Downbeat | Electronica | Leftfield Vinyl 7 Inch 243 Items

Original Pressing found in drummer Richard Driskell's archives. Come housed in original unstamped paper sleeve. Units were a synth punk band formed in San Francisco in 1978. This was a private release from 1979. "Synthesizer bands don't normally thrill. Rather, they tend to lull the listener, falsifying and distorting the images and ideas at hand. San Francisco's Units are not that kind of synthesizer band. All four songs on this EP (even the instrumental!) are straightforward, exciting, lyrical experiments in understanding the beast and making it rock. Two machines and a drummer. Not pastoral visions but urban ones. Not peaceful, still angry. Not satisfied, still probing and asking questions. New life brought to old techniques. How surprising. How wonderful." New York Rocker, November 1979

Sasu Ripatti's complete "Dancefloor Classics" series. Music for imaginary dancefloors, released on Ripatti's own label Rajaton.

Record Store Day Japan 2021 Drop 2 release. From the original album “What’s happening!” Released by actor Akira Emoto in 1987, the highly acclaimed cover work “What’s Going On” (original: Marvin Gaye). Two single cuts of the original song “Sadly Ordinary”. A variety of arrangements by singer Akira Emoto and Makoto Saito are the best couplings to listen to.

Announced in 1981, from NHK 'Minna no Uta', arranged, produced and performed by Ryuichi Sakamoto, drums by Yukihiro Takahashi

The 7-inch of the popular Japanese techno pop 'Computer Grandma' by Syuko Sakai (Tokyo Children's Chorus) is the first reissue.

The coupling includes progressive techno 'Photo Musik' by Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Original Pressing found in drummer Richard Driskell's archives Units were a synth punk band formed in San Francisco in 1978. This was a private release from 1980. "I hate synthesizers but both sides of this make me eat my words. Listen to "I-Night" and re-evaluate the bloated crap that comes out of most electronic groups. Once the singing starts, though, on "Warm Moving Bodies" I throw in the towel. It's some of the lamest vocal arranging ever to be found anywhere and the words are the standard science-art jokes that've gotten as sickly cute as leopard skin on Saturday Night Live. "I-Night" doesn't fall victim to this syndrome, instead letting loose with one of the wildest riffs this side of Metal Urbain. The words are shuddery and bleak, and the vocals tolerable." Slash Magazine, Vol 3 #3

Record Store Day Japan 2021 Drop 2 release. Released in 1972, the theme song for the Toho movie “Goyo Fang-Kamisori Hanzo-” “Goyo Fang (”Fang “theme)” is the first reissue of the popular 7-inch single board.

Record Store Day Japan 2021 Drop 2 release. Released in 2008, the answer song that describes the feelings of her side of the blockbuster single “Koko ni Iruyo feat. Aoyama Therma” by SoulJa is the first 7-inch analog version.

Record Store Day Japan 2021 Drop 2 release. Released in 1978, Masaki Ueda sang the reggae lovers’ masterpiece “Harder They Come” in Japanese, a soulful cover single.

Collection of psychedelic dub songs that sensitively touch acid fields. Defined by low-pressure beats and choral vocals. The six songs were recorded during the pandemic in 2020 with the aim of escaping Barcelona . Collaborative project by John Talabot and oma totem from Hivern Discs together with Meritxell Bonastre and Juns from Futura agency. Pressed throughout three 7" packed in a handmade sackcloth box. Download code printed on plantable paper.

Record Store Day Japan 2021 Drop 2 release. From the EP released in 2002, MURO (producer / DJ), BOO (singer), and Ryoki Matsumoto (composer/arranger) boldly sampled Tatsuro Yamashita’s “Sparkle” to create an R & B flavored song.

