Keiji Haino, one of the foremost exponents of the Japanese avant-garde, always provides a masterclass in constantly shifting improvisation. John Butcher is a saxophonist of rare grace and power, who has expanded the vocabulary of the saxophone far beyond the conventions of jazz and other musics, to encompass a staggering range of multiphonics, overtones, percussive sounds, and electronic feedback. Haino and Butcher met when Butcher opened for Fushitsusha at the show Cafe OTO arranged at St. John, Hackney - 5 years ago. In 2016 they were invited to play two duo concerts – at The Empty Gallery in Hong Kong and at Cafe OTO in London. Otoroku is proud to present the audio documentation of their first UK meeting. Recorded live at Cafe OTO in July 2016 the results are an uncompromising milieu of swirling sound played out as a total union of these two legendary performers.  Haino’s blues drenched guitar entices skittering notes from Butcher’s sax playing as numerous sonic clues unravel over the course of of this unique and compelling journey. Light Never Bright Enough comes in a limited edition of 500 LPs and 500 CDs with matt sleeves and japanese removable obi-strip. --- Keiji Haino / vocal, guitar, flutes   John Butcher / saxophones and feedback --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO on the 9th July 2016 by Luca Consonni. Mixed by John Butcher. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Photography and design by ORGAN. 

One of the final Incus releases and one that was written up in The Penguin Guide to Jazz as ‘an essential document of modern music’. Otoroku is proud to release the first ever vinyl re-issue of Evan Parker’s legendary recording The Snake Decides. Featuring 4  solos recorded in 1986 in St. Paul's Church, Oxford by the late Michael Gerzon. The Snake Decides is a groundbreaking example how far the language of a particular instrument can be taken. From Brian Morton’s liner new notes: “The Snake Decides attracts a certain array of adjectives - intense, radical, fearsome, hypnotic, virtuosic – and occasionally allows a more ambitious reviewer to avoid platitude by talking more specifically about 32nd harmonics, circular breathing, multiphonics and Gerson's exact choice and placement of microphones. But this misses a point, too. Listening to this record, either for the first or the fortieth time, is an arousing experience.” Remastered by Giuseppe Ielasi and housed in a reverse board sleeve with new liner notes by Brian Morton this is the ultimate document of one of the most important recordings in all of Parker’s extensive and exploratory catalogue. Edition of 500 copies.

Dedicated to the memory of Tony Marsh The recordings on this double LP are taken from the first night of Roscoe Mitchell's inaugural two day residency at Cafe OTO in 2012 and his first time playing with drummer Tony Marsh and double bassist John Edwards. It was one of those nights where the music electrifies the room. Everyone on edge. Everything alive with the possibilities. Although there was much talk after the concert of the group playing together again this would sadly be the first and last time the trio would play. Tony passed away unexpectedly just a few weeks later making this his last documented performance and a fitting tribute to a truly great drummer and percussionist. Roscoe Mitchell is one of the most important saxophonists and composers of the 20th Century. Active since the 1960s as a bandleader, mentor, collaborator and teacher. Mitchell was a founding member of Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and the legendary Art Ensemble of Chicago. He has been a pivotal figure in the collective re-imagining of what is possible in jazz, improvisation and beyond combining an instantly recognisable sound on the saxophone with staggering technique (check the lengthy stretch of sustained circular breathing on SIDE C) and an arresting, fractured melodic sensibility. On this date he quickly realised he was in the company of two musicians who could match his vision and create music that is more than the sum of its parts. John Edwards is a vital presence in London's creative music community. A true virtuoso, his staggering range of techniques and boundless musical imagination have redefined the possibility of the double bass and dramatically expanded its role. No one else played or plays drums like Tony Marsh. Richard Williams had previously described Tony's "marvelous ability to erase the boundary between time and no-time" and here, on the jerry-rigged suspended percussion set-up he'd developed (no kick or hi-hats) he opens up a beautifully resonant space, quietly directing the pulse whilst allowing you to fully hear the upper-register harmonic detail and flickering pizzicato of John Edward's bass. You'd be hard pressed to hear anything in the playing that would hint at his shock passing only a month later.
 "Listen closely, take a chance, keep going even if money's tight, and you'll find the real reward – that's why Tony was hip in the most meaningful sense … And he didn't need to play loud, or be loud, to get that intensity. It's like splitting diamonds or something. If you know exactly the right place to make the impact, you don't need to hit anything hard." - Evan Parker 

 (Quoted in John Fordham's Obituary for Marsh)

We're very pleased to announce Pat Thomas's ‘The Elephant Clock of Al Jazari’ on our in-house OTOROKU label. Recorded live at OTO in May 2015 and mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi, the LP comprises four typically genre-defying and sonically dexterous pieces from one of the UK's most extraordinary pianists. In Pat's own words: The title for this Album, was inspired by the incredible automatic water clock invented by Badi' al-Zaman ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari. Al Jazari refers to the fact he was born in Al Jazira which lies between the Tigris and the Euphrates in what is now Northern Iraq. Badi al Zaman means prodigy of the age. He is known by historians of technology as the father of modern robotics. The Elephant Clock at seven metres high is a testament to his engineering genius, it utilizes Greek water raising technology, combined with an Indian elephant, Egyptian phoenix, Arabian figures, Persian carpet and Chinese Dragons celebrating the diversity of cultures in the world. This and other marvels of engineering can be found in his Book of the Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices translated by Donald Hill (Pakistan Hijra Council). Over 50 devices are mentioned. Amongst them the first analog computer, his remarkable Castle Clock, however, the debt the world owes this muslim genius is found in his remarkable water raising devices, particularly water raising device number 4 where for the first time a crank connecting rod system is used. The crank is considered to be the most important single mechanical device after the wheel, by 1206 this is found fully developed in Jazari`s machines predating Francesco di Giorgio Martini by 3 centuries. 'For Al Haytham' is dedicated to the great polymath genius who wrote the great book on vision, the first person to give us a true understanding of how we see. 'Lubb' is an Arabic word meaning innermost consciousness whilst to conclude proceedings 'Done' is loosely based on a well known standard. - Pat Thomas 26TH May 2017 Pat Thomas began playing  piano at the age of eight. He studied classical music and reggae was an early interest. Thomas was inspired to take up Jazz after seeing legendary pianist Oscar Peterson on television. By 1979, Thomas was performing seriously as an improviser. In 1980 he became a member of oxford based group Ghosts with Pete Mcphail and Matt Lewis. Has worked with Mike Cooper, Steve Beresford, Geoff Hawkins, Chuck Berry, Tim Hill, Alex Ward, Eugene Chadbourne, Steve Noble, Jimmy Carl Black, Thurston  Moore, Mats Gustafsson, Evan Parker, Oliver Lake, Alan Silva, Bill Dixon, Joe Gallivan, Alan Wilkinson, John Edwards, John Zorn, John Butcher, John Russell and a duo with Mark Sanders since 1986 a duo with Steve Noble (who first met in 1979).  Current activities include Black Top with Orphy Robinson, Valid Tractor with Lawrence Casserley and Dom Lash, About Group with Alexis Taylor and John Coxon, Albert Newton with Charles Haywood and the Founder Effect with John Coxon, a duo with Han Bennink and a trio with William Parker and Hamid Drake. Pat Thomas received Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Composers in 2014. --- Pat Thomas / piano --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO on the 4th May 2015 b Mark Jasper. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Photo by fabio Lugaro. Design by Maja Larsson. 

"Japanese bluesman Kan Mikami is nothing less than an unalloyed force of nature. A skin-shredding blast of frozen wind from the poor, rural north of Japan that he calls home. In the late 1960s, like thousands of other Japanese young people Mikami made his way to Tokyo in search of a life different from that of his parents. Since then he has forcefully carved out a space for himself in the culture as a modernist poet, a raging folk singer, an author, a actor, an engaging TV personality, and one of Japan’s most uniquely powerful performers. For most of Mikami’s career as a singer, he has performed solo. Just him and his electric guitar against the world, creating jagged A-minor vamps to drive along the surreal wisdom of his lyrics. But he’s equally at home in more demanding improvisational contexts such as those provided here by John Edwards on bass and Alex Neilson on drums. Their dense propulsive textures seem to spur on Mikami, his voice arcing powerfully into fragmented spaces, his guitar darting, colliding, shedding jagged and angular splinters of sound. A pulsing, raging maelstrom of serrated-edged energy. Gruff, rough, honest and very, very real." - Alan Cummings --- Kan Mikami / vocals, guitar John Edwards / bass Alex Neilson / percussion --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO on 3rd April 2013 by James Dunn. Mixed by John Chantler. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi

Recorded live at Cafe OTO in March 2009 during Otomo Yoshihide's first residency here. This was one of only a handful of solo piano performances Otomo has given where he uses the instrument as a control matrix for harmonically rich feedback tones and devastating clusters of complex noise. Vinyl sold out long ago, so pleased to share this as a download finally! "For Otomo, the piano is a big box of potential sound. But since he’s an obsessive sort, he really digs into certain of its corners, and dig he does; when this record doesn’t sound like a gonzo feedback extravaganza, it sounds like he’s cutting through the side of the instrument with a hand-held saw. Whatever the means he used to make the piano sound like that, he’s laid utter waste to the instrument’s conventional sonic associations. There are plenty of people out there making pianos sound like something other than pianos, but I can’t think of anyone else doing it with so much punk spirit and so little reference to any familiar piano vocabulary." - Bill Meyer, Still Single --- Otomo Yoshihide / piano  --- Recorded at Cafe OTO by Shane Brown. Mixed by John Chantler. Mastered by LUPO at Calyx Mastering. 

Delighted to share the full recording of Dave Burrell's stunning OTO show from last year. 'Overlooked' implicates Burrell in a jostle for positioning which he likely isn't bothered with - he's been happily writing and recording as a composer in residence at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia for well over a decade, and has worked with his wife, poet and librettist Monika Larsson, to tell the complex stories found in the archive there for years. No one in the room at OTO failed to notice his sense of deliberate ease and total elegance as he struck up two forty-five minute sets to thunderous applause, blending his earlier music with his later projects. Both sets hinge on one of Burrell's more contemporary works - 'The Paradox of Freedom’, as it weaves its way in and around the earlier ‘Black Robert’ and his most recent piece, 'Full Blown Rhapsody'. 'The Paradox of Freedom' imagines contradictions felt by freed slaves as they migrated north. “I use a boogie line that my mother used to play; there was a dance that went with it called 'Truckin’. I decided to use that line and try to do something with my right hand that would give the idea of migration and maybe an overreaction to freedom. The paradox is what kind of freedom are we talking about?”  A luminous second set opens with 'Margy Pargy'. Burrell traces its edges, open faced, sonorous and laden with swing, and then adds a gradual ringing, repeating slow dripped melody. He strides from Jelly-esque stompers into 'Expansion' and 'Full Blown Rhapsody' before looping back to 'Paradox'. 'Lush Life', Burrell's deconstructed tribute to Billy Strayhorn, closes the evening to a hollering room. An understated master. We wish wholeheartedly for his return. --- "Rough-hewn, strongly structured, then more distant before dropping in hints of recognisable melody. Rare excursions deep in to the bass register reinforced the sonorous resonance of OTO's Yamaha, drawn out by judicious use of pedals. Dense, chordal clusters gave way to the relentless rhythms of the railroad, cut short suddenly by a subdued sense of peace. A blink of boogie-woogie, and a warm 12-bar blues which gradually self-destructed with virtuosic invention. Dancing with Monika, considered and contained, closely followed by a spring-loaded Red Summer March, composed in the company of Steve Swallow one freezing winter, a spikey blues morphing in to a solid beat with a crafted melody strung over it, summoning up the spirit of Ellington." - London Jazz News --- Dave Burrell / piano --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO on Thursday 1st November 2018, by James Dunn. Mixed and mastered by James Dunn. All material Dave Burrell-Lanikai Sounds Publishing Company, BMI. Photo by Fabio Lugaro. 

After touring together in 2016, Paul Dunmall's joyous Quintet returned to OTO last winter. Known for his past collaborations with saxophonist Elton Dean and drummer Tony Bianco, and his work with improvising quartet Mujician (with pianist Keith Tippett, bassist Paul Rogers, and percussionist Tony Levin), Paul's work as a writer really shines brightest with this Quintet. The first set showcases totally new material - The Soultime Suite - and the second an emphatic rendition of 2016's Dreamtime Suite. Pure melody switches through pennywhistle, trumpet, tenor and alto with an elated rhythm section keeping things high energy. "When I listen to Paul, which is a great pleasure, and when I play with him, I hear the whole history of everything. You hear the history of the saxophone. You hear what Yusef Lateef called 'The Great Tradition'. That's the type of artist I want to be, one that reflects, as Paul does, the great tradition." Hamid Drake in conversation with Soweto, BBC. “Ever since I heard UK sax colossus Paul Dunmall with Keith Tippett’s Mujician quartet, I knew that there was something special, spiritual about his (tenor) sax playing. Nobody has a sound like him, he is in a class of his own!” – Bruce Lee Gallanter, Free Jazz Collective --- Paul Dunmall / tenor & alto saxophone, pennywhistle Hamid Drake / drums & framedrum Percy Pursglove / trumpet Steve Tromans / piano Dave Kane / bass --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO on Thursday 8th November 2018 by Shaun Crook. Mixed and mastered by James Dunn. Artwork by Paul Dunmall. 

The bold voice of James Brandon-Lewis meets one of the UK's fiercest rhythm sections. A relatively new, young player, Lewis' credentials include having studied with with Charlie Haden and Wadada Leo Smith at Cal Arts and recorded top records with Jamie Branch and Chad Taylor. His playing is characterised by a strong attack but has a wicked way of threading a fine melody from a chunky chord. When Edwards matches him on a tone and the pair find themselves locking into Sander's smouldering, skittish groove it's magic - proper mid-air, heady free jazz. Solo sections from Sanders and Edwards testify to the fun had in our hot little room. We look forward to a reunion.  --- James Brandon-Lewis / tenor saxophone John Edwards / double bass Mark Sanders / drums --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO by Paul Skinner on the 4th February 2019. Mixed and mastered by James Dunn. 

Glorias Navales are five member ensemble based in Santiago, Chile. Their jam is somewhere between Chilean folk music (ala Violeta Parra) and ramshackle post-Velvets psychedelia. Crafted on acoustic guitars, rabel and bombo chino (drum), this recording teases out lines from their stunning debut LP 'Cofradia Nautica' on Graham Lambkin's KYE, taking new, fuzzed out trips along the way. This particular show made Clive Bell's end of year list. --- Tracklisting: 1. 12.4.17 - 41:19 --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO by Shaun Crook on Wednesday 4th April 2017. Mixed and mastered by Jimmy Dunn good again. 

First time trio from Ren Schofield, Seymour Wright and Paul Abbott. Under the Container moniker Ren usually improvises overblown electronic hardware: infectious drum patterns, restructured feedback and dying tape loops. Wright and Abbott’s respective practices look to interrogate the British tradition of improvised music – groups such as AMM and SME - so this meeting somewhat shoves spontaneous interplay onto the dancefloor. The result is a high density recursive tangle of magnified antagonism and genuine investigative collaboration which steps off on the more cognitive side of techno. Not your usual dancefloor but experiments like this will keep free improvisation fresh. --- Seymour Wright / saxophone Paul Abbott / drums, electronics Ren Schofield / Roland 909, tape machine, delay --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO by Adam Maschulat on Thursday 9th August, 2018. Mixed and mastered by James Dunn. 

