pre-order, arriving late december / early jan Amazing duo perfromance by Hamid Drake and Piano, recorded at the Shenzhen Jazz Festival in China, during late Cotober of 2019, issued by the always amazing Shenzhen based imprint Old Heaven.  Hamid Drake - 鼓 Drums / 打击乐 Percussion / 框鼓 Frame Drum / 人声 Vocals Pat Thomas - 钢琴 Piano 录制于第九届 OCT-LOFT 国际爵士音乐节，深圳 B10 现场，2019 年 10 月 20 日 Recorded at the 9th OCT-LOFT Jazz Festival, B10 Live, Shenzhen, October 20th, 2019

Originally issued as a very small run of tapes on Glasgow's GLARC, this is the first time vinyl release of Still House Plants’ self-titled debut. Recorded and mixed to tape in one day at Green Door Studios with Emily and Stu, ‘Still House Plants’ documented the then quartet’s output at the start of summer 2016. The tape was the first release on the GLARC label which turns 10 years old this year.glarc.bandcamp.comMastered by John Hannon at No Recording Studio and cut to lacquer for the vinyl reissue by Loop-O. All songs written by Jess Hickie-Kallenbach, Finlay Clark, David Kennedy and Calum O'Connor. Artwork by Still House Plants.

Music in Continuous Motion, Bill Orcutt’s latest entry in his 21st-century repertoire of quartet guitar music, pointedly steps away from the cut-and-paste constructivism of Music for Four Guitars into a sonic stratum that's yearningly melodic, resolutely human, and built for performance. Conceived for a 2026 NYC concert, Music in Continuous Motion shares the concision of its predecessor -- but rather than the discrete, mechanistic precision of Music for Four Guitars, the tracks on Music in Continuous Motion unify — each song weaving four gleaming threads into the warp and weft of an evolving, complex texture that employs simple, repeating motifs to build new melodies from counterpoint itself. It accomplishes this in the most efficient manner possible: most of these 12 tracks hover around two-and-a-half minutes, each iterating first the substrate, then the melody and its variations, then slamming shut like a clockwork music box.Based on previous recorded evidence, Orcutt is fond of boundary conditions for his studio guitar records. Much of the time, his launchpad is obvious (The Four Louies, How to Rescue Things); with others, it’s intentionally obscured. When recruiting me to write about each release, he might send me a clue (“This is a bridge pickup record more than a neck pickup record,” Orcutt helpfully offered for Music for Four Guitars). Although any given dispatch is a potential red herring, up until now, each has implied an Oulipian conceit (however obtuse) that at least somewhat determines the outcome. Thus, I was a bit surprised by his statement on Music in Continuous Motion -- “The mystery of how [the] same person, same process, same gear produces different results." When pressed, he elaborated that the record features “no triplets,” something I’ve yet to count out to determine for myself.Whatever overarching form the recording process may have mapped out, the path of the finished album is explicitly poetic. Echoing its predecessor, the song titles, read in sequence, paint fleetingly-glimpsed forms -- but in contrast to the distant shapes described in Music For Four Guitars, the present narrative spotlights the dance of polygons momentarily grasped (and then lost) as they spin through space: “Because sharp also smooth,” “And warm to the touch,” “Now nearly gone,” “Yet always moving,” “Impossible to reach.” Ultimately, the key difference between the albums (and what places Music in Continuous Motion in the realm of poetry) is its celebration of movement over immutability, of melody over form, of music as a hot wire to the heart rather than another upped ante in an arms race of inscrutability. — TOM CARTER

