Marika "Politissa" Frantzeskopoulou was a Greek singer from Constantinople, reknowned for her precise, fluid and graceful performances and depth of feeling. Backed by some of the best musicians of the era on lyra, violin, oud, kanonaki and guitar, Marika’s repertoire and techniques drew from Byzantine and Ottoman musical traditions. She possessed an ability to devastate her audience through her expressions of grief, exile, and tragic love, running the gamut of cafe aman, torch songs, lilting and fragile odes to heartache, heavy Piraeus style rebetika, and ecstatic Near-Eastern climaxes, all with a visceral sense of atmosphere, emotion, and fatalism. Marika’s voice is complimented beautifully by her backing musicians, creating a pulsing acoustic foundation over which her voice soars with clarity and purpose. LP version includes a 12 page color booklet with rare photographs, full lyrics, and extensive notes (Bandcamp version includes booklet in PDF format). Produced in collaboration with Tony Klein (Greek Rhapsody, Mortika) and Stavros Kourousis (From Tambouras to Bouzouki) and co-released by Olvido Records (A. Kostis, Alexis Zoumbas). --- Compilation Produced by Gordon Ashworth, Tony Klein and Stavros Kourousis Notes and Research by Tony Klein, Stavros Kourousis and Kostas Kopanitsanos English Translations by Tony Klein --- Released by Olvido Records and Mississippi Records in 2020 OLV-009 / MRI-124

Tomaga's seventh and final album, "Intimate Immensity" was completed just before the untimely death of Tom Relleen, who had been recording with percussionist Valentina Magaletti since 2013. This set was mostly put together at Relleen's self-styled "Bunker" studio during off days from incessant touring, and explores the concept of intimacy and space while dragging in influence from artists as disparate as Muslimgauze and Pauline Anna Strom. The result is a fluid selection of jams that speak to Magaletti and Relleen's confidence performing together as well as their insatiable hunger for exploration and creative betterment. If there's an overwhelming mood it's the groove-led psychedelia that often accompanies Italian arthouse/trash axis movies or the kind of private press goodness that Light in the Attic might repackage for wider consumption. There's an expertise and jazz root that hints at library music chops, but each track belies an interest in more experimental modes, from the Religious Knives / Dead-esque jammer 'The Snake' to the furious club-in-dub funque explosion of 'More Flowers'. Genre agnostic, potent stuff for anyone who's exhausted the soundtrack reissue industrial complex and fancies something more challenging and way more exploratory --- Intimate Immensity: featuring Agathe Max’s violin, it is the heartfelt never-ending crescendo of a recursive spleen that is flourishing into peace – an end and the beginning of a new form of life --- Thank you Tom x

With the release of Natural Information in 2010, Joshua Abrams entered into a new phase of his creative life, making music with a deep involving groove that communicates the pulsating energies of the human body and the incessant kaleidoscopic interplay of sensory perceptions.  Represencing, recorded in Chicago in the summer of 2011 and originally released the following year by Eremite, was the next stride along this exhilarating path.Once again Abrams gives a key role to the guimbri, a North African bass lute, which he had started to play during the late 90s following a trip to Morocco. Its sound when plucked is percussive, emphatic from moment to moment, yet also bouncy and rhythmically propulsive, as if naturally springing forward. A time-honoured instrument, used traditionally in healing ceremonies, the guimbri in Abrams’ hands offers an invitation to the trance, an expanded present where time intersects with timelessness.  As the title Represencing suggests, this is uplifting music with a serious mission - to express that ongoing present and to give voice to our presence, here and now, within time’s continuous flow. Once again, a fine selection of sympathetic friends help Abrams to craft this antidote to the current century’s compulsion to accelerate and its ever-diminishing attention span. They include saxophonist David Boykin, drummer Chad Taylor and guitarists Jeff Parker and Emmett Kelly. Lisa Alvarado plays harmonium on two tracks. She also provides a painting for the cover art which matches the music beautifully, vivid and vibrant, its interlocking geometry binding fragmentary perceptions into a coherent pattern, self-sufficient yet also clearly part of a far larger picture. By 2012 this fascinating music was taking on a group identity, performed by Abrams with the Natural Information Society. That development  was subsequently consolidated with the recording of Magnetoception, released in 2015. Represencing, however, conveys the excited air of an adventure unfolding. Reminiscent in passing of a variety of other musics - of tightly poised jazz, motoric rock and minimalism plus echoes from other cultural traditions - it remains nonetheless a singular statement by an artist rapidly finding his own distinctive voice. The music offered by Represencing is intricate yet direct, hypnotically repetitive yet constantly changing, built to last yet intimately present.

