April 24, 2026:
An interesting and busy week as we presented the latest edition of our Hooked on Sonics experimental sound series here in Wilmington, NC. This month, we assembled the Wilmington Sound Orchestra to interpret David Tudor's Rainforest, bringing together a collective of seven performers to immerse listeners in a wild lighting and fog environment by DJ Strafnatz, with environmental decorations from Sebastian Zampino.
That kept us active in the first half of the week, while in parallel we cataloged a strong set of albums, completing the latest round of Tzadik releases with the excellent and heart-rending album from Vadim Neselovskyi, Perseverantia, reflecting on the war in Ukraine. We also added Paul Dunmall's latest quartet release, balancing collective improv with composed work, including John Coltrane's "Spiritual," as a meditation on the plight of women in Afghanistan. Both albums stand as timely and important statements on the conflicted and unjust state of the world.
To balance those records, we added the most recent Harriet Tubman album, featuring the trio of guitarist Brandon Ross, bassist Melvin Gibbs, and drummer JT Lewis, joined here by vocalist Georgia Anne Muldrow. After 25 years, the trio demonstrates nearly telepathic communication as they explore jazz, funk, psychedelia, and soul, tracing paths that lead back to the AACM and the Art Ensemble. Their music is a heady brew, elevated and ignited by Muldrow's commanding vocal presence. It's an album of the year contender and a great addition to our catalog.
Coming up, the new AMM album on Matchless, restocks and new releases on Out of Your Head, new Confront titles, Balance Point Acoustics, Utech's latest Mats Gustafsson LP, Intakt, Ingebrigt Haker-Flaten's latest Sonic Transmissions, Jerome Noetinger's latest on UNREC, new Thingamajigs from the Hat Hut legacy, and 8 new titles on Listen! Foundation.
 Dunmall, Paul Quartet: Afghan Women (RogueArt)
A powerful free improv statement from saxophonist Paul Dunmall and his quartet with Sophia Domancich, James Owston, and Miles Levin, blending composed themes — including a rendition of "Spiritual" by John Coltrane — with collective improvisation, as the ensemble's masterful interplay unfolds with fluid cohesion, balancing explosive energy and introspective nuance in a deeply expressive album.
 Neselovskyi, Vadim: Perseverantia (Tzadik)
A powerful chamber work from Ukrainian pianist and composer Vadim Neselovskyi, this release blends classical composition and improvisation, as piano and string trio merge structured writing with spontaneous expression, aligning his lyrical, introspective voice with modular, improvisation-driven aesthetics shaped by the tensions and resilience of his homeland.
Jaap Blonk's Improvisers:
Jaap Blonk continues his Improvisers series with two new albums that we picked up this week. The first is with trumpeter and sonic experimenter Birgit Ulher, the second with microscopic sound explorer Ricardo Arias.
Blonk's Improvisers series has, over the years, become a quietly essential document of contemporary free improv, built on a simple but fertile premise: one-on-one encounters between Blonk and a wide range of international improvisers. Rather than treating these as casual meetings, the series captures focused dialogues where voice meets instrument in highly responsive, often unpredictable ways. Blonk's extended vocal techniques — spanning guttural textures, percussive phonetics, and elastic bursts of sound — act as both catalyst and counterpoint, drawing out equally inventive responses from his collaborators. Each release stands as its own microcosm, shaped by the distinct language and sensibility of the guest artist.
Over time, the series has developed into a kind of evolving archive of global improvisation, mapping connections across scenes while maintaining an intimate, conversational scale. Whether engaging with the breathy, fragmented trumpet work of Ulher or the hyper-detailed, near-silent explorations of Arias, Blonk adapts without losing his identity, creating spaces where sound is examined at its limits. The result is a body of work that is at once consistent in concept and endlessly varied in execution, offering listeners a deep and ongoing study in the art of spontaneous musical communication.
 Ulher, Birgit / Jaap Blonk: Breezes (Kontrans)
Birgit Ulher and Jaap Blonk engage in an eccentric duo of trumpet, radio, electronics, and voice, where drifting textures, interference, and extended techniques shape a spacious, volatile improvisation balancing delicate detail with sudden, fractured gestures, recorded at the artist-run collective, gallery, and cultural venue Westwerk in Hamburg, Germany.
 Arias, Ricardo / Jaap Blonk: Lucht (Kontrans)
A duo of breath and air, recorded in Bogotá in 2025, Colombian sound artist Ricardo Arias and vocalist Jaap Blonk explore microscopic improvisations using balloons, fragments, and extended voice, where fragile textures, elastic tones, and near-silence merge human and object into a tactile, minimal, subtly uncanny, and occasionally absurdist sonic dialogue.