One of Stockholm’s most versatile and probing pianists returned to OTO last Autumn, and we're pleased to release both sets from the evening - a solo and a special duo. Having met in 2014 when playing with Johan Arrias, Lisa Ullén and Welsh violinist Angharad Davies reunite for a gorgeously spacious set. Both extremely technically accomplished but led by a sensitivity to so many musics, their duo set is a highlight.  --- Lisa Ullén / piano Angharad Davies / violin --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO on Sunday 14th October 2018 by Shaun Crook. Mixed and mastered by James Dunn. 

"Tim Feeney seeks to explore and examine the timbral possibilities inherent in everyday found and built objects. He treats his percussion setup as a friction instrument, using bows, scrapers, and rosined drumheads to capture and amplify frequencies that go unheard when an object is struck with a traditional mallet. He supplements this acoustic console with an electronic instrument, arranged from mixers, contact microphones, and effects pedals, that synthesizes and alters the spectral characteristics of low-fidelity tones, feedback, and noise. Tim worked for years within Boston’s timbral improvising community, a group of musicians interested in unstable sounds and silences, exploring austere#combinations of sound and the otherworldly ripple effects that pulse through#a silent space and alert ears. He has performed with musicians including thereminist James Coleman, cellist/electronic musician Vic Rawlings, pianist Annie Lewandowski, tape-deck manipulator Howard Stelzer, trumpeter Nate Wooley, sound artists Jed Speare and Ernst Karel, saxophonist Jack Wright, the trio Meridian (with percussionists Nick Hennies and Greg Stuart), and#the trio ONDA (with vocalist Ken Ueno and violinist Hillary Zipper. His concerts have been held at experimental spaces such as the Red Room in#Baltimore, Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, Firehouse 12 in New Haven, Connecticut, the Knitting Factory New York, and the Stone, as well as the Center for New Music and Audio Technology at UC-Berkeley, the Stanford#Art Museum, Princeton University, and Dartmouth College." --- Performed and recorded by Tim Feeney in Berkshire, NY, and Tuscaloosa, AL, 2010-2013.

“Fusées” isn’t the first collaboration between Thomas Bonvalet and Jean-Luc Guionnet, their first joint effort “Loges de Souffle” appearing on Be Coq last year. The same label also put out a vinyl edition of “Fusées”, but now Sarah Hennies’ label Weighter Recordings has thankfully stepped in with a CD and download release for the rest of us. Although the two artists are primarily known for their attachments to a particular instrument (guitar for Bonvalet, saxaphone for Guionnet), these instruments are only recognisably audible towards the end of the album, with the majority of sounds belonging to the percussive and analogue-electronic domains. In fact, so rhythmically driven is the album that I would’ve guessed that one of them was a percussionist. The album has a roughness and warmth to its timbres that is very appealing. Ideas unfold at a steady pace, not remaining static but not rushing anywhere either — a pleasure in sounds, but also in their organisation. The album title translates into English as ‘rockets’, and while there’s plenty of chemical energy and fire, there are also clear trajectories and flight plans. Whether these trajectories were planned out in advance or made up on the fly is, from the listener’s point of view, perhaps not so important. Developing structure can be clearly heard on tracks such as ‘2 mer D_v3’, where the interplay between synth stabs and pounding percussion twists and turns in an intricate dance. Even at its most off-kilter, such as in the broken ringtone melody of ‘1 mer B_v6_oct’, the music retains a sense of intention and direction; the transition through several shades of chaos is as detailed and as captivating as the harmonic micro-shifts of Hennies’ percussive rolls, just with much brasher colours. The guitar playing on ‘3 mar N_v3’ produces both percussive rhythm and modulating sinewave-like pitches, a synecdoche for the shapes of the album as a whole. Later in the piece, long single-note sax crescendos mould timbre and volume like clay on a potter’s wheel, inflected by stop-start percussion — a stunning effect. Only very rarely, such as on the last track, does the music slide into stock free improvisationish territory, competently done but already explored. “Fusées” is a propulsive album bursting with ideas, distilled into lucid and finely-balanced forms that dazzle and enthral." - Fluid Radio --- Thomas Bonvalet / audio ducker, microphones, amplificateurs, frappements de pieds et de mains, peau de tambour, banjo six cordes, componium, diapasons, plectre de pavot sec … Jean Luc Guionnet / deux vieux orgues électriques (Bontempi Tempest & Farfisa Matador), trois petits harmoniums, une table de mixage bouclée et quelques micros contacts et magnétiques, un petit trumpet speaker mobile, trompette de poche, saxophone soprano --- Recorded at Instants Chavirés, January 2014 by Adrian Riffo. Thanks to Instants Chavirés, Adrian Riffo, La Fonderie and François Tanguy.

"The three duets on the record (respectively written by John Cage, Peter Ablinger, and Hennies) all feature a “solo snare drum performer in duets with three non-performative musical elements.” All three of the elements presented here (silence, noise, and tone) in some way reflect a sonic component of the snare drum’s sound, and tonal differences between each track is striking. On Hennies’ own “Cast and Work,” the composer explores the tonal variations that can occur when the snare on her instrument is turned off and then mixed with other pitched elements. Like Cage’s and Albinger’s compositions, “Cast and Work” is mostly a subtle piece until a barrage of pitched noise from Vanessa Rossetto, Brent Fariss, and Henna Chou comes in near the end. When taken together, these compositions alter the listener’s perception of what a snare drum can do sonically and succeed in taking the instrument out of its often typecast role in music." - Tiny Mix Tapes --- A solo snare drum performer in duets with three non-performative musical elements: Cage - silence Ablinger - noise Hennies - tones --- "Cast and Work" includes contributions from Henna Chou, Brent, Fariss and Vanessa Rossetto. Performed and recorded by Sarah Hennies, 2012-2013.

Audio version of the DVD release of ‘Clots’, which sits somewhere between performance documentary, artist’s film, audio-visual installation, and music video. “The music follows Hennies’ penchant for subtle affective states arising from extended repetition, while retaining the strong sense of performing agency heard in recent releases by him for Weighter, Consumer Waste, and Quakebasket. However, O’Neill’s contributions on electronics also come through strongly, particularly in later sections. This brings a sense of multiple discrete layers to the composition, with each section comprised of a number of interlocking parts — an orchestration that fits well with the audio-visual immersion conjured by the project as a whole.” - Fluid Radio --- Sarah Hennies / percussion, concept Clay Odom / design Sean O‘Neill / electronics, design Visual documentation / Raphael Umscheid ---  Filmed during the Clots live performances in Austin, TX, March 23 & 30 2013.

"The remarkable Boston violinist and composer Morgan Evans-Weiler doesn’t have a score for this record, but its focus is ultra-precise. The piece, dedicated to the stalwart experimentalist Jed Speare, a close friend of the musician and who died in 2016, is a rigorous exploration of pitch, specifically in the microtonal complexity of the simplest bowed gestures. Evans-Weiler relies on a handful of simple pitch variations from memory, but ultimately the results don’t rely on any sort of melodic movement. Rather, the violinist pulls his bow across the strings in richly striated tones both gentle and piercing, marbled by a bounty of sounds—high-pitched squeals, abraded drags, intensely ringing double stops—that eventually bypass the lack of compositional shape to create an enveloping experience all its own. Evans-Weiler explained that “the performance of the piece is specifically dictated by my experience of the repetitions and the fatigue that accompanies,” and that certainly can apply to the listener, whose level of engagement depends on a certain freshness of the ears, the volume of playback, and attention level. The performance draws heavily on psychoacoustics, where an immersion in the sounds creates an almost psychedelic experience—where the bowed violin seems to produce ever-fattening tones, both viscous and biting. Extended passages are interrupted by brief moments of silent repose, with the violinist changing his fingering before embracing a slightly different pitch—it also allows the listener to recalibrate and retrench for another study that builds in volume and attack. It’s probably not for everyone, but the degree of focus and the richness of Evans-Weiler’s sound-worlds are nothing short of astonishing." – Peter Margasak, Bandcamp Daily --- Morgan Evans-Weiler / violin--- released November 1, 2017

Prune Becheau's 'Tone strains, guts and hair' is full of colorful, expressive and vivid melodies and fresh timbres, mixed with a sense of fun. Becheau's other work in Pancrace and Urs Graf Consort attest to her free sense of experimentation - it's super nice to hear where she takes it solo.  --- Prune Bécheau / violon baroque --- Tracklisting: 1. introduction - 01:54 2. tlelel letl - 05:49 3. gegze tulilu - 08:04 4. hgjh hgjh - 02:31 5. fsiu fsiu fsiu - 01:03 6. lui tsk ui - 03:38 7. thschjre - 02:29 8. zzffk zzffk - 10:43 --- Enregistré au Tuquet en janvier 2018. Mastered by Thomas Pujols.

Black Truffle is thrilled to announce the reissue of legendary performance and sound artist John Duncan’s forgotten gem Klaar, originally released by Extreme in 1991 and partly created in collaboration with Andrew McKenzie (The Hafler Trio). Duncan is perhaps most well known for his notorious early performances pieces, which explored violence, self-denial, and the establishment of extreme psychological and physical states in both artist and audience. Alongside these transgressive experiments, Duncan began to create audio works primarily using short wave radio. Where some of Duncan’s earlier recordings are composed of magnificently sculpted but abrasive walls of noise, Klaar, recorded while Duncan was living in Amsterdam, occupies a more meditative territory. Opening with ‘Delta’, which layers long tones seemingly sourced from slowed down voices over a distant, watery field recording, the remainder of the first side is occupied with the epic title piece, which arranges shortwave radio abstraction, vocal experiments, and field recordings (street sounds, fireworks, monastic chants) into an episodic cinema for the ear. The second side is dominated by the long, brooding ‘The Immense Room’, where layers of shortwave interference and field recordings are gradually built up into a pulsing, wavering bed of sound infused with a subtly disturbing sense of psychological unrest. This rises to the surface near the end of the piece as sexual moans and ominous rumbles crisscross the stereo image before being abruptly brought to a halt. A singular work of electroacoustic composition, Klaar is both compositionally sophisticated and infused with a sense of mystery and a vital reality often lacking in more academic experimental music; it sits proudly alongside contemporaneous recordings by Duncan’s friends and collaborators Jim O’Rourke and Christoph Heemann and is a must for anyone interested in their work. - Francis Plagne

“Patience Soup presents the entirety of a live performance from the trio of Oren Ambarchi, Jim O’Rourke, and Japanese underground legend Phew that took place at the Kitakyushu Performing Arts Center on November 4th, 2015. Known to many listeners outside Japan primarily for her early collaborations with members of Can, Phew has been undergoing something of a creative renaissance in the last few years, prolifically recording and releasing a body of work that strips away the band arrangements present on most of her past releases to focus solely on her raw DIY electronics and possessed vocal stylings. Forming a perfect companion to 2017’s well-received Voice Hardcore, a series of pieces composed of only her processed voice that saw Phew push her work into the most abstract terrain yet, Patience Soup finds the trio inhabiting an uneasy landscape of moans, howls, and smeared electronic sonorities. Presented in atmosphere-enhancing room fidelity, the set begins in crunching textural abstraction and Phew’s vocal asides, set against a backdrop of Ambarchi’s shimmering Leslie-cabinet guitar tones and O’Rourke’s synthetic slivers. A testament to the risk-taking prowess of these three master improvisers, the performance moves organically from ecstatic crescendos powered by Phew’s processed wails to moments of near-silence in which a translucent veil of lingering electronic tones is gently punctuated by O’Rourke’s chiming piano chords. Constantly shifting, both harmonically and dynamically, Patience Soup is suffused throughout with a haunted energy and shows these three established figures continuing to venture out into uncharted territory.”

"First release from the duo of two important yet often underappreciated musicians, Eiko Ishibashi and Darin Gray. Ishibashi is a singer-songwriter, keyboardist, drummer, and multi-instrumentalist, known in Japan both for her own elaborately conceptual solo albums and for her frequent collaborations with figures such as Jim O’Rourke, Merzbow, and Phew. Darin Gray is a bassist and multi-instrumentalist known for a multitude of collaborations (with O’Rourke and Loren Connors, among many others), for On Fillmore, his cinematic post-exotica project with Glenn Kotche, and as one half of Chikamorachi with Chris Corsano, one of the finest free-jazz rhythm sections around. Presenting the entirely of a live set performed at Tokyo’s Super Deluxe in March 2013, the set begins as a duet for Ishibashi’s flute and Gray’s upright bass. Calmly melodic yet harmonically inventive, with shades of ‘spiritual jazz’, the pair’s acoustic ruminations are gradually joined by Ishibashi’s lush electronics, which randomly flicker between chords in a manner recalling the classic work of David Behrman. As the electronics build into a gloomy fog of slowly cycling loops, Gray lays his bass aside and turns to making strangely mournful interjections on a mouthpiece. Eventually Ishibashi moves to the piano, enveloping the audience in rippling pools of sustained, octave-doubled melody, provided by Gray’s bass with a fluid and dynamic foundation. For much of the second side, both Ishibashi and Gray turn to electronics, ultimately arriving in a bizarre space of melancholic arpeggios and random sputter and sizzle, oddly reminiscent of 70s outsider prog acts like Wapassou. An uneasy coda of rich piano chords ends the set. Captured in warm room ambience and beautifully mixed by Jim O’Rourke, Ichida is a rare combination of improvisational acumen and emotional directness, both adventurous and immediately accessible."

So You ... (Hermes, Orpheus, Eurydice) is a major new work by legendary experimental composer Alvin Lucier. It is an hour long epic that tracks the familiar Orpheus myth from a less familiar perspective: that of Eurydice as imagined by poet H.D.; a Eurydice who rails at Orpheus for his hubris in attempting to rescue her. Two key, and formerly distinct, aspects of Lucier's practice come together in this piece: the exploration of interference patterns in closely tuned intervals, and the exploration of resonant chambers. From speakers mounted inside amphorae a constantly turning braid of beating sine waves trace the descent into the depths of hell, and then the doomed attempt to climb back into life. Singer Jessika Kenney and long-time Lucier collaborators Anthony Burr and Charles Curtis embody the three title characters in deeply focused performances that assert themselves against the process of the sweep, or become enfolded in it. The electronics were mixed in real time by programmer and equipment designer Tom Erbe. 

Two Words is the debut release from the duo of Canadian sound artist crys cole and Australian songwriter Francis Plagne. Building on a series of experimental live performances in which the pair toyed with possible common languages for their seemingly unrelated approaches to music, the LP’s two sides present a single piece that brings together abstract texture and slow-motion song in a sonic space where genre cedes to the logic of dreams. The piece begins with a long, nearly static sequence built primarily from rubbed surfaces, using movement in the stereo field and changing mic placements to create a unified but unstable sonic environment that mimics wind, water, and breath, opening an impossible space between nature and artifice. This artificial outdoors ultimately makes room for Plagne’s electric organ, which sounds a series of melancholic chords to accompany a wandering Wyatt-esque keyboard line as cole’s intimate contact mic textures sizzle and pop in the foreground. From here the piece makes a surprise detour into song, as the majority of the second side finds Plagne intoning a series of obtuse two word phrases (from a text by Berlin-based poet Marty Hiatt) to an austere organ accompaniment. Working closely with engineer and producer Joe Talia, cole and Plagne extend the studio-as-an-instrument tradition of Teo Macero and This Heat, introducing subtle yet unexpected production shifts that lead the listener from the initial austerity of the organ and voice to an oneiric space of asynchronised vocal doubles, creaking textures, and distant whistling, ultimately arriving at something like an imagined meeting of Organum and Arthur Russell. Packaged in a suitably mysterious sleeve featuring a lush work by Australian painter Anne Wallace on the front and text by Hiatt on the back, Two Words is both comforting and strange, a disorienting blend of seemingly discrepant elements.

