Originally released in 1982, Pascal Comelade’s Sentimientos is one of the most elusive and sought after LPs in the French composer’s vast catalogue. Recorded on a two-track Revox machine, the album is an eclectic series of brief pieces—only two of the twenty tracks exceed four minutes—showcasing his poetic imagination and impressive range. While much of Comelade’s early work hints at many of the major electronic movements to come, Sentimientos remains earthbound and organic. Melodic fragments performed on piano, organ, plastic saxophone, vibes, guitar, toy piano, ukulele and synthesizer place Comelade’s boundless creative spirit on display. It is telling that Comelade chooses to cover a Brian Eno tune not from the ambient pioneer’s seminal Music For Airports, released just four years earlier, but rather the more traditional “Taking Tiger Mountain,” here rendered to highlight the song’s previously hidden hymn-like qualities. Like fellow countryman Ghédalia Tazartès, there is something distinctly unclassifiable about Comelade’s music. Undoubtedly, the two artists share a flair for the mischievous. Sentimientos is an unapologetically whimsical, frequently dizzying and loveably anarchic album of manic energy and radiant mystery—a perfect introduction to Comelade’s singular musical mind. This first-time reissue is limited to 750 numbered copies.
LP $27.00
08/29/2020
MP3 $9.90
08/29/2020
FLAC $11.99
08/29/2020
Fluence is the brainchild and first release of sound artist / provocateur Pascal Comelade. Recorded in Montpellier, France in 1974-1975, the project consists of exploratory electronic pieces in the Fripp & Eno vernacular with a Kosmische tinge. “A Few Reasons To Stay / A Few Reasons To Split,” a title inspired by Swiss conceptual artist Urs Lüthi, features Comelade’s kaleidoscopic arpeggios and Richard Pinhas’ howling guitar, which variously resembles a dreamlike cello and ghostly human moans. “Barcelona Tango’s” off-kilter exotica with pocket trumpet and looping drum beats foreshadows Comelade’s later work, which would create a stir in some avant-garde circles for his use of unorthodox instruments (plastic saxophone, toy piano, etc.). On the side-long “Schizo,” Comelade’s electric organ with probing, Terry Riley-esque swooshes collides with Gabriel Ibanez’s thick, reedy buzz—together forming a truly magical soundscape. These incendiary performances ably join the ranks of other dreamily cosmic, impressionistic guitar-and-synth masterworks like No Pussyfooting and The Serpent (In Quicksilver) as well as Conny Veit’s work with Popol Vuh. Originally released in 1975, Fluence offers a remarkable emotional and textural range—richly experimental and deeply progressive—that sounds at once timeless and strikingly contemporary. This first-time standalone reissue is limited to 750 numbered copies.
LP $27.00
08/29/2020
MP3 $9.90
08/29/2020
FLAC $11.99
08/29/2020
Terry Fox was a first generation Bay Area conceptual artist. Beginning in the 1970s, he worked extensively with sound, especially the use of piano wires detached from their native instrument and anchored between opposing walls of the performance space. Linkage, Fox’s first album, was originally released in 1982 to accompany an installation at Kunstmuseum Luzern in Switzerland. The record would mark Fox’s first attempt to realize his groundbreaking and visceral piece “Berlin Wall Scored for Sound.” Side one links five ways of playing the piano wires: drumming, pulling, bowing, beating and scraping. The room itself acts as a type of natural resonator as Fox moves the wires with padded mallet, his bare fingers, violin bow, wooden shish kebab stick and rusted metal rod. The effect of such plain arrangements can be utterly hypnotizing. The second half of Linkage was recorded in the attic of Künstlerhaus Bethanien, West Berlin, in May 1981. A thirty-three meter long wire was held in contact with a sardine tin. Over the course of 20 minutes, pulsating drones dissolve into rhythmic patterns that sound almost synthetic in origin. As noted in the original LP pamphlet, all these sounds were strictly acoustic; the only electronics involved was the recording equipment. In an introduction for this edition, Marita Loosen-Fox and Ron Meyers write, “The desire to eliminate any barriers between the art and the viewer/audience connects all of Fox’s situations/actions/performances. The ultimate goal is to communicate as directly as possible, which finds its most concentrated expression in the...
