Back catalogue: All genres

Review: This is a very special and exclusive new version of what is a sonnet cold classic album from the annals of jazz history. Few albums hold the prestige of Getz/Gilberto which was released in 1964 and is a special collaboration between saxophonist Stan Getz, guitarist Joao Gilberto, and composer Antonio Carlos Jobim which very much represents a pinnacle moment in the fusion of jazz and bossa nova. Across its ten tracks, the album weaves a mesmerisng tapestry of melody and rhythm, casting a spell that continues to captivate listeners over half a century later. At the heart lies the symbiotic relationship between two musical giants: Stan Getz, the virtuosic tenor saxophonist renowned for his velvety tone and lyrical phrasing and Joao Gilberto, the Brazilian guitarist and vocalist whose soft, intimate delivery epitomizes the essence of bossa nova.

Notes: Amidst the turmoil of the times, such as the spread of coronavirus and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Gezan searched for ways to interact with people and pursued new music with the theme of "voice", at a live concert at the Hibiya Open Air Concert Hall. The performance of the new system "Million Wish Collective" was unveiled for the first time, and Hibiya was shaken with shock and joy. Directed by Shuichi Bamba, the vivid camerawork with 13 cameras with different textures captures the complexity of this world and approaches the true meaning of what a rock band is. Tickets for this performance, which was greeted with the largest capacity in their career, were sold out quickly at full capacity. The package is a special jacket with a bright red photo of Taro Mizutani stamped with gold foil wrapped in a special jacket called the December Newspaper, and the newspaper consists of the members' columns and illustrations. It is a work full of imagination that presents hope after regaining human wildness and flesh in a distorted era.

Region code: 0 (universal)

Notes: DVD + CD. Nightclubbing: The Birth of Punk Rock in NYC is the first-ever documentary about the renowned New York City nightclub Max's Kansas City (1965 - 1981), which had an indelible impact on the world of music, fashion, art, culture, and the creation of the New York City punk rock scene. As legendary Alice Cooper puts it: 'A million ideas we're launched back there,' referring to the Max's Kansas City famous backroom, where everybody gravitated toward the pop art genius Andy Warhol, who held court there. This first-ever film on Max's Kansas City features never-before-released footage, including footage of three of Warhol's superstars -- Jayne County, Ruby Lynn Reyner, and Penny Arcade. DVD bonus features include the seven-minute feature titled 'Survivors' Guide to 70s NYC w/ Neon Leon and Sonny Vincent,' trailer and Spanish subtitles. This deluxe version also includes an additional 50 minutes of deleted scenes, a soundtrack CD, poster and special slipcover.

Region code: 0 (universal)

Notes: The story is about Taina, a nine-year-old, Afro Boricua basketball novice growing up in Brooklyn during a pandemic who learns valuable life lessons from family, friends, and the community, both on and off the court. The narrative seamlessly weaves social-emotional learning with math, arts, social justice, identity, culture, and sports education, all in a fun (and at times goofy) manner!

-Written by Bobbito Garcia and illustrated by Estafania Rivera Cortes.
-58 large full colour printed pages (8.5" x 11"). Hardcover w/matte finish.
-Age range: 7+ and beyond.
-A helpful tool for social-emotional learning as well as math, social justice, identity, culture, and sports education.
-For any store that buys the book, Bobbito Garcia offers to do a personalized video drop to post on their socials and he'd repost it in his stories on IG. He would also add the store to the website of where people can go to buy the book locally (aimhighlittlegiant.com).

-"A brilliant, beautiful and spiritual basketball revelation disguised as a children's book."-Scoop Jackson, author of The Game Is Not A Game
-"A unique reframing of basketball delivered through New York City's diversity, geometry and spirituality."-Max Resetar, editor of SLAM MAGAZINE
-"Yet another achievement for the brilliant Bobbito Garcia who inspires the youth to championship heights! There is a giant in all of us."-Dan Klores, director of Basketball: A Love Story

"Bobbito Garcia's street-smart text and Estafania Rivera Cortes' starburst illustrations make for a buoyant, fun, and thoroughly modern experience. Call 'I got next' on AIM HIGH!" -Alexander Wolff, author of Big Game, Small World: A Basketball Adventure

"I've been documenting hip hop, sneaker, and basketball history in books, films, and magazines since the '80s, so imagine the thrill for me to finally write fiction, and especially for kids! The experience was liberating and allowed me to flex my experiences as a parent, which I haven't shared much of at all publicly. I truly hope the multiple communities I exist in have the opportunity to see themselves in the words and illustrations" -Bobbito Garcia

Brilliantly illustrated by Estefania Rivera Cortes, an artist based in San Juan, Puerto Rico with a compassion for social causes, Aim High, Little Giant, Aim High! is an unprecedented presentation of NYC's unique outdoor basketball culture, created for children of any background to enjoy. The book is published by We Are Little Giants, an independently Black and Puerto Rican owned business.