"Face Time is the second release from the trio of Oren Ambarchi, Kassel Jaeger, and James Rushford, following on from their 2016 debut Pale Calling. Recorded at the GRM studios in Paris in June 2017, the record immediately returns to the idiosyncratic sound-world of the trio’s first release, a simmering stew of electronic smears, pitched-down animal moans, and mysteriously emotive microtonal organ chords. But before long the record takes an unexpected turn, as sounds that initially enter as occasional percussive pitter-patter build to a halting rhythm. Equally reminiscent of Basic Channel-style dub techno and the sound of a microphone loose in a pocket, these stumbling rhythmic figures provide the framework for the remainder of the record’s two sides, occasionally receding into the background to allow squelching electronics, chiming bells, distorted autoharp, inchoate grunts and the sound of a Cristal Baschet to take centre stage, but each time returning with the inevitability of a an idée fixe. Eschewing any clear sense of form, the two side-long pieces move seamlessly through episodes with the organic flow of improvisation, embracing the happy accidents of events conjoined by chance and lingering on liminal moments. Gradually washing out into a cavernous roar, the record’s final moments are suddenly enlivened by shimmering metallic percussion and a sequence of woozy synth chords, combining with the muted rhythms and a distant thunderstorm to become a sort of oneiric tribute to the work of Wally Badarou. Bringing together three of contemporary experimental music’s most individual voices, Face Time is an essential slice of outsider electro-acoustics. Cover design by Stephen O’Malley. Mastered by Rashad Becker at D&M, Berlin."

A collaborative release with the visual artist Shannon Ebner, STRAY: A GRAPHIC TONE features the poems of Susan Howe and Nathaniel Mackey. Produced and collated by Ebner, STRAY: A GRAPHIC TONE juxtaposes historic and recent material from Howe and Mackey between 1991 – 2018. The work brought together specifically examines the two writers’ lifelong preoccupation with subjects adrift in dispossessed narratives both real and imagined. According to Ebner, “STRAY: A GRAPHIC TONE is the full-length version of what I started in 2016 when I began seeking exchanges with these two poets. I was drawn to their works for their experiments with poetic form – for their politics of poetic form, to be exact – for their poems’ stray figures and stray errant marks.” --- Tracklisting: 1. Extract From A Letter - 1:512. Hope Atherton's Wanderings - 6:103. Loving Friends And Kindred - 0:444. Scattering As Behavior Toward Risk - 6:315. Abide - 1:086. Little Sir Echo - 0:457. An Excerpt From The Foreword To DEBTHS - 1:438. Intro - 3:509. Dogon Eclipse - 2:0110. Song Of The Andoumboulou: 1 - 1:5011. Song Of The Andoumboulou: 50 - 8:4812. An Excerpt From Lone Coast Anacrusis - 3:3813. Parlay Cheval Ou - 0:37

"Charles Mingus’s classic 1963 album The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady is swerved into Harmony Holiday’s classic 2018 album The Black Saint and the Sinnerman. The albums are not the same, not at all. But they speak to one and other across time and language, motion and sound. A man and a woman meet in the marketplace. She is selling her body and he is beating his drum. A man and woman meet in a concert hall. She is thinking the music he spins loose as tantrum. Ah Um and other standards of misused/freedom. A man and woman meet on the radio. He calls her a hoe and she calls him a prince. Jokes are science. She wears white lace and he wears no rubbers. What eagles, also shrugs. Slugs Tavern smells like burnt wheat and hussies. A man and a woman meet there to touch. A man and a woman meet at University. She is studying Frederick Douglass and he is learning to count the bones. Jesus was a geneticist and we are mapping our way home. A man and a woman meet on the way home. He tries to corrupt her as if the sins of the father are being visited in prison. Dial tone. Heart bone. Copper and carbon make electricity. Ringing and spinning into thought. The copper in your pineal gland and the carbon in your cerebral cortex. A man a woman meet in the mind. She is electric and he is legba, the trickster, sluggish under her lucky sun. Not every love story is a fairy tale. In fact the best ones simulate the process of waking up from a nightmare; a man and a woman meet in that glare, fuzzy-hearted almost despair of morning. This is a story about the body. Brown in white lace, disgraced and redeemed. There are no more sour grapes. My teeth glow like a railroad. A man and a woman meet on a train. Your brother and your sister don’t speak to you, and I don’t blame them. Do you blame them? Sin is not as simple as breaking a man made rule. Sainthood is not as simple as being good. This is a story about the body. Sweet grapes. Sweetback. Sweet race. Sweet runner. Sweet earth/rising." The Black Saint and the Sinnerman was recorded live at Machine Project in Los Angeles, CA on September 9, 2016. The album was mastered and engineered by Gus Elg at Sky Onion in Portland, OR in the Fall of 2017.

Entirely comprised of poems contained in her latest collection, 2016’s Certain Magical Acts, Live in Seattle elucidates why Alice Notley is one of the world’s most revered poets, the recipient of the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Griffin Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Lenore Marshall Prize, and the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Prize. “I am alive outside written memory” is how one of the speakers of Notley’s poem “Voices” puts it and listening to the poet read her work live, in front of an entranced audience, serves to detail the intangibility of sound vis-à-vis language. Live in Seattle also includes excerpts of the onstage conversation Notley had with Seattle poets John Marshall, Christine Deavel and Rebecca Hoogs. Among other topics, the talk revolves around concepts of success, what it means to write female poetry circa 2017, and the importance of always creating from a position of disobedience. As part of Seattle Arts & Lectures’ Poetry Series, 'Live in Seattle' was recorded at McCaw Hall in Seattle, Washington on Wednesday, April 5th, 2017 and mastered and engineered by Gus Elg at Sky Onion in Portland, Oregon in the Summer of 2017.

Featuring poems written over the past 15 years, some of them from her recently published collection Partly: New and Selected Poems 2001-2015 (Wesleyan, 2016) and some of them previously unpublished, Rae Armantrout’s Conflation interrogates the difference between texture and tactile; thing unspoken versus thing unseen. The world largely exists in the interstices and Rae Armantrout’s poetry makes that clear. As she elucidates on “Scumble,” the 15th poem on  Conflation: What if I were turned on by seemingly innocent words such as “scumble,” “pinky,” or “extrapolate?” What if I maneuvered conversation in the hope that others would pronounce these words? Perhaps the excitement would come from the way the other person touched them lightly and carelessly with his tongue. What if “of” were such a hot button? “Scumble of bushes.” What if there were a hidden pleasure in calling one thing by another’s name? A Rae Armantrout poem is a space where no word is safe from speculation. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award for her 2009 collection Versed, Armantrout is the poet for the Twitterified 21st century and Conflation allows its listener to lapse and bathe in her voice’s nuanced measure. --- Featuring poems written over the past 15 years, some of them from her recently published collection Partly: New and Selected Poems 2001-2015 (Wesleyan, 2016) and some of them previously unpublished, Rae Armantrout's Conflation interrogates the difference between texture and tactile; thing unspoken versus thing unseen. The world largely exists in the interstices and Rae Armantrout’s poetry -previously awarded the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award - makes that clear.

"Aloha/irish trees is a collection of new and old poems by Eileen Myles, many of which have never been featured in their previous print collections and all of which have never been featured on a record. Further, unlike the vast majority of poetry records, Aloha/irish trees was recorded live. Live meaning that it encapsulates an experience that every poet is familiar with—an occasional linguistic flub can be heard now and then, as can the sound of the poet clearing her throat, taking a sip of water. “Fuck, this is so hard” is uttered on the first track of Side A. The final sentence heard on the last track of Side B is “I’m gonna catch up, I have to pee.” Listening to Aloha/irish trees is listening to Eileen Myles read their work live, an aural experience easy to hear, hard to escape." --- All poems written by Eileen Myles. Recorded by Ambrose Bye and Max Davies at Harry’s House in Boulder, Colorado at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics/Naropa University in the Summer of 2015 and engineered and mastered by Gus Elg at Sky Onion in Portland, Oregon in the Fall of 2015.

"Reissue of Derek Bailey and Tristan Honsinger Duo, originally released by Incus in 1976. Born in Burlington, Vermont, and conservatory-trained in the US, the cellist Tristan Honsinger moved from Montreal to Amsterdam in 1974, quickly linking with Han Bennink and Misha Mengelberg and opening a long and fruitful musical relationship with Derek Bailey. Recorded in 1976, Duo displays a performative musical approach already characterized by the lack of inhibition which would later endear him to The Pop Group: he is knockabout, exclamatory, explosively rhythmic; burping Bach and folk melodies with spasmodic lyricism, in amongst the garrulous textures and accents of his scraping, bowing, and plucking, and gibbering like a monkey; throwing out his arms and stamping the floor, grappling with his instrument like an expert clown, always tripping himself up. You can hear Bailey reveling in the company, as he ranges between scrabbling solidarity and an askance skewering of his partner's antics, on prepared (nineteen-string) and standard electric guitars -- and a Waisvisz Crackle-box, for the garbled, quizzical, cross-species natter which closes "The Shadow". Throughout, the spirited interplay between laconic, analytic wit, and guttural, sometimes slapstick physicality is consistently droll, often laugh-out-loud funny; vigorously alert, alive, and gripping.” --- Tristan Honsigner / cello, voice Derek Bailey / electric guitar, crackle box --- Recorded at Verity's Place 7th February 1976, except for A1 and B2 which were recorded at Tangent Studio 6th February 1976.

Originally released by Incus in 1974. Recorded at a private house in Catford, south-east London, the side-long title track is a masterwork: a twenty-two-minute, starkly personal, freely expressive, itchily searching re-casting of orders of rhythm and sound into a new, quicksilver kind of affective and musical polyphony. Never mind the guitarist’s championing of ‘non-idiomatic improvisation’, the poet Peter Riley gets the ball rolling in his identification of the various hauntings of Bailey’s playing at this time: ‘mandolins & balalaikas strumming in the distance, George Formby’s banjo, Leadbelly’s steel 12-string, koto, lute, classical guitar… and others quite outside the field of the plucked string.’  The five pieces on side two were recorded back home in Hackney around the same time — with the exception of Improvisation 104(b), from the year before (and issued by Incus in its TAPS series of mini reel-to-reel tapes) — opening with ventriloquised guitar feedback, and taking in some cod banter about colleagues like Mervyn Parker, Siegfried Brotzmann and Harry Bentink. Crucial. "In 1974, when Derek Bailey was planning his second solo LP on Incus, he decided to include a side-long solo using his stereo electro-acoustic set-up. Unfortunately, he never seemed to have a 20-minute stretch of time free of interruptions in his home, so he asked if he could record it at my place. After a fairly lengthy drive across London on the arranged date, he discovered that he had brought all his gear except the actual guitar. So he had a cup of tea and a chat, then drove home again. He came again about a week later, on May 13th, this time with everything. I set the level too high for the first two takes, not quite allowing for his enormous dynamic range (which really was not suitable for analogue recording and reproduction equipment). The result was too much distortion for his liking. The level was corrected for the third take which was the one used as the title track on the LP, even though he preferred the music on the earlier takes. All but one of the short pieces on the second side of the LP were recorded by Bob Woolford around the same time, probably at Derek's home. (The exception, 'Improvisation 104(b),' was recorded the previous year and originally released on one of the Incus TAPs -- mini reel-to-reel tapes that were an attempt to bypass the technical problems of going from tape to vinyl. They were reissued by Organ of Corti.) 'Pain In The Chest' and 'In Joke (Take 2)' feature the unamplified 19-string (approx) guitar, which was probably the only instrument that Derek modified -- he otherwise used standard guitars. There was a shortage of good vinyl at the time, making it difficult to get decent pressings. (The original pressing of the solo Steve Lacy Emanem LP sounded as though it had been recorded in a hail-storm.) We were recommended to go to a pressing plant that specialized in 'classical' music. (At the same time that Derek was trying to get Lot 74 pressed, I was also working on his duo album with Anthony Braxton.) The first test pressing of Lot 74 was very muffled, and we discovered that the cutting engineer had played the tape up-side-down, so that the music had been filtered through the tape backing (used on professional tapes to reduce print-through). The cutting was subsequently redone correctly, resulting in an acceptable test pressing. However, the plant manager was completely incredulous and perplexed, as he was used to checking pressings using his library of scores of Beethoven sonatas and the like. How could he tell if the vocal and feedback howls at the start of side two ('Together') were correct? Over thirty years later, advances in technology have eliminated most of the technical problems we had then, so that this magnificent music can be heard sounding better than ever. Every so often, I get someone asking me to issue things on vinyl -- my response is usually not very polite." Martin Davidson

Oxley's experimental electronics album. Anyone who has heard Pat Thomas do Black Top will hear Pat in this - high end keys, spoken word samples, worked with Matt Wand on drum machine and percussion, rather than Orphy Robinson.  In fact, Derek and Tony sit out and let them record "Duo MP" - a sparse, alien affair with fantastic tape loops. The following "TD Duo" is Bailey and Bevan all skittering and brittle, just as you'd imagine. Overall it's the quartet that really works, and you can tell how much fun they're having. A natural foreground to Derek's exeriments on Limescale, and again, Pat Thomas's work on Re-rectangle's And (with Steve Noble and Derek Bailey) and later his duo Black Top.  --- Matt Wand / drum machine, electronics, tapesDerek Bailey / electric guitarPat Thomas / electronics, keyboardTony Oxley / percussion --- Recorded on 8th April 1992 at WDR, Cologne, by Werner Srasser & Peter Eichenseher. Edited by Ulrich Kurth. Design by Karen Brookman. Painting ‘The Singer’ by Tony Oxley. Photography by Max Lautenschlager. Post Production by John Haddon. 

"Oxley and Bailey first played together in 1963. Although they come from the same city and share the same kind of background their meeting was, in a way, coincidental. Bailey - 10 years older than Oxley - after some years working away from their hometown, returned for what was initially intended to be a brief family visit. The musical situation he found there persuaded him to stay. Oxley and Bailey then worked together, continuously and intensively, for the next three years and developed, with Gavin Bryars who was then a bass player, their own particular approach to free improvisation. Since 1966, their working relationship, although intermittent, has continued in a multitude of different playing situations. Initially, during the late 60's and early 70's, much of it was in the context of Tony Oxley's small groups - quartet, quintet and sextet. From the late 70's on, it would sometimes be within Derek Bailey's improvisor's ensemble, Company. Throughout, and increasingly in the 1990's, they have played in duo. These recordings, a London studio recording made in 1977, and a concert recorded in New York 1995, are testament to the remarkable richness and sustained variety of their musical relationship." - Simon Kelly --- Derek Bailey / electric & acoustic guitars Tony Oxley / acoustic & electric percussion, violin --- Tracks 1-4: Recorded in Soho, London in February 1977 by Kevin Spencer. Tracks 5-10: Recorded at the Knitting Factory, NYC in September 1995 by James Mclean. PPhotographs of Derek Bailey &  Tony Oxley in concert (France, May, 1997) by Franz-Heinrich Busch. Post Production & design by Karen Brookman.