Other-worldly Canon singing from MIEN (YAO) hill tribes in China, Vietnam, and Laos. Raw, ethereal, and cosmic – for fans of Bulgarian choir and Javanese Court Gamelan & Sundanese styles of vocal ascension. Although their name comes from a pejorative Chinese expression that means “dog” or “savage" – stemming from a legend that they were founded by a dog who saved the life of the daughter of a Chinese emperor and thus was rewarded with her hand in marriage – the largest branch of the YAO minority call themselves MIEN, which means simply “people". They number 4 million and are spread over the southern Chinese provinces of Guizhou, Guangxi, Yunnan and also migrated to Vietnam, Laos and Thailand over the last centuries. Part of the Miao-Yao (Hmong Mien) group of the Sino-Tibetan ethnolinguistic family, they have many subgroups, usually defined according to colors of their traditional clothes. --- Recorded and produced in the field by Laurent Jeanneau (Kink Gong), this limited edition LP comes with a two sided insert of photos and liner notes with extended track descriptions by Laurent Jeanneau --- Subline Frequencies, 2021

Tracklist: 1. Shrimp Dance 2. Kuro to Shiro 3. Walk Tall 4. Cat 5. Romance Celebrated in jazz collectors circles, in the lofi beat scene, and among music diggers around the world, Cat has become one of the most sought after Japanese jazz albums of all time and, much like Ryo Fukui’s Scenery, has fascinated old and young generations alike. Cat was recorded in October 1975 at Nippon Columbia Studio, while Hiroshi Suzuki was visiting his home country of Japan after moving to Las Vegas in 1971 to play with Buddy Rich and perfect his craft. Back on his old stomping grounds, the man known as Neko (Cat) immediately reunited with his dear friends for an epic two day session of groove magic. The chemistry was still intact. The skills and style had grown. The result, Cat, is a smooth masterpiece, a deep and soulful affair where stunning trombone solos by Hiroshi Suzuki flirt with Takeru Muraoka’s heavenly saxophone and the sensual rhythm section of Hiromasa Suzuki (keyboards), Kunimitsu Inaba (bass), and Akira Ishikawa (drums). --- Trombone: Hiroshi Suzuki. Keyboards: Hiromasa Suzuki. Bass: Kunimitsu Inaba. Drums: Akira Ishikawa. Saxophone: Takeru Muraoka. Recorded at Nippon-Columbia Daiichi Studio, on Oct 8-10, 1975. --- Klimt Records, 2019

After 'Sleeping Beauty' in 2002, here is the second solo album from the ultimate japanese voice! Very rare. The scream beyond all screams, the most incredible intensity within its simplest aspect. Two years in the making, here it is finally, 'The void', a minimal masterwork with two tracks recorded in Paris : the first one with a raw direct naked voice approach - yet very clear and unheard as Junko has never recorded her full voice this way, and a second track with all of Junko's voice frequencies pushed to extremes for a wild excessive vocal trance. Minimal, repetitive, obsessional : this is one of the keys to enter 'The void'. Recorded, mixed and mastered by Joachim Montessuis in Paris between may 2013 and august 2014 at MDE studios. 300 copies. --- Recorded, mixed and mastered by Joachim Montessuis in Paris between may 2013 and august 2014 at MDE studios Photos of Junko by Alex Woodward, taken at Arika 12: Episode 2: A Special Form Of Darkness @ Tramway, Glasgow on Saturday 25th February 2012. --- Erratum Musicals, 2014

Tracklisting: A. The Last Song Of My Life - 26:22B. The Last Song Of My Life - 25:45 This album documents a recording of Tori Kudo’s Last Song Of My Life. Some may know Kudo already as prime mover in pop-naïf collective Maher Shalal Hash Baz; his history stretches back over four decades, and he’s a significant figure in the Japanese underground, thanks to his membership of groups like Noise (with his wife Reiko Kudo), Guys ’N’ Dolls, Snickers, and Sweet Inspirations. Untold numbers of said underground have passed through the ranks of Maher Shalal Hash Baz, among them members of Luna Park Ensemble, Fushitsusha, High Rise, Tenniscoats, Los Doroncos, Nagisa Ni Te and Ché-SHIZU. On this album, Kudo and his musical collaborators performed “Last Song Of My Life” to accompany the screening of a film work by Umi Ishihara aka Ummmi entitled The Garden Apartment. During the performance, the members of the ensemble were instructed to play either the eight-bar score that Kudo provided, or noise, depending on their response to the film work that was being projected. If you’ve been following Kudo’s recent releases, particularly his recent, prodigious output on Bandcamp, “My Last Song Of My Life” feels almost like a totemic score for him – he returns to it repeatedly, elaborating different takes on its graceful melancholy. Here, that melody cycles slowly for fifty minutes, the spine of a performance that sees Kudo and his ensemble stretching out, members of the ensemble drifting off on diversions, floating gusts of loose improvisation across Kudo’s gorgeous melody. It’s a beautiful, hypnotic performance that, across its fifty-minute arc, brings to mind, fleetingly, The Red Crayola With The Familiar Ugly, Walter Zimmermann’s Lokale Musik, Christian Wolff’s Exercises, James Tenney’s Postal Pieces, but stays fundamentally Kudo throughout. It’s another excellent example of the deeply human beauty at the core of Kudo’s approach to music-making. --- Edition of 275, housed in a heavy “old style” silk-screened jacket (beautifully done by our friend Alan Sherry ) with obi strip (light blue, light green, natural white), postcard and inserts Catalogue number : [An’20] Liner notes by Jon Dale