For his third new album release for Drag City, Tashi Dorji turns to the electric guitar. After the furious acoustic improvisations that drove the previous two—"Stateless" and "we will be wherever the fires are lit" — it’s easy to imagine an album of his electric guitar improvisations as an encompassingly incendiary essay. Especially when titled low clouds hang, this land is on fire. After all, this is a man capable of tearing up the place with the tactile musical violence of Bill Orcutt and Derek Bailey! And yet, this knowledge serves to set up a greater shock: the album’s disarmingly gentle musical drift.When asked why he turned the knob down from 11 for this album, Tashi says simply, “To find the silence.” As ever with Tashi, this is a political statement. Even the search for silence takes intention and happens for a reason. In this time of such institutional inhumanity, what is there to feel but exhaustion? When seeing the faces of the deprived, what is there to feel other than hopelessness? In the face of such grief, what words are there to say? So, Tashi got a couple amps, moved from the shed where he’d done his first two DC titles, set up in a room in the family home with high ceilings and dialed in the reverb. Once the sound was in the space, reflecting in a manner that he felt congenial with his mood, he taped it. It’s a striking signal, meditative and melancholy, with a delicacy comparable to the lineage of Loren Connors or Bill Frisell, the songs at times developed with the deliberate exposition of themes in raga’s alap form. It’s a sound that lives within silence.Once he’d laid down the sound, Tashi went back and listened to the composition of each piece. Then the words came easily. They’re the titles of these songs, they provide the narrative — or a prism, to allow us to gaze unblinking upon the awesome rot of empire. These are Tashi’s punk anthems for the year 2026… for all the years, really— to be thrown to the people outside the walls, to aid them in their quest to be allowed in.The cover art for low clouds hang, this land is on fire includes this found verse, sourced from an old anarchist ‘zine:"...here we are, the dead of all time, dying again,only now with the object of livingyou have to get out of yourself to save yourself"Dead time awakens us. We need to feel it all and then get up and get goingagain.

Geologist is the nom-de-théâtre of Brian Weitz, whose pursuits have been an active part of the music underground since since he was 15, playing and working in alignment with an organic ensemble of friends that would one day choose to call what they were doing Animal Collective. Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights? migrates from that tradition, containing a number of surprise affects of its own. #1 is that it is the first-ever proper Geologist solo album! For real. Surprise #2 is its pursuit of a musical answer to the not-oft-enuf-ast question:what if, back in the 80s, Ethan James had made a hurdy gurdy album for SST?Geologist’s affirmative answer to the question begins with another question — Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights?. It’s also the first step into a rippling songscape in which his hurdy gurdy gives and takes multiple forms, an epic electro-acoustic textile of many colors cut from the life and times of Brian Weitz. It’s an inspired ride through his phases and stages, with traditional sounds, ritual moods, avant, prog-jazz, kraut, post-punk and minimalist vibes merging in electronic infinity.Time changes everything. Brian said the title of the album once a day for probably four thousand days in a row, at least. Now it’s been over five thousand days since he stopped saying it. Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights?, lit like a constellation, threads impulses and happenings across space, cherry picking from his psychic archive: the vibe of an energizing drive from Tucson into the desert, taken repeatedly in the early aughts; an incendiary live witness one night in the clubs in 1998; the unending thrill of the mind-meld in eternal recurrence. Geologist uses the drone and chanter strings, whose possibilities blew open the walls for him back then, to highlight these moments in the kaleidoscopic flow of memory.It’s a process, right? These things take time! As he set the controls to account for a multitude of directions on this long-promised journey, Brian took inspiration from late-dawning solo eras of players like Bill Orcutt and Susan Alcorn. Then, hurdy gurdy in hand, Geologist realized structures, improvisations and rhythm tracks at home before seeking other energies at Asheville’s Drop of Sun Studio. At the session, Adam McDaniel helped a lot — he drafted drummers Emma Garau, Alianna Kalaba (FACS, Cat Power) and Ryan Oslance (The Dead Tongues, Indigo De Souza), Sham’s Shane McCord on clarinets and Mikey Powers on cello. Through vagaries of fate, Brian got Adam Lion to play vibraphone in a few places, Dave “Avey Tare” Portner for a couple bass tracks, and his son, Merrick Weitz, on acoustic guitar for “Government Job.” Izzy Barber painted the front cover and gatefold, capturing that Tucson magic, and Bob Nastanovich lettered the back cover, supplying additional pieces of time and space to the puzzle.Through the mystery and science of record making, Geologist refracts beatifically through his back pages throughout Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights? Realities and mirages flicker in and out of the aural parade route, and as we join the path of engagement, the puzzle transfers itself to our own experiences. That’s the beauty of records at work — and of this first record truly from the heart and soul of Geologist. Let your eras down, and let the mystery loose once more.

