Penda’s Fen, a film for television by David Rudkin, tells the story of a boy obsessed with the music of Elgar. Through a series of visitations — angels and demons, Christ, King Penda, even Elgar himself — emerge the ancient secrets of the Malvern Hills. Director Alan Clarke achieves a masterful balance of the fantastical and the literal that has connected deeply with generations of viewers for over fifty years. Scene by Scene is a deep dive into how this masterpiece came to be, drawing upon every surviving draft of the script, a wealth of production papers, revealing correspondence, evocative on-location photography from the summer of 1973, and extensive interviews with cast and crew. This is the definitive account of how the film was written and made. Ian Greaves has written about broadcasting history and the arts for over twenty years. Previous books include edited collections of Dennis Potter, Jonathan Miller and Ivor Cutler. He has devised documentaries for BBC Radio and curated events at the BFI, Barbican and the Royal Court. Ian has worked as a consultant on major television archive projects including BBC Four’s fiftieth anniversary celebration of Play for Today and the Raven Row exhibition of community broadcasting, People Make Television.

Totally beautiful and rare piano performance from Loren Connors, joined on guitar by long time collaborator Alan Licht.  Celebrating thirty years of collaboration, Loren Connors and Alan Licht performed for two nights at OTO on May 5 and 6th, 2023. On the second night, with the stage lit in blue, Connors took up a seat on the piano stool whilst Licht picked up the guitar. What followed was the duo’s first ever set with Connors on piano - one of only a few times Connors has played piano live at all - here captured and issued as The Blue Hour. Its spacious warmth came as a total surprise live, but makes complete sense for a duo whose dedicated expressionism takes inspiration from a vast spectrum of emotion. Both opening with single notes to start, it doesn't take long before a surface rises and begins to shimmer. A run up the keys, the drop of a feedback layer on a sustained and bent note. The two begin to exchange notes in tandem and brief touches of melody and chord hover. After a while, Connors picks up the guitar, stands it in his lap and sweeps a wash of colour across Licht’s guitar. Sharp, glassy edges begin to form, open strings and barred frets darkening the space. When his two pedals begin to merge, Licht finds a dramatic organ-like feedback and it’s hard not to imagine Rothko’s Chapel, its varying shades of blue black ascending and descending in the room. When Connors goes back to the piano for the second side, the pair quickly lock into a refrain and light pours in. It’s a kind of sound that Licht says reminds him of what he and Connors would do when the duo first started playing together 30 years ago. It’s certainly more melodic than some of their more recent shows, and the atonal shards of At The Top of the Stairs seem to totally dissolve. What is always remarkable about Licht is that his enormous frame of reference doesn't seem to weigh him down, and instead here he is able to delicately place fractures of a Jackson C Frank song (“Just Like Anything”,) amongst the vast sea of Connors’ blues. Perhaps it's the pleasure of playing two nights in a row together, or the nature of Connor’s piano playing combined with Licht’s careful listening, but the improvisation on The Blue Hour feels remarkably calm and unafraid. There’s nothing to prove and no agenda except the joy of sounding colour together. Totally beautiful.  --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO on Saturday 6th May 2023 by Billy SteigerMixed by Oli BarrettMastered by Sean McCannArtwork by Loren Connors Layout by Oli BarrettScreenprint by Tartaruga Manufactured in the UK by Vinyl Press.  Edition of 300 standard LPs, 100 LPs with screenprinted artwork by Loren Connors printed as inserts. Also available on a limted run of 200 CDs. 