“The Reinvention of Romance,” a new work for percussion and cello that examines the care and empathy that emerge when two lives share space. Over the course of 90 minutes, a series of repeating patterns creates a peculiar kind of harmony in which two musicians are rarely “playing together” but are nonetheless intimately bonded. The Knoxville-based duo Two-Way Street (Ashlee Booth and Adam Lion) commissioned Hennies to compose “a very long piece;” for this recording they step into its two intertwining roles. --- Composed by Sarah Hennies Performed by Two-Way Street: Ashlee Booth, cello & Adam Lion, percussion --- Released 2020; Astral Spirits

December 1982, Tokyo. Kiyoaki Iwamoto has a guitar, a simple rhythm box, a friend with a bass guitar, and some stripped-down songs, brazen in their post-punk simplicity, irritation and controlled aggression, yet full of sadness and resignation. Five songs, including a rearranged version of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” are recorded and released on a now extremely rare 7” record. This release, available on 10” vinyl, CD, or digital download, features those five songs, along with a previously unreleased 1980 live performance by his duo Birei, as well as a 2020 reworking of “Love…”, by the Japanese duo Chisako and Junta. Iwamoto was an enigma, active in the post-punk scene in Japan in the late 70s and early 80s, a member of Birei and founding member of Guys & Dolls with Tori Kudo (Maher Shalal Hash Baz); in the mid-80s he cut contact with his friends, disavowing his name and later performing under a different moniker. --- released September 18, 2020

Deluxe boxed LP set of Graham Lambkin’s first four solo records, remastered, including an expansive book featuring essays and unseen photos. --- LPs included are: Poem (For Voice & Tape) Salmon Run Softly Softly Copy Copy Amateur Doubles --- The years between Graham Lambkin’s tenure with the legendary Shadow Ring and his more recent improvisational duos mark a distinct period of creative production within the artist’s insular career. Living with his family in Poughkeepsie, NY, from 2001 through 2011 Lambkin recorded and self-released four solo albums that valorized mundane domestic situations while reveling in the liminal spaces between the acts of listening, recording, and producing. Created through an ingenious economy of means, these solo records are as beguilingly seductive as they are uncanny. Perpetually laughing in his own duplicitous face, Lambkin breathed new life into musique concrète and sound poetry, giving outmoded forms a contemporary consciousness while setting the gold standard for a continuously unfolding canon of 21st century tape music. Poem (For Voice & Tape), Salmon Run, Softly Softly Copy Copy, and Amateur Doubles are now remastered and finally back in print, with Salmon Run and Softly Softly Copy Copy available on vinyl for the first time. This deluxe boxed set of Graham Lambkin’s first four solo records includes an expansive 42-page book featuring unseen photos and reproductions of artworks as well as essays and anecdotal recollections providing fresh insight and divulging hermetic secrets by Ed Atkins, Mark Harwood, Matt Krefting, Lawrence Kumpf, Samara Lubelski, and Adrian Rew.--- Blank Forms Editions, 2021

