Featured Releases "Philip Glass, the great American composer, was already in his mid-30s before his first album appeared, and then only because he produced the double LP himself. Music With Changing Parts was the inaugural release on his own Chatham Square imprint in 1971. At this point, Einstein on the Beach, Glass' first opera, was still five years away. Yet in Changing Parts, one can already hear much of his vocabulary in full bloom: the buoyant arpeggios, the melding of electronic and acoustic instruments, the elongated drones of human voice, the primary emphasis on pulse (an interest he shared with fellow composer Steve Reich) and the ecstatic potential inherent in repetition. The album features the original Philip Glass Ensemble -- the composer himself, along with Jon Gibson, Dickie Landry, Art Murphy, Steve Chambers, and Robert Prado -- playing Farfisa organs and woodwinds as well as Barbara Benary on electric violin. As Glass describes in his memoir Words Without Music, he secured a $500 interest-free loan for the recordings' initial release from the Hebrew Free Loan Society -- an organization intended to help immigrants from the Old World upon arrival in the US. Though Glass was merely the grandson of immigrants, the venture wasn't far off the society's charter as Changing Parts helped usher in a new world of sound that would become known as minimalism. Chatham Square went on to release albums by other composers in Glass' circle, including Gibson and Landry. The label was named after the Manhattan intersection where Landry had a studio and the ensemble rehearsed. Born in Baltimore in 1937, Glass first moved to New York to attend Juilliard at just nineteen, having already graduated from the University of Chicago. A staple of the Downtown scene, he can perhaps be appreciated as akin to the likes of sculptor Richard Serra or filmmaker Jim Jarmusch: mavericks who became major cultural figures entirely on their own terms. This first-time vinyl reissue reproduces the original side-breaks and gatefold sleeve." ( ...show more... ) PRICE: $40.00$34.00 Black Editions presents the expanded and definitive edition of White Heaven's brilliant third album Next to Nothing. Originally released in 1994 by Tokyo's Noon Disk, the full album was only ever available in a limited vinyl pressing of 250 copies. Since then, it has become one of the most sought-after artifacts of the '90s Japanese underground and is regarded as a highpoint of Japanese psychedelic rock. Led by vocalist, songwriter and conceptualist You Ishihara, the album finds the group in a phase of refinement. Taking a more intricate and open approach, the music is buoyant and light yet at the same time, nocturnal and introspective. Next to Nothing marks the first time guitarists Michio Kurihara and Soichiro Nakamura appear together on record after having separate turns as lead guitar on the group's first two albums. The pairing is revelatory as they weave luminous melodic lines, sometimes in parallel, sometimes opening into sustained intricate counterpoint. Bassist Koji Shimura and drummer Ken Ishihara shuffle and swing in parallel with a fluid, sinuous rhythm, while flourishes of synthesizer, mellotron and the introduction of Go Hirano on keyboards and piano deepens the group's sound with orchestral colors and a soft cinematic haze. Across the album, clear, shimmering guitar tones and gentle chord progressions are layered with bright arpeggiated figures and darker minor-key passages. The songs develop through gradual changes in tone and dynamics as Ishihara's voice reveals a gentle yearning and wistfulness. An extended version of Burt Bacharach and Hal David's "The Look of Love" serves as the album's entrancing focal point; stretching the song's familiar lounge-pop swagger, the group renders it as a slow-burning, psychedelic meditation crackling with electricity as it drifts into the night. Available for the first time on vinyl in over 30 years. Remastered and expanded with three previously unreleased song versions on a second LP cut at 45RPM. Presented in a heavy tip-on gatefold with metallic and ink pigment foil stamping, spot colors as well as a gatefold insert. House in a custom vellum wrap with a mirror metallic sticker seal. Pressed at RTI Recorded at Inter Music Studio, Tokyo 1994. Remastered at Peace Music 2021, Produced by You Ishihara. ( ...show more... ) PRICE: $29.50$25.08 Cloud Management return to Altin Village & Mine for a unique collaboration with New York writer and creative polymath Vivien Goldman. A pairing spanning generations and geography, but with a musical overlap that is quite fitting in both process and result. Cloud Management's jammy, improvisational approach to their dubby electronics blends well with Goldman's idiosyncratic vocal style, which has its origins in the early days of post-punk and UK dub experimentalism. Cloud Management blend many historical aspects of German electronic music into something distinctly their own, while retaining a view