The never-before-seen in its entirety, visual documentation proving this avant-garde collaboration of mythic proportions did indeed occur. Recorded at Sideshows by the Seashore along the Coney Island boardwalk on June 8th, 1986 as documented on VHS by John Polizzi under the commission of event producers Rick Russo and Bronwyn Rucker. It was long believed that Cage and Ra never performed together but as you'll see,these two shared the stage the entire time. The VHS footage has been combined with the audio master (containing several silent sections and some mic issues that occurred during the production), which breathes new life into the tiny reels of tape. The silent passages illuminate new auras when presented with the previously unseen visual component, and now over thirty years since it was recorded, you can truly experience the full spectacle. Included here is an additional audio track of commentary featuring Rick Russo. Also included in this package is a 45 RPM record documenting John Cage performing verses from his Empty Words writings while accompanied by Sun Ra. The B side features one of the two ''Silent Duets'' the two performed together that night.

Record Store Day Japan 2021 Drop 2 release. The first analog 7-inch version of the major debut single “One Night Carnival” released in 2002.

On the B side, “Every time the morning comes”, which was also recorded in the original single, is coupled.

takaramahaya announces "play variations," a 7-inch double A-side single featuring a taiko drum made by takaramahaya himself and a vintage foot-pedal organ. takaramahaya, who is a member of the four-piece band "Yamafutatsu," who won the grand prize at the Apple Vinegar Award 2024, the minimal music band "Tokyo shiokoji" described by Steve Reich as 'a wonderful live band,' and "LA SENAS," an improvisational percussion group that uses hand signs to conduct, is releasing an eagerly awaited solo work. In addition to the solid artwork he created himself, takaramahaya also fully demonstrates his abilities as a percussionist on "drum variations," a human-powered trance, and on "organ variations," a superb ambient piece created on the organ. The work is a perfect condensation of takaramahaya's talents as a multi-instrumentalist.

Clear vinyl.

CRU Servers return to the 12th Isle after five long years with a new LP's worth of their technicolour machine mulch: "Part hexagonal lube-pool, part peatman’s gallbladder; EEL marks an encephalitic (onward) plowter for both of us. Like intractable flagellations hoisted through individual druse romps, staminate bleachfields give way to unillustrated gonging, in chiefly 12V 3A veinlets. EEL – acronymised in ‘pen scrape’ – decontaminates, in our eye, four key baronial globoids, expunging gladly by 5 pin toddy ladle. In the torrential burn below, head hair, jaw hair and clothes sticky, stinking and greased with black charcoaled remains; arms are held aloft, supplicants to a muse long rent from this earth"

500 copies on black vinyl includes bonus 7" featuring two tracks by the mysterious no-wave punks CCV.

All Cru Servers material written and produced by Rickie & Jamie McNeill CCV are, were and forevermore shall be Jon McNeill & George Cathro

Tape restoration for CCV by Connor Walker at the National Sound Archives of Scotland

Limited edition.

This EP contains six tracks previously released as three 7" singles in 2003, and have not been available for almost two decades. Emerson Kitamura played his favourite songs from different eras and places with his organ equipped with bass pedals and accompanied by the legendary drum box TR-808.

Having had a long career playing keyboards in bands and sessions, Kitamura came to the fore in Japan with his self released 7" on his Bubblingnotes label. In 2018, he burst onto the international scene with his EP for EM Records, The Countryside Is Great, which gave him an opportunity to stretch out his inimitable style to make a bass/dub re-work of the Thai hit. The EP also debuted his collaboration with the guitarist/singer/songwriter/ mmm, with their cover of George McCrae's Rock Your Baby. The duo went on to release their LP Chasing Giants on Kitamura's label, and to grace Europe with a few legendary gigs.

This EP represents Kitamura's roots, with two Jackie Mittoo covers, some jazz evergreens, and a stellar version of the Lou Rawls classic You'll Never Find.