Following the release of her 2018 solo tape, Ggggg (Anticausal Systems), vocalist Charmaine Lee returns with her debut LP, KNVF, for Erratum Musical (Paris, France). In just two years, the album marks a considerable evolution from the austere concentration of Ggggg towards expansive sonic worlds. Inspired by the arcs of popular music, Charmaine freely and fearlessly navigates a wide range of aesthetics, digging beneath each surface to disclose a highly personal sense of musicality. Microphones of varying fidelities, contact mics placed on the throat, and amplified hair combs are used to simulate polyphony and a dialogue between the inner and outer body. With Charmaine’s unique vocal articulations atop a bed of feedback and extreme frequencies, form follows expression in an ever-evolving context built on the traditions of noise, vocal, and improvised music. KNVF is a powerful statement in modern vocal music and a thrilling new development in Charmaine‘s artistry that will reward those who listen for the journey. --- Charmaine Lee (b. 1991) is a New York-based vocalist from Sydney, Australia. Her music is predominantly improvised, favoring a uniquely personal approach to vocal expression concerned with spontaneity, playfulness, and risk-taking. Beyond extended vocal technique, Charmaine uses amplification, feedback, and microphones to augment and distort the voice. She has performed with leading improvisers Nate Wooley, id m theft able, C. Spencer Yeh, and Ikue Mori, and maintains ongoing collaborations with Conrad Tao, Victoria Shen, Zach Rowden, and Eric Wubbels. --- Erratum Musicals, 2021

The first commercial recordings from Asia were made in Japan in 1903 by Fred Gaisberg, the legendary producer and recording engineer who traveled the world making recordings for the Gramophone Company (later His Masters Voice). The recording industry barely existed at this time. Man’s ability to record and reproduce sound had only existed since 1877 (with the invention of Edison’s cylinder phonograph) and flat disc records, what we all collect and obsess over today, had only come into being in the late 1890s. It is a miracle what these fragile discs have survived: wars with Russia and China, the fire bombings (and worse) of World War II, modernization, the onslaught of Western media. They document, through a dreamlike haze of surface noise, a Japan that had just barely begun to open its doors to the rest of the world. Including gagaku, shakuhachi, shamisen, storytelling, folksong and more. these recordings are a unique glimpse into an ancient culture and an important document of the beginnings of the recording industry. Simple and complex. Alien and familiar. Featuring important artists and those who only appeared to sing before the strange Western recording horn and then vanished. Sound Storing Machines spans only 9 years of recording—-from 1903 and the first commercial recordings made by Fred Gaisberg to 1912, the beginning of Japan’s homegrown record industry, including a few sides taken from Japan’s notorious bootleg 78rpm industry. Collected on various trips to Japan and compiled by sound artist Robert Millis (Indian Talking Machine, Victrola Favorites, Climax Golden Twins, Phi Ta Khon: Ghosts of Isan, This World is Unreal Like a Snake in a Rope, etc).  This is part three in a series (all produced by Millis) of early recording from Asia—including Sublime Frequencies’ The Crying Princess: 78rpm Records from Burma and Scattered Melodies: Korean Kayagum Sanjo. --- Limited edition LP with two sided insert of liner notes by Robert Millis --- Sublime Frequencies, 2021

Fantôme Phonographique present a reissue of Speech After The Removal Of The Larynx, originally released by Smithsonian Folkways in 1964. The larynx or voice box is a small organ located towards the top of the neck in humans and some other animals. Constructed largely of cartilage, it houses the vocal folds that allow for the manipulation of pitch and volume, which are essential for the phonation of spoken speech. It is also involved in bringing air to the lungs when you breathe and it protects the windpipe when you swallow. However, those unfortunate to experience the potentially fatal malignant tumors of laryngeal cancer will have their larynx removed, resulting in a traumatic loss of speech; thankfully, as this rare record issued by Smithsonian Folkways in 1964 demonstrates, removal of the larynx does not necessarily spell the end of speech for such blighted individuals. Instead, through developments in artificial voice creation, patients could learn to employ modes of vocal communication again. The album was recorded by physician Harm A. Drost at the Phonetic Laboratory of the Ear, Nose, and Throat Dept. of the University Hospital, Leiden, in the Netherlands, working under the direction of Professor H. A. E. van Dishoeck. As the advances were fairly new and surprisingly varied, Drost felt a phonograph album demonstrating the techniques would be useful for those in the field. The album thus features a narrator explaining aspects of several different techniques, followed by examples of patients employing them. Buccal speech (limited to certain consonants), parabuccal speech (collecting air in a space between the upper jaw and the cheek), glosso-pharyngeal speech (a method deemed obsolete where air is forced between the tongue and the palate), esophageal voice (made by reconditioning one's esophagus via swallowing, suction, or injection), various injection techniques and devices such as the larynxophone, pipa di tichioni, and "western electric" are all explored here, along with other aspects of the larynx and its absence. Speech After The Removal Of The Larynx is definitely one of the strangest albums ever given a commercial release

Endless Happiness release the long awaited reissue for Terry Riley's 1966 debut album, and one of the greatest pieces of minimal music ever created on Philip Ornstein’s iconic MassArt imprint, which also brought us Max Neuhaus & John Cage’s Fontana Mix-Feed and Allan Kaprow’s How to Make a Happening, is among the most sought after in Terry Riley vast discography. It is also the first recordings Riley made using his two personal Revox reel-to-reel tape machines (or "Time Lag Accumulators") later heard on his groundbreaking release Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band All Night Flight.