LP $27.00
12/06/2019
For over half a century, Takehisa Kosugi was one of the most unique and enduring figures in the Japanese underground. As an art student in Tokyo in the early 1960s, he joined the Fluxus-styled performance unit Hi Re Centre and founded the improvisational ensemble Group Ongaku, but his most legendary project was The Taj-Mahal Travelers – a multicellular organism that included Kosugi, Ryo Koike, Yukio Tsuchiya, Seiji Nagai, Michihiro Kimura, Tokio Hasegawa and sound engineer Kinji Hayashi. With a penchant for long psychedelic jams (some lasting 12 hours or more) The Taj-Mahal Travelers lived up to their name. Touring in a Volkswagen van across Europe and Asia in the early '70s, they eventually reached the actual Taj Mahal in India. Upon their return to Japan, they held a concert to raise more touring funds and released their very first recordings. Their debut album, July 15, 1972, would extend the band's matter-of-fact titling: all the tracks were named precisely for the times they began and ended. With a grab bag of instrumentation (electric violin, double bass, santoor, vibraphone, harmonica, radio oscillators, sheet iron, etc.), The Taj-Mahal Travelers weave together mesmerizing waves of sonic texture. Featuring longtone concepts that Kosugi discovered while working with sound generators in New York in the mid-'60s, July 15, 1972 remains just as much a collective tone poem as psych workout. These leader-less sounds coalesce into a unified whole that feels both subconscious and sublime, as if the waveforms bypass the listener's ears and land directly inside...
LP $29.00
11/01/2019
Yoshi Wada's Lament For The Rise And Fall Of The Elephantine Crocodile, originally released in 1982 on India Navigation, remains one of the most remarkable flowers to grow in the rarefied air of American minimalism – akin to Terry Riley's Reed Streams and Pauline Oliveros' Accordion & Voice, yet with a wild, liberated energy all of its own. After graduating from Kyoto University of Fine Arts with a degree in sculpture, Wada moved to New York City in 1967 and quickly fell in with the community of artists known as Fluxus. In the early '70s, he began building his own instruments and writing musical compositions, studying with La Monte Young and Hindustani singer Pandit Pran Nath. Recorded during an epic three-day session in an empty swimming pool in upstate New York, Wada's first album brings together two of the oldest drone instruments – the human voice and bagpipes – to simple and glorious effect. A visit to the Scottish Highlands spurred Wada's interest in bagpipes, which the composer integrated into these sparse, otherworldly sounds heard on Lament. "That swimming pool was quite hallucinatory," recalls Wada. “It was another world. I felt it in terms of resonance. I slept in the pool, and whenever I moved, I woke up because of the reverberations.... The piece itself is an experiment with reeds and improvisational singing within the modal structure." This first-time vinyl reissue is limited to 750 numbered copies. Comes with poster.
LP $27.00
11/01/2019
Considered as the first piece of electronic music to accompany a ballet, Totentanz is the arrestingly abstract and mightily expressive result of Warner Jepson’s experiments with tape and Don Buchla’s groundbreaking synthesizer, the Buchla 100. Totentanz, originally self-released in 1972, reveals a composer relieved of convention. In the 1950s and 1960s, Jepson was part of an informal circle of Bay Area artists that included Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Morton Subotnick and Steve Reich. A fixture of the legendary San Francisco Tape Music Center, Jepson was among the performers who realized the world-premiere of Riley’s seminal minimalist composition In C and worked closely with postmodern dance figure Anna Halprin as well as the Welland Lathrop Dance Company. Jepson’s affection for the performing arts meant that he was thrilled to be commissioned by the San Francisco Ballet Company to compose a piece to accompany Carlos Carvajal’s beguiling, danse macabre-inspired Totentanz. Jepson, who passed away in 2011, incorporated concrete sounds from his collection as well as creations on the Buchla 100, which had recently migrated to Mills College. As the composer once wrote, “Don Buchla’s box ... offered numerous sound possibilities without a map.” First-time vinyl reissue. Limited edition of 500 numbered copies on clear vinyl.
