Originally issued on cassette in limited runs between 1989 and 1990, At That Time is a long-overdue excavation of Nostalgie Éternelle – one of the most quietly crucial names in the European DIY underground. The compilation brings together tracks from three early self-released tapes – Damned Forever Those Who Listen To This Tape (split with Due), Art Is The Tool (split with From Nursery to Misery), and Virtual Reality (split with PN 4632402) – issued on the band’s own One Last Dream label and circulated through Europe’s mail-based cassette network. Formed in the small northern town of Leer in 1986, Stefan Heinze (aka Inox Kapell) and Dieter Mauson (later of Delta-Sleep-Inducing Peptide) worked with what was at hand – battered drum machines, cassette decks, synths, tape loops, found sounds – and pushed it into strange, low-lit zones between minimal synth, ambient-industrial, and new wave abstraction. Their sound was shaped as much by environment as influence: the clang of metal from a nearby workshop, Dutch radio static, local zines, field recordings in tunnels, and the distant pull of DAF, The Ex, Cluster and Palais Schaumburg. They didn’t chase scenes – they stayed locked in their own language, quietly radiating outward. These recordings land somewhere between NDW, DIY industrial, coldwave and post-punk decay – think early Portion Control, Legendary Pink Dots, Das Ding, P16.D4, or the more atmospheric zones of Nocturnal Emissions. Nostalgie Éternelle remain one of the great cult acts of the era, their output shaped by instinct and sustained by exchange. This LP captures them in full motion: abstract, skeletal, emotive, and locked into a sound entirely their own. Recently restored and remastered from the original tapes, this release marks the first time this material has appeared on vinyl, providing a vital compilation for those tracing the margins of the European tape underground.

Orchid Mantis, by Michelle Helene Mackenzie and Stefan Maier, is a work that draws its inspiration from the history of the Sanzhi Pod City, in northern Taiwan. Sanzhi Pod City was built from 1978 onwards, made up of buildings constructed from assemblages of ‘pods’ inspired by the futuro houses of Finnish architect Matti Suuronen. The project was abandoned in 1980, following a number of accidents during construction and persistent rumours that the site was haunted. However, this wasteland of a city has allowed insects to proliferate, in particular five species of orchid mantis. It is this strange environment, made up of utopian buildings, proliferating insects and vegetation reclaiming the site, that serves as the imaginary space for Michelle Helene Mackenzie and Stefan Maier’s music, a music of carefully designed pace and progression, drawing, through resonance and stridulation, subtle sonic materials that guide and accompany us into multiple worlds with admirable ease and grace.  — Breach, by American composer Olivia Block, engages in a dialogue between field recordings and synthesised sounds, creating a vibrant plea for wild spaces that face an ever-growing threat to their survival from human activities. The work is based on recordings collected in the San Ignacio lagoon in the Mexican part of Southern California. This lagoon is known as a breeding ground for eastern Pacific grey whales. With the help of precise electronics, the music unfolds like a drift, depicting the subjective soundscape of whales caught up in the noise of the Anthropocene. The composer uses otoacoustic emissions in particular, representing the sound saturation caused by humans in the habitat of these large marine mammals. Going beyond a merely descriptive dimension, Olivia Block manages to transcend her subject to offer a fascinating musical form that engages the listener in a constantly renewed way.

Dan Melchior has a wild history, brain and catalogue. Penultimate Press is honoured to add to it. The former and later that is. This is Melchior's first piano recording. “I used my girlfriend Jessica's piano and got a fairly cheap mic from the guitar centre that could just be plugged onto the end of a guitar cable.” The reverb is natural, as the piano sits in a large, mostly empty room. Hill Country Piano is the result of a human music box mind brimming with many a corner somehow aligning with chambers still being told. Melchior does not play the piano in any formal way, as you can probably tell. He played and recorded the piano, with simple repetitive parts, whilst listening to previous recordings on headphones. Then the magic happens. The gentle introduction of a banjo on Sparrow Song paints the reality of an America now lost. The percussion on the self-titled track unravels a psychedelic gamelan piano duo residing in the now. It didn't start out that way,it never does, but this slow burning trip around a mind/world happened to come into formulation just as an interest in Pascal Comelade was coming into play. All original piano was recorded in Austin. 4U.Dan Melchior is from London, England. He has lived in various cities in the USA for the last 24 years.Melchior’s resume is as unique as it is exciting and diverse. Having cut his teeth in the land of garage rock as a collaborator with Billy Childish and Holly Golightly his vision takes sharp twists landing on Graham Lambkin’s strange and beautiful experimental label Kye with two records which broke not only the mould of himself but that of the song itself.Melchoir is a musician with a voluminous discography which embraces many different forms of expression, from song based rock to pure textural explorations. His music has evolved significantly, to become a distant entity from some of his earlier blues-based work, showing a definite influence of more experimental bands such as The Homosexuals and The Fall, and some absurdist elements which have led to comparisons to compatriot exponents of that genre, Vivian Stanshall and Syd Barrett.Always experimenting with form in an original manner avoiding any inherent genre anchor. Blues is referenced and extended, musique concrete is found embedded in the song.Melchior has collaborated with artists as diverse as Billy Childish, Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, Letha Rodman Melchior and the LAFMS outfit Dinosaurs With Horns. Just as diverse are the record labels he has been associated with, including Sympathy for the record industry, Siltbreeze, Kye, Ultra Eczema, Chocolate Monk, Ever/Never, Feeding Tube and Penultimate Press, and more.Melchior supports himself in recent years as a portrait artist, while pursuing various divergent paths, both artistically and musically.