well beyond those borders or any particular era. This approach fits well with Goldman's deep multidisciplinary career, not easily defined because of its eclectic abundance across disciplines, yet always orbiting around music as its foundation. When it comes down to it, these are great tracks created in the same way they sound: loose but refined, circling and turning inwards and outwards, back onto themselves. A dub of a dub of a dub, but never falling too far from the source -- the minimalism necessary to deliver a direct, steady resolve and a gripping listen. The B Side of the record features three remixes by artists from across the globe, all with strong connections to the front line of dancehall, dub, and electronic music experimentalism. Longtime Equiknoxx member Time Cow from Kingston (Jamaica), delivers a version of "Quick Cover Up" that represents a major overhaul of the original. This remix strips away much of the looseness of the source material and leans into a lush yet slightly darker atmosphere, created by layered synths and a masterful use of underlying percussion and melodic stabs. Up next are Twin Cities, Minnesota-based Feel Free Hi Fi, who take on "Judge Judge." The duo tighten things up, overlaying weighty vintage string synths and digi-flute melodies. This version feels designed for smoky, late-night dub sound system sessions, harkening back to dub's foundations. Last but not least is London's Pat Orburn. Stripped way down, the remix rides an interplay between alternating minimalism and a more lo-fi but lush exuberance, somewhat reminiscent of a bossa nova-esque minimal synth sound. This version's lo-fi pop sensibility provides a fitting contrast and completes an eclectic yet copacetic trio of remixes for the record. ( ...show more... ) PRICE: $29.50$25.08 LP version. Laurence Pike's Possible Utopias for Jazz Quintet represents a search for freedom, potentiality -- liberatory strategies that transcend the ego and the solitary, atomized figure. But in this case, the album title is also a red herring, because there is no jazz quintet here -- just Pike, his drums, and his machines, not so much an ersatz ensemble as a purely notional one, a thought experiment equipped with drumsticks, circuitry, and the desire to go beyond hardwired limits. And the results incorporate the vocabulary of jazz, along with that of ambient, electronica, and post-rock. The Sydney-based musician has a long history of coloring outside the lines, not just in his solo recordings -- including four albums for the Leaf label between 2018 and 2024 -- but also in the trio Pivot (later PVT); Szun Waves (alongside saxophonist Jack Wyllie and Border Community's Luke Abbott); Triosk, which recorded an album with Jan Jelinek in 2003 (FAITBACK 005LP); and even post-punk titans Liars, whom he joined in late 2018. Of his first album for Balmat, Pike says, "My loose concept was: What does music sound like when the expectations of late capitalism are removed from it? How might a jazz musician from an idealized culture of the future, or even another world, utilize musical language when the conventions of style and marketing are no longer a factor in music making?" That inquiry, he says, connects to his "guiding principle: that the purpose of music is to access something bigger than the individual, and reveal a sense of possibility and freedom in the world to the listener. To create an understanding that the future can be something other than what we imagined or expect, even unconsciously." Heady ideas, but plug into his stream-of-metaconsciousness flow and you may start to intuit what motivates him. There is a deeply lyrical expression in these pieces, but also a sense of exploded perspective, of ideas approached from more angles than any one mind could dream up. Of a collectivized consciousness, of mycelial networks branching across tone and rhythm and timbre, of ideas articulated in distributed fashion, nodal points dancing across drum heads. Pike's imaginary quintet is hardly without precedent; it's a continuation of concepts floated across Jan Jelinek's Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records (FAITBACK 001LP), Burnt Friedman's many guises, and much of the recombinant improv of the International Anthem roster, not to mention the far corners of ECM's catalog in the late 1970s and 1980s. ( ...show more... ) PRICE: $36.50$31.03 Faitiche welcomes a new artist to the label. Christina Kubisch belongs to the first generation of sound artists. Her practice ranges from performances, concerts, to works with video and visual art, but she is best known for her sound installations and electro-acoustic compositions. TUNING brings together three pieces by Christina Kubisch from different periods of her oeuvre. What they have in common is the way they transform sound phenomena originally considered "non-music" into compositions.From Christina Kubisch: "I alter my source material as little as possible, layering and overlapping until a distinctive sound space emerges. In recent pieces, I sometimes combine magnetic waves with field recordings or live instruments. In 'Gaming' it's my recording of a Chinese song about silence... With ['Two persons walking through a street in Madrid'], I wanted to understand what is heard by people participating in an Electrical Walk in the same place but moving in different ways. The Spanish composer Miguel Alvarez-Fernàndez and I set off from opposite ends of a major shopping street in Madrid, met briefly in the middle, and then continued to the end. We both recorded our walks and I then layered them over one another. You might call it a work of electromagnetic conceptualism... 