"Quite simply, Company produced some of the most stimulating improvised music you will ever hear." - John Eyles 1982 line-up of Company. Keith Tippett, Fred Frith and George Lewis are joined by concert pianist Ursula Oppens and composer & harpist Anne LeBaron. After playing more frrequently in Japan in the late seventies, Bailey had also invited Motoharu Yoshizawa on bass and Akio Suzuki on assorted instruments like glass harmonica.  --- Derek Bailey / guitarJulie Tippetts / guitar, voice, fluteMoto Yoshizawa / bassFred Frith / electric guitar, electronics, percussionAkio Suzuki / glass harmonica, spring gong, kikkokiririkiAnne LeBaron / harpKeith Tippett / pianoUrsula Opens / pianoGeorge Lewis / trombonePhil Wachsmann / violin, electronics --- Recorded by Jean-Marc Foussat. Produced by Derek Bailey & Evan Parker. Design by Karen Brookman. Financial assistance by The Arts Council.  

Kicking off a series of collaborations between Honest Jon's Records and Incus: Solo Guitar Volume 1, a reissue of Derek Bailey's Solo Guitar release on Incus in 1971, with additional tracks included on previous reissues and a performance at York University in 1972. Recorded in 1971, this was Bailey's first solo album. Its cover is an iconic montage of photos taken in the guitar shop where he worked. He and the photographer piled up the instruments whilst the proprietor was at lunch, with Bailey promptly sacked on his return. The LP was issued in two versions over the years -- Incus 2 and 2R -- with different groupings of free improvisations paired with Bailey's performances of notated pieces by his friends Misha Mengelberg, Gavin Bryars, and Willem Breuker. All this music is here, plus a superb solo performance at York University in 1972, a welcome shock at the end of an evening of notated music. It's a striking demonstration of the way Bailey rewrote the language of the guitar with endless inventiveness, intelligence, and wit. As throughout the series, the recordings are newly transferred from tape at Abbey Road, remastered by Rashad Becker, and available for download exclusively here. --- Derek Bailey / guitar, synthesizer — Tracks 1-13 recorded by Bob Woolford and Hugh Davies. Photographs by Roberto Masotti. Mastered by Rashad Becker.

Two concerts of experimental improvisation from Eddie Prevost and Christian Wolff, two giants of conceptual improvisation and composition, recorded at Ikletick in London in 2015 and at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire in 2016; with superb pacing and brilliant execution, these dialogs between keyboard and percussive instruments explore unique sound worlds with depth, inquisitiveness, and a sense of wonder. "The set documents two concerts - 1, recorded at Iklectik in London in September 2015, is in two parts, 37 and 18 minutes in length; 2, recorded at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, in July 2016 is a singular 50-minute piece. Each musician restricts himself to a relative narrow palate. Prévost uses a bass drum as both drum and resonator and explores bowing and scraping cymbals for sustained metallic sounds, with very rare eruptions of multiple sounds. Wolff plays piano with even greater delicacy, from isolated sustained tones, alternated intervals, subtle use of plucked strings and minimal preparation and an occasional brief melodic figure. A keyboard wind instrument, perhaps a melodica, arises brieflyin both concerts." - Free Jazz Collective --- Eddie Prévost / percussion Christian Wollf /piano --- Artwork by Myah Chun Grierson. Edited and mastered by Giovani La Rovere and Rupert Clervaux. Recorded by Giovani La Rovere and Sangwook Nam. 

Recorded at a concert given at The Band on the Wall Manchester, England on 26th May 1994.  --- Marilyn Crispell / piano Eddie Prévost / drums --- Tracklisting: 1. Opening Time - 6:49 2. Slow Chaser - 3:59 3. Fragments - 2:48 4. Dogbolter - 2:05 5. Apart (I) - 2:33 6. As Our Tongues Lap Up The Burning Air - 6:29 7. Old Thumper - 1:08 8. Night Moves - 12:11 9. Bishop's Finger - 1:11 10. Irons - 3:47 11. Quiet Now - 3:37 12. Spitfire - 3:42 13. Last Orders - 8:20

Complete audio recordings of Evan Parker, John Edwards and Eddie Prévost's May 2013 residency at Cafe OTO.  --- Evan Parker / tenor saxophone John Edwards / double bass Edwin (Eddie) Prévost / drums Alexander von Schlippenbach / piano Christof Thewes / trombone --- "Given the different line-ups and the inclusion of both sets from each of three nights, the listener is presented with the chance to hear the music exposed and developing in many dimensions. Not only can each player be heard by himself and in shifting combinations - duet, trio or quartet - with the others, but the progression in mood and approach across an entire evening can be clearly appreciated. This is particularly marked on the second disc, where the careful exploration of the first set is succeded by the all-in surge of the second, which begins as if the four are resuming an interruped conversation. From the first night to the last, the music played over these three nights is of the highest quality. What can't be captured in the discs, but should never be underestimated, is the presence of listeners whose attentiveness cleared and charged the space in which the performers could do their work of creating a music as delicate in its inner workings as it is robust in its insistance on building for itself, night after night, a world without walls." - Richard Williams. --- Audio recorded by Giovanni LaRovere. Mastered by Rupert Clervaux. 

"Crux" is an Organum track, featuring Andrew Chalk on bowed gong, David Jackman on drone flute & bowed piano, Dinah Jane Rowe on drone flute and Stephen Stapleton on chair. "Flayed" features mainly AMM's Prévost on drums, general percussion and acme thunderer whistle, while Jackman added some bowed gongs and electronic sounds. "If you like the dronescapes of traditional Far Eastern musics, you'll love 'Crux'; if you wigged out to La Monte Young at his most conceptual, you'll do much the same with this. Better still, you may love 'Crux' having previously heard none of these supposed influences; you're simply wired for sound." - David Ilic.  --- Andrew Chalk / bowed gong David Jackman / drone flute, bowed piano, bowed cymbal and electronics Dinah Jane Rowe / drone flute Eddie Prévost / percussion, acme thunderer  Steven Stapleton / chair --- Flayed and Crux were produced by David Jackman and first featured on an LP released on Silent Records (SR8704A/B). Artwork by David Jackman. 

"Alan Wilkinson’s best known for his work with the high-energy Hession-Wilkinson-Fell trio. His discography includes just two duets, both with guitar players, but anyone who can stand up to both Derek Bailey and Stefan Jaworzyn comes out of a large and resource-rich bag. He is by far the most energy-oriented player to join Prévost in this particular ring, but the latter’s overriding determination to play exactly what the music of the moment requires serves him well here. Despite what I said a moment, ago, don’t get the idea that there’s any sparring going on here; while Wilkinson hits hard on both alto and baritone sax, this is a record where the two men work together, not against each other. Each is respectful of the other’s individuality and ability. Wilkinson does contribute some feral blowing; his unbridled snorts and whinnies on the title track are positively Ayleresque in their dimensions. But Prévost’s contributions take the music to a different place, unstable yet completely assured. His work in AMM has labeled him a percussionist, and rightly so, but listen to “Supa, Supa;” with its shuffling high-hat and dancing brushes – this is idiomatically aware jazz drumming of a very high order. Some of the best music occurs when they bring things down. On the lengthy and languorous “For Marlene,” baritone first sings quietly and then bubbles while toms rumble; a melody winds and twists whilst discovering itself in empty space. Exquisite." - Bill Meyer, Dusted Magazine --- Eddie Prévost / drums Alan Wilkinson / alto & baritone saxophones --- Recorded at Barefoot Studios, London, on 10th January 2006, by Mark Richie. Front cover by Gina Southgate.

"These pieces create a coherent and cohesive statement of Cardew's approach to interdeterminacy. They set in motion his dual attention to extreme pragmatism and philosophical, even utopian ideals. They are subtle essays in how one might initiate a skeletal framework to be fleshed out, to be made corporeal, by future generations. Cardew referred to this as 'growth mechanisms' : ie, how changing performance practice and musical outlooks can be accommodated by compositional activity. It is a balance between 'cogent explicitness' and 'sufficient flexibility' rather than a fully notated, self contained piece." - David Ryan, 2001.  --- Anton Lukoszevieze / celloSimon Allen / vibraphone & marimbaBridget Carey / viola Rhodri Davies / harpAndrew Sparling / clarinetDavid Ryan / bass clarinet & pianoSarah Walker / piano & prepared pianoDave Smith / prepared piano & melodicaTania Chen /pianoRobert Coleridge / organMichael Parsons / electronic keyboard --- Recorded by Apartment House, directed by Anton Lukoszevieze. First commercially released recordings of many of Cardew's early compositions.Recorded at Gateway Studio, Kingston-upon-Thames on the 6th and 7th of April, 2001. Front cover artwork: detail from 'Solo with Accompaniment'

"Their 5th album finds the band in a studio again, in their label Trost Records hometown Vienna, with time and the desire to try something new. Seven compositions in the disctinctive strong FULL BLAST nature get an exciting electronic treatment by Michael Wertmüller (sounds/electronics by Gerd Rische- head of Berlin Acadamy of Electro-acoustic Music 1995-2014) during and after the recording. For mixing the band decided to work with Gareth Jones (well-known for his work with Einstürzende Neubauten and Depeche Mode), whom they have used with Pliakas‘ Band Steamboat Switzerland before. FULL BLAST created an album that in his nonconformism and richness in variety stands on his own in contemporary jazz." --- Peter Brötzmann / reeds Marino Pliakas / e-bass Michael Wertmüller / drums Gerd Rische / electronics --- CREDITS:Recording: Martin SiewertProduction: Konstantin DrobilMix: Martin SiewertMastering: Martin SiewertArtwork: Peter Brötzmann

"Wild free jazz grooves, another monster of an album from the trio of reedist Mats Gustafsson, bassist Ingebrigt Haker Flaten and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love with guests Anna Hogberg on alto sax and Goran Kajfes on cornet; intense, passionate, and precise." --- Mats Gustafsson / tenor & baritone saxophones Ingebrigt Håker Flaten / electric & double bass Paal Nilssen-Love / drums, percussion Additional guests on Aim:  Anna Högberg / alto saxophone  Goran Kajfes / cornet --- Recorded June 1st and 2nd 2015 by Jørgen Træen at Duper studio, Bergen Norway. Mixed June-July 2015 by Johan Berthling and Andreas Werlin, Stockholm Sweden. Mastered by Lupo at Calyx Mastering, Cover by Lasse Marhaug.

"Consisting of Mats Gustafsson (sax), Ingebrigt Haker Flaten (bass), and Paul Nilssen-Love (drums), this trio plows through nearly 40 minutes of improv across three tracks." "The Thing is still archetypal free jazz/rock of the 21st century - it’s a group you might recommend to someone who wants to explore a more adventurous genre, although they work for experienced listeners as well. I’m surprised how this band wins me over again …. and again." Free Jazz Blog --- Mats Gustafsson / tenor & baritone saxophone Ingebrigt Håker Flaten /  electric & double bass Paal Nilssen-Love / drums, percussion --- Recorded July 2nd and 3rd, 2017 by Øyvind Gundersen at Studio Paradiso, Oslo Mixed October 2017, by Andreas Werliin at Repeat Until Death, Stockholm Mastered by Lupo at Calyx mastering, Berlin Liner notes by Brian Morto. 

French guitar player Boni teamed up with legendary US jazz-musician McPhee in the early 80s for some intense cooperations and albums (as a duo and as a trio with Andre Jaume). The complete concert inspired by the words of Eric Dolphy:  "When you hear music, After it's over, It's gone, In the air, You can never capture it again." --- Joe McPhee / soprano saxophone, electronics and voice Raymond Boni / Electric guitar and electronics --- Recorded at Hulsey Recital Hall on the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) campus. April 20,1985

"A giant two day meeting of three outstanding musicians German legend Peter Brötzmann is one of the leading saxophone players in the current international free jazz scene, continuing to tour and release with various musicians. Keiji Haino – japanese avantgarde wizard, mesmerizing with voice and guitar. Jim O’Rourke –outstanding composer, from ambient to free jazz to rock." --- Peter Brötzmann / alto/tenor-saxophone, tarogato, clarinet Jim O‘Rourke / guitar Keiji Haino / guitar, voice, shamisen --- Recorded At Shinjuku Pit Inn, Tokyo, on November 23, 2010 In memoriam: Yasuo Fujimura. Thanks to Kanji Suzuki & The Pit Inn Staff, and Mark Rappaport.

"Hermann Nitsch playing the church organ in the Jesuit church of Vienna, November 20th, 2013. Four heavy drone pieces, mastered by Martin Siewert. These four tracks of Nitsch performing solo on organ are made of sustained drones that are soothing and intense. Music is beautiful and meditative, as it slowly evolves and transforms, full trills that shimmer with celestial light and glide slowly into one another in a harmony that's at the opposite of Nitsch's jarring and disturbing Aktion pieces, though with a similar droning minimalism aesthetic." --- Tracklisting: 1. Satz 1 - 16:04 2. Satz 2 - 13:16 3. Satz 3 - 11:54 4. Satz 4 - 13:00

Brotzmann's mighty Tentet with Joe McPhee, Mats Gustafsson, Ken Vandermark, Paal Nilssen-Love, &c. live at Molde, Norway in 2007.  "Three compositions showing all the expressive force and spontaneity of these free improvisers. At Molde 2007 is a recording that could narrate all the accumulated experience and the communicative capability of this ensemble; a decade of genuine artistic effort by the Tentet from Chicago." --- Peter Brötzmann / reedsJohannes Bauer / tromboneMats Gustafsson / saxophonesPer-Ake Holmlander / tubaKent Kessler / bassFred Lonberg-Holm / celloJoe McPhee / trumpetPaal Nilssen-Love / drumsKen Vandermark / reedsMichael Zerang / drums

"Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist, composer and bandleader Ken Vandermark is widely known for paying homage to artists of various disciplines, regularly including dedications in his song titles to those who have inspired him. On 35mm, the studio debut of his newest ensemble, The Frame Quartet, Vandermark reveals his longstanding debt to cinema, not only in name, but in approach.  Filmmaking is an intensely collaborative medium, and The Frame Quartet embraces this concept implicitly; Vandermark is the sole writer, yet each of the album's five compositions is conducted by a different member of the quartet, except for "M.E.S. (for Merce Cunningham)." Though only "Lens (for Ennio Morricone)" is dedicated to an artist directly involved in film, all of the pieces embrace the art form's predilection for linear development. Eschewing conventional forms, these labyrinthine structures transition suddenly between modes, emulating cinema's narrative flow with dramatic shifts in tone that parallel the sudden splice cuts found in celluloid editing. Bringing these episodic works to life are some of Chicago's most resourceful improvisers, including cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm, bassist Nate McBride, and drummer Tim Daisy—all veterans of Vandermark's numerous ensembles. Utilizing an array of raw, electronic EFX, Longberg-Holm veers from austere acoustic cadenzas to amplified torrents of coruscating feedback. McBride alternates between upright and electric bass, while Vandermark reserves his clarinet for introspective moments, unfurling burly, pneumatic cadences on tenor saxophone elsewhere." - All About Jazz Recorded on 29 July 2009 at Strobe Recording, Chicago

"Inspired and relaxed duo compositions between Chicago's Ken Vandermark on reeds and Pandelis Karayorgis on piano performing original compositions. Vandermark dedicates one work to Derek Bailey, and one to Misha Mengelberg. Beautifully balanced work that alternately relaxes and incites the listener." "The pair had recorded once before in a 1999 trio with bassist Nate McBride. On Foreground Music they are found in the intimacy of a duo, sharing song-writing responsibilities. Vandermark wrote all new music for the collaboration and sticks to tenor saxophone and clarinet. The opportunity to hear him in subtle dialogue with a pianist is intriguing. None of the usual bombast is here and even Vandermark's pieces seem geared towards the understated." - All About Jazz.