Notes: The book project "M_Dokumente" focuses on the explicitly female perspective of the all-female bands Mania D., Malaria! and Matador on the West Berlin music and art scene from the late 1970s on.

The three bands around Bartel, Koster and Gut played concerts, released records and toured around the world in different formations from 1979 on. What stood out and was new was the self-determined appearance of the musicians, which was reflected in their music and lyrics as well as in their unique style and the genre-crossing approach of "more art in the music, more music in the art". To this day, the three M_Bands are considered visionary, they shaped a new image of women in pop culture and are pioneers and role models for important and necessary emancipatory movements in the music industry.

With oral history documentary by and with Beate Bartel, Gudrun Gut and Bettina Koster as well as contributions by Nick Cave, Diedrich Diederichsen, Christine Hahn, Peter Bommels, Mark Reeder, Scumeck Sabottka, and Annett Scheffel.

In German and English.

Notes: "With his gratifying archive, Matt Goody details one of the most successful eras in the history of rock music - Flying Nun Records, formed in 1981 by Roger Shepherd in a Christchurch record shop. Shepherd and his brilliant cohorts served up the legendary output of not only kingpins like The Clean, The Chills and Tall Dwarfs, but also captured the best from favourites of mine like Able Tasmans, Bird Nest Roys, Look Blue Go Purple and The Verlaines. Goody provides the most comprehensive presentation yet of Flying Nun's rise from Shepherd's notepad to international underground rock sovereignty - and a vital part of one nation's collective art history." - Bob Nastanovich, Pavement

In this remarkable tale of creativity and chaos, do-it-yourself innovation and extraordinary attempts at world domination, Needles and Plastic tells the inside story of one of New Zealand - and the world's - great independent music labels. Hundreds of full color & black and white photos illustrate the story! Founded in 1981 by Roger Shepherd in Christchurch, New Zealand, Flying Nun Records unleashed an extraordinary wave of music that had an impact around the world. Needles and Plastic is the first comprehensive history of the early years of the label and its bands covering the critical period from 1981-1988 when many of the most influential and critically acclaimed artists emerged on Flying Nun, bands like - from The Clean, The Chills, The Verlaines, Straitjacket Fits and Bailter Space. The influence of the obscure label became apparent in the 1990s, when big-time indie acts like Pavement, Cat Power or Yo La Tengo started covering Flying Nun bands.

In entries on over 140 records from The Clean's 'Tally Ho!' 7" in 1981 to The Verlaines Bird-Dog LP in 1988, Matthew Goody tells the story through the records themselves. His book draws on years of in-depth research to reveal the stories of the bands, the recordings, the songs, and the audience, with a host of significant characters contributing along the way - Shepherd, Chris Knox, Doug Hood, Hamish Kilgour and many more. In this remarkable tale of creativity and chaos, do-it-yourself innovation and extraordinary attempts at world domination, Needles and Plastic tells the inside story of one the world's great independent music labels.

Notes: Formed in Wiltshire, England, in 1980, the Subhumans are rightly held in high regard as one of the best punk rock bands to ever hail from the UK.

Over the course of five timeless studio albums and just as many classic EPs, not to mention well over 1,000 gigs around the world, they have blended serious anarcho punk with a demented sense of humour and genuinely memorable tunes to create something quite unique and utterly compelling. For the first time ever, their whole story is told, straight from the recollections of every band member past and present, as well as a dizzying array of their closest friends and peers, with not a single stone left unturned. Bolstered with hundreds of flyers and exclusive photos, it's the definitive account of the much-loved band.

Praise

"It's all here: the genesis of the band, the practising, the song-writing, the recordings, the gigs, the original split and the reformation ... in fact everything you could possibly want to know about this very special band."
Tony Whatley of Suspect Device

"Ian Glasper captures the emotion and excitement surrounding one of the most enduring punk bands on the planet. With an extensiveisome might say forensicinarrative, this book really gets under the skin of a perennial favourite who have rarely put a foot wrong."
Nathan Haywire, Louder Than War

"Subhumans have integrity in spades, and you can't buy that. They were important then and are important now."
Sean Forbes of Wat Tyler and Hard Skin

"Subhumans are special both on and off stage. It's the passion that's evident onstage, with those beautifully constructed lyrics spat out with every breathiand that charged energy they generate, that sweeps through the crowd and leaves us feeling changed."
Ruth Elias of Hagar The Womb

"They're one of my favourite bands in the world, but a band is only as good as the people in it ... and the Subhumans are the real deal."
Stu Pid of Police Bastard

"Their songs seem to exist out of time, somehow always relevant. And they've stuck to their gunsithere's this stubborn defiance in the face of fashion, and a glorious, unaffected honesty."
iWinston Smith

"They are the ultimate punk band, with the most genuine, inclusive, informative, approachable attitude, and such amazing music ... tight and edgy as fuck, and so professionalia joy to watch."
Peter Jones of Paranoid Visions

About the Author

Ian Glasper has been writing about punk since 1986, when he first started his own fanzine, Little Things Please Little Minds. Then in the early Nineties he started writing reviews for Record Collector, and a hardcore punk column for Terrorizer, the extreme music magazine that he contributed to for the next twenty years. He is the author of six other books including Burning Britain and The Day the Country Died. A father of two, and a lifelong vegetarian/vegan, he writes for Down for Life and Fistful of Metal, as well as regularly penning liner notes for retrospective punk and metal releases. He is tentatively working on the next book in his ongoing overview of the UK punk scene.

