Aguirre Records

27/04/2026

Marion Brown - Awofofora lp (Aguirre, 2026)

First time reissue of JP / US free jazz rarity. Old-style Gatefold LP with rare photographs & liner notes by Ed Hazell. Edition of 1000

The 1970s were Marion Brown’s most searching decade, a period during which he sought to move beyond the free jazz of the previous era and find more personal approaches to structuring improvisation and composition. After leaving New York for Europe in 1967, Brown began reshaping his music into what he described as “a more deliberate kind of music that had more structure to it,” pacing it so that moods and modes could develop over time. Albums such as In Sommerhausen, Afternoon of a Georgia Faun, Geechee Recollections, and Sweet Earth Flying trace this evolution: rhythmic structures moved to the foreground, harmony receded, and composition became a matter of orchestrating interlocking rhythmic parts as one would polyphonic lines.

Released in 1976, Awofofora is an overlooked but crucial entry in that sequence. At the time, its use of funk and reggae beats, electric guitars, and grooves drawn from contemporary Black popular music led some to misread it as a jazz-rock detour. In retrospect, it is entirely consistent with Brown’s methodology. As he admired in the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the stimulus comes from within the community. Here Brown filters Afro-Caribbean rhythms and funk through his own sensibility, abstracting their structural qualities rather than adopting surface style.

26/02/2026

JS Donny - Death Folk lp (2026, Bamboo Shows) 🖤

24/12/2025

T h i s w a s 2 0 2 5 o n A g u i r r e

Jean-Marie Mercimek - Dans Le Camion De Marguerite Duras
CD3 - Rules For Living
The Ancients - The Ancients
Natural Information Society - Perseverance Flow
Akira Sakata / Giotis Damianidis - Adyton
Jef Mertens - Orchid Alto

17/12/2025

The obligatory year-end list of 2025. So much good music released this year. Happy to see the underground experimental music scene alive and well.

Arianne Churchman, Benedict Drew - The Tree Of The Left Hand
Oiro Pena - Béke
La Festa delle Rane - Il Lago è Il Cielo Del Bosco E Tutte Le Rane Cantano In Coro
Bòsc - Bòsc
Brannten Schnüre - Landschaft Aus Tränen
Shelter, Orion, Turner Williams Jr. - Krakatoa
Various - Lost Coast: Some Visionary Music from California, 1980–1992
Abel Ghekiere - In de verte, dit uitzicht
Eddie Marcon - Carpet Of Fallen Leaves
Carpet Of Fallen Leaves
Amateur Hour - Går I Kras
Karen Willems - A Fool's Guide To Reality
Big Hands - Thauma
Naoki Zushi - III
Half Asleep - The Minutes Hours / Les Heures Secondes
Nicolae Brînduș - Soliloque I / Soliloque IV / Match / Antifonia

02/12/2025

°° NATURAL INFORMATION SOCIETY ° PERSEVERANCE FLOW °°

Sinking their teeth into a single theme for nearly 35 minutes, weaving minimalist jazz with strands of dub and dance music, Joshua Abrams and his bandmates have never sounded more focused—or more expansive (Pitchfork)

Announcing Perseverance Flow, the latest album from acclaimed Chicago-based ensemble Natural Information Society (NIS), release date 2024-10-24. After a trilogy of double LPs by expanded manifestations of the band that began in 2018 with Mandatory Reality & continued through Since Time Is Gravit...

16/10/2025

Läuten der Seele - Unterhaltungen mit Larven und Überresten LP (2025, World Of Echo)

Christian Schoppik, half of Brannten Schnüre, returns with a stellar new album under his Läuten der Seele moniker. Edition of 500.

Some time ago, a few steps down from the place where I lived back then, there was this unkempt garden belonging to a smallish, rather bland-looking 1920s-era mansion. The garden was surrounded by a stone wall and one side of that wall had a huge crack running right through it. I've passed that spot every day on my way to work. The crack itself was shaped like a lightning striking through the stone or resembled something that would imply seismic activity even if no such thing is known to occur in these part. But its energetic radiance was undeniable to me. Often when I passed it, a rush of electricity flooded my thoughts and I would wonder – what microcosm, what kind of infinitesimal life, would rest inside there? It felt as if that crack could contain a whole reality of its own, different from mine, highly sensitive and yet perfectly encapsulated by the stupor of our mundane wanderings.

Listening to Unterhaltungen mit Larven und Überresten (trans: Conversations With Larvae and Fossil Remains) brought back the memories of that wall, that energy, that phantasmal presence of something beyond physical perception. In a way, this record feels like a live transmission from the inside of that crack – or better, every crack, every narrow gap and interstice gouging the thinlayers of a reality we all seem to share.

Notorious for dwelling in these in-between spaces, Christian Schoppik's Läuten Der Seele project has long since stirred the anima within the hidden reverse of quotidian objects by looping
and re-contextualising obscure and disparate sample sources. With the addition of Jota Solo,
these often oneiric and impressionistic collages and story paintings now open up to a more expressive and direct colour scheme, quite literally as if Schoppik's sonic phantasmagorias have
been ultimately given a real human voice to speak their mysteries. But whose voice is that?

