more masters to study, traditions to absorb, and techniques to hone than is possible in multiple lifetimes. They can also inflict heavy and often contradictory burdens of influence . . . When completed with precision and with no stone left unturned, the seams between the pieces vanish and the listener is deposited somewhere beautiful and strange, left to assign their sensations meanings of their own." --Mat Muntz

Orlando Furioso is led by Atria Vicente and features David Acevedo, David Leon, Andrew Boudreau, Alec Goldfarb, Daniel Hass, Simón Willson, and Niña Tormenta. Orlando Furioso celebrated its release at Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn, NY, as a part of Wet Ink Ensemble's 24th Season opening concert, a performance lauded by The New York Times. Winner of the Deutscher Jazz Preis: Best International Debut Album 2023.

"Making liberal use of microtonal harmony and hypnotic, ostinato rhythms -- as well as the occasional stylistic smash-cut, reminiscent of John Zorn -- Orlando Furioso announced itself on Wednesday as a punchy, creative force on the New York scene. (...) Atria's rhythms had a welcoming, social propulsion, and the microtonality of his writing for keyboard proposed an individual -- even insular -- language." --Seth Colter Walls, The New York Times.

$19.00 LOW STOCK LEVEL

The next chapter of the Natural Information Society is here. Since Time Is Gravity, credited to Natural Information Society Community Ensemble with Ari Brown, presents a newly expanded manifestation of acclaimed composer & multi-instrumentalist Joshua Abrams nearly 15 year, 7 albums- &-counting flagship ensemble. Joining the core NIS of Abrams (guimbri & bass), Lisa Alvarado (harmonium) Mikel Patrick Avery (drums) & Jason Stein (bass clarinet) are Hamid Drake (percussion), Josh Berman & Ben Lamar Gay (cornets), Nick Mazzarella & Mai Sugimoto (alto saxophones & flute), Kara Bershad (harp) & Chicago living legend of the tenor saxophone Ari Brown. Recorded live to tape at Electrical Audio & The Graham Foundation, cover painting Vibratory Cartography: Nepantla, by Lisa Alvarado.

"Since first developing Natural Information Society in 2010, Joshua Abrams has been gradually expanding the group's conceptual underpinnings, its musical references & the sheer number of the group's members. Its music is, in a sense, an expansive form of minimalism, based in repeated & overlaid rhythmic patterns, ostinatos & modality. Its roots, its scale & its meaning become clearer in time. If time is gravity, it also allows us to carry more. Having begun as fundamentally a rhythm section with Abrams' guimbri at its core, the version here can stretch to a tentet, including six horns. Abrams has been expanding his minimalism gradually, but he has long understood a key to minimalism's potential: the breadth of its roots in the late 1950s & early 1960s, ranging from the dissatisfaction of young European-stream composers with the limitations of serialism to the simultaneous dissatisfaction of jazz musicians with the dense harmonic vocabulary of bop & hard bop. The former began exploring rhythmic complexity & narrow tonal palates in place of harmonic abstraction (Steve Reich's Drumming, Philip Glass' Music with Changing Parts; perhaps above all Terry Riley's In C & his late '60s all-night organ & loop concerts); the later reduced dense chord changes to scales (signally with Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, but rapidly expanding with John Coltrane's vast project). In the 1950s the LP record opened the world with documentation of Asian & African musics, key influences on both minimalists & jazz musicians. If John Coltrane's soprano saxophone suggested the keening shehnai of Bismillah Khan, the instrument was rapidly taken up by two key minimalists, LaMonte Young & Riley, similarly appreciative of its flexible intonation, the same thing that kept it out of big bands. If the guimbri, the North African hide-covered lute that Abrams plays with NIS, involves a rich tradition of hypnotic healing music associated with the Gnawa people, Abrams' music also touches on other musics as well --other depths, memories & healings, different drones, rhythms & modes. As the group expands on Since Time Is Gravity, he has made certain jazz traditions in the same stream more explicit as well. If there is a mystical & elastic quality involved in the experience of time, both in direction & duration, you will catch it here. The parts for the choir of winds expand on the roles of Abrams' guimbri, Mikel Patrick Avery & Hamid Drake's percussion & Lisa Alvarado's harmonium: at times, the winds are almost looping in the tentet version, each hitting a repeating note in turn, at once drone & distinct inflection on temporal sequence. The brilliance of the work resides in Abrams' compositions, the NIS' intuitive execution & in Ari Brown's singular embodiment of the great tenor saxophone tradition, including the oracular genius of Eddie 'Lockjaw' Davis, & Yusef Lateef..." --Stuart Broomer, April 2022