Flung is proud to present a major new work by cellist and composer Okkyung Lee with London’s Explore Ensemble: Signals dissolves boundaries between live performance, studio construction, and electroacoustic illusion.Following her 2025 minimalist/ambient album ‘just like any other day (어느날): background music for your mundane activities’ on Shelter Press, Okkyung Lee moves in another direction with London’s Explore Ensemble. Flung is proud to present Signals, a release that eludes categorisation while shifting between electronics, acoustic composition, and improvisation. It places Lee’s improvisational language in dialogue with the instrumentalists of Explore Ensemble’s sextet, whom together become enveloped by kaleidoscopic electronic sound, at times fiercely intense, at others weightless yet immense.As a meta-document of the ensemble’s commission for Lee, Signals takes recordings from live performances in Leuven, Huddersfield, and Luxembourg, restructuring them with additional layers created and edited in the studio. Lee’s hybrid approach blurs the line between real and imagined acoustics, where the listener’s sense of small and huge, near and far, dark and bright, all combine in seemingly impossible ways, restlessly morphing between materialisation and dissolution.The album unfolds in seven sections, one for each of Explore Ensemble’s musicians plus Lee’s own section ‘Wings / First Love’, which ends both sides of the LP (the second instance also called ‘Farewell’). Every section creates a distinct environment that tests the boundaries between instrument and performer — including Lee herself on cello sitting among the ensemble — from ultra close-mic string crackles, to woodwind multiphonic canyonscapes, melodies heard both near and far, and the piano turned inside out. Where Lee renews Signals for every performance by altering the sequence of these sections, on record she commits to a fixed constellation that reinforces both the particularities of the individual musicians and the work itself in a striking of live and studio composite version.A release that feels both self-interrogating and outward- looking, Signals folds Lee’s personal language together with collective form. Each performer’s presence — their sound and intuition — emerges clearly, while Lee’s voice remains central. As she writes:The main focus of making music has been to understand myself through the music. For me the audience is there to immerse themselves in that journey, and maybe discover something on their own. For the last seven years, the world seems to have split into two extreme ends, with no possibility of bridging the gap. Once I felt this sense of hopelessness, I also started to ponder upon the reason for this music's existence when it didn't seem to have any actual relevance to what was happening in the world. Not that the music should have "meaningful reasons for its existence" but how can I express my political stances and beliefs without lyrics or long explanatory texts? With this aspiration, I wanted to create a piece with signals that can generate multiple facets for the performers and the audience. — Okkyung LeeSignals is released by Flung as its first vinyl released in an edition of 300,

