Riding four to a single quad bike for the first and possibly last time, Steve Noble (drums), Otto Willberg (bass guitar), Alex Paxton (trombone), and Gabriel Wonck (trumpet) attempted a musical wheelie in celebration of the ending of the ever-terrible month of January. Recorded at a Monday night gig, the music captures the spirit of Saint Monday—the habit of extending weekend revelry to the detriment of work, a practice widespread well into the nineteenth century. The playful dissonance that results rails dangerously against the prevailing weather—a wheelie in a blizzard. -- Recored at Cafe OTO, 31st January 2022 by Shaun Crook Mixed by Otto Willberg Mastered by Oli Barrett

vinyl copies have a seem split on top, and are marked down / cheap to reflect that Black Truffle is pleased to announce The Leisure Principle, a new solo LP from London-based bassist and sound artist Otto Willberg. A key player in the London underground, Willberg is often heard on acoustic and electric bass in free improv settings and bands with Laurie Tompkins (Yes Indeed) and Charles Hayward (Abstract Concrete), as well as the fractured No Wave unit Historically Fucked. His previous solo releases have ranged from extended technique double bass to explorations of the acoustics of a 19th century artillery fort. But nothing Willberg has committed to wax so far prepares a listener for The Leisure Principle, six unashamedly melodic improvisational workouts created almost entirely with heavily filtered bass harmonica and electric bass.On the opening ‘Reap What Thou Sow’, a single-note bass harmonica loop pulses along underneath a roaming bass solo, the side-chained envelope filtering (where the dynamic behaviour of the bass determines the filter for both bass and harmonica) fusing the two instruments into a single stream of burbling shifts in resonance. After several minutes of patient exploration of this low-end landscape, the music suddenly opens up in widescreen with the entrance of Sam Andreae’s graceful melodica chords, spreading out across the stereo field. From this epic opener, each of the remaining pieces goes on to explore a slightly different aspect of the terrain. On ‘Shadow Came into the Eyes as Earth Turned on its Axis’, a similarly buoyant harmonica bass line provides the foundation, but this time playing a soulful descending riff, its almost R&B feel abstracted and half-obscured by the filtering. On ‘Mollusk’, echoed bass arpeggios skitter between elegiac chords somewhat reminiscent of the opening of John Abercrombie’s ‘Timeless’, before settling into a hypnotic groove.On the record’s second half, Willberg pushes further into the possibilities of his idiosyncratic instrumentation. On ‘Wetter’, bass and harmonica come together into a monstrous, growling jaw harp; on ‘Had we but world enough and more time’, the subtly shifting pulsating patterns start to feel almost like a kind of evaporated, drum-less dub techno until an eruption of wheezing bass harmonica gives the piece a comically folkish turn. Willberg’s melodically inventive and virtuosic bass performance calls to mind any number of fusion touchstones, from Jaco Pastorius to Mark Egan’s singing tone in the early Pat Metheny Group—even Anthony Jackson’s work with Steve Kahn. But with its radically reduced instrumentation, The Leisure Principle is also an exercise in minimalism, and the absence of percussion gives even its funkiest moments a strangely abstracted quality. At times, its uncanny blend of the abstruse and the immediate suggests the fried pop experiments of David Rosenboom or the skewed but deeply musical DIY of 80s underground groups like De Fabriek. Both easy on the ear and profoundly strange, The Leisure Principle proudly takes its place among the most eccentric offerings on the Black Truffle menu. 

Proud to present a full recording of the inaugural confluence of THAT, a new trio featuring Pat Thomas, Gwilly Edmondez and Otto Willberg, together handling responsibility of making some respectable music. Captured in one extended rush, this release captures the moment when various orbits finally collide head on, resulting in heady combustion or wet patter. At certain points sounding like a performance arguing with itself, at others sounding like nothing so much as Looney Tunes performing the collected works of Chopin simultaneously in the Garden of Earthly Delights, this is a recording at once beautifully unhinged, wide-ranging and deep. A true one of a kind. -- Recorded by Shaun Crook Mixed by James Dunn Mastered by Oli Barrett Cover art by Gustav Thomas

A Manchester-London lock-down special by bassist Otto Willberg & guitarist David Birchall, "exploring certain spaces that are out of touch, maybe forgotten, bypassed, existing on the fringes - ’shadowed spaces'". Created by sending each other recordings of themselves playing in spaces near to their respective abodes, they melded the material together by revisiting the spaces and playing each of the recordings back to activate each others' acoustic. The result - like a photo of a murky landscape processed through multiple exposures - is a frothing mudbath of hollers, bellied drones, clattering percussion, creeping voices and caustic vibrations, resonating through streets, tunnels, open spaces and deep into our mind nuggets. David and Otto's work together in junk-rock/no-wave group Historically Fucked and in various free music settings has showcased their taste for bin rattling improv-flex and obscene humour, but we're pretty certain they've never made anything remotely like this. Music that teeters the line between the banal, the deeply weird and the beautiful. Fans of Peter Brötzmann & Han Bennink's 'Schwarzwaldfahrt', Blood Stereo's aural slimeballs and Idea Fire Company's intimate ritualistic melancholia - dig!