$27.00 IN STOCK

Pauline Marx, formerly of the fantastic duo La Fureur de Vouivre, seems like a being from another time and place; namely, an escaped marauder lurking in the forests of a Bruegel painting and integrating the surreal flora and fauna of a Boschian creation into the scenery and lore of deep Brittany. Her invented mythology is loaded with murky rituals and contorted mantras, backed by the surprising sounds and textures of terrains so earthly and so unreal. Where do you think you come from? Where do you think you're going? Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate: you, with the noodle to the four winds, who pass the threshold of this disc, you better leave all hope there, and glide in the poisonous footstep of the devil your guide. Where do you think you come from? The mountain is no longer just the mountain; after your passage, it will no longer even be a mountain. Like the whole landscape, it will have been eaten, sauced by invisible leeches. Your nostalgia for the ground and your thirst to find the source will have only discovered a forest of vain words and foul water. Where do you think you're going? At the crossroads, the world is consumed in the previous future. Only the devil will know how to make you overcome the disgust of traditions, and only the love for the devil will give you enough vim to reach your goal: a village, perhaps, but which belongs to no one, a haven to your excessiveness. The dark tradition to which this game of ternary trampling belongs, like the rhythm of a heart in tune with the inverted world, has no country and no assigned time. Rather a topology of Eve awakened after a thousand-year sleep, an idiosyncratic and possessed reading of our common humus, made up of stories composted in the limbo of the past, of songs captured in extremis vitae and rebus in the privatized antechambers of death. What does she tell us about? Of our automobile and in love roamings, of the porosity of the membranes that separate beings and things, of the constant inversion of signs. The seventeen stages of this short journey, where intertwine the throbbing of objects, blown horns and rubbed horsehair, form the map of a country never to be found, ours, where only the voice of an old child and the disgusting devil's poisonous charm can guide us. Music, artwork, and text by Pauline Marx. Mastered and mixed by Manuel Duval. Recorded in a yurt in 2021. Edition of 300.

$27.00 NOT IN STOCK

The union of Antwerp synthesist David Edren and Tokyo minimalist Hiroki Takahashi is a fit so natural as to feel preordained. Both traffic in subtle shades of contemplative electronics, marked by patience, space, and poetic restraint. And both have rich histories of curation and collaboration -- Edren in the duo Spirit & Form alongside Bent Von Bent, and Takahashi as proprietor of the Kankyō record shop, as well as one fourth of cosmic ambient quartet UNKNOWN ME. Mutual fans of one another's work, they began sharing stems in the latter half of 2020, which slowly blossomed into a collection of multi-hued compositions inspired by notions of connectivity and impermanence, translated for east and west: Flow | 流れ. Opener "Dusk Decorum | 黄昏礼節" maps the mood of what's to come, elegantly pirouetting and percolating through an expanding vista of looming stars and half-light horizons. Takahashi describes Edren's arrangements as evoking "a strange feel, something we haven't heard much of before." The sensation is one of "in-betweenness," a restless current whispering beneath the beauty, like seasons seen in time-lapse footage: flickering but infinite, transience turned permanent. Takahashi's signature sculpture garden tones plot spiral patterns over which Edren cascades dazzling pointillist synthesizer coloration. The pieces veer between delicate and dilated, micro and macro, their aperture forever softly in flux. From the oscillating orchestral lullaby of "Stalactime | 鍾乳石時計" to the sweeping, sparkling dream sequence closer, "Shift Register | シフトレジスタ," the album achieves the elusive goal of being more than the sum of its parts. This is music of rare air, elevated and amorphous, shimmering just out of reach. Though Edren and Takahashi have yet to cohabitate the same room in person (a fact that should be rectified soon by an astute festival booker), their palettes and poise are perfectly paired, twin fragilities woven into seven radiant and regenerative vibrational states. The cover design of a beatific, beaded leaf rippling on the surface of a hidden pond aptly captures the record's muted majesty. Takahashi's quiet pride is justified: "We are very happy with this time-consuming and carefully crafted work."