ollowing their collaboration on 2021’s Oscar winning Drive My Car, Eiko Ishibashi & filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi up the ante with a deeply inspired synergistic exchange: music for images, visuals for sounds. Eiko’s score initiated the project that has become his celebrated new film (Best Picture – BFI London Film Fest, Asian Film Awards, Silver Lion – Venice Film Fest, Best Score – Asia Film Awards). Every nuance mixed & mastered by Jim O’Rourke.

More in tune now with the rhythm of the sun and moon, Xylouris White speak to each other across great distances with the intuition and fellowship that can only be found over years in each other’s company. With fewer distractions, appreciative of the freedom to play with new sounds and spaces, they carve The Forest In Me from unbelievably thin air.

Koln, Germany around 1991. After a 40-minute train ride from Aachen, Christoph Heemann and Jim O'Rourke are sitting around with Jan St. Werner, C-Schulz, Frank Dommert and George Odjik. Heemann has brought with him a strange obscure disc (what else?) from Portugal by some group called "Plux Quba." Or is it the record? The label? Who knows, because no one here reads Portuguese, dummy! But what they do know when the needle hits the groove is that they've never heard anything like it. Attempts to cite reference points are soon given up, there are some similarities to Robert Ashley's later work, but even that is deceiving. It is simple, gentle, melodic, and yet completely alien. Originally released in 1988 on Ama Romanta, and reissued last in 1998 on Moikai.

OTOROKU is proud to reissue Evan Parker's first solo LP "Saxophone Solos". Recorded by Martin Davidson in 1975 at the Unity Theatre in London, at that time the preferred concert venue of the Musicians' Co-operative, Parker's densely woven and often cyclical style has yet to form; instead throaty murmurs appear under rough hewn whistles and calls - the wildly energetic beginnings of an extraordinary career.  Reissued with liner notes from Seymour Wright in an edition of 500.  --- "The four pieces across the two sides of Saxophone Solos – Aerobatics 1 to 4 – are testing, pressured, bronchial spectaculars of innovation and invention and determination. Evan tells four stories of exploration and imagination without much obvious precedent. Abstract Beckettian cliff-hanging detection/logic/magic/mystery. The conic vessel of the soprano saxophone here recorded contains the ur-protagonists: seeds, characters, settings, forces, conflicts, motions, for new ideas, to delve, to tap and to draw from it story after story as he has on solo record after record for 45 years. ‘Aerobatics 1-3’ were recorded on 17 June 1975, by Martin Davidson at Parker’s first solo performance. This took place at London’s Unity Theatre in Camden. ‘Aerobatics 4’ was recorded on 9 September the same year, by Jost Gebers in the then FMP studio in Charlottenburg, Berlin. Music of balance and gravity, fulcra, effort, poise and enquiry. Sounds thrown and shaken into and out of air, metal and wood. It is – as the titles suggest – spectacular." - Seymour Wright, 2020.