"The first recording between Swedish dynamo Mats Gustafsson (tenor/baritone saxes & French glageolett) and Chicago's reigning tenor giant, Ken Vandermark (also on bass clarinet). The rhythm section consists of perennial Vandermark bassist collaborator Kent Kessler and Steve Hunt on drums." --- Mats Gustafsson / tenor and baritone sax, french flageolett Steve Hunt / drums Kent Kessler / bass Ken Vandermark / tenor sax and bass clarinet --- Recorded on October 15, 1995 at Überstudio, Chicago. 

"Trio featuring Peter Broetzmann (A-clarinet/tarogato-alto/tenor & bass saxophone), Mats Gustafsson (tenor & baritone saxophone), Ken Vandermark (B-flat-clarinet - tenor & baritone Saxophone). Recorded live at the LOFT in Köln Oct. '03. 7 improvised pieces." "No One Ever Works Alone has 24 possible saxophone combinations multiplied by Peter Brötzmann's indefatigability, Mats Gustafsson's percussive brilliance and Ken Vandermark's synthesis of the entire saxophone tradition. These three form the core of Brötzmann's Chicago Tentet, a marvelous large ensemble, and that vigor has been compacted here. Sonore is an example of how "free jazz", music that has no repertoire, no standards, relies on the head-on collision of different musical perspectives. Vandermark and Gustafsson here are quite different than on two projects released on the Oslo-based Smalltown Superjazz label." - All About Jazz

"Talk about powerhouse trios! Take the fastest rising saxophone star in improvised music, put him together with the most innovative bassist in Europe and the most inventive percussionist in the world, and what do you get? ...a magnificent meeting of minds recorded in the studio during a broadcast on Swedish radio in 1992. The distinct elements: Gustafsson's lightning-quick soprano, tenor, baritone and fluteophone (his own invention), Guy's gonzo technique and unreal preparations (scrub brushes, sticks, mallets, slides and multiple bows) and Lovens' precision timing, volcanic energy and brilliant use of timbre and texture...a trio more exciting and combustible (if that's possible) than the sum of its parts."

Edition Wandelweiser co-founder Jürg Frey presents the starkly beautiful minimalism of ’24 Wörter’, a song cycle based around the album’s evocative song titles, and performed by the trio of Regula Konrad (soprano), Andrew Nathaniel McIntosh (violin), and Dante Boon (piano). They’re mostly very succinct works with no detectable fat to trim, forming a gorgeous, dreamlike archipelago of experimental contemporary classical compositions... “Jürg Frey in conversation with Thomas Adank: JF: The 24 words are the titles of the individual pieces, and they are at the same time the entire text. They are also a list that shows how the piece gets from a beginning to an end. It is, in a sense, a cycle not simply a collection of pieces - a cycle which begins, makes a journey and ends at a different place. TA: If I had to categorize this list of words, it seems to me they are addressed to quite different areas. Herzeleid (Heartbreak) for example, sounds old-fashioned, Einsamkeitsmangel (Lack of Loneliness) almost sounds like a neologism, as do Halbschlafphantasie, (Half-Sleep Fantasy) Sehnsuchtslandschaft (Landscape of Longing), Vergessenheitsvogel (Bird of Oblivion). Others, such as Tod (Death), Schlaf (Sleep), Glück (Happiness), Wind (Wind), are very often used in everyday life. Did you, as you compiled this list, consider these categories? Or did you tell yourself a story that made these words necessary? JF: I was thinking in categories. At first I really wanted to make an even more rigid sequence. As it now stands, with the long words at the end and the short words in the middle, you can still feel a little of this structure; also at the beginning, which has many words with "e" and "ei". However, now it is not so strict. The words developed lives of their own, and this displaced some of the original structure. Some are everyday words, others are made by combining words, and some words found individual paths into the piece, including some very personal things. L'oiseau d'oubli ("Vergessenheitsvogel",Bird of Oblivion) comes from Edmond Jabès and is a tribute to this author I adore. But I also think that here Jabès has given me the perfect word. --- Dante Boon / pianoRegula Konrad / vocalsAndrew Nathaniel Mcintosh / violin --- Recorded 16.17 September 2013, Aarau, Schweiz.

Composer Eva-Maria Houben in a collaborative work with bass flutist Rebecca Lane and bass clarinetist Samuel Dunscomb, the composer performing on piano and orgran, for two renderings of "Observing Objects", a patient work of long notes and tones interspersed with silence, lower registers in the winds balanced by the piano or organ's upper register. --- Samuel Dunscombe / bass clarinetRebecca Lane / bass fluteEva-Maria Houben / organ, piano --- Tracklisting: 1. Observing Objects - 28:18 2. Observing Objects - 28:18

The piece originated from a field recording at Mentryville Park in Southern California; alone, in the same location, and as the sun was rising, which was transcribed by Martin and Amy Golden, Ben Levinson, Davy Sumner, and Ryan Gaston using Martin's system of notating silence. All slightly different, these five transcriptions were then combined into a score in which performers could wander while reading at their own pace(s) left to right.  Tracklisting: 1. so softly that it came, a wild dim chatter, meaningless - 72:00

"'Air" is yet another utterly impressive offering from, in my opinion, one of the most consistently extraordinary composers at work today, one who continues to unveil new facets of her persona. Hear it." - Brian Olewnick "And if you would ask me for a statement to composing, to my composing – I would answer: listening becomes the awareness of fading sound. Fading sound is the link between life and art; between perception in daily life and perception while performing, while composing. And the awareness of fading sound may become the awareness of presence.I am pianist and – in addition – organist. As organist I never forget that the organ is a wind-instrument. My pieces for organ and my “installations” for organ (the installations last many hours) ask: Am I realizing a piece? There is hardly anything you may hear in the church. The organ releases as a jewel each single sound; each stream of air; each noise: disappearing into the space of the hall. The listener will find the way to listening: in this particular room with this particular organ and its streams of sound/ air/ wind. All sound, all streams of air and noises are quiet; sometimes hardly recognizable. The sound of music; the noise of music; the sound and noise of everyday life: they cut into each other. Both sound and noise of music do not depend on silence as with a piece of music. Both sound and noise do not need any silent location: they are quiet themselves; their quietness creates silent rooms, which welcome all sounds. It is organ the machine and human beings working together. Man cannot breathe sounds of almost eternal duration; but the organ must not be considered a machine. My pieces for organ require the player: moving the keys; make the winds stream. Sounds, wind, noises of the organ as a wind-instrument and the silence at sacred spaces: not a coincidence. Churches’ sacred spaces turn into locations for people to nothing more than just be there and breathe; where people can listen – unhindered by any possible meaning of sounds and streams of air. In spite of the fact that the organ may have an endless breath – I composed one of my first organ pieces dazwischen (between) (2000) with two drones – you can hear “nearly nothing” by listening to the streams of air." - Eva-Maria Houben --- Recorded 2014, ref. church Elgg, Switzerland (ein schlummer), Hardstudios Winterthur, Switzerland (aufhören; atmen V: flutes), St Margareta, Dortmund-Eichlinghofen (atmen 5, organ)

"Madrid born composer, painter and sculptor Maria De Alvear wrote Besando El Tiempo in 1995. Public awareness of her music had grown a few years earlier with pianist Hildegard Kleeb’s excellent, intense and flinty interpretation of her spartan score En Amor Duro (hatART CD). Revisiting that encounter with tough love might be good preparation for the testing experience of listening to flautist Antoine Beuger on this stark and protracted new release. De Alvear’s refusal to dress instrumental sound in anything more than rudimentary musical trappings is disarming. The flute player often seems to have become absorbed by some private ritual, meandering in quiet introspection, picking over simple phrases at considerable length, all the while grappling with the task of kissing time set out in the title." - The Wire --- Tracklisting: 1. Besando El Tiempo (7./8.2.1995) 46:032. Besando El Tiempo (9./10.2.1995) 47:19 ---   Recorded: Haan (2015/2016)

"Issued under Bondi's name, he's joined by his Diatribes partner D'Incise on this composition, the former playing Indian harmonium, melodica, harmonica and pitch pipes, the latter Indian harmonium, electric organ and melodica. From the instrumentation alone, you get the idea that you're going to be experiencing, among other things, some rich drone-oriented music and yes, that's one aspect of 'euhesma, 2017'. Euhesma, incidentally, is a genus of bee and one wonders whether at least part of the piece is a meditation on that species' apparent decline in the world." - Brian Olewnick --- Tracklisting: 1. Euhesma, 2017 - 40:18 --- Cyril Bondi / harmonium, melodica, harmonica, pitch pipesd'incise / harmonium, organ, melodica ---

“Not since the early days of MC5 at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit, circa 1968, had there been such an organic melding of sheer metalesque maelstrom and free jazz. These archival recordings from the legendary punk club CBGB capture a moment in time when open-minded musicians from the ‘downtown scene’ were exploring the possibility of bringing Lou Reed’s feedback-infested Metal Machine Music together with Albert Ayler’s Love Cry. Dissipated Face guitarist Kurt “Hologram” Ralske and special guest saxophonist Daniel Carter provided that implausible link between punk rock and avant garde jazz on these 1986 live recordings. Fueled by the throbbing rhythms of Steve “X Dream” Popkin and Ben “Face” Munves, who alternated on bass and drums, Ralske’s twisted, thrashing power chords and shrieking licks blend with Carter’s cathartic alto sax wailing to make the perfect union of disparate worlds." “Ralske would go on to attain a certain level of indie rock fame with Ultra Vivid Scene and subsequently make an impact as a London-based producer-conceptualist-avant-popmeister and visual artist. Carter would become one of the most ubiquitous figures on New York’s free jazz scene, recording with William Parker, David S. Ware, Billy Bang, Alan Silva and Matthew Shipp and the cooperative bands Test and Other Dimensions in Music. But for this one moment back in 1986, their paths crossed with bandmates Popkin and Munves, and the results were frighteningly intense.” – Bill Milkowski.  “Don’t let the Raymond Pettibon cover fool you—this ain’t exactly some SST discard that cluttered up the amerindie record collections of the late-eighties! Dissipated Face, although they could have made it as a fringe signing to that infamous label, are a tad different’n the reams of collegeboy experimental bleats that were getting a whole lotta hosannas from cloistered clods like myself. As if you actually knew, Dissipated Face were a hot trio that was romping through the post-fun era of NYC rock back when they laid these sides down at CBGB on July 31st of 1986, and their mix of everything from free jazz and late-seventies avant-prog to punk rock made for some of the wildest mergings of the form since Red Transistor. Nothing as out-there as that group, but better’n many a similar-minded excursion into freedom aesthetics. What’s best is that none other’n noted avant saxist himself Daniel Carter sat in giving a particularly Albert Ayler-ish air to these excursions, so if you were a fan of this guy’s various endeavors on the stage of the CBGB Lounge during the final days of Hilly you’ll be glad to know that he was in on the punk jazz game for a longer time’n you could’ve dreamed!” – Christopher Stigliano, Black To Comm “Oddball discovery of a live meeting of an early group led by Ultra Vivid Scene’s Kurt Raiske with the always amazing Daniel Carter guesting. Carter’s on sax here, and the blend – right near the end of New York City’s post-SIN Club trajectory – is a very cool collision between free jazz and lateperiod scum-rock readymades. Why was this not known of before?” – Byron Coley, The Wire “If you’re like me, and you got into standard rock music that had choruses and verses and bridges as a child, but always longed for something more extreme, you probably remember the moment you first heard Septic Death or Albert Ayler or Wolf Eyes or Mr. Bungle or whatever it was that destroyed the musical parameters previously established by your brain. I bet if I stumbled into CBGB’s in 1986, everyone probably would’ve been like “who the hell let a five year-old in here, where are his parents?”, but supposing I was a teenager or something, Dissipated Face probably would’ve cracked my skull open with their flailing, post-no-wave free-rock assault. They sound like one of those early ’80s downtown NY groups like Lounge Lizards or Material or Golden Palominos, had they crashed into Reagan Youth on the cab ride over with the few surviving members improvising live.” - Yellow Green Red “Frantic free punk, that reminds me of Easter Monkeys, then Flipper, then Pere Ubu… it’s wound up post VU sounds from the streets of NYC when that still meant something, inflections of no wave spurting saxophone and weirdly HC-esque guitars, but the swagger and fuck-you take over and overpower the skronk…It’s reminiscent of MC5′s incursions into jazz, not jam Ginn band shit, but fucked up on PCP Les Dirtbags out for blood, armed with Sun Ra and the Dead Boys. Sick Pettibon cover art too. Eat it or beat it!” – Layla Gibbon, MaximumRockNRoll “In the mid-1980s, Dissipated Face were one of a number of groups weaned on New Music Distribution Service catalogs, cut-out bins, and ready to occupy something of a vacuum. Punk rock, prog, free jazz, funk, modern composition and Downtown art scum were all part of the landscape and exactly what went into their melting pot. Consisting of guitarist Kurt “Hologram” Ralske and Stephen “X. Dream” Popkin and Ben “Face” Munves trading off bass, vocals and drums, their approach ranged from cut-throat punk slop to unhinged bluesy sleaze (the wonderfully bizarre “Streets Of New York” with its hardcore breakdowns). The guest appearance of alto saxophonist Daniel Carter on these four archival cuts recorded live at CBGB in 1986 adds an extra dose of fire to the proceedings. A regular in the groups of bassist-composer William Parker and a fixture in the New York free jazz environment since the mid-70s, his jubilant squall nudges Ralske’s wiry, feedback-drenched statements to unbridled heights. Given more room to stretch it would be interesting to hear what these players could accomplish, but the seven-inch format gives these tracks an extreme urgency, as though if one blinked the music’s gifts would be lost. Thanks are due to Minneapolis’ Roaratorio Records for releasing this snapshot (replete with Raymond Pettibon artwork) of an ecstatic DIY moment.” – Clifford Allen, Tiny Mix Tapes