'Diapason' is part of a series of three pieces that deal with 'non-instruments' or instruments that no longer exist: electrical mine bells used to send signals to the workers underground; a historical glass harmonica originally used for medicinal purposes; and tuning forks that were used by doctors to test people's hearing. All of these methods are no longer in use. The sound of the tuning forks, audible only if held close to the ear, was recorded at the electronic studio at Berlin's Technical University in such a way that even their decay remained audible. The frequencies range between 64 and 2048 Hertz and they can be adjusted at micro-intervals using small movable weights. The sequence and the duration of the pauses are dictated by chance and were not defined in advance. The 2009 version was created for an installation in the historic Holy Cross Church (Korskirken) in Bergen. Visitors could enter and leave the space at any time, deciding for themselves where and for how long they wished to listen to the sounds played back over an array of small loudspeakers placed on the floor of the apse." ( ...show more... ) PRICE: $30.50$25.93 Take Me, I'm Yours is the first collaboration album between Alan Abrahams and Jan Jelinek. Released through the latter's faitiche, it builds upon multi-layered vocal sketches by the former. The Paris-based artist, primarily known for his work as Portable and Bodycode, supplied Jelinek with multi-layered song sketches that the German artist subjected to a rigorous process of manipulation, excavating the ambiguities of the original material and transforming its rhythms into subtle pulses. Take Me, I'm Yours is neither a typical Abrahams record nor a classic Jelinek album -- it is something third, mediating between the physicality of the voice and the abstraction of electronic sound design. The two had crossed paths before really getting to know each other after Abrahams invited Jelinek to play at one of his Süd Electronic parties. The idea of a collaboration emerged slowly. "It started as an experiment, and over the past few years grew from a few tracks into this album," says Abrahams. He describes recording the basic material as a "tantalizing" process, not knowing how Jelinek would transform his material, some of which was based on wordless chanting, while other tracks were working with lyrical content. However, their mutual trust allowed Jelinek to remove the harmonies, radically reduce the rhythms, and concentrate on Abrahams' voice. Jelinek heard something "fragile" in this voice, "moments of doubt and dark premonitions." He points to "Forever" as an example. "Alan's original song reminded me of classic vocal house, but his voice seemed to almost break," he says. "This contradiction made the piece even bigger, because we hear a singer in the moment of an awakening." He further accentuated such tensions through arrhythmic synth modulations and time-stretching algorithms, while also adding concrete sounds from a variety of sources. With its dedication to both transforming and amplifying the emotional qualities hidden within Abrahams' pieces, Take Me, I'm Yours functions as a dialogue between those two singular artists. Includes download code. ( ...show more... ) PRICE: $29.50$25.08 Originally released on Ezekiel Honig's Anticipate label in 2007, Standing on a Hummingbird is the debut album by Canadian sound artist Mark Templeton, now appearing for the first time on vinyl, newly remastered by Giuseppe Ielasi and cut by LUPO. Working at the intersection of post-glitch, electroacoustic ambient, and textural minimalism, Templeton composes through restraint and erosion, building patient and richly tactile pieces primarily from acoustic sources -- fingerpicked guitar, plaintive banjo, muted accordion tones -- subjected to careful processes of granulation, filtering, and environmental masking. These gestures never overwhelm the source material; instead, they wonderfully destabilize it. Melodies appear briefly, only to dissolve into dense atmospheres of field recordings: distant streets, birds, water, air. Sounds hover, vibrate, and vanish, much like the wing beating latent in the album's title. Tracks such as "Pattern For a Pillow" and "Amidst Things Uncontrolled" articulate this approach with particular clarity, setting languid acoustic figures