Led004 = Led001+led003, mathematically and poetically it made sense to make a glow-in-the-dark boxset with these two contemporary belpop EP’s. 001 with Victor De Roo and 003 with Azertyklavierwerke

»What is Dance?« contains two pieces originally conceived in 2017 for a performance/sound installation of the same name at Meinblau Projektraum (Berlin), as part of the series singuhr_projekte. Drawing inspiration from the works of American sound artist Joe Jones and his »Music Machines«, Robert Lippok (Ornament und Verbrechen, To Rococo Rot) arranged various sound objects (pieces of wood, cymbals, rotating plastic film), that were played mechanically. The sound piece—designed for a 4-channel system and condensed into a loop, that clocked in at around 20 minute—is his interpretation of three dances from the opera »The Fairy Queen« by Baroque composer Henry Purcell.

From this source material, Robert Lippok has now extracted and rearranged two pieces for »What is Dance?.« The result is music of its own right: Dense, but permeable drones are central, but complemented by harmoniously matching and gently pulsating sounds.

Jam City’s debut album Classical Curves is a landmark in the history of UK-club music. Released in the summer of 2012, it blazed a trail through the tangled aftermath of the late 2000s DJ-renaissance. Not purely a dance album nor overly cerebral, it offered something fresh. Menacing and playful, sensual and razor-sharp, the 10 tracks moved listeners in a bodily way that defied words. It soon became clear that Jam City had done something spectacular; the artist invented a genre. “Deconstructed Club”—the term eventually used to describe the sonic aesthetic of Classical Curves—doesn’t quite capture the record’s impact. Jam City’s synthesis of honeyed melodies and angular drums set the tone for what would blossom into Hyperpop. The record also inspired a generation of aspiring producers to experiment with unconventional sound-design, providing them with an imaginative template to adapt and make their own. 10 years on, the significance of Classical Curves is clearer than ever before. Featuring an additional 10-tracks of rarities and unreleased material created around the time of its initial release, this deluxe 2 x LP reissue invites fans to delve deeper into the record’s multi-sensory world. In addition to an exclusive 7-inch vinyl, listeners also have access to unseen photographs taken by the artist as research for the record’s infamous cover art. Beloved tracks “her” and “How we relate to the body” are pre-primed for the club, appearing as extended versions. Glassy fragments of 80s art-pop coalesce in suspended silence on the previously unreleased “He Watches Over Us All’. For respite, listeners can bathe in the 26-minute “Goodbye Hyatt Park”, a reverie that harnesses the record’s more soothing qualities. As influential as Classical Curves was upon its release, it was also ahead of its time. Nostalgic as this reissue may be for some, it also brings into view aspects of the record that have yet to be appreciated in full. Meanwhile, Jam City has gradually been coming full circle. Listen closely, and you may hear traces of the 2012 debut on his future solo material.

Vinyl close to VG+. Copy n° 23/100

Ceremonia ("Ceremony") is the first collaborative release between singer songwriter Luvi Torres, and producer Chancha Vía Circuito. Combining exceptional voicework with powerful creative rhythms typical of Chancha, the lyrics include mantras Luvi uses in their therapeutic exercises, thereby immersing us in a healing musical world.

Taken as a whole, the album's four tracks, Abro ("I Open"), Creo ("I Believe" or "I Create"), Sano ("I Heal"), Amo ("I Love") encourage sensitive receptivity. Luvi's vocals are enveloped by lush ambient dub. Chancha's rhythms and vibrations create a comforting and calming soundscape that invites a sense of timelessness and expansion.

At times Ceremonia spirals hypnotically, blurring the distinction between inner and outer worlds. This music calls for attentive listening and encourages active individual and collective reinvention.

Record Store Day Japan 2021 Drop 2 release.A special 7-inch version of the tropical and groovy Latin fusion “Kalimba Night” (side A) and “Don Kama” (side B) recorded in Hiroshi Sato’s third album “Orient”, released in May 1979.

This 7” attempts to represent a time when Ruth Goller, Dario Rossetti-Bonell and Dave De Rose would gather with the intention to create fresh music together, free of stylistic boundaries. Each one of us would bring our own compositions to Ruth's house in Walthamstow where we'd experiment and elaborate them together. You'll be sad to know many other recordings of this era were lost and now only exist in miserable mp3 format... sometimes things like these happen... what to do? Celebrate the surviving tracks with a lathe cut! In the later version of this group we invited our fantastic friend and collaborator Ed Begley to sing with us. We hope you enjoy!