A revelatory debut album by a 64 year old pianist/composer may beg the question: where has Carei Thomas been all this time? Born in a culturally diverse neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Thomas cut his musical teeth in Chicago during a particularly fertile period for that city: gigging with Sun Ra as an improvising vocalist in 1959-60, joining up with the AACM for one hot minute in 1966, co-founding a group called The Light with Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre (which also included Jerome Cooper and Wadada Leo Smith), and forming the compositional concepts that would provide a springboard for tireless exploration in the ensuing decades. Thomas moved to Minneapolis in 1972, where, in the mode of Horace Tapscott, he eschewed the industry-driven career path, choosing instead to work within the Twin Cities’ community. Recorded live with a group that features, most notably, the unfettered talents of Curlew saxophonist George Cartwright, Mining Our Bid’ness represents the range of Thomas’ no-boundaries Feel Free Ensemble, running the gamut from gorgeous Ellingtonian ballads to combustible free jazz testifying. Packaged in a mini-LP gatefold sleeve, with cover artwork by Judith Lindbloom, and liner notes by, among other contributors, Douglas Ewart and Anthony Cox. Until now, Thomas’ name has been known mostly to fellow musicians (David Murray, Sunny Murray and James Newton are counted among his admirers); this recording serves as the first opportunity for the general public to hear this important figure in the world of creative improvised music. “Thomas displays an intuitive element for inspiring action from the musicians who surround him….on this series of mostly quintet performances, he works wonders as a stimulating wellspring of ideas.” – Frank Rubolino, One Final Note “Like Duke Ellington, Thomas conducts via the piano, using it to cue and cajole the ensemble… while his approach is considerably more freewheeling than Ellington’s, the end result is equally appealing.” – Rod Smith, Minneapolis Star Tribune “His compositions, in true AACM style, are harmonically complex and allow for numerous changes of tempo and instrumentation… ‘Tippy/One Ahead’ says more in nine minutes than most musicians do in a whole album…” – Dan Warburton, The Wire “[Thomas'] user-friendly compositions lighten the theoretical rigor of avant-jazz with playful humor and friendly tunefulness.” – Cecile Cloutier, City Pages “It seems that every few years, some unknown treasure of American improvised music pops up after decades of toil in relative obscurity… this is fine, passionate music… a pleasant surprise, and [it] will surely please listeners as it did me.” – Jason Bivins,Cadence “…[Thomas'] phrasing caresses the ear and his melodies have a yearning quality that makes Cartwright and Sandberg’s in-out-and-back-in solos sound right at home…well worth hearing.” – Francois Couture, All Music Guide

"Second album by the dream pairing of Joe McPhee and Chris Corsano. A follow up to Under A Double Moon, which featured McPhee’s alto saxophone, Scraps And Shadows finds him largely on tenor. Recorded live in Milwaukee in 2011, the album consists of seven dedicatory pieces, from the delicate balladry of “For Adrienne P” to the appropriately combustible “For Han Bennink.” Corsano’s stupendously detailed drumming and McPhee’s free-soul love cries weave a master latticework together. Cover art by Judith Lindbloom."  “Multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee is 72 years old, far enough along that he could be forgiven for kicking back and letting people put laurels upon his brown. But as Fred Anderson, one of the seven dedicatees on this LP of dedications, was reminded every night that he walked off the stage of his club and went right back to stocking the bar, the free-jazz receiving line is a short one.
McPhee knows this, too. Like Anderson, he’s carrying on as he always has, pushing himself to evolve and proving his mettle anew each time he plays. And he makes a special point of celebrating not just the people who’ve come before him, but the people who are making things happen now. Two of the people honored on Scraps and Shadows are no longer with us, but the other five still have earthly hands to receive the bouquets that McPhee and his much younger partner Chris Corsano have picked for them.
But for these two men, paying tribute does not mean making nice; there are plenty of thorns in these bunches of flowers. Sticking mostly to tenor saxophone, McPhee pushes his horn beyond the bounds of convention; he sings through it, or along with it, obtaining otherworldly polytonal effects that’ll put the hairs right up on the back of your neck. He also plumbs his sax for vibrato-laden lines that arc out from whatever cloud the Ayler brothers smile down from these days and gnarled utterances so compacted it’ll take a dozen listens to decode them. He’s more frankly lyrical on his other instruments, using a patiently expressed pocket trumpet melody to set up a fractious tenor-drums duel on “For Paul Flaherty,” and honoring artist/musician/bartender Adrienne Pierlusi with a brief, tender clarinet air.
Corsano is scrupulously attuned to McPhee’s wavelength, using a light rain of cymbal tones to ratchet up haunted anguish of McPhee’s cries on “For Jim Pepper” and powering the saxophonist with gale-force bursts on the unfettered closer “For Han Bennink” before pulling back, way back, to erect the transparent but sturdy scaffold of stick-work for him to ascend at the tune’s end.” – Bill Meyer, Dusted “Scraps And Shadows is a new duo LP with Joe McPhee [and Chris Corsano]. This time, Mr. McPhee plays mostly tenor sax, and his deep, gurgling tone hits tons of places — from pure R&B honk to ripping fiery gusts of sheer overblown freedom. The pieces are dedicated to different saxophonists and drummers, and the results are a lush, grounded and highly jazzic LP.” – Thurston Moore & Byron Coley, Arthur “…a lyrical and tough expansion on the art of McPhee and Corsano.” – Clifford Allen, Ni Kantu

Both the 1970 Hope College premiere, performed by a 14-piece ensemble, and a 1977 recording from Wesleyan University, performed by a 43-piece orchestra. The first commercially available release of this eerie, beautiful, and important Oliveros work. “Shortly after it was published in 1968 the SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas fell into my hands. Intrigued by the egalitarian feminist principles set forth in the Manifesto, I wanted to incorporate them in the structure of a new piece that I was composing. The women’s movement was surfacing and I felt the need to express my resonance with this energy. Marilyn Monroe had taken her own life. Valerie Solanas had attempted to take the life of Andy Warhol. Both women seemed to be desperate and caught in the traps of inequality: Monroe needed to be recognized for her talent as an actress. Solanas wished to be supported for her own creative work. Commissioned by the Music Department of Hope College, Holland Michigan, To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of Their Desperation had its premiere in 1970. Though everyone knew Marilyn Monroe hardly anyone recognized Valerie Solanas or took her Manifesto seriously. I brought the names of these two women together in the title of the piece to draw attention to their inequality and to dedicate the piece.” – Pauline Oliveros. “Much of Oliveros’s aesthetic is best understood as environment, areas of aural doldrums providing momentary and slightly queasy resting points, like the requisite standing back from a massive architectural work to take in the whole before venturing back in. In To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe, the hallmarks of Oliveros’s later philosophy and aesthetic are brought into direct play with politically-charged expressionism. Kudos to Minneapolis-based Roaratorio Records for uncovering such a significant work, a piece of music that will probably scare the living shit out of you. Valerie Solanas would be proud.” – Clifford Allen, Paris Transatlantic “…it’s beautiful and strange, emotionally articulate, and I also believe it succeeds as a much less stilted approach to open composition than Cardew, Cage or Stockhausen. It is truly natural and unforced organic music, semi-scored and collaborative, making efficient use of the energy of the musicians she works with.” – Ed Pinsent, The Sound Projector **** 4 stars : “Oliveros’ magnum feminist opus has a protracted tonal structure comparable to the work of Giacinto Scelsi. Its tenebrous expressivity is beautifully matched by the cover art…” - All Music Guide --- To Valerie Solanas And Marilyn Monroe In Recognition Of Their Desperation: for any group or groups of instrumentalists (6 to large orchestra), Smith Publications, c1977. 1970 Performance: at Wichers Hall, Hope College, Hope, Michigan; 6 October 1970. 1977 Performance: at Crowell Concert Hall, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut; 7 April 1977.

Since 2003, NYC’s Talibam! have been charting a course through the improv waters in a way that few other groups can pull off. Rock, jazz, noise and all stops in between collide in an aggressive mix that defines free music in the best sense of the term: nothing is deemed out of bounds. Too much fun to be a po-faced postmodern exercise, and too expertly played to be sunk in a morass of good intentions, The New Nixon Tapes hurtles through two side-long pieces in an agile cascade of rhythmic and melodic ideas. Kevin Shea (drums) and Matt Mottel (synthesizer) have worked with Cooper-Moore and Rhys Chatham, among others; here they’re joined by master saxophonist / trumpeter / flautist Daniel Carter. Recorded live in the WFMU studios. Digital download coupon included.“…Mottel and Shea move so effortlessly across the musical map, from ESP / BYG brainfry to psychedelic drone to truly evil boogie (try side two), there’s no point in trying to pigeonhole what they do anymore… exciting stuff.” – Dan Warburton, Paris Transatlantic “The synth and percussion duet of Talibam! is well-served by the addition of reedsman Daniel Carter, a fixture of the NYC free jazz scene… Melodies shoot in every direction but for as free as it is, it’s expertly guided and adheres to a vicscous vision.” – Justin Wunsch, Dusted “[Shea] appropriates the spare detail of John Stevens and distracted antics of a young Han Bennink in a churning, ornate approach to free time. The ensemble is quite well-integrated; Carter’s language, while hard-bitten, is equally that of a slightly differential colorist, so his keening exhortations are textural flits rather than blustery overblowing. To a degree, Mottel and Shea appear to soften their playing, foregoing a penchant for raucousness and knitting together an intensively active instrumental landscape… The New Nixon Tapes offers another equally curious side to Talibam’s art, all of which confounds image and expectation to a truly musical point.” – Clifford Allen, The Austinist “All in all this is really rather enjoyable and will appeal to those who don’t mind some electricity and the invasion of Rock-punk elements into an out soup.” – Grego Applegate Edwards, Cadence

Rag captures the best from a series of freely improvised meetings between saxophonist George Cartwright and percussionist Davu Seru, recorded at various Minneapolis venues over the course of 2009. Cartwright – longtime leader of Curlew, and owner of a musical c.v. which includes Ornette Coleman, Half Japanese, Alex Chilton and Loren Mazzacane – can be restlessly melodic or jaggedly guttural on the reeds, although his bedrock lyricism is never far from the surface. Seru’s playing is atrompe l’oreille marriage of forward motion and suspended stasis; over the past decade, he’s performed with Milo Fine, Paul Metzger and Evan Parker, among others. From the anthemic opening of “Titus” to the miniature coda of “I Think Eudora Knows,” Rag is a lively dialogue between two masters of their craft. “Cartwright is a protean reed player. On tenor he is capable of reminding the listener of Rollins one minute and Ayler the next. On alto, the Dolphy tinge is evident one minute but there’s also the impassioned melodic streak of Julius Hemphill. But these are all reference points. Cartwright ultimately sounds like himself, obviously a multi-faceted player. He’s well matched by Seru. I suspect if Seru were based in New York instead of Minneapolis, he’d be on everybody’s first call list. He’s a remarkable free player, imbuing the music with a constant motion: ebbing and flowing, responding to and instigating Cartwright to go into different areas with subtle shifts in texture and tempo. These two respond to each other like they’ve been playing together for years. The duets are varied and Cartwright’s shifting of saxophones assures diversity. The only disappointment is that this wasn’t a 2-LP set.” – Robert Iannapollo, Cadence “Across five improvisations, Cartwright is heard on soprano in addition to his usual alto and tenor saxophones. Seru is an interesting foil for Cartwright, start-stop jitters and sound-rhythm cut with an extremely broad stroke, he surges, piles and disappears against hard-bitten, heel-digging tenor on “Titus,” as reedy lines bunch, billow and shout, flaming out and recharging. “Saint Joe to Himself” lopes and wanders at the outset, Cartwright’s soprano hanging behind Seru’s startling rumble and thrash before sending spikes through the mass.The centerpiece of the album is the 18 minute “Troubles like Old Dirt,” which takes up most of the second side, Cartwright’s alto in bubbly, flywheel-charged cycles that recall Oliver Lake at his fiercest. Seru drops out to allow the reedman a space to explore the clicks of his pads and spin out soft, breathy tendrils and terse patter. That patter becomes a bevy of bitter screams as the drummer’s taiko-like jabs and ceremonial weight return to encircle and shove off Cartwright’s volleys, which shift from coiled multiphonics to a sinewy blues processional before reveling in jaunty hops. Rag is an excellent duo, finding two musicians engaged in an epic conversation and tug of wits, breath and rhythm.” – Clifford Allen, All About Jazz

“Orienting Response was written specifically for Cristian Alvear at his request. In writing the piece I wanted to see if I could create the same kind of focus and intensity I have created with percussion instruments using an instrument (the nylon stringed guitar) that is naturally not well-equipped to produce the type of timbres or high dynamic levels that I have worked with up to this point.” ... The score Orienting Response (2015-16), written by Sarah Hennies specifically for Chilean guitarist Cristian Alvear, is composed of six parts with short instructions describing some unusual techniques, such as: Play as accurately and consistently as possible but with the assumption that “mistakes” are inevitable. Allow “mistakes” to occur, do not attempt to correct them. All sounds should ring freely (as long as is possible) unless otherwise indicated. All timings and tempi are approximate and flexible. 

“The recordings were made over a period of a couple of years. The windmill is located about a mile north of the town where i live, on what i assume is ranch land used for raising cattle. It was once used to pull water from underground to fill a couple of large tanks nearby. It's in a bad state and no longer in use. There are two large crows nests at the top, and the inner workings are laying on the ground next to it.” The recordings were made using a mini-disc recorder and hand made contact microphone. They are monaural recordings. Jeph Jerman is appearing in a variety of musical groups and collaborative projects across different genres for more than three decades. From the nineties, we can see in his extensive work a great interest in the sole act of listening. Rather than a classical musician, he is more suggestive of a sound wanderer who sets off daily from his home to the surrounding Arizona desert (characteristically named Sonoran desert), where he records sound fragments or collects found objects which he uses in his improvisations and performances. As a contemplative walker without a set destination, he is interested in the pure sound without references. To what we listen is not so important, what matters most is the time, place and the way we listen. Unlike other field recording artists, Jerman is not interested in the aesthetic richness or sonic variety, but simplicity, gentle differences, vibrations, moderation, and the primordial animalism on the quiet edge of organic and inorganic nature. The 34° 111' 3" N 111° 95' 4" W named field recording is a collection of three pieces, in which Jerman maps a specific place and which carefully reflect his life philosophy. It’s a recording of an abandoned windmill in different times, stages of decomposition and weather conditions. The symbol of the circle and rotation and the moaning material shaped by nature elements subtly fit in the comprehensive sound diary and environment where Jerman moves and lives. "These days I don't try to evoke anything. I make sound that'll hopefully be listened to.“ Jeph Jerman has already collaborated with artists like Jon Mueller, Ben Owen, Taku Sugimoto, Tony Whitehead, John Hudak, Bernhard Günter, Greg Davis, Tim Barnes, Aaron Dilloway, and others. 