"The three musicians seem to exchange and overlap tones, creating the feeling of a single and continuous arc extending, curving in space, a kind of bridge or thoroughfare outward." – Stuart Broomer (liner notes) ---VellumMagda Mayas pianoJohn Butcher tenor and soprano saxophonesTony Buck drums ---recorded on 30 November 2019 at ausland, Berlinengineered by Andrew Levineedited and mixed by John Butchermastered by Andreas 'Lupo' Lubichliner notes by Stuart Broomerlp design by Yaqin Siinner sleeve photography by Cristina Marx/Photomusixmanufacturing by Daniel Klotz/Die Lettertypen

Butcher is interested in particular people and their personalities. He prefers not to work in a generic situation, where there's an agreement in advance to play a certain kind of thing, and the music cannot swerve in a sudden fresh direction. As he told me a few years back: "What got me so interested in the type of improvising I ended up really spending time on was, at least at a personal level, there was a feeling you could start from scratch. Now you might well be mistaken, and rediscovering endless wheels, but it felt like there was a chance… Whatever things you do pull together from various places into that, relate more to your own personal take on – I’m not just talking about music, but how you want to live as a musician in the world, what aspects of things outside of music you’re hoping will find their way into your activity." Clive Bell John Butcher soprano and tenor saxes Angharad Davies violin Mark Sanders percussion Pat Thomas electronics

The record can be considered a sort of farewell note to one of London’s most crucial venues for improvised music and sound art after its unexpected closure in late 2023 due to gentrification. Butcher had previously collaborated with these three musicians in different contexts, but Unlockings documents a first-of-its-kind quartet line-up. »I wanted a new combination, but made of players I’d worked with over the years,« says Butcher. »Choosing is probably 75 % about the player and 25 % about the instrument—trying to imagine how it might work sonically, but also setting up a situation that is able to surprise everyone, that takes everyone beyond their personal ideas. I’m still always slightly amazed how individual approaches interact and entwine in a collaborative improvisation.« Kristoffer Patrick Cornils John Butcher tenor and soprano saxophones Angharad Davies violin John Edwards double bass Mark Sanders percussion Pat Thomas electronics

Tarab Cuts evolved from a request by the Paris-based Lebanese electronic musician, Tarek Atoui. In 2011 he invited several composers, including English saxophonist John Butcher, to create short pieces that responded to music in the collection of Kamal Kassar, who owns one of the world’s largest vinyl and shellac collections of Arabic classical music. Butcher, who is much more strongly identified with free improvisation than composition, edited snippets from Kassar’s 78s into a new piece of music, and then finished the piece with real-time saxophone responses to his construction.  This became “Between the Skies,” which is side one of the album under consideration. Butcher went on to expand the work into Tarab Cuts, a set-length piece that includes more reconstructed recordings as well as improvisations by Butcher and drummer Mark Sanders. He performed Tarab Cuts six times in the United Kingdom, Brazil, Spain and the USA. Curiously, while these presentations enjoyed some acclaim, the recorded iteration is barely known. The LP, which has “Between the Skies” on one side and an early performance of the material with Sanders called “Under the Walls” on the other, was pressed up as an audiophile 45 rpm 12”.  Whilst it takes inspiration from early Arabic classical, secular and Sufi music it is not an attempt to copy these musics.It is an interaction across decades and cultures that throws an intriguing light on the contemporary musical practice of Butcher and Sanders. A meeting of distant voices with their own, in pursuit of both common and unfamiliar ground. These pieces were later expanded into a 50 min concert presentation also called Tarab Cuts. LP purchase includes a free download code for a live performance of this.Photo: Tarek Atoui's Visiting Tarab in Sharjah, UAE. --- Side A Between the Skies - 13:56 John Butcher / saxophones and sound files --- Side B Under the Walls - 14:08 Mark Sanders / drums & percussion John Butcher / feedback, sound files ---