Record Store Day Japan 2021 release. The world’s first 7-inch reissue from the only LP by the funk band AFRIKA formed in Osaka in 1981!

The album “FUNK CITY” released in 1985, which is popular among domestic and foreign funk-boogie enthusiasts, is a unique work that Japanese people are closest to US funk music at that time.

Under the supervision of the project Tokyo Condition by DJ Notoya, two songs, “Feel The Night”, a boogie track with undulating bass and cutting, and “Foxy Lady”, an electro-funk with a cool development in the second half, are selected from the album and are 7 inches. ·release. 8ronix remastering.

Record Store Day 2021 release. Greg Kmiec’s Xenon pinball machine was released in 1980 and marked a significant milestone in pinball technology and design. The expansion of microchip technology would provide new opportunities for sound designer and synth pioneer Suzanne Ciani, allowing for basic oscillator control and a wider scope for sampling capacity which could facilitate the higher frequencies of a female human voice and entirely reshape the concept of the machine in the process. By using state of the art Synclavier synthesiser technology and an invaluable experience in film scoring and record production Suzanne would devise a complete minimal music score for the machine, then dissect the piece into separate fragments that would be triggered throughout the game play adding an extra creative dimension in player inter-activity (potentially turning the participant into their own musical arranger). By incorporating her own infamous voice box (which had been the focus of a seminal David Letterman Show feature) Suzanne’s combination of a harmoniser and a vocoder also provided the first-ever female identity to a pinball machine which in conjunction with the games ergonomic design and Paul Faris’ figurative graphics (echoing the aesthetic of Rene Laloux and Roland Topor’s La Planète Sauvage) Xenon was able to add a degree of subconscious sensuality to its performance, a feature previously unchartered in arcade development. This disc presents the full extent of Suzanne Ciani’s groundbreaking musical effects for Xenon, in their isolated form, for the first time ever heard outside of the confines of the machine which recently earned the composer her own induction to the Pinball Expo Hall Of Fame

Tom Boogizm’s Rat Heart has already given us AOTY-worthy excursions into fizzing ambience, fritzed Arthur Russel-esque scuzz, flipped neo-soul and bleary-eyed bangers, always with those timeless hooks and wild-but-insular production. Never one to care much about fitting in with any one thing or another, Rat Heart evokes that golden stretch in the mid-late 80’s when heads got past the shine of new technology and started getting deep into the thing - you know the stuff - Thomas Dolby, Prince, Prefab, Scritti. In other words, Rat Heart is supremely well suited to the 45, giving sharp focus to his pop instincts, tightening the screws in a way that echoes contemporary work by Dean Blunt or Vegyn, you can imagine his thing properly going off too. In fact, you don’t really need to stretch the imagination too much with this one, the A side guided by the spirit of Sade via Prince in a slow love mode, Ben Vince’s Saxophone providing an added layer of moody romance. On the flip, it’s all Spanish guitar and broken (heart|)strings, just a solitary synth and that gutted vocal for company.

In the early eighties Exart label owner Hessel Veldman regularly went to the city of Rotterdam to visit the creative minds behind local act Rotterdans. Their base was a house that both served as a home studio to record sessions of improvised music and a dealing spot for marihuana, which means customers were ringing the doorbell all day and all night long. During a late-night session one of the Rotterdans members told Veldman about a certain coworker, a ship welder working in the harbor, who was in his mid-twenties, lived with his parents in a typical workers' home and was totally obsessed by analog synthesizers. Collecting all the different types and playing them every night.

A meeting was arranged and Veldman met Aart Zwaans for the first time. They went to his room upstairs where he spent his evenings experimenting and writing his own tracks, that turned out to be a mixture of melancholic ambient pieces in the vein of synth wizards like Enno Velthuys and the early electronic music of Klaus Schulze and the Berlin School. Zwaans was a real outsider, not interested in the underground tape trading scene and preferred to be left alone. He did however promise Veldman to record some tracks and draw a cover for a cassette on Exart which was releases in 1982. Although plans were made to release more of his music, the Sémi Hóra cassette turned out to be the only remaining proof of his mysterious existence.

