This book is a historical and interpretive study of the movement of jazz experimentalism in West and East Germany between the years 1950 and 1975. It complicates the narratives advanced by previous scholars by arguing that engagement with black musical methods, concepts, and practices remained significant for the emergence of the German jazz experimentalism movement. In a seemingly paradoxical fashion, this engagement with black musical knowledge enabled the formation of more self-reliant musical concepts and practices. Rather than viewing the German jazz experimentalism movement in terms of dissociation from their African American spiritual fathers, this book presents the movement as having decisively contributed to the decentering of still prevalent jazz historiographies in which the centrality of the US is usually presupposed. Going beyond both US-centric and Eurocentric perspectives, this study contributes to scholarship that accounts for jazz’s global dimension and the transfer of ideas beyond nationally conceived spaces. "Few studies have understood how improvised music functions as a complex ecosystem, indeed an interlocking one that overlaps and exchanges with other like ecosystems, not just musical ones, but artistic, political, and social ones as well. Perhaps only George Lewis’s A Power Stronger Than Itself and Kevin Whitehead’s New Dutch Swing have managed to capture the intricacies of free music – or what Lewis has termed “experimentalism” – in this way, with the depth and feeling that it deserves. "Harald Kisiedu’s magnificent European Echoes: Jazz Experimentalism in Germany, 1950-75 joins the ranks of these groundbreaking books, adding indispensable substance to the current scholarship. Basing his argument on meticulous primary research that includes many unknown or under-discussed details, Kisiedu moves deftly between biography, history and analysis, ultimately depicting improvised music in Germany as part of a continuum with African American jazz, rather than falling into line with received knowledge, which has tended to treat it as a major break – an “emancipation,” to use the problematic language often deployed – from its precursors and contemporaries in the United States. This allows Kisiedu to investigate the complexities of race, in particular, in the emergent new music of both West and East Germany, but also to evaluate the specificity of German improvised music, its relationships to Fluxus and its place in relation to new art and contemporary composed music in Europe, and the political and social contexts of the divided country in which it all emerged. Along the way, Kisiedu provides the most detailed biographical portraits of his principal subjects – Peter Brötzmann, Alex Schlippenbach, Manfred Schoof, and Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky – yet published in English, and the book includes an important trove of newly discovered and previously unpublished photographs.“   John Corbett, Chicago, author of „A Listener’s Guide to Free Improvisation“ "Harald Kisiedu’s groundbreaking interdisciplinary study trenchantly illuminates how during the Cold War and after, first-generation German and Swiss experimental musicians challenged national, political, conceptual, and racial borders to produce cosmopolitan new forms and practices of free improvisation. Kisiedu brings the study of improvised music together with German studies, critical race theory, and political science to produce a rigorous yet intimate portrait of the musical, cultural, and personal relationships among highly innovative musicians who shaped a new future of music.“  George E. Lewis, author of „A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music“

This is a record of halves.Angela Seo sings on half of the record. Jamie Stewart sings on half of the record.  Half of the songs are experimental industrial. Half of the songs are experimental modern classical.Half of it is real. Half of it is imaginary.The real songs attempt to turn the worst life has offered to five people the band is connected with into some kind of desperate shape that does something, anything, other than grind and brutalize their hearts and memory within these stunningly horrendous experiences. The imaginary songs are an expansion and abstract exploration of the early rock and roll “Teen Tragedy” genre as jumping off point to decontaminate the band’s own overwhelming emotions in knowing and living with what has happened to these five people.What none of this record does and despite the oft repeated assertion, what Xiu Xiu has never done, is attempt to superficially shock the listener. Instead, Xiu Xiu has spent twenty years grappling with how to process, to be empathetic towards, to disobey and to reorganize horror; there is no other word for it other than horror. The motivation for writing Ignore Grief to be about a child who was sold into prostitution by his mother, a junior high student who was kidnapped and murdered, incessantly choosing alcohol and cocaine over one’s family, becoming lost in the bleakest, darkest aspects of cultish spirituality and committing suicide as means to escape and protest a life of violent sex work is because the members of Xiu Xiu themselves are deeply shocked.Old friend and new member David Kendrick (Sparks, Devo, Gleaming Spires) joins Angela Seo and Jamie Stewart through whatever this may be and whatever it may mean and why ever it may have occurred. The point of aesthetic examination is to see if there is any way to come out the other side or if there is even any reason. In either case there may not be but to simply turn away would be yet a further act of destruction. “I had now lost all confidence in myself, doubted all men immeasurably, and abandoned all hopes for the things of this world, all joy, all sympathy, eternally. This was the truly decisive incident of my life. I had been split through the forehead between the eyebrows, a wound that was to throb with pain whenever I came into contact with a human being.”