"In the two compositions for vibraphone she wrote for mappa editions, Sarah Hennies analyses the psychoacoustic dimensions of space. Sisters is a sonic exploration which opens the space between the rough walls of the church, an infinite pulse penetrating into every crinkle, hole and fold. In the sense of her quote "When you pulse one note on a vibraphone for 20 minutes, why do you need to do anything else?", we witness the fullness of one single tone, disappearing resonances and gentle changes, which reveal various performative, spatial, psychic and listening situations. Sisters was a challenge for Lenka Novosedlíková, who is slovak composer, performer and organizer. Novosedlíková is well known distinctive figure of the youngest composers generation in Slovakia. She moves across contemporary composition and interpretation (percussion instruments), improv or electronic music projects. She is member of Cluster Ensemble which is renowned Slovak ensemble with many international achievements.  We discovered the church in Kyjatice three years ago during our irregular wanderings across southern Slovakia. We were completely enchanted by this well hidden medieval building standing over the village, surrounded by sunny fields and dense forests. We asked ourselves how we could bring life again to the church, how we could fill it with sound which would not interrupt the contemplative character of that specific environment. The result should have been the sound intervention which would awaken and reveal every corner inside of the church. Just for a moment, we wanted to caress all the monumental fresco paintings, creaking wooden benches, pipes of howling organ, hand painted ceiling and carved saints by sound which could release them from the long guarded and abandoned silence.  The church in Kyjatice is a sacred place of mappa editions. It blesses all our activities. It's a place of inevitable distance from our everyday life. Here we find distance from our everyday lives. By buying a recording you contribute to better accessibility and maintenance of this significant Roman-gothic monument with valuable fresco decorations.  --- composed by Sarah Hennies performed by Lenka Novosedlíková  ---Recorded by Jonáš Gruska. Mixed and mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Design by Jakub Juhás and Zoltán Czakó. Cover photography by Zoltán Czakó. Liner notes by Jennie Gottschalk. Special thanks to Janka Miháliková, Nina Pacherová and Lukáš Ďurian. Released by mappa as MAP011 in 2018 Supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council

"IQ+1’s third album, titled Conversaphone Plus, as the result of several séances recorded at the end of 2017. Every submersion in its depths is an unrepeatable experience. The organic sonic material is constantly contracting and expanding, adapting itself to the listener’s context, escaping beyond the horizon, creating mimicries, and enticing us to bubbling, popping, and jingling polyrhythms to then release its protective toxins. All six pieces boil on the narrow edge of chaotic decomposition and celestial order in which every sonic detail has its precisely determined position. Field recordings permeate the instruments on an equal footing, making it difficult to identify the sound, instrument, or player, so that each time the record is turned over, a new adventure begins. Federsel (B4, Handa Gote, Gurun Gurun) took care of the connective tissue between the pieces and the balanced post-production architecture. Avoiding irritating instrumental exhibitionism, and egocentric deafness, Conversaphone Plus is nothing less than an uncompromising electro-acoustic testimony to the vitality of the Czech improvising scene. And it is nothing more than an attempt to connect sonic geology with astral listening. Open the window a little – a messenger from the spacecraft known as IQ+1 is descending through the opening." ---  George Bagdasarov / vintage turntable, FX, baritone sax Veronika Hladká / violin  Jana Kneschke / violin  Jaroslav Tarnovski / synths, electronics, percussion, field recordingsPetr Vrba / clarinet, trumpet, electronics  Michal Zbořil / analog synths, electronics, Indian harmonium Kateřina Bilejová / body weather  --- Recorded by Federsel @ Divadlo Ponec, Prague (1-5) Školská 28, Prague (6) Mixed & mastered by Federsel @ CSN, Prague Artwork by Christian Orlock & design by Kella Translated by Ian Mikyska Thanks to Lukáš Jiřička, Divadlo Ponec, Jakub Juhás, Josef Jindrák Special thanks to Federsel 

“This recording is based on a particular geographic area of Sydney: the industrial zone around Sydenham Train station. As with many inner city industrial areas in large cities all over the western world, this place is ripe for redevelopment. However, in this case, due to the zone being directly underneath the flight path to Sydney airport, as well as being flood prone due to environmental factors, unscrupulous property developers are not able to completely gut the place and erect hideous apartments. What is interesting to me, and what this recording aims to capture, is that these factors – the aeroplanes and the puddles – act as a form of resistance to the development.” (MP Hopkins) MP Hopkins is a hidden treasure from Australia, a sound artist known for his varied music projects and strange mix of lo-fi urban field recordings and intimate bedroom experiments. Sonic details of empty streets from close neighbourhood, subtle intervention and fragments of lonely voice comments are reminding distinctive forms of sound journalism or a diary for night adventurers. Aeroplanes & Puddles follows the previous Traipse - Marrickville (2015) album which is Hopkins's starting point for his walks along the Sydney suburb. Mappa presents the sonic evidence of this opposition; the non-human voices of resistance that the aeroplanes and water speak with in this acoustic environment. The work features field recordings of the area garnished with a text narrated by Hopkins which combines fragments of the 2017 Australian Federal Budget speech and parts of ‘The Powerhouse’ – a radio play by Richard Packer (Gargoyle Poets series, 1972).”Feel free floating in the holy sound voyeurism and thorough collection of evidence from the other world at the same time." --- Recorded, mixed and mastered by MP Hopkins. Artwork and design by Jakub Juhás, Richard Čecho. Photos by Nina Pacherová. Released by mappa as MAP09 in 2018

"Mappa editions presents special project of Bruno Duplant and Pedro Chambel duo which connects field recordings (2 CD) and Duplant's photographic project emerging from the same concept. “All my new pieces with field recordings are "autofictions/self-fictions". Field recordings, like always with me came from lot of places. I don't care about where were recorded the sound, but much more how to create new entities, territories (the self-fictions/autofictions), which are both fictive, intimate and personal. I like the idea that listeners will enter in that fictive places like if they were real, like they did with a great novel.” Bruno Duplant is sound enthusiast, composer, improviser and multi-instrumentalist living in the north of France. In his work he is creating new fictional universes and uncharted territories using many field recordings collected in different parts of world. Architecture and culture of these sonic environments is created in two ways. First one is listening and collecting of surrounding sounds, not especially “natural” ones, but more “cultural” ones. Second one is shaping the sound and the composition itself. “Recording and editing are two different states, one more passive for me (the recording) and the other more active (the work on the sounds, the composition itself). The collection of sounds can be seen as fishing, an artisanal harvest in which one can have good surprises and less good ones. The whole approach is about accepting to make do with this. With this method of work I have to accept the hollow periods, failures and even the doubt.” In this case the role of active listening is shifted from recording in certain time and space towards studio work and to finding new sound elements, relations and spaces. “I see and name my compositional process (whether for instruments or for field recordings) as an "attempt at organizing chance". The composition allows me to assemble more or less logically and incongruously the different sounds collected. I never try to reproduce the sounds that surround me in a logical and precise way. I try to create something new, a new fictional entity that I have named “autofiction”, "self-fiction".” The result is discreet witness of everyday life, where the listening ear is trying to decode and create an imaginative model of well-known place. It is a timeless place, which is possible to visit again and again and explore its hidden corners and details. The orientation in space is not easy since whole surroundings is misted by electronic sounds of Portuguese musician Pedro Chambel. “The use of discreet electronic sounds came from the idea about to ask oneself the question: where does those sounds came from? Are they from the field recordings? Some sounds came from there, some other not, but which ones? I also like the idea of using those sounds as some disruptive elements, like in most of stories, novels or movies.” Duplant is autodidact who following and renewing concepts of John Cage, Luc Ferrari, Rolf Julius or Toshiya Tsunoda. In his work we can also find parallels to literary techniques and space or to forms of reading. “First of all, I am teacher, a librarian teacher. I only make music when I have time, in the evening, on the week-end, in my holidays. I spend most of my time surrounded in books. I have this opportunity. Some authors, some texts, some works have become great sources of inspiration for me. This is the case for all the poetry of Francis Ponge, the texts of Georges Perec, the philosophy of Gaston Bachelard. So, my life, my practices are not compartmentalized. Besides collaborative sound projects duo Duplant/Chambel is also known for their curatorial work in delicious label Rhizome.s. In past they collaborated with Ilia Belorukov, Lance Austin Olsen, Barry Chabala, Nate Wooley, Ryoko Akama, Manfred Werder. Quotes are taken from interview between Bruno Duplant and Tobias Fischer for 15 Questions. www.15questions.net/interview/fifteen-questions-interview-bruno-duplant/page-1/   --- Bruno Duplant / composition, field recordings & discreet electronics Pedro Chambel / discreet electronics  --- Dedicated to Georges Perec. Assembled in Waziers during 2016/2017. Mixed & mastered by Bruno Duplant. Photos from self-fictions/autofictions series by Bruno Duplant. Design by Jakub Juhás. Thanks to Alžbeta Halušková.

  "The Blue Horse is a beautiful strange journey through a landscape where little is familiar but all are welcome. Made from predominantly acoustic sources, The Blue Horse gracefully hisses, puffs, wheezes, whirls, and clunks it’s way through a series of distinct musical and non musical environments. Sounding both at times like a dark and stormy night… and “an elephant trying to get laid”, the ambiguous style of The Blue Horse conceals the artists’ unsettling, fantastical and quietly humorous sensibility. Whilst The Blue Horse lacks any obvious precursors, it’s elemental and environmental leanings potentially tread a path initially mapped out by Moniek Darge and Godfried-Willem Raes in the works coming out of the Logos Foundation in Ghent, Belgium in the mid 80’s. The Blue Horse is the debut recording from Sholto Dobie and Mark Harwood and features a guest appearance from cellist Judith Hamann.  Sholto Dobie is an artist and performer born in Edinburgh and living in London. His solo output is marked by live performances that are characteristically delicate, evocative and absurd. He uses his own instruments, crudely assembled from materials such as reeds, whistles, bin bags, fans and air compressors, alongside loose performative structures, to respond to places and situations. He plays in Al Fresco (with Lia Mazzari & Tom White) and regularly collaborates with Ben Pritchard. He has also worked with Ashley Paul. He continues to run the event series Muckle Mouth which he founded in 2014. Mark Harwood is a musician and performer born in Ferntree Gully and living in London. His output veers towards uncanny audio both delicate and unsettling whilst his performances rely on teasing out and playing with the mood embedded within any given environment and audience situation. He has collaborated with Graham Lambkin, Aine O’Dwyer, Timo Van Luijk and MP Hopkins and runs the Penultimate Press label which brings forth this very release." --- “People say he looks blue under the moon”, is what Mhairi told me when I asked her about it. I was walking along the roadside with my partner in the Cabrach, one of the most remote areas in northern Scotland. At a bend in the road, something directed my attention towards the hill and when I looked up I could make out a silvery-blue creature, moving slowly and gracefully, obscured by the trees. It wasn’t clear at first, but I soon clocked that it was a horse and I took a picture of it. Earlier in the day I came across a fairy ring of field blewits, mushrooms otherwise known as blue-legs, so I knew something was up. By the time it was dark (around 4pm in November) we were the only customers in the Grouse Inn, a long-standing middle-of-nowhere tea room and whisky bar, beautifully cared for by Wilma McBain and her daughter Mhairi. Noticing the leather harnesses on display I asked Mhairi about the horse we’d seen earlier in the woods. I was somewhat enchanted just talking about it, and she wasn’t surprised. Later in the evening, we ended up behind the bar in the refrigeration room (where Mhairi paints), she showed us her painting of the blue horse. I didn’t sleep much that night.” – Sholto Dobie, 2019 ---

'Who will listen to aches that Everyone has’ is a telaesthetic document of disquiet, distance, and disintegrating memory. Careful mantels, rumours of summer, a nocturne, the black inside; Septembers wither, sentiments wane, the chamber-band plays.  ---MB / violin, piano, spokes, hotel bell, lighthouse bell LR / cello ML – pianette LF / cutlery SM / silhouette  ---

Exceptional first release from much talked about trio, Triple Negative: Madame Tlank & Clinical Wasteman & others. Bayern Tāmaki Makaurau/northsouth London, since 1989/2003/2016. "Nether neither either ether [C.B.]. Bad bad grace back for a death-affirming day. Hard-to-Reach claimants born in the wrong place (Bayern Tāmaki Makaurau, Arkhangel district), put out too tender & possessed by spite.3 x negation = 15 years Philosophie Queen, 18 Meanstricken, meaning totgeschlagen! No end to the keratodermic bouzouki, knock-off Glock, plastic reed, Tascam Spiel. There’s nothing not superficial about it. An animus nursed with bad bad grace."

First in a series of two releases unveiling the previously unissued soundtracks made for the films of Ursula Reuter Christiansen by her partner and collaborator Henning Christiansen. The Executioner (Skarpretteren) is Ursula’s first film from 1971 and is now considered one of the most important works of early Danish feminist art. A highly praised recent show at the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen highlighted the pertinent themes and ongoing urgency which lies within this bold symbolic work. The exquisite score is one of the key neo-romantic works in Henning’s far reaching output. A deeply melancholic set of vocal based works which place the listener deep within the tension and despair of Ursula’s themes. This unique vinyl presentation also features nature sounds recorded for the film on the island of Moen along with surprising works that defy anything else in Henning’s output.

Kreuzmusik was commissioned by the Bonner Kunstverein Gallery, Kunstfond, Germany in August 1989, for inclusion in their 'Taking Fluxus Around for a Drive' happening, (also featuring performances by Dieter Daniels, George Maciunas, Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen, Joe Jones and others) and originally issued on cassette in 1990 by Neue Bildende Kunst in an edition of 100 copies. "in 1967 Joseph Beuys and i travelled to darmstadt for a performance of hauptstrom fluxus from 1:00 -11:00pm (10 hours) on the 20th march. hauptstrom was basically a new ritual, which is how a lot of people saw it at the time, and later on too. beuys used his own body as a deeply primal human language, and i made 10 hours of ritual music using a number of tape recorders. and obviously we wanted to make a completely new space for hauptstrom. the space at franz dahlem's at 7 aha street was small and there was even less space for the rather large audience because beuys made a roughly 7cm high rampart of margarine around his own performance space; and my main motif was a knocking sound, like the sound of a heart beating, which i used to create peace in the space, separate from the other more energetic sound-music passages. when i got the invitation for 'taking fluxus around for a drive' i immediately remembered that darmstadt exhibition in 1967. it's not all that far from denmark, 150 km to bonn-darmstadt, but a timespan of 22 years. i thought of jörg immendorf's lidl-bundestag, which you could say landed in the roses outside the real bundestag. this poetic, political act impressed me at the time, because it showed that our world could basically be quite different. i decided straight away that i wanted to make kreuzmusik, and i was also sure that no other fluxus people would come up with the same idea. most of my fluxus friends go for homo ludens and that's fine, but i wanted to feel the intimacy again in a small space, i wanted to make a scandinavian ritual in fluxid behandlung. i took my stone age gramophone (which really does play stones) called my friend ernst ludwig kretzer from hamburg and arranged with him that he would operate a time delay on my tapes and voice so that i could ritualise freely.

in kunstfond i didn't make a mound of margarine - of course not - instead i made one from flour (bread), in the middle of this was the stone age gramophone and hanging on the wall there were strange crosses, made out of socks and clothes hangers; as well as this there was a headless figure of christ and a toy cessna plane in a little canary cage.

i began with my piece io am en vogel as a 'starter' (about 20 minutes), then i performed zum preis des fluxus, which had been my contribution to the wiesbaden fluxus 82 catalogue, then i threw green stones into a bucket of water, then to the accompaniment of the eurasienstab -fluxorum organum music i played a green cutting sheet that was hanging on my chest, then to european zen i played 3 glass bowls with red sticks, the bells and knocking für das alte russland (for old russia). then everything went dark and i lit candles while my deep groundnote played. after 5 minutes played the lights came on again and my groundnote led into the sheep composition (sheep instead of fiddles); i used my green fat-fiddle to make little twittering sounds; for me, sheep mean peace and insight. this soundworld then lead into the composition with 180 hammer blows against war monkeys. i hammered very sharply and powerfully. beuys once wrote a piece with the title: der dumme hammer tritt auf (the stupid hammer performs), that's how it should be - against the war monkeys, logical. this sequence then finally lead into peaceful bird twitterings in a piece that i call die freiheit ist um die ecke (freedom is around the corner). during this i slowly immersed the cesna plane inside the canary cage in a tub of water , after i had flown around in my own space for a while. and that was the end of the whole seance. it lasted over an hour. - Henning Christiansen, 1990.” Thanks to The Henning Christiansen Estate and Ursula Block.