Very cool under-the-radar debut here from Suburban Cracked Collective, the name Shaun Leacy (of Newcastle, Australia) has given to his secluded avant murmurings. It’s fairly inscrutable music, but allow me to try to, umm, scrute it – it’s what I love to do! There’s what seems to be live percussion (a normal drum kit struck with abnormal mallets?), stringed instruments (maybe a guitar), and sparse electronics that seem to be knocking on death’s door, and Leacy weaves it all together in an understated and alluring fashion. The sonic rhythms of first-world convenience shaped into little instrumental “songs” that no one will ever hear, except here I am, hearing them right now. One might file it under “industrial”, but these tracks are so weary and lacking even the slightest sense of confrontational aggression… perhaps “dark occult music for completely unreligious ceremonies” is more appropriate, but most record shops don’t have a section for that. “Milton’s Stilton” might be my favorite cut here, as it seems to be a chopped n’ screwed foghorn dueling with a faulty HVAC system, but the b-side-encompassing “The Bird Ceased To Be Articulate” is wonderful too, some sort of stylistic convergence of the loneliest Dead C-related solo projects and the mysterious new-age noise of Civilistjävel!. No matter how you slice it, Private Failings is a prime slab from the Aussie post-noise underground.

Finally available fully on vinyl, here are the famous ‘Phonetic poems’ from Dadaist Raoul Hausmann – remastered from original tapes and for the first time with the correct track titles along with a 40 pages booklet including typescripts and texts. This LP is published on the occasion of the exhibition Raoul Hausmann and European Experimental Poetry (1945–1971). Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-Vienne, château de Rochechouart.The ‘Phonetic poems” were conceived in 1918, simultaneously and without much knowing with the russian futurists discoveries of Khlebnikov et Iliazd – with the cosmic sorcerer and trans-rational language ‘Zaoum’ (1913), Hugo Ball at Cabaret Voltaire (Karawane, 1916), then Kurt Schwitters (Ursonate, 1922). All these artists-poets were inventors (or re-discoverers) in their own ways of a mediumnic ultralanguage where primordial inter-ethnic and mythological sounds precede meanings, in order to redefine human communication and to connect to the multi-dimensional.Foreshadows of sound poetry and performative action poetry, these ‘Phonetic Poems’ are still there, miraculously preserved thanks to some recordings made in 1955 by Philips, then 1959 by Bureau and in 1966 by Henri Chopin, in Limoges where Hausmann had settled in 1944.All tracks remastered and cut by Frederic Alstadt in 2019 at Ångström Mastering, Bruxelles. --- Erratum Musicals, 2020

First first-length release in eight years by the leading lady of sadtronics, psychedelic harmonies and blurred-out therapy tunes! The glass is never half empty and it’s overflowing right now. Eva Van Deuren scrubbed away her past with a neon pink sponge to create a hyperreal album of old-skool fairytale sadness for Ultra Eczema, and simultaneously a harp-based record for our pals at Kraak Records in Ghent. The covid-19 crisis seems to be the catalyst for an abundance of creative madness; deadbroke but ready to gogo. Titania mask replica!

In 2019 Valentina Magaletti (Tomaga, Vanishing Twin, et al…) & Marlene Ribeiro (Gnod, Negra Blanca) were in residency at the Hysteria project at Porto’s Sonoscopia where they ran percussion workshops for female artists exploring new working methods. Back in London, Valentina’s phone recordings from the workshops became the base materials for DUE MATTE (two crazy women) where the hysteria theme was developed further. Vocal incantations, poems, piano, brass, and electronics were added to the concrte cauldron. The resultant brew is a deftly concocted, potent, and disorienting assemblage that will appeal to head-nodders and chin-strokers alike. DUE MATTE is cinematic in scope, where tension is built with primal, ritualistic rhythms then resolving into detailed, introspective passages. A trip all of its own, for sure. DUE MATTE will appeal to those with ears for Vox Populi, Taj Mahal Travellers, Tools You Can Trust, Bow Gamelan, Anne Gillis. DUE MATTE comes in an edition of 250 copies on heavyweight black vinyl in a reverse board jacket and a beautiful 28 page booklet. released October 30, 2020 Mixed and mastered by Amir Shoat Design & layout by Evelena Ruether