LP $27.00
04/13/2018
Originally self-released in 1961 and later issued by Folkways, Tod Dockstader’s Eight Electronic Pieces is a foundational document of American electronic music and a stunning first work from this revolutionary composer. Refused access to the resources and funding of the academy and without any interest from the record industry, Dockstader assembled his debut album through three years of his own private labor – recording after-hours at the New York radio station where he worked. Dockstader’s approach was informed by the laboratory experiments of his European contemporaries Edgar Varèse and Pierre Schaefer as well as by the aleatory compositional techniques and neo-dadaist aesthetics of John Cage. While Dockstader famously described his music as “organized sound,” Eight Electronic Pieces is not pure musique concrète. Oscillators pulse and clash with fragments of incidental tape music, leaving collages of sound as tuneful and memorable as they are otherworldly. A visionary debut that presages the abstract ambience of modern IDM and an essential addition to any collection of early electronic music. Limited edition of 500 numbered copies on clear vinyl.
LP $22.00
04/21/2017
Die Tödliche Doris was born out of West Berlin’s lively post-punk community in the early ‘80s. Along with Einstürzende Neubauten, Malaria, Sprung Aus Den Wolken and Frieder Butzmann, Die Tödliche Doris ranks amongst the Geniale Dilletanten – which roughly translates as “ingenious dilettantes” – who sought to democratize cultural productions beyond the grip of both Western capitalism and GDR socialism. The Geniale Dilletanten became synonymous with a free-for-all approach to music, film, painting and performance where participants encouraged raw expression through provocation and experimentation. Wolfgang Müller and Nikolaus Utermöhlen founded Die Tödliche Doris in 1980, presenting the public persona of Doris as a constantly shifting entity that deliberately engaged the contradictions of the human condition. The band often referenced themselves in the third person singular, alluding to Doris as a fully-formed female character with explosive, colorful emotions. For her debut album – originally released on Zickzack in 1982 and playfully titled " " (that is, blank space surrounded by quotation marks) – Doris most closely entertains the notion of a typical rock band with drums, bass and guitar. Produced by Neubauten’s Blixa Bargeld, the thirteen songs presented here are disquieting lullabies of profound anxiety, savage and primitive deconstructions of German polka and manic lacerations of punk minimalism: all reflections of the many and fractured personalities of Doris. This first-time vinyl reissue includes a reproduction of the original 24-page booklet. Limited edition repress of 500 copies on black vinyl.
LP $22.00
04/07/2017
The origins of Le Forte Four are those of the Los Angeles Free Music Society itself. Chip Chapman joined forces with Rick Potts (and shortly thereafter Tom and Joe Potts), taking up the LAFMS name in 1974. Ultimately baptizing themselves Le Forte Four, they began threading imagined lines between John Cage and The Residents, Cecil Taylor and Henry Cow – generating sounds completely unlike any of these and anything since. The inaugural release on the eponymous LAFMS imprint with only 200 copies pressed originally, Bikini Tennis Shoes is a staggering piece of anti-music that remains as refreshingly ground-clearing today as it was when it first appeared in 1975. Its 40 minutes (parceled out across nearly as many tracks) chart forays into free improvisation, Buchla misuse, filtered noise, begrudging and damaged melodic sorties (from the Star-Spangled Banner to Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring”) and healthy doses of basement pablum. Le Forte Four emerged out of the lethargic American ‘70s as a locus where, in their own words, “gamelans and ragas merged with serial and chance compositions finally melting together with instructional records and Beatles bootlegs.” A wildly eclectic rummaging of postwar culture and 20th century sound, Le Forte Four’s Bikini Tennis Shoes preempts punk’s outsider ethos and DIY autodidactism. Limited edition of 500 numbered copies on clear vinyl.
LP $22.00
04/07/2017
MP3 $9.90
04/07/2017
FLAC $11.99
04/07/2017