The 5th Sublime Frequencies volume in Laurent Jeanneau’s amazing documentation of vanishing indigenous music of the rural Asian frontiers, this CD focuses on ethnic minority groups of Southern China. Presented here are 17 tracks of supremely infectious vocals and folkloric instrumentals played on a wide variety of local traditional instruments. The centerpiece of this collection is the 13 minute Do Djui Atsei (track 5), an absolutely epic male and female group choral vocal piece which is improvised as a song of intimate personal emotions that brings tears to the performers as they are singing together. Jeanneau has spent many years traversing the hills and valleys of Southeast Asia and China, and he has captured a dizzying array of folk music, much of which has never been documented before. He is perhaps the most committed and accomplished procurer of rare and threatened music from the region and seems more focused than ever as he states in his liner notes for this release: “In China, by the end of the 1950s, 400 ethnic groups registered to be counted in the census. There might be 300 remaining groups nowadays. I was facing an incredible amount of potential musicians. Now after 6 years spent in Yunnan, Sichuan and Guizhou provinces, I have recorded 55 CDs of raw stuff. This Sublime Frequencies product is a compilation from those CDs, displaying the diversity I was able to find between 2006 and 2012, and I’m not finished....”

Senyawa are a contemporary duo originating from Jogjakarta, Indonesia. Rully Shabara (extreme vocals) coupled with Wukir Suryadi's deft instrumentals (and homemade instruments) produce one of the most profound examples of experimental via traditional music happening anywhere today. By weaving Indonesian folkloric moods with various shades of modern genre hybrids, Senyawa has been navigating unexplored musical terrain for more than a decade. Sujudtheir premier release on the Sublime Frequencies label, is the latest chapter of this very special and singular sound of the past, present, and future. The basic theme of the record can be summed up with one extremely powerful Bahasa Indonesian word, "tanah", which translates to "soil-ground-land-earth". Shabara's vocals are an expressive force, conjuring spirits from the soil with a deep humility and respect for the land and their existence in the universe. Suryadi has built a new guitar for these tracks and pushes the Senyawa sound into new territory, utilizing delay, loops, and other effects creating grounded backdrops of folk metal, punk attitudinal, and droning earthscapes - providing Shabara the perfect context to explore his whispering poetry and jagged, sharp-as-a-kris animistic powers. There is simply no other sound like it and Sublime Frequencies is thrilled to present this new direction in their discography.

Paperback, 48pp Spiral House, 2025 Portals SeriesHuman history is filled with unacceptable sounds: high-pitched voices, gossip, talkativeness, hysteria, wailing and ritual shouts. Who makes them? Those deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of self-control: women, catamites, eunuchs and androgynes all fall into this category.  From the myths of antiquity to Margaret Thatcher via Sigmund Freud and Gertrude Stein, The Gender of Sound charts the gendering of sound in Western culture. Carson invites us to listen again, and in doing so to reimagine our conceptions of human order, virtue and selfhood. Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day. Its chief tactic is an ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder and death.

A live document of Elvin Brandhi, Kenichi Iwasa, Microcorps and Ziúr’s improvised set, recorded at OTO during Brandhi’s 2024 residency. Between 15-17 August 2024, improvising lyricist, producer and sound artist Elvin Brandhi brought three nights of unfolding, spontaneous and mind-bending world building to her Café OTO residency, bringing together collaborators from across the globe to take part in multifarious live actions and exploding group improvisations. On day three, Brandhi combined the quartet of Kenichi Iwasa, Ziúr, Microcorps and herself, for an expansive set, knitting processed voices, electronics, horns and percussion. This live recording from the night captures the group moving through choral bursts of atomised group vocalisations that melt into strands of interwoven electronics and live percussion, where automatic compositions spring fourth to be regurgitated into new mangled forms. -- Elvin Brandhi / voice and electronicsKenichi Iwasa / bass clarinet, trumpet, electronics and voiceMicrocorps / modular system, electronics and voiceZiúr / voice, percussion and electronics Recorded at Cafe OTO 17/07/24Mixed by ZiúrCover assembled by Elvin Brandhi from artworks by the whole group.