A. 7 Runs (in arc mental styling) Recorded March - April 2024 in the USA tour van and Berlin DE A compositional structure built entirely from constant movement creates the illusion of a stable architecture. Within this contained structural mirage, an array of sounds seep through, wrapping, camouflaging, and revealing their compositional scaffoldings, conjured up from a simple method of counting. By placing these simple counters alongside one another, different structural configurations are formed. In the fashion of Siah Armanjni’s miniature models, where a plethora of staircases reveal the architectural surface as both bidirectionally mobile and at a standstill, “7 runs” achieves a status of motionlessness through constant repetition. Is descending a ladder to nowhere the same as sitting? Are 7 pulses equally partitioned through time, no longer a discrete measure of time? B. The Third Part of the Night Recorded April-June 2024 Berlin DE Violin by Henry Birdsey A piece for piano, violin, and metal percussion, all realized through digital synthesis (with the exception of H. Birdsey’s violin textures, used to approximate a digital synthesizer noise I enjoy). This work represents a digital amalgamation of synthetic materials, spanning from copper-wound strings to cylindrical-shaped rocks. At the heart of The Third Part of the Night lies a digitally rendered choreography, where three hands slam microphones against precise nodal points on piano wire. These digital hands serve as compositional elements, moving in a deliberate dance to create a sense of “music.” Their movement generates sounds that evoke objects and substances striving to escape their own essence. Attacks and meters act as sculptors, shaping the real into the digital and the digital into an uncanny yet almost tangible reality. "On the new album 7 Runs (In Arc Mental Styling), Max Eilbacher juggles a series of electronic tones, carefully sculpted and spaced to form what the Berlin-based composer describes as “a structural mirage made from constant movement.” Following a conceptual compositional algorithm, Eilbacher’s effervescent, repetitive digitally constructed electronic tones seem to endlessly rise across two side-long climbs that bend and twist like a barber pole. It’s a quality extenuated by a series of diagrams included in the release that map the arcs, arches, and columns created by this sonic shadowplay. As tones and repeating patterns layer and imperceptibly shift in the moment, the music seems to grow more solid and spectral all at once. Eilbacher may explain the “movement” of his illusory structures and even show his work, yet we are still left in awe at the seamless magic that is generated. A debut release on OMA, a new label co-founded by Eilbacher and his bandmates in Horse Lords, 7 Runs makes for a bemusing and breathtaking liftoff. " -Miles Bowe 2025

Flying between virtuosic formalism and freewheeling openness, Andrew Bernstein’s new album Shadows and Windy Places is a gripping picture of the Germany-based saxophonist right now. Capturing recordings across the last five years and disparate sources — some are previous album sessions, others peak into Bernstein’s daily practice — they all fall perfectly into place to form an album as rich as a self-portrait and as spontaneous as a snapshot. “I often feel the pull to formalize my music, to have a reason for every decision, an internal logic that can be explained,” Bernstein says of the album. “This is countered by my lived experience, of music and otherwise, in a chaotic, improvisatory, and complex world. This music attempts to reconcile these impulses.” That tension between logical forms and chaotic, improvised flights only becomes more rewarding and joyful as Shadows and Windy Places unfolds through the hypnotic “A Shadow, Blooming” with subliminal flashes of gamelan and Ethiopian jazz, the silvery, pulsing “Of Infinite Space” and the playful, bubbling “Counting Sines.” They all revolve around the gripping centerpiece “In Blue”, an explosive performance where Bernstein doesn’t reconcile his impulses so much as fuse them entirely with his saxophone forming a fiery crucible. As both an end point for years of material and an opening statement to OMA, a new label co-founded by Bernstein and his bandmates in Horse Lords, Shadows and Windy Places is a defining work for the virtuoso saxophonist. Andrew Bernstein - soprano and alto saxophones, tenor recorder, electronics.

Joseba Irazoki - Onomatopeikoa II Very happy to finally have Joseba’s work become part of Hegoa’s family. A versatile and restless Basque musician who has an extensive discography with almost 20 albums released. Born in 1974 and based in Bera, Nafarroa, Joseba has been leaving his mark on a heterogeneous amalgam of projects and adventures leaving his most introspective and personal self in the works in which he has dared to sign with his first name. “Onomatopeikoa II” follows on from Irazoki's 2017 Gitarra Onomatopeikoa release, and that album's sense of untethered, questing curiosity is not only carried over but expanded upon even further here. Combining a fully committed approach to the guitar with an almost egoless lightness of touch, this album builds upon the already impressively scopious range of Gitarra Onomatopeikoa to dizzying effect. Irazoki makes full use of an impressively broad palette. Yet nothing feels forced, nothing is for show – there’s just a sense of open-hearted generosity. In lesser hands such a whirlwind tour of style and form might risk failing to get its hooks in deep enough, yet not only does Irazoki have the imaginative scope to tackle these varying approaches to the instrument, he has the technical chops to pull it off. Each composition seems to have an openness of intent that is utterly disarming; all cards are on the table and nothing is held back, resulting in a creative tour de force that builds, piece by piece, to a unifying cohesiveness that makes the whole far greater than the sum of its parts. Featuring contributions from long-time OTO favourites Rhodri Davies and Raphael Roginski, “Onomatopeikoa II” is nevertheless unmistakably a work of singular craft and vision.