Sémi Hóra stayed an obscure must-have for collectors of underground music only, until some of the tracks were uploaded to the internet, where it reached a modest new audience. Overlooked by the various reissue labels, some of these hidden gems from the golden age of home taping are now finally presented on vinyl for the first time. In association with Veldman and archivist Bence Meijer, we selected 4 tracks from the original tape to be remastered for a convincing sample of one man’s imperturbable vision. Hopefully it prevents this idiosyncratic and talented musician from fading into total oblivion.

New out on Feral Child is a super limited 7” EP from Italian Kosmische | Library artist Alessio Bosco, under his 30 Door KEY moniker. A wonderful 5 trk 45 heavy on Hauntology vibes, samples, nods to minimal electronica and kosmische. With one foot firmly within the “long lost ‘70s supernatural TV themes” camp, the record is superbly and consistently fresh and ambitious- and comes hugely recommended to devotees of all the above, Trunk records heads and minimal synth, electronica nuts. It looks as cool as it sounds too; screened black board sleeves, with inserts galore and hand numbered to 187 copies on black wax.

“Impressions / I Am Thousands” is the new release from Berlin-based electronic producer and multi-instrumentalist sUb_modU, aka the brainchild of Italian Romeo Sandri. Both songs form part of the jazz musician’s debut album ‘Descent To The Centre’, a record that is an autobiographical and existentialist account of oneself, blending the electric/psychedelic spectrum of jazz with house, avant-garde and ambient leanings.

Following on from “Pidgin Synths EP”, a releases that entangled a homage to afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti with synth-heavy original material, sUb_modU has amassed an impressive list of tastemaker support through his unique reinterpations, from the likes of Gilles Peterson (bbc 6Music), Ross Allen (nts) and Virgil Abloh (Off White). Alongside the release of his debut album is a special edition, double A side single, 7” featuring an exclusive 45 Centre Edit of the iconic “Expensive Shit” paired with a sUb_modu original “ram Generation”.

Originally released in 1983 on Hessian.

Bryn Jones’ work was justly known for its excess—of tracks created, of rhetoric, of volume levels, of repetition, of length—and the sometimes indiscriminate way he produced material as Muslimgauze carried over into his approach to the part of the business that involved getting people to actually hear his music. Known for the deluge of DATs he’d share with the labels he worked with, Jones also didn’t necessarily restrict himself to just one outlet.

Very early in his career, in the same year the first two Muslimgauze LPs came out (1983), Jones released an obscure 7” single with completely blank black sleeve art on a label called Hessian. »Hammer & Sickle« is to date the only release on Hessian (which may have just been Jones himself?). Those two LPs, Kabul and Opaques, are fascinating in the context of the full swath of Jones’ work. They’re much spacier, more drifting, and notably less interested in using the kind of Middle Eastern percussion and other instrumentation that’s such a distinct element on many Muslimgauze releases. »Hammer & Sickle« operates in a similar territory, but if anything a little further out from the main body of Jones’ work.

The side-long title track and the three b-sides here are all cut from the same cloth, spacious productions that mainly play rounded synth percussion against echoing, ›bag of wire‹-style dub hits. After the lengthy examination of »Hammer & Sickle« itself, the other three cuts experiment with altering pitch, duration, tempo, and other elements as if testing the ways Jones could vary the effects of the title track without ever ditching its component parts. His sound was already quickly evolving (even the next year’s Buddhist on Fire is closer to what fans likely picture when they think of the »Muslimgauze sound«), leaving »Hammer & Sickle« an intriguing and valuable portrait of one of Jones’ early side investigations.

Everyone's favourite virtual band with 2 more of their biggest tracks on very limited 7" vinyl.