 Stadhouders, Jasper / Jaap Blonk: JaJaa! - Improvisers (Kontrans)
A fierce live collision of Jaap Blonk's phonetic vocal and electronic inventions and Jasper Stadhouders' raw guitar improvisation, forging a surreal language of sputtered syllables, scraped strings, and disruptive humor, where meaning dissolves into texture and every gesture feels simultaneously unhinged and meticulously alive.
 Blonk, Jaap / Damon Smith / Michael Zerang: Improvisers (Kontrans)
The first meeting as a trio between Jaap Blonk on voice, Damon Smith on bass, and Michael Zerang on percussion, captured live in Chicago and continuing the Kontrans Improvisors series, bringing together three longstanding collaborators in new formation for an inventive and uncompromising set of free improvisation that highlights their commanding spontaneity and creative rapport.
 Wassermann, Ute / Jaap Blonk / Michael Vorfeld : Improvisors (Kontrans)
Blending two of the most unconventional voices on the planet--Ute Wasswerman and Jaap Blonk--with percussionist Michael Vorfeld, also on string instrument, light bulbs and electronic devices, Wasserman adding voice, whistles, kutu wapa, frog buzzer, and mirliton, and Blonk adding electronics; wonderfully eccentric while impressively informed and masterfully executed.
Squidco Publishing Roundup:
You can view our latest fully cataloged albums in the Recently Section.
You can also browse new titles as they enter our Just In Stock Section — meaning we physically have the album and can ship it, though we may still be updating additional information about the release.
To see restocks of previously listed titles, visit our Recently Restocked page.
And if you're interested in a future release, you can ask us to notify you by email via our Upcoming Releases page — no obligation necessary.
April 17, 2026:
Happy Record Store Day Weekend! It seems that Record Store Day has changed considerably over the years, with most new releases now leaning toward the commercial spectrum rather than the more outside music that we carry. That doesn't make us want to celebrate any less. We carry a strong selection of vinyl releases in our catalog — 446 titles in stock as I write this.
For our customers, vinyl doesn't sell as many copies as compact discs, but we still see a steady number of LPs pass through our doors. Our fulfillment service with 577 Records accounts for the largest share of those sales, as the label consistently releases exceptional music in the format, on both black and colored vinyl. That's followed by our own sales of Otoroku LPs, NoBusiness, Clean Feed/Shhpuma, Firehouse 12 Records, The Thing, Corbett vs. Dempsey, NI-VU-NI-CONNU, and RogueArt.
We often reflect on the press surrounding the "vinyl comeback." When I started Squidco 21 years ago, many collectors were still abandoning vinyl, and our initial focus was exclusively on compact discs. I added vinyl to the catalog in our second year, as some releases were only available in that format, but for years our vinyl selection remained much smaller than our CD catalog. Over time, both have grown along parallel paths, expanding even as overall pressing sizes have become smaller. That lends each release a certain uniqueness, regardless of format, though vinyl collectors often have a particularly strong sentimental attachment to it.
It's fair to say that collectors now embrace whatever format best carries the music they value. We now offer cassettes and downloads as well, and our own Squidco Note Records is primarily digital, with facsimile cards and download codes for selected releases. The music is still primary to the format, and that diversity keeps collecting as engaging as ever.
The Ghost of Barry Chabala & Clara Byom:
Our exciting news this week is the release of our fifth digital album: Bella's Ghost, an excellent acoustic improv duo from Barry Chabala & Clara Byom, recorded in the studio across six live improvisations and one composed piece. Squid's Ear writer Nick Ostrum contributed liner notes for the release following interviews with both artists, from which I excerpt here:
Bella's Ghost is also a beautiful expression of a unique, and I would argue locally rooted, style of experimental music. Fittingly recorded in the Southwest, where Chabala and Byom have been playing extensively over the last few years, it leans into partial folk melodies and gusty tonal accretions. It sounds very much both in the moment and in situ. It is not as if this music could not have been realized elsewhere, but it was not, and for that one must give some credit to its removal from the beaten tracks of the urban hotbeds of the avant-garde.
 Chabala, Barry / Clara Byom: Bella's Ghost (Squid Note Records)
Blending acoustic guitars, clarinets, accordion, voice and found objects, Barry Chabala and Clara Byom craft a deeply intuitive duo session that moves between unedited studio improvs and expanded "extractions," weaving folk-inflected fragments, graphic score realizations and haunting textures into a raw yet lyrical free improv language shaped by trust, contrast and evolving interplay.
If the music speaks to you, we encourage you to spend some time with it and consider supporting both the artists and the label as we continue to build this series of releases. Each purchase helps sustain the work behind the scenes and makes it possible for us to keep bringing this kind of music forward.