Sotto le Nuvole arrives as a limited edition one sided LP with artwork by Gianfranco Rosi. Designed by Maja Larrson. Produced, recorded and mixed by Daniel Blumberg. Recorded at Daniel’s flat, London and underwater in Baia, Italy. Additional recording by Alberto Landolfi. Mixed at Timeline Studio, Rome. Additional mixing by Stefano Grosso. Mixing Assistant: Giancarlo Rutigliano. Mastered and cut by Loop-O.In Gianfranco Rosi’s portrait of Naples, Sotto le Nuvole (Pompei: Below The Clouds), the ground shakes periodically. Between Mount Vesuvius and theTyrrhenian Sea, the fumaroles of the Phlegraean Fields hiss volcanic gas and steam. Below the sleeping volcano, modern day Naples emerges in black and white and fills with voices, with lives. From the traces of history and the concerns of the present, Rosi documents a city immersed in its continuous past, with Daniel Blumberg’s minimal soundscape hovering in a sonic space between liquid and air. Tasked with creating a soundscape that would suspend space within Rosi’s film, Blumberg called upon the extended technique of saxophonists Seymour Wright and John Butcher to create a gossamer fabric of traces and sounds abstracted from their instruments. Having transitioned from theoretical physics to the saxophone, John Butcher has always deeply considered space in the context of his playing. His concerns are with flow, density and how the saxophone is situated in the living world. Zeroing in on the core sonic properties of the mechanical and acoustic components of the saxophone, Seymour Wright has integrated its every breath, reed vibration, keypad clatter and hissed microtone of his alto into his own, unique improvisational language. In his work with these two seminal players, Blumberg makes his most concentrated soundtrack to date - reinforcing the film's sense of overlapping time and space, and pushing at the limits of experimentation. Initially recorded in Daniel’s flat in London, Butcher and Wright centre themselves around long, consistent tones, so soft that it seems breath is being gently pulled from the saxophone's bell by an invisible hand. Blumberg himself adds haunting bass harmonica, and recordings of Wright’s launeddas - a traditional and ancient triple pipe polyphonic reed instrument from Sardinia, Italy. Blumberg then travelled to the volcanic region of Baia, next to Pompeii. Once a flourishing classical Roman city loved by Nero, Baia slowly sank under hydrothermal pressure, leaving the city in a kind of geological purgatory. Using specialised geophones and hydrophones, Blumberg took those initial recordings and amplified them underwater, sending them calling out across the ruins of Baia’s mosaics, Nymphaeum statues and villas.  “It was important to me that the music was whispered in the same landscape that Gianfranco has worked for the past three years, so that you can hear the volcanic air gulping, the lapping of the waves, the steam and bubbles popping against John and Seymour’s saxophone breaths – an echo from a suspended time.”   What emerges is deeply melancholic, tender, subtle and right at the edges of audio technology. Submerged in an aquarian mausoleum, the mysterious vibrations of the saxophone and its bell become an echo of an echo, wading from the future into the past.  --- Seymour Wright / alto saxophone, launeddasJohn Butcher / soprano & tenor saxophoneDaniel Blumberg / bass harmonica

It’s been ten years since Bill Orcutt released A History of Every One, a compendium of hacksaw renditions of American standards on acoustic guitar — and since ten years is a blink of an eye, you are forgiven for not immediately realizing that we've gone an entire decade waiting for Jump On It, the next Orcutt solo acoustic record. As those of us of “a certain age” will tell you (ad nauseam), a decade is a blink of an eye containing an infinity of experiential moments, and if this record is any gauge, the weight of those experiences have squashed Orcutt’s rough edges, feathered his stop-motion timing into a languid lyrical flow, and snapped the shackles tethering his instant compositional skills to the imperative to deconstruct guitar history. In short, Jump On It is a collection of canonical, mature acoustic guitar soli to contrast against the fractured downtown conceits of previous acoustic releases. For those paying attention to the arc of Orcutt’s electric records, which chart a course from Quine’s choppiness to Thompsonian / Verlaine-ian flow, it should be no surprise that the ten year gap between acoustic records should expose a similar underlying journey.But what’s maybe more surprising is that Jump On It, with its living-room aesthetics and big reverb, packs a disarming intimacy absent from the formal starkness of Orcutt’s earlier acoustic outings. Although you might sense the looming human in the audible breath whispering intermittently between chords (a physical flourish reminiscent of the late Jack Rose), such documentarian signposts are the exception rather than the rule. Not quite refuting (yet not quite embracing) the polish of revered watershed records by Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, or Bola Sete, Jump On It treads a path between the raw and the refined, exemplified in tracks such as “The Life of Jesus” and “In a Column of Air” that alternate swaying chords with Orcutt’s trademark angular quicksilver runs (cut brick-wall short). While you won’t mistake Jump On It for incidental music, at least not iftaken at full strength, stray passages radiate a conversational beauty that would please the most dissonance-adverse listener.Strangely, some of the melted lockstep grooves found in Jump On It evoke nothing other than Music for Four Guitars. While many of the linear runs are clearly improvised, and the phrasing distinctly slurred, intuitive and non-mechanical, the strummed chords hint at a cellular construction similar to Jump On It’s electric predecessor. (Orcutt states that he prefers to keep his strategies obscure — but that implies there is in fact a strategy).Whatever the case, I also hear Satie in Music for Four Guitars, and I hear him here too, hidden within Jump On It’s lilting repetition, which I easily imagine stretching to an infinitely-distant horizon. Like each of Satie's three Gymnopedies, each facet of Jump On It is a tiny miniature bound in a slim volume, an earworm you might savor again and again upon awakening or before drifting off. Each track is a key to a memory, a building block in a shining anamnesis leading to the recollection that hey, we’re all humans in a shared cosmos, and music is one way we might make that universe go down easy. And who wouldn't jump on that? — Tom Carter