$21.50 NOT IN STOCK

"Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy, x2 LPs of long-form, lyrical, groove-based free improv by acclaimed guitarist & composer Jeff Parker's ETA IVtet, is at last here. Recorded live at ETA (referencing David Foster Wallace), a bar in LA's Highland Park neighborhood with just enough space in the back for Parker, drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Anna Butterss, & alto saxophonist Josh Johnson to convene in extraordinarily depthful & exploratory music making. Gleaned for the stoniest side-length cuts from 10+ hours of vivid two-track recordings made between 2019 & 2021 by Bryce Gonzales, Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy is a darkly glowing séance of an album, brimming over with the hypnotic, the melodic, & patience & grace in its own beautiful strangeness. Room-tone, electric fields, environment, ceiling echo, live recording, Mondays, Los Angeles. Jeff Parker's first double album & first live album, Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy belongs in the lineage of such canonical live double albums recorded on the West Coast as Lee Morgan's Live at the Lighthouse, Miles Davis' In Person Friday & Saturday Night at the Blackhawk, San Francisco & Black Beauty, & John Coltrane's Live in Seattle. While the IVtet sometimes plays standards &, including on this recording, original compositions, it is as previously stated largely a free improv group -- just not in the genre meaning of the term. The music is more free composition than free improvisation, more blending than discordant. It's tensile, yet spacious & relaxed. Clearly all four musicians have spent significant time in the planetary system known as jazz, but relationships to other musics, across many scenes & eras -- dub & Dilla, primary source psychedelia, ambient & drone -- suffuse the proceedings. Listening to playbacks Parker remarked, humorously & not, 'we sound like the Byrds' (to certain ears, the Clarence White-era Byrds, who really stretched it). A fundamental of all great ensembles, whether basketball teams or bands, is the ability of each member to move fluidly & fluently in & out of lead & supportive roles. Building on the communicative pathways they've established in Parker's -- The New Breed -- project, Parker & Johnson maintain a constant dialogue of lead & support. Their sampled & looped phrases move continuously thru the music, layered & alive, adding depth & texture & pattern, evoking birds in formation, sea creatures drifting below the photic zone. Or, the two musicians simulate those processes by entwining their terse, clear-lined playing in real-time. The stop/start flow of Bellerose, too, simulates the sampler, recalling drum parts in Parker's beat-driven projects. Mostly Bellerose's animated phraseologies deliver the inimitable instantaneous feel of live creative drumming. The range of tonal colors he conjures from his extremely vintage battery of drums & shakers -- as distinctive a sonic signature as we have in contemporary acoustic drumming -- bring almost folkloric qualities to the aesthetic currency of the IVtet's language. A wonderful revelation in this band is the playing of Anna Butterss. The strength, judiciousness & humility with which she navigates the bass position both ground & lift upward the egalitarian group sound. As the IVtet's grooves flow & clip, loop & repeat, the ensemble elements reconfigure, a terrarium of musical cultivation growing under controlled variables, a tight experiment of harmony & intuition, deep focus & freedom. For all its varied sonic personality, Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy scans immediately & unmistakably as music coming from Jeff Parker's unique sound world. Generous in spirit, trenchant & disciplined in execution, Parker's music has an earned respect for itself & for its place in history that transmutes through the musical event into the listener. Many moods & shapes of heart & mind will find utility & hope in a music that combines the autonomy & the community we collectively long to see take hold in our world, in substance & in staying power. On the personal tip, this was always my favorite gig to hit, a lifeline of the eremite records Santa Barbara years. Mondays southbound on the 101, driving away from tasks & screens & illness, an hour later ordering a double tequila neat at the bar with the band three feet away, knowing i was in good hands, knowing it would be back around on another Monday. To encounter life at scales beyond the human body is the collective dance of music & the beholding of its beauty, together." --Michael Ehlers & Zac Brenner

$26.00 NOT IN STOCK

Originally released on cassette in 2016 on Feathered Coyote Records. Brannten Schnüre are one of those neo-romantic music experimentalists who add to a long tradition of celebrating folk tale and exoticism. Their meticulously crafted loops, hesitant melodies and heavily nostalgic lyricism could easily be translated to what the late philosopher and music critic Mark Fisher called "hauntology", a postmodern longing for a lost future. To describe the beauty of Geträumt Hab' Ich Vom Martinszug, however, the term seems somewhat dissatisfying. Romanticism is a hard nut to crack in the Anthropocene, and Brannten Schnüre's realms of the cerebral are too deeply ingrained in a German tradition of storytelling to define them within popular paradigm. Geträumt Hab' Ich Vom Martinszug was recorded in 2014 in Würzburg and functions as the autumn part of the band's seasonal cycle quadrilogy (the other segments being Aprilnacht (SicSic), Sommer im Pfirsichhain (Aguirre) and Durch unser zugedecktes Tal (Youdonthavetocallitmusic)). It deals with the Saint Martin's parade, a mostly European tradition to celebrate the medieval spirit of Saint Martin of Tours, friend of children and patron of the poor. Around November 11th, children come out on the streets with lanterns and sing ancient songs in exchange for sweets. It's a period of snugness and expectation, of yearning and dreaming, and therefore a consummate subject for the duo to scrutinize. To the adult's ear the dream of the Saint Martin's parade isn't all that consolatory. The dark and slow loops of Christian Schoppik rather sound like motifs for a welcome paralysis. Sometimes as a gentle backdrop for vocals by Katie Rich and Schoppik himself, the repetitive structures serve as tricksters that trade innocence for the uncanny. The dream becomes a fever dream which quickly absorbs the listener into a vacuum, an eternal post-panic attack semi-relief. Maybe that's the amazing paradox of Brannten Schnüre. The space they occupy is never comforting -- as if being locked up inside a Carl Grossberg painting -- but it's also a subliminal aural zone you do not want to leave. It's music as being, as a stream, devoid of climax or catharsis. And because it is flux and being, and exists to be taken, it speaks in art's purest form. Layout by Johannes Schebler. Mastered by Pieter De Wagter. Edition of 500.