Reinvigorated by months of shutdown woodshedding, David developed new works for guitar, as well as a piano piece and an exceptionally eerie bit of musique concrète. Inspired by the deep dive into Gastr del Sol’s duo magic that facilitated last year’s compilation box, David opened his deeply personal solo pieces for engaging conversational gambits with modern masters Rhodri Davies, Andrea Belfi, Nikos Veliotis, Nate Wooley, and Cleek Schrey

Colonia Dignidad was the settlement of a German evangelical sect.After being prosecuted for child abuse in Germany, the group fled to Chile in 1961. Like similar religious sects, it was characterized by the outward appearance of a unified, godly community with well-tempered cultural activities and social welfare, but inwardly and in its environment by oppression, sexual abuse, and exploitation. In the 1970s, it unquestioningly inserted itself into Pinochet's regime of terror, aiding in the imprisonment and torture of political prisoners, weapons production, etc. Since the end of the 1980s, there has been a legal reappraisal of the C.D.'s crimes in Chile.Its successor organization makes a living from tourism.The C.D. project uses, on the one hand, a series of documentary recordings of contemporary witnesses, and on the other, a set of melodic improvisations (MIDI files), improvised in the spirit of the impressions of terror, tension, claustrophobia and fear associated with the Colonia. CD 2 (Knochenstückchen) directly reflects this atmosphere. CD 1 (Reue?) on the other hand, is characterized by the contradictory breadth of the statements found after the dissolution of the sect: Denial of atrocities to glorification of the C.D. by leaders who returned to Germany against the professed traumas of formerly abused inmates and exploited community workers.For this purpose, the eyewitness recordings were sound-modified to a considerable extent. The MIDI files were played back with a variety of virtual instruments (piano, guitar, sax, turntable, lung machine, barrel organ, synths, etc.) in a multitude of modifications (speed, pitches, loops, harmonic and tonal variations), so that the 11 pieces from CD 1 and the 16 pieces from CD 2 each represent a closely interwoven overall composition.Ralf Wehowsky is one of the most respected practitioners of radical music of our day. He was the founding member of the seminal German group P16.D4 and ran the legendary experimental label Selektion whose ground-breaking releases influenced many working in today's experimental music scene. Previous releases have seen him collaborate with such well known and diverse artists such as Merzbow, Andrew Chalk, Jim O'Rourke, Achim Wollscheid, Lionel Marchetti, Kevin Drumm, Kouhei Matsunaga and Bruce Russell.

Maths Balance Volumes follow up their acclaimed 2020 release A Year Closer with a further and sturdier bucket of songs scraped from the dust of being. Haunted, fragile and beautiful, this is music that explores the ghostly zones of its own creation. The loneliness and vulnerability that unfolds with the opening cut Stay lays the way for exploration of sound and song with simple melodic guitar and organ whilst the subsequent Janet’s Song weaves mirror elements alongside the sound of pebbles on water.This is evocative music made thoroughly by humans with the most basic of tools. Unafraid to step away from their screens Maths Balance Volumes stroll with breezy resistance to the current thread of platform regurgitation.Tonight flips the song on its side as a barnstorming melange of concrete hustle made from shakers, animals, humans and beelzebub knows what. Egyptian Wedding sounds like they operated off the depths of a rotating well. Forming a round is a dusty scratchy heartbreaker that encapsulates the hybrid Smithsonian Folkways label approach that only MBV do.There is something enormously human about Maths Balance Volumes take on underground experimental music, one far more so than the human pitched music made in the mainstream today. In the 20th Century it was the other way around. What has happened ? I will let you contemplate that. But for me, in this case explicitly this press scribe is chuffed at the consequence of this reversal. Very happy indeed.

Filterbeds was Jim Whelan, Natalie Williams and Mark Courtney. I have typed this first sentence out so many times in my mind and broken down. Left wondering the incomprehensible fate of friendships; the loneliness of death; the staggering shock of grief. And then there’s the sheer marvel of sharing, caring, crying with laughter, revelatory joy, smiles, dancing, hugs, trips and….and….creating something from ordinary nothing.This release comes with the heaviest of hearts. The exhilaration matched by agony.If Mutualism can tell us anything, it says ‘whatever you have planned, do it NOW’. We couldn’t have done this without Jim and now we must do without him.Mutualism is where sounds bend, blur and bind. Melody is whispered like a secret, Rhythm broken and unrepentant. These pieces are singular but derive from a mutual assent.In Loving Memory of Jim Whelan 1963-2024Special thanks to Carim Clasmann for Mastering (The Fishtank, Cologne) and Test Pressing approval (Real Leyton Library, London)Released March 2025