stunning new solo Orcutt recorded live at Oto  Another Perfect Day is Bill Orcutt's first solo electric guitar record since 2017’s eponymous Bill Orcutt. While that eight-year gap might not seem like a ton of time on the cosmic scale, it nonetheless represents a busy half-decade plus for Orcutt projects: a raft of improv collaborations, an acclaimed run of chopped and looped albums on Fake Estates, and the collision of Orcutt's computer and guitar music on Music For Four Guitars and last year's How to Rescue Things, both on Palilalia. The undeniable alchemy of those latter mashups inspired not only a wider appreciation of Orcutt-as-composer, but also the resurrection of Orcutt-as-bandleader, as the Bill Orcutt Quartet hit the road in support of Four Guitars, Orcutt's first work with a proper score (courtesy of Shane Parish). All of the above makes 2025 the perfect year to reacquaint ourselves with Orcutt-as-solo-performer, wielding his trademark four-string rather than a mouse, running the neck rather than shuffling waveforms, blasting through Cafe Oto's tattered Fender Twin (the cover model for the aforementioned How to Rescue Things) rather than a pair of ancient NS-10s. Indeed, this 2023 performance at Oto, East London's finest music establishment, boomerangs back into the slashing chords and frenzied double-picking of the Harry Pussy years, tossing the gentler melodic glow of the last few solo records into the dustbin. In other words, this may be Orcutt's most overtly punk-rockist record since Gerty Loves Pussy, his first solo electric LP from a decade ago. It's an affirmation that Orcutt is above all a lead player -- angular runs scaling the heavens, ricocheting back to ground zero before climbing again. Orcutt builds tension with short phrases, repeated with slight variability until it seems like they’ll never stop, finally slamming into a fresh line like the dawning valley at the crest of the mountain pass. Another Perfect Day is, ultimately, something of a solo guitar Nouveau Roman, an exhilarating run through melodic reiteration, impossible crescendos (check out those ecstatic crowd hoots on "For the Drainers") breaking into — a moment rarely found on an Orcutt record — soft, whisper-quiet tracer notes at the end of "A Natural Death." Another Perfect Day returns Orcutt to the immediacy of his earliest records while maintaining the melodic complexity, phrasing, and flow of a player, who's been going, what — four-plus decades now? And when he taps his roots, it's a reminder of exactly what was so exciting about Orcutt's playing in the first place. — TOM CARTER