$29.50 NOT IN STOCK

Limited 2023 restock; reissue. There's not another album on the planet that sounds even remotely like vibraphonist Khan Jamal's eccentric, one-of-a-kind masterpiece, Drum Dance To The Motherland. Thirty years after its release, the album's tapestry of sound, fearless abstractions, relentless grooves, cool swing, flashes of ecstasy, and pan cultural embrace remain powerful and beyond category. One of only three albums released on the Philadelphia-based Dogtown label, it was barely distributed beyond the city's limits when it came out in the early '70s. Finally available again, a really stunning document of musical exploration, a classic session. In its improbable fusion of free jazz expressionism, black psychedelia, and full-on dub production techniques, Drum Dance remains a bracingly powerful outsider statement fifty years after it was recorded live at the Catacombs Club in Philadelphia, 1972. Comparisons to Sun Ra, King Tubby, Phil Cohran, and BYG/Actuel merely hint at the cosmic otherness conjured by The Khan Jamal Creative Arts Ensemble and by sound engineer Mario Falana's real-time enhancements. Clearly, the members of the Khan Jamal Creative Arts Ensemble saw African American music as a continuum that stretched from the Motherland through the blues, R&B, jazz, and free jazz, and they prided themselves on mastering the continuum. In the early '70s, these were fairly new ideas, but they had taken firm root in Philadelphia. The search for an African American music that is modern and culturally progressive but rooted in an African tradition is the music's heart and soul. Its connection to the specific African American community in Philadelphia is its immediate inspiration. "My ancestors eventually show up in my music every time I play," Jamal says. "I've always said that my backyard is Africa." Originally issued by Jamal in 1973 in an edition of three hundred copies on Dogtown Records, Drum Dance To The Motherland was effectively a myth until eremite's 2005 CD reissue. With the master tapes long vanished, the audio was transferred at Sony Music's 54th street studio from a minty copy of the original LP. Includes an insert with Ed Hazell's detailed telling of Drum Dance's incredible history. Under License from Eremite Records.

$28.00 NOT IN STOCK

Reissue, originally released in 1989. After Dinner's Paradise of Replica is a concise nugget of tomfoolery that occupies a whimsical no man's land between art pop, Japanese folk music, and full-assed Art Zoydian avant proggery. Gentle, arcane and covertly sweeping, it typifies that friendly strain of experimentalism that Eastern music seems so predisposed towards and which curious minds find such great delight in. Assembled by the enigmatic chanteuse and composer known simply as Haco, After Dinner was less a band and more of a loose art collective that utilized a plurality of different musical disciplines stapled together through free improvisation sessions. And some of this does come through on Paradise of Replica -- the record is a scrapbook of bells, strings, and koto humming under Haco's ethereal vocals, and the effect, while perfectly tuneful, does come off more as a musical project than a conventional album. But Paradise of Replica is far from an impenetrable scholastic endeavor -- in fact, there's something of an Elephant 6-like quality in its ability to warp conventions while still coming off more or less like pop music. Counter to the ramshackle hostility of much improvised music, After Dinner's choices are melodious and feel deliberately sequenced. Even crescendos don't tend to rise above a murmur, and there are even apparent hooks on tracks like "A Walnut" and "Ironclad Mermaid." Ultimately, there's not much to be said about Paradise of Replica that can elucidate more than actually hearing it will be able to. Proggy, playful, and lush, it's a brief glimpse into something in the vicinity of genius, and just outside the realm of commercial music. It's a quietly bold project that shows a softer side of the avant-garde, and makes a perfect companion to Stereolab and Magma at once.