Gloriously psychoactive set from Joke Lanz (turntable) and Ute Wassermann (voice + objects), recorded as part of a stellar line-up alongside Charmaine Lee and Jackson Burton at OTO in May 2025. From the outset, there's a real sense of playfulness here, but the technical skill on display from both artists here is truly jaw dropping. They both wear it lightly though, allowing the listener to sit back and bask in the generosity of a rare gift, freely given. Ute's voice covers a scarcely believable range, not so much speaking in tongues as channeling an entire other realm. Guttural growls and avian trills mix with half-swallowed breaths and Clangerish whistles; gulps and gasps and overtones spin around each other, all interspersed with a whole array of bird whistles, noisemakers and found objects. Through Ute's vocalisations, Joke weaves snatches and snippets of sound from the turntables, crafting a surreal, absurdist collage of orchestras and oratorios, clattering percussion and stammering preachers, low brass and penny whistles and much, much more. Both artists move with a remarkable dexterity, and, even more than this, a vitality, a sense of always being fully in the moment, even if that moment is restlessly hurtling ever forward at several hundred miles an hour. There's such an uncanny symbiosis to the duo's interactions - clearly hard-earned - that it's genuinely hard in some places to tell which sound is coming from which performer, or how such a intricate, multilayered sounds could be coming from just two performers at all. All of this races along at a breakneck pace, barely ever giving the audience time to settle. But why would you want to? The sonic landscape keeps flashing by in an ever-brilliant sugar-rush of kaleidoscopic colour, and it's no hardship at all to just give yourself over to it. -- Recorded by Rory SalterMixed and mastered by Oli Barrett

"Monasunne is the duo of composers Lara Agar and Louis d'Heudières. The album Fields Become Sky is the band’s debut. Starting from their shared experience of growing up in East Anglia in the UK, the duo dug into the history of the region, finding myths and poems written at a time when it was an independent kingdom. The Anglo-Saxon poetry - dealing with questions of death, mortality and spirituality - forms the textual backdrop of the record and is sung in its original Old English. The duo treat the language as a sonic artefact and voice it through ‘the musical contemporary’ autotune, giving the music a wonderfully unsettling temporality. Rather than embalm a buried past, Monasunne re-imagine the historical geographies as a myth. The sonic worlding that results is a journeying across distanced times. Fields Become Sky was developed over multiple recording and listening sessions from 2020-2023, using a mixture of self-programmed synths, violin textures, field recordings and autotuned vocals. Musically adjacent to a hybrid of Under Byen, Björk and Felicia Atkinson, the album traverses an emotional landscape of ritualistic chanting, cavernous spaces and subterranean kicks. From the primordial phonographic vocal folds emerge alternative lullabies in a lost mothertongue."

XXXCLUUSIVO !! These aren't available outside of the US, don't delay !  The 4th album by JCC. Limited edition CD / LP version of “Estrella Por Estrella” in special case with double-sided artwork by Puro Fantasía. Includes one exclusive track “Chupa-te ~Reflexion~” which will not be available digitally. "Estrella Por Estrella is a series of compositions for acoustic and electric guitar. Opener “Unifying Force” mixes glistening tones mix with crushing riffs; though the track only has a four minute runtime, it seems to stretch out as far as the night sky. Crampton wrings different emotions out of these basic sounds (see the meditative “Now That I Know U” or the blistering mania of “Acidito”), but his compositions on Estrella Por Estrella are all unified by a shared sense of scale. This is huge music, an album that often feels as vast as the universe itself." - undrcurrents --- Composed, performed & recorded in Northern California by JCC for electric and acoustic guitars.[Un-Mastered]"Sol, mi música siempre es un regalo para ti. I hope you reach for this one when it catches your eye" ---

Denise Riley is renowned as a feminist theorist and a poet and for her remarkable refiguring of familiar but intransigent problems of identity, expression, language, and politics. In Impersonal Passion, she turns to everyday complex emotional and philosophical problems of speaking and listening. Her provocative meditations suggest that while the emotional power of language is impersonal, this impersonality paradoxically constitutes the personal. In nine linked essays, Riley deftly unravels the rhetoric of life’s absurdities and urgencies, its comforts and embarrassments, to insist on the forcible affect of language itself. She teases out the emotional complexities of such quotidian matters as what she ironically terms the right to be lonely in the face of the imperative to be social or the guilt associated with feeling as if you’re lying when you aren’t. Impersonal Passion reinvents questions from linguistics, the philosophy of language, and cultural theory in an illuminating new idiom: the compelling emotion of the language of the everyday.