Notes: Michael Gira - The Knot: Complete Words for Music, Collected Stories and Journals

Hardcover 7 1/4 x 10 1/4 inches, 408 pages, includes 101 colour images printed on high quality photographic paper.

Journals, stories, and songs span the years 1981 to present. Includes visual archives and artwork dating back to 1974.

Hardcover Collector's edition of 3000 numbered copies, signed by M. Gira

"From the Preface to The Knot: This book contains the words to every song I've written worth collecting to date from all my musical projects throughout the years. I've left out various imbecilities and feckless half-starts. Also included in this book are several previously published short stories. They're taken from the collections The Consumer and The Egg, as well as a few other hand- made limited editions of stories. In a few cases I've included excerpts rather than the entire story. This was done for aesthetic purposes, with the overall feel of this current volume in mind. There are a great many journal entries in this book. For the most part they are also, emphatically fiction. They're from an ongoing journal, not a diary. My journals are where I often allow a disembodied, fictional 1st person narrator to take over and unspool imagined events, diatribes, impossible scenarios, psychic auto-cannibalisms, and corrosive or ecstatic dreams etc. Again, these are fiction. Certain things I've written about (in fiction and in song form) seem to exist beneath the surface (in myself and others) and I find them compelling to look at and to describe. I view this as a positive act. In acknowledgment of the constricting and microscopically judgmental and censorious times we live in, the usual authorial caveats apply here. Certainly there are many purely anecdotal journal entries included in this book as well, and my presumption is that an intelligent reader would be able to differentiate one from the other. Personally, I'm very suspicious of memory (especially my own), so I can't definitively vouch for the veracity of the recounting of the literal events herein either. I have also excised material that I felt too personal to include, out of respect for the people involved as well as for myself. There are several large gaps in the journal entries over the years. This is due to lost journals of the time, and in one case a lost laptop (which, painfully, contained a great deal of writing). There are also periods where I didn't keep a journal and didn't write fiction. In any event, I've tried to include fiction and journal entries that correspond roughly to the period before and after a musical album's release and the words that were written for that music. The end section of this book consists of recently unearthed visual documents and imagery and functions here as an incidental archive. The images span the years from 1974 to the present."

Michael Gira

Notes: Michael Gira - The Knot: Complete Words for Music, Collected Stories and Journals

Paperback; 7 1/4 x 10 1/4 inches, 408 pages, includes 101 colour images printed on high quality photographic paper.

Paperback has bookplate signed by M Gira.

Journals, stories, and songs span the years 1981 to present. Includes visual archives and artwork dating back to 1974.

"From the Preface to The Knot: This book contains the words to every song I've written worth collecting to date from all my musical projects throughout the years. I've left out various imbecilities and feckless half-starts. Also included in this book are several previously published short stories. They're taken from the collections The Consumer and The Egg, as well as a few other hand- made limited editions of stories. In a few cases I've included excerpts rather than the entire story. This was done for aesthetic purposes, with the overall feel of this current volume in mind. There are a great many journal entries in this book. For the most part they are also, emphatically fiction. They're from an ongoing journal, not a diary. My journals are where I often allow a disembodied, fictional 1st person narrator to take over and unspool imagined events, diatribes, impossible scenarios, psychic auto-cannibalisms, and corrosive or ecstatic dreams etc. Again, these are fiction. Certain things I've written about (in fiction and in song form) seem to exist beneath the surface (in myself and others) and I find them compelling to look at and to describe. I view this as a positive act. In acknowledgment of the constricting and microscopically judgmental and censorious times we live in, the usual authorial caveats apply here. Certainly there are many purely anecdotal journal entries included in this book as well, and my presumption is that an intelligent reader would be able to differentiate one from the other. Personally, I'm very suspicious of memory (especially my own), so I can't definitively vouch for the veracity of the recounting of the literal events herein either. I have also excised material that I felt too personal to include, out of respect for the people involved as well as for myself. There are several large gaps in the journal entries over the years. This is due to lost journals of the time, and in one case a lost laptop (which, painfully, contained a great deal of writing). There are also periods where I didn't keep a journal and didn't write fiction. In any event, I've tried to include fiction and journal entries that correspond roughly to the period before and after a musical album's release and the words that were written for that music. The end section of this book consists of recently unearthed visual documents and imagery and functions here as an incidental archive. The images span the years from 1974 to the present."

Michael Gira