Another seminal reissue from Superior Viaduct: an absolute storming free jazz grail  In the pantheon of classic free jazz, Noah Howard's The Black Ark looms large. Recorded at Bell Sound Studios in New York City in 1969 – just prior to the alto saxophonist's relocation to Europe – the album was eventually released in 1972. The Black Ark exhibits not only the power and imagination of Howard's playing, but also his breadth as a composer and bandleader. Listeners expecting unrelenting blasts of "energy music" might be surprised to find a cohesion atypical of free jazz; amidst the wild, impassioned solos, Howard weaves in Latin rhythms and fat-bottomed grooves. The first side, consisting of "Domiabra" and "Ole Negro," sets the album's tone. Both tracks sound as if they could have appeared on some of Blue Note's proto-spiritual jazz, groove-heavy releases – evoking the likes of Horace Silver or Bobby Hutcherson – before ceding the floor to the horn players' anarchic firepower. As John Corbett writes in the liner notes, "Two players stand out. Bassist Norris Jones – who would soon consolidate his name into a one-word reversed amalgamation/permutation of the two, Sirone – is given ample room, largely unaccompanied; his corporal approach foreshadows later work with the Revolutionary Ensemble. But the secret weapon on The Black Ark is Arthur Doyle. Straight from basement rehearsal sessions with Milford Graves, whose ensemble he had joined and who remained a favorite of the drummer for decades, Doyle is a human flamethrower." Trumpeter Earl Cross' guttural, vocal effects complement Doyle's take-no-prisoners approach, while the estimable combination of Muhammad Ali (Rashied's brother) on drums and Juma Sultan on congas adds an ever-shifting propulsion. The septet is rounded out by the enigmatic pianist Leslie Waldron, who anchors the group with imaginative accompaniment and occasional boppish flourishes. Every bit worthy of its reputation as an "out-jazz" holy grail, The Black Ark only sounds better with age. It remains the ideal record to convert the remaining free-jazz skeptics.

The music of these Louisville-NYC art-punk-rockers continues to exist bafflingly outside of time – so when better than 42 years after initial release to reissue their album debut on vinyl? New listeners will find, in addition to the roiling compulsion of its odd, dance-damaged clockwork and synthesis of feral and aestheticized values, a refined understanding of the width and breadth of “post-punk” music, from any era, known or unknown.

Antigone is a chilling look at our already-alternate reality, coming from inside Eiko Isibashi’s own head. Her band brings a wide array of sounds and moods, shading pop, funk and jazz, ambient, electronic and musique concrète in a bittersweet latticework. Interlocking her new songs in seamless long-play flow with the compositional ambitions of her acclaimed soundtrack work, Eiko’s expressions are epic and intimate. 2025 will never be the same!

A feverish essay of transcendent drumming: Chris’ solo approach, rooted in the exploration of elements of extended technique, sought another level, via possibilities facilitated by a self-made string drum! The Key (Became The Important Thing [& Then Just Faded Away]) brings his encompassing focus on free improvisation and noise into a granular fusion with acoustic experiments and hot-wired ideations of hard rock riffing and the post-punk sound.

Minimalist avant-rock from experimentalist Dreyblatt: ultra-rhythmic overtones created from striking piano strings strung to a bass. LP originally released in 1982 by India Navigation Records

At long last, Rafael Toral delivers 'Travelling Light', his stunning, wildly anticated follow-up to 2024's critally acclaimed ‘Spectral Evolution’, via Drag City. Sprawling across beautifullay produced double LP and CD editions — complete with liner notes by Oto’s own Bradford Bailey — encountering the Portuguese, experimental journeyman embarking into the some of the most ambitious territory of his career, 'Travelling Light' is one of those rare wonders that unfolds over time and has to be heard to believed.

"Breathing in, breathing out. Tide comes in, tide goes out. The sun rises and it also sets: beginnings and endings. These are the first impressions given by The Visitor: a build-up and break-down. One seamless, 38-minute piece of music that completely engages its listeners. An extremely thoughtful piece that even a year later, still retains all of the qualities it had upon first listen. This record made me realize the full potential music can have when someone who actually gives a damn does something about it. Here, O'Rourke constructs an intricate and personal piece of music that unveils its beauty with every listen. Open your ears, put this record on the platter, close the door behind you, shut your eyes, and prepare for the trip. Remember to be a good visitor - and visit often..."