10/10/2025

🧽 new additions to the shoppp + pre-orders

Dean Blunt & Elias Rønnenfelt - Lucre LP (World Music)
Blod - Den Oändliga Historien LP (Discreet)
Oiro Pena - Béke LP (Ultraääni)
Läuten Der Seele - Unterhaltungen mit Larven und Überresten LP (World Of Echo)
Suzanne Vega, Ictus, Collegium Vocale Gent - Einstein on the Beach 3xLP / 2xCD (Vlek)

20/09/2025

Soundohm is running an Aguirre super sale until Monday with big discounts on select titles 👀👀

02/07/2025

Lost Coast: Some Visionary Music from California, 1980–1992 LP (House Rules, 2025, Aguirre)

Lost Coast: Some Visionary Music from California (1980-1992) assembles little-known sounds from California’s metaphysical underground. Each recording is stylistically different—dream pop, guitar soli, fourth world, avant-electronic—but they are held together by a regional ethos of the “visionary.” This is music that sees through the mind’s eye and conjures new worlds.

Some people say that California is where “the nuts stop rolling”—where those too eccentric to fit in elsewhere often find themselves. What was meant pejoratively is easily reclaimed as a celebration of the free-thinking and the freely-freaking. Until the turn of the millennium, all manner of seekers rolled westward until they hit the pacific. Stationed along this edge, music was a way to roll still further, imagining territories unencountered and wavelengths as yet unheard.

Lost Coast is a commemoration of the people who made these journeys and a resurrection of recordings they made little effort to broadcast. While some pieces were originally released with modest distribution, others were only shared among friends or never shared at all. All tracks were found on cassettes in flea markets, barn sales, rural thrift stores, and even stranger places—outside a gem and mineral shop, for example, and on the ranch of a retired mescaline dealer.

Regardless of their obscurity, these recordings are eminently listenable. California, after all, is a place where the strange and the pleasurable are frequent bedfellows.

01/07/2025

CD3 - Rules For Living lp (2025, Aguirre)

Edition of 300, comes with postcard. Limited edition of 20 T-shirts available. Cerulean blue print on cream 190 GSM shirt.

Super seductive lo-fi goo from Altered States Tapes’ Cooper Bowman (Troth, Th Blisks), in duo with David Roeder, joined by a host of far flung pals - Jon Collin, Yuta Matsumura, Amelia Besseny (Troth), Sofie Herner (Enhet För Fri Musik) and Sarah Pickles - on their hypnagogic sojourns for Aguirre.

Listening to CD3, I'm reminded of how the Vincent Over The Sink record '22 Coloured Bull Terriers' made me feel all those years ago. There's a free ranging quality to it. It feels calmly capable of doing whatever it wants. It feels mysterious and self-generating, almost aloof to the humans who made it. I adored that record; it cascaded into so many epiphanies.

I don't want to implicate Cooper and David's music in any fleeting desire towards currency, but listening to this CD3 record over the last few weeks has felt weirdly, thematically correct. There's an echo-ey kind of referentiality to it. Not to particular styles of music, but to the recently elapsed histories those styles of music evoke.
It's something that Th Blisks kind of gestures towards, but which this project seems to own entirely.

It's a kind of melted reconfiguration of popular (occasionally popular-on-the-fringes) styles. These familiar sounds are reconfigured and muddied. Hindsight frames the sources in an almost primordial light, to the extent that they feel like folk art.

Glyphted and Franzbranntwein sound like pop songs stripped to their bones and distorted, as if the styles they vaguely recall are as old as time. It's a stunningly weird effect. Songs like The Duchess and Farmhand exacerbate this impression. The record comes to feel yearningly ahistorical. But in a way that feels pertinent?

It might just be where my head is at, but the implacable nature of the record feels important to me, somehow. It's something far, far north of post-modern but... ancient too.

- Shaun Prescott

18/06/2025

Jean-Marie Mercimek - Dans Le Camion De Marguerite Duras lp (2025, Aguirre)

Off-kilter indie-pop compositions from Marseillaise duo Jean-Marie Mercimek. Edition of 300, comes with large poster.

"The road is a wrinkled timeline. Uncanny flatness conceals unfolding textures, transparent layers and open tabs. The truck cuts the landscape, tracing the road with a line of mad logic that composites time, space, thought. On “Le Camion de Marguerite Duras,” French duo Jean-Marie Mercimek have returned with a road movie for the blind. Composed and recorded by Marion Molle and Ronan Riou over six years across France and Belgium, this unlikely distillation of microtonal MIDI composition, French B.O., and post-punk chansons brazenly expands the duos’ penchant for lowkey narrative spectacle.

Across “Le Camion,” sounds form a theatrical screen. Our ears are the curtains drawn wide and listening with a look that pans across the shot. No title cards, they cut straight to action. The truck is a camera, zooming and framing the tracks as scenes. Songwriting and sound design blur in a tangle of delicate economy. The balance of mutant music-boxes and dewy miniatures recalls otherworldly hits from Gareth Williams’ Flaming Tunes, Residents, and catchier corners of the Lovely Music catalog. Strange, sure, but this flick is never quite a cartoon. Molle and Riou’s vocals dilate into a cast of very human characters. Voices sing borrowed texts like untrained actors (playing themselves, in fact) stepping into the frame once before disappearing forever. And when they’re gone, you miss them. But here in the truck, it all comes back again under the cyclic spell of repose in perpetual motion. Turn up the radio and appuyez sur le champignon.

- Turner Williams Jr.