Table of the Elements

Table of the Elements is a curatorial network and interdisciplinary platform, live-event presenter, and fine-arts publisher of print, audio, and film, lauded by Pitchfork Media as ‘a national treasure.’ Since its origin as a record label in 1993, TotE has been dedicated to preserving, promoting, and promulgating works by international creators of radical innovation. The organization’s 170-plus releases — along with influential intermedia festivals — comprise a vital contemporary chronicle, a survey of meaningful eruptions across a broad horizon of sound, word, and vision. Each unique project demonstrates how a publishing concern might romp wild, unbridled from the carousel of convention.

PROJECTS BY FORMAT 

PHONO LPS • FILMS / BLU-RAY • BOOKS • HYBRIDS • LIVE PROJECTS • PODCASTS • PREPRODUCTION

Everloving
WFMU Sessions

“By unifying seemingly opposite forces — the Highlonesome keening of Appalachia, the austere thrum of Hindustani classicism — Henry Flynt piloted an escape velocity from the bounds of modernity.”

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Matthew Welch
The Upside Down World (for Glenn Branca)

“...and so from vaults comes this dedication already to him, aged like a fine Scotch whisky, now a wailing requiem to his idiom. Rock in Protest, GB.”

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Matthew Welch
The Library of Babel

“...sprawls to a shuddering, heaving climax of near-ultrasonic highs and infrasonic lows, registering awe in the Ur-language of sound.”

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Gabrels • Kane • Parker Wells
Gabrels • Kane • Parker Wells

“Odysseys endure, and Gabrels, Kane, Parker Wells would have sizzled across the raucous ‘70s spaceways of afro-futurismo Miles Davis, the post-prog ‘80s jetstream of the Adrian Belew-led King Crimson, or any other ionospheric era craclking with volatile, electric potency.”

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Water Damage
Repair

“Water Damage roar and rage against the troubles of our own time, their volume and power making you forget for at least 20 minutes at a clip.”
— Grayson Haver Currin, Pitchfork

Rhys Chatham
& His Guitar Trio All-Stars
”GUITAR TRIO IS MY LIFE!”

“So, take a listen, and hear what one man can do with hundreds of guitars, thirty years, one chord, and a skyscraper of amps set to Liquefy.”

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David Grubbs
Banana Cabbage, Potato Lettuce, Onion Orange

“...deliberate and thoughtful excursions, charted with mindful, patient authority and executed in a spirit of comradely challenge.”

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John Cale, Tony Conrad, Angus MacLise, La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela
INSIDE THE DREAM SYNDICATE VOL. I: Day of Niagara (1965)

“The great missing link between classical and popular music—and Eastern and Western music—of the late 20th century. A monumental achievement."

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Rhys Chatham
A Crimson Grail (for 400 Electric Guitars)

“...a snapshot of eternity, an echo of a moment a thousand years gone, and a thousand years to come.”

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Zeena Parkins
Nightmare Alley

“...a parallel world of sensations that is disorienting, surreal, strangely pleasurable, and more than a little dangerous.”

Tyler Hubby
Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present

“Joyous, exhilarating, and transformative, Tyler Hubby’s documentary is essential viewing for anyone involved in the history of music and visual art.”
— Amy Taubin, Artforum

Hal Rammel
Views Through a Kaleidophone

“Peering beyond Sir Wheatstone, Rammel flutters with the kaleidophone in improvised unison, capturing its fleeting dance of idiosyncratic brilliance in snapshots of timeless fascination and delight.”

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Patrick Nickleson
Protestations on the Dreamhouse Door

“In a bizarre plot twist, Day of Niagara became the hot-wax soundtrack to a caper flick, a derring-do gratification of retributive theft reversal, in which overdue justice is administered with righteous comeuppance.”

Dave Soldier + Johannes Kepler
Motet, Harmony of the World

“...Dave Soldier and Johannes Kepler flow together across a 500-year expanse of discord and concord, firmament and filament, enumerating the heavens in the song.”

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Jon Mueller + Tom Lecky
All Colors Present

“...an awe-inspiring display of elegant athleticism, preternatural focus, brute restraint, and ecstatic, monastic reverie.”

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Joseph Nechvatal
Selected Sound Works (1981–2021)

“...offers a vivid account of the evolving strategies that have defined experimental electronic music and sonic art across the millennium.”

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Joseph Nechvatal
The Marriage of Orlando and Artaud, even

“...an arch commentary on the perils of subjectivity, the intricate art of listening, the rewards of skillfully practiced patience, and the occasional guilty pleasure of diplomatic excess.”

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Charlemagne Palestine
CCCCOOOONNNNTTTTIIIINNNNUUUUIIIITTTTIIIIEEEESSSS

“Using wedged keys, massive sustain, and architectural resonance, Palestine transforms the pipe organ into a total environment where sound, space, and the listener fuse in an act at once durational and devotional.”

Art Kane, with Jonathan Kane, Reeves Gabrels
What the Pictures Sound Like:
Sonic Explorations of Art Kane Photographs

“In sprawling and decisive microseconds, Art Kane exposed moments of profundity and affixed them to sheets of eternity.”

Leif Inge
9 Beet Stretch

“ … unbelievably beautiful … a masterpiece of a masterpiece, and maybe the closest we can ever come to experiencing what the deaf Beethoven heard or experienced in his head. Science tells us time doesn’t exist, yet paradoxically, we remain its prisoners.”