$36.50 NOT IN STOCK

Sold out, repress in 2023... Reissue, originally released on CD in 2005. Eric Dolphy's final studio album is hailed as one of the finest examples of mid-60s post-bop. Dolphy, having recorded the album in February 1964, was in Europe less than six weeks later and his all-too-brief life ended less than two months after that. It marked his last flurry of original compositions and is considered his apex. It is fascinating to consider whether he would have moved past or away from the album in 1965, had he lived. Though Dolphy should not be considered an avant-garde musician by the term's most common definitions, most interpretations of Out To Lunch have been done by players working squarely in that area. So it is with this album, the most ambitious in its recreation of the five-tune disc (with one original added to the final "Straight Up And Down", extending the piece to almost thirty minutes). All five compositions from the original quintet LP are revisited in the same order, the record sleeve even duplicates the old album jacket, although a photo taken by Daidō Moriyama inside Tokyo's Shinjuku railway station replaces the enigmatic "Will Be Back" sign. Otomo Yoshihide first came to international prominence in the 1990s as the leader of the experimental rock group Ground Zero, and has since worked in a variety of contexts, ranging from free improvisation to noise, jazz, avant-garde, and contemporary classical. Recognizable themes ("Hat and Beard," "Out to Lunch," "Straight Up and Down") appear, and individual players -- including Alfred Harth on bass clarinet -- don't carry forward echoes from the past in the spirit of a sincere and heartfelt homage. However, a good deal of the time all bets are off; in addition to the usual brass, reeds, bass, and drums (and of course a bit of vibraphone, here played by Takara Kumiko) are such sonic paraphernalia as sine waves, contact mike, no-input mixing board, and, of course, "computer." Otomo himself plays electric guitar. From composition to composition and even during episodes within compositions, the band takes radically different approaches. There are blasts of free jazz energy not too far removed from the Peter Brötzmann Tentet, an impression reinforced by the presence of spluttering wild man Mats Gustafsson on baritone sax. Not surprisingly and often in contrast with the Dolphy original, the music is dense and filled to overflowing with sounds -- sometimes due to fundamental reworkings in structure rather than just the larger size of the ensemble. Dolphy is transported into the 21st century and allowed to romp through modern developments in music.

$28.00 NOT IN STOCK

Originally released in 2018. "Swedish progg is not to be confused with 'prog' as in progressive rock music. When we are talking about progg, we are referring to the Swedish music movement influenced by the political climate of the late '60s, to some extent the hippie movement and in many cases also Swedish folk music. Music highly driven by a political agenda. Blod's Knutna Nävar, originally released in an edition of 150 copies on Förlag För Fri Musik in 2018 and later a small cassette run, is pretty much a lost progg classic from the '70s. This is not a case of copying a certain sound though, far from it, neither are ideas really rehashed nor does the album feel nostalgic in that sense. Rather it feels like if someone has read about the progg movement and all the records but never actually heard it, yet decided to do an album and somehow managed to succeed big time. Further developing the sound palette and ambience initiated with parts of the Leendet Från Helvetet recording, the music feels slightly louder and more in your face. It's like it's more of everything. The melodies are immediate and it's quite impossible to resist the brash catchiness of it all. Albeit mentioning progg music and its importance for this recording, the actual musical side of Knutna Nävar has in reality more in common with soundtrack/library music and Swedish composers like the late Björn Isfält when you attempt to break it down. The crude DIY approach and anything-goes mentality just adds an extra dimension to it all and ultimately places the music somewhere else. There's a rather blunt use of samples throughout the record (sources probably best to leave out, though you don't have to be an Einstein to figure these out), but then again this is made by the same guy that gave the world the ABBA album. Those samples have managed to become an integral part of the music through the few years that has passed and though well familiar with the records those snippets are now to me genuinely Blod and nothing else. It seems like everyone has their own favorite but Knutna Nävar is the Blod album I have returned to the most. It has that extra something that sets it apart and if I would have to pick up a few records that sums up why Gothenburg has been a pretty damn awesome place to be in the last 10 years or so, this would definitely be one of the top picks." Includes insert and large poster; edition of 500.