against churning granular backdrops that feel at once sheltering and unstable. Elsewhere, moments of fragile clarity -- fluttering guitar lines, reedy accordion tones -- briefly break the surface before being absorbed back into the field. Heard today, the record offers a clarion, almost spartan strain of textural ambient music: intricate yet unforced, shaped by human touch rather than automated excess. Its refusal of spectacle feels especially vital in a landscape saturated with maximalist digitalia -- a reminder that electronic music's most enduring gestures often occur where sound is allowed to tremble and hold itself just long enough to be felt before disappearing once again. (Alex Cobb, 2026) ( ...show more... ) PRICE: $31.50$26.78 Pepijn Caudron, aka Kreng, transports you through the swirling darkness and into the unknown with Wormhole, his first album in over a decade. What does a trip towards another world sound like? The master of tension, melancholy, and the deranged is back after a long period working in the worlds of theatre and cinema. Last seen on Miasmah with the grief stricken The Summoner, Kreng now returns with Wormhole, following closer in the footsteps of the cult classics L'Autopsie Phénoménale de Dieu (2009) and Grimoire (2011). Starting with "You Are Here", the listener travels through a vacuum of spacious minimalism and edge-of-your-seat tension. Within the journey, we are pulled and lured towards a mystic inner core and beyond, encountering drifting fragments of old-world nostalgia on the way: echoes of empty jazz bars sit alongside hellish, Hieronymus Bosch-like scenarios. Surrendering to the album reveals a surprisingly reflective beauty beneath its darkness; it's a true home-listening gem that unfolds like a Lovecraftian cosmic horror-mystery in the way only Kreng could deliver. Forget everything you know and enter the secret door... Gatefold sleeve; includes download code; edition of 500. ( ...show more... ) OM Variations On A Theme LP LP version. "Variations on a Theme, features Al Cisneros and Chris Hakius. It was produced by OM, and was originally released in 2005 on Holy Mountain." On Meditations, Bhajan Bhoy presents four expansive, deeply immersive compositions that slowly open and unfurl across the album's duration. Length here is incidental; what matters is the total listening experience. These pieces move with patience and grace, drawing the listener into a blessed, inward journey. The result is a remarkable record -- equally cinematic, intimate, and richly evocative. Drawing from folk traditions, ambient synthesis, ethereal guitar work, and deep listening practices, Meditations creates a world of textural depth and microscopic wonder. The album's wide-ranging instrumentation -- accordion, piano, yangqin, synthesizers, guitar and bass, banjo, and harp -- highlights Bhajan Bhoy's imaginative and searching compositional approach. Each sound feels carefully placed, allowing space, resonance, and atmosphere to guide the music's emotional weight. There is a quiet power running throughout Meditations: a sense of stillness that never drifts into stasis, and beauty that reveals itself gradually. These are pieces that reward patience and presence, offering something profound to the deep listener. "These tracks served as a series of spiritual prayers when I recorded them," says Ajay Saggar (Bhajan Bhoy). "They became even more important to me later, as personal changes occurred in my life from mid-2025 onwards, and the real power and beauty of the tracks came to the fore -- helping me heal in my body and in my mind." Meditations is a meditative, enchanting work -- music as refuge, reflection, and renewal. ( ...show more... ) "The drones on this album were created using a Yamaha SY77 FM synthesizer from 1989. I have a special relationship with this machine -- it was the first 'big' synth I ever bought, and it has contributed to almost everything I've recorded over the past 30 years . . . The SY77 features six FM operators with multi-stage looping envelopes. I've always enjoyed crafting steady drones with it -- sounds that slowly evolve into something new over time. The output of the SY77 is routed through a Dynacord DRP 20 reverb and recorded into a DAW. For each piece, I recorded four tracks: one with a very low note, one with a medium-low note, one with a high note, and one where I played freely, following my intuition. The results were then edited and lightly processed to reduce excessive noise in certain sections. I also occasionally added reverb and pitch shifting, using my own custom algorithms. Signal to Noise - Volume II picks up where my 2004 album Signal to Noise left off, revisiting the same techniques and instrument twenty-two years later." --Robert Henke Cover photo taken by Robert Henke on February 1, 2004, at Joshua Tree National Park, CA, USA. ( ...show more... ) "One of three releases marking the 100th birthday of Randy Weston. It f… truncated (37,497 more characters in archive)
TextSearch