It was a strong week for new releases, led by a number of John Zorn titles on Tzadik Records, featuring his compositions performed by various configurations. We finished cataloging the new Gnostic Trio album Sing Me Now Asleep, a welcome return after a few years' break, along with the next two Bagatelle volumes. We completed Brian Marsella's extraordinary solo piano interpretations of Zorn's work in Bagatelle Volume 7 — I'll have more to say about Volume 8 next week, along with the superb new album from Vadim Neselovskyi, Perseverantia.
For my ears, the standout release of the week is on vinyl: Re-Ghoster Extended on the Konnekt label, presenting a live concert of wild yet sophisticated electroacoustic improvisation with a no-holds-barred approach to expressive interaction. I'd also point listeners to the new Suspensão album on Creative Sources, here expanded to an octet with an exceptional group of collaborators, including Hernâni Faustino, Flak, André Hencleeday, Monsieur Trinité, and Tiago Varela, alongside Creative Sources stalwarts Ernesto Rodrigues, Nuno Torres, and Carlos Santos. These two albums sit at opposite ends of the activity spectrum while sharing a similarly masterful level of detail and seemingly telepathic interaction.
I'd also point listeners to Hannah Marshall's exceptional solo cello album on Relative Pitch, Grazing. I've been an enthusiast of her work for decades, but hadn't spent much time exploring her history in depth. This week I read an excellent interview with her from the British Music Collection, which I highly recommend-both for its insight into the breadth of her artistic development and for the inspiration she offers as an improviser.
 Re-Ghoster Extended: Dreaming With The Lights On [VINYL] (Konnekt)
Recorded live at the Archipel Festival, this quintet of Nicolas Field, Thomas Florin, Jerome Noetinger, Fritz Welch, and Nate Wooley delivers an intense electroacoustic performance where composed frameworks erupt into explosive, immersive interactions, as voice, trumpet, piano, percussion, and electronics collide in dense, mutating textures that are disorienting, consuming, often volatile, yet consistently exhilarating.
 Zorn, John / Brian Marsella: The Bagatelles Vol. 7 (Tzadik)
Performing thirteen selections from John Zorn's 2015 Bagatelles collection, pianist Brian Marsella delivers a dynamic solo recital that navigates angular, atonal forms and moments of striking lyricism, blending classical precision with jazz spontaneity to create an intimate, virtuosic, and emotionally resonant interpretation of Zorn's expansive compositional language.
 Zorn, John / The Gnostic Trio (w/ Frisell / Wollesen / Emanuel): Sing Me Now Asleep (Tzadik)
Reuniting Bill Frisell, Kenny Wollesen, and Carol Emanuel as The Gnostic Trio, John Zorn presents a refined set of compositions that blend chamber minimalism, early music influences, and ambient textures, where delicate interplay, spacious forms, and a touch of electronics from Ikue Mori yield a serene, introspective, and subtly cinematic exploration of tone and atmosphere.
 Marshall, Hannah: Grazing (Relative Pitch)
Presenting two extended solo performances recorded at Cafe Oto, cellist Hannah Marshall draws on classical training, theatre, and jazz to shape a deeply immersive free improv work, where patient explorations of tone evolve into tense constellations of harmonics and release through propulsive bowing, balancing immediacy, physicality, and a thoughtfully unfolding sonic narrative.
Squidco Publishing Roundup:
You can view our latest fully cataloged albums in the Recently Section.
You can also browse new titles as they enter our Just In Stock Section — meaning we physically have the album and can ship it, though we may still be updating additional information about the release.
To see restocks of previously listed titles, visit our Recently Restocked page.
And if you're interested in a future release, you can ask us to notify you by email via our Upcoming Releases page — no obligation necessary.
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Jane in Ether (Klein Mayas / Voutchkova):
Ray Anderson / Joe Hertenstein Quartet feat. Michael Moore & Michael Formanek:
Ivo Perelman / Nate Wooley:
Mike Westbrook:
Martin Escalante / Charlie Mumma / Tete Leguia:
Jerome Deupree / Sylvie Courvoisier / Lester St. Louis / Joe Morris:
Eldritch Priest:
Believe (Farrar / Manojlovic / Thomas / Pike):
Uneven Eleven (Segers / Hawyard / Kawabata):
Harriet Tubman (Ross / Gibbs / Lewis) & Georgia Anne Muldrow: Electrical Field of Love (Pi Recordings)
Hubsch, Carl Ludwig / Claus Van Bebber / Jaap Blonk: Improvisors (Kontrans)
Suspensao: Something Ancient Listens Within Us. The Light Has Forgotten Its Name But Will Remain. (Creative Sources)