$28.00 IN STOCK

Originally released in 2017 on Förlag För Fri Musik. "It's been a true pleasure but also a rather chaotic experience to follow the progress of Blod from a close distance since the beginning. I have fond memories of receiving the odd cassettes from the early days, like the severely fucked up Unga Röster (later issued as an LP on Förlag För Fri Musik) and the awfully mesmerizing Prat Om Depression recording. Returning to Leendet Från Helvetet for the first time for long a while, it's quite evident that the album marked a new phase in the troubled Blod universe. There's few traces left of the found tapes/audial voyeurism and brutish stop/rec editing that made up the first few releases, instead we are served with what is pretty much a proper album in a, sort of, traditional sense. The record opens with a sole beat from a hand drum soon accompanied by a beautiful and very Blod-ish subtle melody from a glockenspiel but it only takes a few minutes before Gustaf's past as a free jazz aficionado is noticeable with the rather rough saxophone burst of 'Natten'. It's not until the title track that things kicks off for real though, most likely the first example of the sound and, maybe more so, very special feeling that I would say most people associate Blod with nowadays. To me, it's the sound of growing up in Sweden in the '80s; having two channels on the TV, eating brown food, rainy summers, taping commercial stuff on the radio, playing D&D in a purple tent in the garden . . . Arguably, Blod has never sounded more Blod than on this track, this is the very essence of the man's work right here. The progam continues on side B with the solemn piano piece 'Lust', another saxophone rager and then the flipside's centerpiece 'Tro, Hopp & Kärlek' which pretty much mirrors the title track in its larger-than-life scope and pure beauty. A couple of years has passed since its initial release back in 2017 and I think it's safe to say that Leendet Från Helvetet is by far the most overlooked album in the Blod discography (well, if you can say that about a record that was only pressed in a mere 100 copies to begin with!) The blueprint to what would later evolve into the bombastic Knuta Nävar (2018), the intimate Tusen Bitar (2020), the highly confusing medieval masterpiece Missväxt (2021), not to mention all the self-released cassettes and CD-rs." Includes insert; edition of 500.

$28.00 NOT IN STOCK

Originally released in 2015 on Holiday Records. In dark times of geopolitical powerplay and war mongering, artistic counter attacks are often shaped as quests for openness and liberation. No troupe within the current musical underground embodies this urge like the Gothenburg sound dwellers of Enhet För Fri Musik. With spiritual roots in the candor of the 1960s free jazz and the raw aesthetics of early 2000s free folk, Enhet started delving into different forms of (semi) improvised musical expression around 2015. "Fri Musik" is a very apt generalisation of previous liberating endeavors in music history, since the Enhet does not approach the freedom trope from a genre bound perspective, they are as much folk as they are ambient or lo-fi cassette experiment. At times they sound like an indigenous tribe from some undefined part of the world, then again like hazy mutterings from a long forgotten utopian hippy commune. On Dokument 1: Improvisationer Och Bandmusik För Vilt Dansande Själar, spontaneity is celebrated over orchestration, imagination over production. The story goes that it was the group's aim to record a progressive jazz record, only brilliantly failing in doing so. They would sit together drinking, only to see someone picking up an instrument every now and then and having a go at it. The record, then, is labeled as a "document" for a reason. What is offered here are stimuli of what could possibly become ballads, but obstinately refuse to do so. It is a registration of their hiss drenched freedom culture, not "an album" as such. The drafts and sketches are molded into miniature song deconstructions that synthesize DIY sound culture of the last seven decades in a way that is both local and universal. As if it could only have come from the country that also sprouted Philemon Arthur & The Dung, but at the same time sleeping in between Un and Brannten Schnüre. The wild dancing souls that are mentioned in the record's title are haunting through these documents as the summoned predecessors, but they are also the souls of the listeners. Witnesses who are evoked to be alienated and disoriented into the Enhet's cult of intuition, soaked into an ambiguous organism that is nightmarishly intimate, and soothingly discomforting. Includes large poster; edition of 500.

$28.00 NOT IN STOCK

"In the old attic, among dust and dimness, I once found an old children's magazine, that opened itself on a photograph of three melancholic girls eating soup." A distant voice, quietly singing ravels of poems from the 19th century, all gone and forgotten long ago, is accompanied by monotonous loops, played on toy keyboards, or are they maybe a rustling and hissing of twigs on the roof? Repeating gusts of wind, slightly moving curtains over a flaking window frame? The pace of moonlight on the carpet? Do you also hear a horn, every now and then sounding from a frayed and yellowed picture of a castle on flower dotted wallpaper?