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Anthony Moore
Jamjemjimjomjum

“...a burst of physical and intellectual rigor that challenges a listener with the implacable persistence of a hypnotist’s swinging timepiece.”

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Jennifer Walshe
Time, Time, Time

“She is a unifying force and has managed to create works… that bind the many strands of our cultural life together.”
—The Journal of Music

Jackie Higgins • Leif Inge
9 Beet Sentient

“Crucial in science writing, as in poetry, are clarity and apt analogy… Higgins modestly keeps herself in the background, yet she orchestrates every image and juxtaposition like a film director, adding up to a rousing vision of life.”
—Washington Post

Mary Jane Leach – TBD

“The music is continuous, yet it breathes very deeply … creating a multidimensional cathedral-like environment that surrounds the listener in swirling sound.”
—Musicworks

“Time, time, time. Life should be abundant enough for each person to feel what it is to have the greatest pleasure in wasting time. For my own part, I know that now, when music playback systems can put out hours and hours of sound at one flick of the button, it’s nothing unusual to think about playing a set for an hour. There was a time, though, when it really meant something to like playing your 78 RPM records on the 16 RPM setting — so they would run a half hour, and sound so… so… so… slow.”
— Tony Conrad, Early Minimalism Vol. 1, 1996

A Conduit for History Exploding in the Present Moment

TABLE OF THE ELEMENTS is a curatorial network and interdisciplinary platform, live-event presenter, and fine-arts publisher of print, audio, and film, lauded by Pitchfork Media as “a national treasure.” Since its origin as a record label in 1993, TotE has been dedicated to preserving, promoting, and promulgating works by international creators of radical innovation. The organizations’s 170-plus releases — along with influential intermedia festivals — comprise a vital contemporary chronicle, a survey of meaningful eruptions across a broad horizon of sound, word, and vision.  Each unique project demonstrates how a publishing concern might romp wild, unbridled from the carousel of convention.

•     •     •     •     •

"The supremacy of Table of the Elements as an unwavering outpost of ultra-experimental strains can be attributed to its concomitant adherence to valiance. Most of the Table of the Elements catalog has no broad commercial appeal, and many of its projects are risky ventures, even with respect to the experimental marketplace. Yet, this philosophy of risk works because everybody associated with the label feels like they're doing important work releasing important records, and they're willing to go for broke to make it happen.”
—Grayson Haver Currin, Pitchfork

“The hallmarks of this New Archivism are beautiful and innovative packaging, elaborate and idiosyncratic liner notes, rare and obscure recordings ... Working with graphic designers such as the Grammy-winning Susan Archie, Jeff Hunt produced a collection that combines varied textures, lavish finishes, and period details with art from the era of the original source recordings. Their treatment of Robert Longo’s late 1970s photographs for Rhys Chatham’s releases could, for instance, measure up to what’s on view at most contemporary art centers. In addition to its archival endeavor, TotE also releases the new work of its avant-garde heroes and their devotees. TotE’s active support of the work of sonic pioneers ensures that theirs are living traditions — not ossified museum objects.”
—Thomas Peake, Art Papers

Tony Conrad: Completely In the Present
A Film by Tyler Hubby

"Hubby's film captures Conrad in all his facets ... broadly as a man determined to make 'abstract art funny, happy, energetic, joyful.' Conrad lived long enough to see his early recordings, barely or never released, get the reissue and the attention they deserve. ... [Completely In the Present] is a sharp, sweet, eloquent documentary about the merriest, most artistically expansive minimalist on record. His work and his life asserted the importance of listening for the sounds nobody else has heard."
—Chicago Tribune

“Joyous, exhilarating, and transformative, Tyler Hubby’s documentary is essential viewing for anyone involved in the history of music and visual art.”
—Artforum

"Conrad was 100 percent badass. Without Tyler Hubby’s documentary and Table of the Elements ... one of the great stories of American music and art might have gone underappreciated.”
—Henry Rollins

“[John] Cale left the Dream Syndicate for the Velvet Underground; Conrad found a community in avant-garde film. But after Reed fired Cale from the VU and he was at loose ends, he and Conrad revived their string-drone collaborations. Some of these works can be found on the box set John Cale: New York in the 1960s, released in 2000 on Jeff Hunt’s Table of the Elements label. Hunt, who played a big part in Conrad’s return to music in the early 1990s, is one of the film’s most articulate expert witnesses to Conrad’s artistic achievements. … In 2000, Table of the Elements finally released digital remasters of three early-’60s Dream Syndicate recordings, which Hunt says appeared mysteriously in the mail one day, as well as the boxed set Tony Conrad: Early Minimalism, which includes one work that is actually “early,” Conrad’s divine Four Violins (1964), as well as other disks by Conrad, MacLise, and Jack Smith.”
Amy Taubin, Artforum

 

 

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All contents ©1992–2025 Table of the Elements ®2025 Table of the Elements. All Rights Reserved. Related media from the Table of the Elements Archive published courtesy the estate of Tony Conrad.

Since 1993, Table of the Elements has staked its claim on a massive enterprise. It intends nothing less than to rewrite the history of American music in the second half of the 20th century -- and beyond. The label’s 150-plus releases are a vital contemporary chronicle, a survey of meaningful eruptions across a broad horizon of improvised, experimental, minimal and outsider sounds.

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