Kot Kot's I Pni ("and stumps") LP brings another glimpse into Lena Filatova's sound gathering and recording process and her unique sensibilities. Feeling as though born from some kind of advent calendar hiding forgotten sounds, neglected moments and haunting sentiments, waiting there for those inclined to have a look. Lena is curiously opening doors individually and in new unisons to arrive at sound collages and compositions born from both accident and design (see the 5/4 odd time signature in "Ottepel"). Vocals that are fragile yet often laced with a feeling of determination and emotive persuasion. Lyrics pulled from old children's books, juxtaposed with often dark and foreboding loops and samples that dance asynchronously around each other beneath Lena's voice and piano/toy keyboards. Often recognizing and embracing the magic in imperfection and choosing to keep early takes and improvisations, capturing and treasuring what others might have failed to recognize and hold dear. Lena is always demonstrating an innate ability to sew all of these things together in such a way as to cast a spell on the listener from inside a zoetrope of curiously collected and curated frames. I Pni is a big and serious poetic work about the most hidden, almost lost and perished, but forever wandering between sleep and waking in an eternal hauntological dream of an old attic. Includes lyric sheet; edition of 300.

$35.00 IN STOCK

A sprawling collection by Belgian loner blues savant Bram Devens aka Ignatz encapsulating the mystery, murk, and melancholy of his uncanny craft at its most windswept and wayward. Originally issued via Goaty Tapes in September of 2015, this long-anticipated vinyl edition expands the saga with an additional 17 minutes of archival material. Deven's palette remains constant throughout: feathery fingerpicking, modal loops, and intuitive six-string navigations interspersed with candlelit passages of mournful voice, alternately whispered, mumbled, moaned. His is an aesthetic of embers and resin, cracked masks and distant lights, of what's left behind and what lingers on. I Live In A Utopia was recorded following a relocation from his longtime base of Brussels to Landen, with a second child due soon: "I remember the weather being nice and having just bought a hammock." The change of scenery seeded a promise of slower days and lighter times -- no utopia perhaps, but a sense of faint hope glowing on the horizon. The songs slide between loose acoustic spirituals and smoky basement ragas, late afternoon haze and midnight moons, a seesawing restlessness reflected in the titles ("I Have Found True Love", "Time Does Not Bring Relief", "We Used To Smoke Inside"). The fidelity is grainy but vivid, refracted by tape warp and Flemish dust. As always, Deven's playing is deceptively elegant, raw but precise, attuned to resonance, radiance, and negative space. Echoes of Fahey and Jandek reverberate in certain moments but ultimately the world Ignatz maps is one incomparably his own. A landscape both doomed and dawning, weary but undefeated, tracing outlines of lengthening shadows. "I walk in the sunshine," he sings, uneasily. This is music of a rare inner wilderness, poised at cryptic crossroads, devoted to its ghosts. I Live In A Utopia stands as an apex work by one of the underground's most veiled and visionary talents. Double album in gatefold sleeve with artwork by Zully Adler. In co-production with House Rules. Edition of 500.

$35.00 IN STOCK

The Jericho project is fully in line with the approach of the La Nòvia collective from which it originates, a hub for like-minded musicians reinventing regional folk repertoires, marrying traditional French song with minimalism via the use of drone. Jericho is just one of many available permutations of La Nòvia members, with the line-up including Yann Gourdon, Clément Gauthier, Jacques Puech, and Antoine Cognet -- you could say it's La Nòvia's flagship, or super-group. There are no dramatic stylistic shifts here, this is a story of gradual evolution within parameters that Jericho, and La Nòvia, have set for themselves. That also applies to their interpretation of individual songs, which are largely traditional. They can build from almost nothing to reach a furious, near-hallucinatory pitch, underpinned by Gourdon and driven higher by Cognet's banjo and Gauthier and Puech's cabrettes (Auvergnat bagpipes). Gauthier and Puech also sing in unison but drift marginally in and out of time with each other, creating a natural delay effect. Many of the songs slide into each other in long sequences, adding to the sense of disorientation; the one which runs from "Revenant Des Noces" to "Trois Mariniers" takes in both eerie, keening balladry and wild dances. When Jericho hit their stride at these moments -- see also, especially, the glorious "Planh De la Madalena" --they leave you feeling like you're spinning forever, encircled by whirling bodies caught up in dancing mania. Double album in gatefold sleeve with artwork by Elodie Ortega. In co-production with La Nòvia. Edition of 500.

$30.50 NOT IN STOCK

Ferocious JP/US free jazz bomb. A rare meeting between the NYC free jazz scene and the Japanese free music scene. Following hot on the heels of the first, mid-sixties generation of Japanese free jazz players like Kaoru Abe, Masayuki Takayanagi, Yōsuke Yamashita, Motoharu Yoshizawa, etc., an exciting second wave of younger players began to emerge in the seventies. Two of its leading members were the saxophonist Kazutoki Umezu and multi-instrumentalist Yoriyuki Harada. Both were post-war babies and immigrants to the city, Umezu from Sendai in the north and Harada from Shimane in the west. They first met as students in the clarinet department at the Kunitachi College of Music in western Tokyo. The two began to play together in an improvised duo, with Umezu on clarinet and bass clarinet and Harada on piano. Experiments led to the creation of a trio, with a high-school student called Tetsuya Morimura on drums, that they decided to name Seikatsu Kōjyō Iinkai (Lifestyle Improvement Committee) in joking reference to the Marxist discourse of the student radicals of the time. Around 1973, Umezu and Harada decided to call it a day and go their separate ways. Umezu began playing with the Toshinori Kondo Unit and Harada with the Tadashi Yoshida Quintet. In 1974 Harada formed his own trio and began to play at jazz coffeehouses across Japan. In September 1974 Umezu travelled alone to New York. Umezu soon became known on the scene as Kappo and he started to make connections with some of the young musicians. Umezu wrote to Harada and invited him to come to New York. He accepted and arrived in the city in July 1975. Harada and Umezu took the opportunity to resume their artistic collaboration. Their first concert together in over two years took place on July 20th at another loft, Sunrise Studios at 122 2nd Avenue. Umezu invited along trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah. Abdullah led his own group and was a long-term Sun Ra sideman. William Parker, one of the key figures in the loft jazz scene of the period, was on bass. Abdullah also brought along Rashid Sinan on drums. Sinan played on Frank Lowe's immortal Black Beings (1973) and Arthur Doyle's Alabama Feeling (1978). By all accounts the evening was a huge success, with speed and dynamism of Harada's piano playing gaining him lots of support. Since they had managed to save some money from their day jobs, Umezu and Harada decided to set up a recording session with the same line-up on August 11 at Studio We, where there was a well-equipped studio on the third floor. On their first recordings, the humor element, which is key to their sound, is not yet present. Instead, there is a febrile sense of joy in creation and connection. Old-style gatefold with rare photographs and liner notes by Alan Cummings.

$30.50 NOT IN STOCK

Famed free jazz concert registration of an early New Direction for the Art performance. Recorded in 1971. The performance by Takayanagi Masayuki New Direction for the Art at the Gen'yasai festival on August 14, 1971 was an intense, bruising collision between the radical, anti-establishment politics of the period in Japan and the febrile avant-garde music that had begun to emerge a few years before. 1962, Takayanagi, bassist Kanai Hideto and painter Kageyama Isamu went on to form an AACM-style musicians' collective called the New Century Music Research Institute. Every Friday, members gathered at Gin-Paris, a chanson bar in the fashionable Ginza district of Tokyo, to push the outer limits of jazz creativity. But the pivotal moment for his music was the creation a new trio version of his New Directions group in August 1969, with the free bassist Yoshizawa Motoharu and a young drummer Toyozumi (Sabu) Yoshisaburō. Experiments eventually led to the creation of two basic frameworks for improvisation that Takayagi referred to as "Mass Projection" and "Gradually Projection". La Grima (tears), the piece that was played at the Gen'yasai festival, is a mass projection and listening to it, you can get a clear sense of what Takayanagi was aiming at. Mass projection involves a dense, speedy and chaotic coloring in of space that destroys the listener's perception of time, and thus of musical development. The ferocity of the performance of La Grima at the Gen'yasai Festival in Sanrizuka on August 14, 1971 was consciously grounded by Takayanagi in a particular historical moment, ripe with conflict and violence. A month after the festival, on September 16, three policemen would die during struggles at the site. This was the context that the three-day Gen'yasai Festival existed within. The line-up reflected the radical politics of the movement, with leading free jazz musicians like Takayanagi, Abe Kaoru, and Takagi Mototeru appearing alongside radical ur-punkers Zuno Keisatsu, heavy electric blues bands like Blues Creation, and Haino Keiji's scream-jazz unit Lost Aaraaff. New Direction for the Arts trio topped the bill on the opening day, playing an aggressive, uncompromising "mass projection" set of polyphonic improvisation. Alongside drummer Hiroshi Yamazaki and saxophonist Kenji Mori, Takayanagi soloed hard and continuously for forty minutes. This was performance as precisely calibrated metaphor: three musicians responding to the demands of the moment with instinctive force and fury, untethered by rules, leaderless yet not rudderless (the direction part of the group's name was no accident). The piece was entitled La Grima and the fusion between the palpable anger of the performance and hopeless sadness of its title were also perfectly apt for the situation. This was a fight that the state was always going to win. A union of anger, sorrow and malevolence that can be placed nowhere effective, all it can do is find expression and channeling. Old-style gatefold with rare photographs and extensive liner notes by Alan Cummings.