Two previously unreleased works from the late Danish composer, musician, publisher, artist and performer. Rødhætte (1985) is a rendition of Little Red Riding Hood featuring Ursula Reuter Christiansen as narrator. All the hallmarks of Henning’s unique approach to music/sound appear as the tale goes deeper into the depths of animalistic frenzy.  Ruinmusic (1984) inhabits the last breath off the piano housed within the former Marienborg Manor, an estate once on the Danish island of Møn. Prior to the destruction of the estate Henning Christiansen played a final haunting melody before the instrument was dumped down in the dirt.  Artwork by Ursula Reuter Christiansen.

Sold out as a CD, we're pleased to add this classic duo's second release to the shop. Dada-da follows the debut vinyl release (also on Leo) Ammo, and was recorded in London by Emanem's Martin Davidson.  --- Phil Minton / vocals Roger Turner / percussion --- Tracklisting: 1. Ah Ha - 2:192. Wa Wa - 3:503. Lala La La La - 5:184. Car - 4:475. Za Za - 10:386. Chacha Cha - 13:197. Ba Ba - 3:588. La Du Da - 5:369 . Dee Da - 4:3310. Da Da - 0:35 --- Recorded at the Singapore Pedang, London, 18 January, 1993 by Martin Davidson. Artwork by L. Denis. Remastered by D. Bernez.  

"This recording was released in 1984 as an LP with the same title and was unavailable for fifteen odd years. In artistic terms, it was a shocking statement from Phil Minton and Roger Turner which scared a lot of people. Now, years later, the recording sounds as if it has been recorded today. It has not lost any of its artistic qualities and stood the test of time. The work of great originality and integrity." "Upon its initial LP release, this 1984 improvising session turned more than a few heads. And it would take a fertile imagination for one to reconcile the duo's rendition of Monk's "'Round About Midnight with the original, for example. Armed with boyish enthusiasm, the artists pursue a wanton spirit through their surrealistic game plan. Of course, British freestyle vocalist Phil Minton is a well-known improviser since the advent of this date with his fellow countryman, percussionist Roger Turner. But this recording still resides as an attention-grabbing document." - All About Jazz

"Solo performance by the brilliant pianist paying tribute to John Coltrane. Recorded in London, Logan Hall, 1987. Seven pieces, four of them by Coltrane. This dedication has been inspired by the mystical experience where the pianist felt the presence and guiding of Coltrane's spirit. A new romantic side of Marilyn's talent. Outstanding reviews." "Hearing Marilyn Crispell play solo piano is like monitoring an active volcano,” wrote Jon Pareles in the New York Times. “She is one of a very few pianists who rise to the challenge of free jazz." Crispell, who was born in Philadelphia in 1947, is a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music where she studied classical piano and composition, and has been a resident of Woodstock, New York since 1977, when she came to study and teach at the Creative Music Studio.Crispell discovered jazz through the music of John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor among others. For ten years she was a member of the Anthony Braxton Quartet and the Reggie Workman Ensemble and has been a member of the Barry Guy New Orchestra and guest with his London Jazz Composers Orchestra, as well as a member of the Henry Grimes Trio, Quartet Noir and Anders Jormin's Bortom Quintet. Crispell has described how, through playing with the Braxton Quartet, she “began to think more compositionally and pay more attention to space and silence”. Besides working as a soloist and leader of her own groups, Crispell has performed and recorded extensively with well-known players on the American and international.

"Kuryokhin's reputation as the enfant terrible of the Russian avantgarde may have deterred some listeners from checking his work. This release should change that. Behind its ungainly title lurks his most accessible music to date, a frothy concoction of wit, whimsy and flashing virtuoso power delivered at time with madcap elan." Graham Lock. --- Recorded 4 June, 1991 in London

"Recorded live in Venice in 1977, these rare solo performances find Ra revisiting all facets of his career. With Ra there was never the divide between entertainment and art that marks the performances of younger, more self-conscious tone scientists, a term he preferred to musicians. Thus when he plays a simple blues he brings more dissonance to his left handed feints then you usually associate with the traditional sounds. When he performs his own "Angel Race," he begins by singing variations on the outer space theme." - All About Jazz --- Sun Ra / piano --- Recorded live at the Teatro La Fenice, Venezia, November 24, 1977. 

"Saved from oblivion by Anthony Braxton himself this recording can't be more welcome, for at the time of the release other Braxton's solo CDs are mostly unavailable. But make no mistake: the thing that will strike your ears is how absolutely contemporary this music sounds. Recorded twenty four years ago it sounds as if it has been recorded today. It was a long concert, but we managed to save every sound by editiong out bursts of applause after each piece. Yet it happened to be the longest recording in the entire Leo Records catalogue: 78'02." "Not released until 24 years after it was recorded, this classic solo album by one of the giants of the saxophone is a welcome addition to Anthony Braxton's discography. Performing solely on alto sax, there is a searing lyricism and a surprisingly jazz-oriented underpinning to even the most abstract of Braxton's improvisations. While most of the compositions are originals, the two that are not -- "You Go to My Head" and "Impressions" -- reveal Braxton's remarkable ability to delve deeply inside a song's structure and make it his own. In later years, Braxton often revealed a mellow tinge to his playing, even in solo performances. The instant release, though, reveals him in an energetic mood, and should satisfy those who appreciate his more radical side within the "mainstream" of the jazz avant-garde. He barks, screeches (though only occasionally and in characteristically good taste), and shows some outstanding technical skills, including incredible speed. While he has recorded some of these compositions elsewhere (for example, as Steve Day writes in the liner notes, four of the compositions appear on the impressive Alto Saxophone Improvisations 1979), Braxton is in peak form on this one and the results are uniformly excellent. Braxton enthusiasts (and others, too) will want this in their collections." - Surfing the Odyssey

"Gorgeously psychedelic debut by this new guitar/violin duo, created by two of the form's great maestros. Samara Lubelski and Bill Nace are both veterans of the American sub-underground. Between them they have many projects under many names on many labels. Most recently, however, the two have been focused on string-based duo aktion, Samara in cahoots with Marcia Bassett, and Bill with Kim Gordon in Body/Head. These two ensembles explore different expanses of the genre. The Lubelski/Bassett Duo focus on the powerful beauty of drone rainbow landscapes, while Body/Head venture into dialogues dealing with subconscious dream language. On this album Bill and Samara create a hybrid between these approaches, offering textual interactions that blaze like fire. On the five tracks of their eponymous LP, Samara's violin creates a base of long form string distention, against which Bill's amp-shudder creates event surges that fill your brain with frozen images of walls caught in mid-collapse, and continents sinking into a sea. Their motion has tectonic implications. About all I can compare it to is momentary flashes of A Handful of Dust (the Bruce Russell/Alastair Galbraith unit), but the intent here seems quite different, and as mentioned before, the results feel bracingly psychedelic. Have not had a chance to spin this after an acid drop yet. Will wait for the actual LP to do that, but I'm thinking it will make for a most excellent pairing. I suggest you consider the same. Tout de suite." - Byron Coley --- Samara Lubelski / violin Bill Nace / guitar --- Cover art Spencer HerbstScreened on Stoughton Tip On Covers by Alan Sherry

After years of collaboration in various configurations, the trio of guitarist Bill Nace, drummer Chris Corsano and tenor saxophonist Paul Flaherty met in the studio in 2015 to create these three extended tracks of gut-wrenching and fierce free improvisations. Wherein we come upon three visceralists who have been collaborating for years - innumerable instances in a roulette wheel of settings - finally shacking up in a studio and fashioning a proper trio record. Glory be. Let's listen in... "These." It's a phrase that never gets started, and an apt title for this record, which right off bolts from the barn and burns so brightly it nearly gets away from you by the time you're done twisting your head around looking for whoever it was that left the door open. He asked me when I planned to come back. Always, I said. Nace's guitar mines savage depths, egging on the propulsive swing of Flaherty and Corsano. The results are as beastly as the heart itself. Swing. Bounce. Joust. Jab. Uppercut. Flutter. Wink. Sneer. They all play with anguish and ecstatic rupture - the frustrating joy of pushing an instrument to its limits, fashioning a necessary and brutal needlepoint. They move with all the otherworldly elegance and mania of moths at a lamp show.The music asks no specific questions, but wrenches open a space for all manner of questions - this is one of art's most vital functions! It deals in shades, no matter how sharp the apparent angle. Check out "Blue Water": the solemn bells of Bill's guitar signal not so much a funeral, but a new dawn after a tragedy. Flaherty's saxophone sounds innocent, almost tentative at first, but as Chris' drums chime in, Paul starts to wrench the fabric loose. The track builds into a fierce and alien vista, charting a territory all its own - a simmering judgement. It becomes hard to talk about. Didn't you ever try to eat your own tail in the midday sun? No? These three, whose veins are coursing straight through with a nuanced emotional lexicon and the smarts to harness it, have given us a record that expands potential with each listen."- Matt Krefting, Holyoke, MA 2017

First in Open Mouths Solo Guitar Series. Excellent debut solo from Sightings guitarist Mark Morgan.  "The thing is though is that Mark has always had this really great guitar sound, only partly courtesy of all those shitty pedals he insists on using. He's not coming at this from a Pharoah Sanders-worshipping, free jazz-loving, sensibility. Rather, I hear his home town, Detroit. The record is scuzzy, and raw-sounding, punctuated with moments of utter desolation. Moments build, only to collapse again. There are even funky grooves but, of course, they fall apart. It's fucking great. Dude, you should check it out!' - Julie Cafritz, August 2018" "It's probably the best solo ‘noise’ guitar album I've heard since Alan Licht's 2013 masterpiece Four Years Older(IMO, of course). And yet to call this noise guitar feels like a bit of a misrepresentation as it implies (at least technically I suppose it does) a certain underlying haphazardness. That definitely doesn't feel like the base force at work here. While harshness undeniably plays a big part in the proceedings, this is an infinitely listenable record for fans of inventive textures, extreme processing, and dark industrial implications." - Free Jazz Collective --- 1. Jinx Hack - 4:54 2. Gentleman's C - 4:103. Supercomplication - 10:554. Doctor Detroit - 10:125. A Guy Named Reggae - 2:246. Mikki - 4:22

"Charley recites Apocalypse Rose on one side. Theother side is Bill NACE doing a piece of music inspired by the poem" Charles Plymell's “Apocalypse Rose” was published in 1966 by the City Lights Journal and later that year in his first book of poetry with an introduction by Ginsberg. Charles recited the free-associative poem here, alongside Nace's 16-minutes instrumental guitar abstraction. "Nace mirrors beautifully its dense, hallucinogenic images. Nace arranged a slow, hypnotic drone, first played on a distant, Far Eastern-tinged acoustic guitar, that later morphs into a quiet, and even quieter claustrophobic-electric rustle, that fits the closing lines of the poem: The blood that fell on each new tomorrow And you saw this as I was watching you. Under the influence of all your stars, In mirrors of your galaxies of blue, The hero and his love became your scars But this rose picked could not be picked anew. To measure you and me in full disguise I lay beside our rose of paradise." - The Free Jazz Collective

X04 is Nace, Jake Meginsky, and John Truscinski. Their third LP, after previous releases on Ultra Eczema, Ecstatic Peace, Joshua Burketts Spirit of Orr, etc.  --- Bill Nace / guitar Jake Meginsky / electronics John Truscinski / drums --- Recorded in July, 2008 VT.

"This trio of Chris Corsano on drums, Bill Nace on electric guitar and Steve Baczkowski on saxophones was one of the most powerful albums of the drums-guitar-sax statement in 2018. Unfortunately the vinyl is already sold out."  My first listen to these four extraordinary pieces by Chris Corsano, Bill Nace, and Steve Baczkowski was over a very rough ferry crossing from Cairnryan to Belfast. It's hard not to think of the ghosts of impossible crossings, victories, loses, harbors in such rough waters. Why would anyone venture out here? Finding something new or an overdue visit? Ending all of the wars? For me, for my first listen to Mystic Beings instantly cured all motion sickness. It was probably just the very welcome adrenalin shots from their performance, but all the crashing and pitching over the waves became a joy. I was braver from listening in. Sometimes they hovered like a three-headed beacon -- a soaring vision to follow out on the horizon. Sometimes they seemed pulled into action and attack. Detonations and radio calls. Sometimes the spines of their own instruments cried out on the power of their own cores, their bodies having been left elsewhere. They drifted apart like a search party, skies clouded over, a spreading landscape streaked with transparent layers over layers. Or they joined together in quiet and unsparing ceremony, the kind usually reserved passing back through the place by which you've entered. All the while there was no scratching or banging at hard enclosed corners. These three players created a world of open space and flexible membrane, where any violence would only come from an outside imposition. Each of the songs read like movements in a larger work. As an eavesdropper, I added my own abstract, personal story over the whole album. I could repopulate new stories over and over again over this framework. The arc is that strong, and the conversation is that good. And even if just overheard, Mystic Beings generously called me out to where I needed to be. The shallows and the shores are where the worst dangers can find us, and our best chance of survival is sometimes out in the rolling depths. Deafen out the sirens and stay onward in the deep waters. Thank you, Bill and Chris and Steve, for sharing this kind of wild captain's safety with us.' --Meg Baird, Cairnryan and San Francisco, Nov 2018"

"First commissioned by the French Government in 1981, the LP Rose Des Vents Action Musicale evolved out of a six year project by Swiss composer Pierre Mariétan to document and musicalise the sound environment of urban landscapes within France, creating an inter-geographical auditory map of cities and townships located in the suburban reaches of Paris, including Bezons, Herblay, Montmagny and l’Isle Adam. Through a mix of field recording, interviews, vegetable market catcalls, braying animals and urban hubbub, Mariétan paints a broad, psycho-acoustically vivid and decentralised profile of metropolitan life from the period; carried to the ear through a coupling with musical studio performance and serialist compositional technique. Over an hour and forty minutes, the recording provides an intersectional and ambient passage through environmental and urban narratives, the radiophonic voice of Ana de Carvalho offering fleeting, poetic orientation with announcements of each titled scene, divining and evoking the sonorous qualities of each landscape as it comes into focus. Each scene tangible yet non-specific, the artist arranging and signalling the possibility of civic and pastoral space as a musical container for spontaneous, sonorous interactions. Mariétan’s profile is of a rigorous yet open and exploratory composer, utilising principles of chance and curiosity in organising found sound and often negotiating or encouraging encounters with improvisatory gesture or incidental and occurring sound. In 1966 he established the outfit GERM, grouping composers and musicians dedicated to developing new meeting points between composition and improvisation. Members assist in contributing recordings and performances throughout Rose Des Vents, including musical passages on piano, synthesizer, horn and saxophone. These studio pieces, played on saxophone by Daniel Kientzy or piano by Gerard Fremy, recall and redeploy techniques developed over the lifespan of the project, where site- specific actions and concerts were performed within each of the towns. In many ways, the album is a folding of each facet of the author’s life and work into a single representative culmination. A sympathy towards radiophonic or documentary production values is recognisable—Mariétan produced two iterations of Rose Des Vents. Action Musicale for Alain Trutat and Jean Tardieu’s ground-breaking Atelier De Création Radiophonique on Radio France Culture ahead of this LP release—alongside the influence of his work in urban acoustics and research into forms of sound ecology. So too is the obvious pleasure taken in introducing the sweetness of music to children, with notable samples from his educational workshops and sound installations helping to internalise and evoke a sense of inquisitive delight. It’s these components, combined with themes and concerns about the acoustic environment that resonate 30 years later and establish Rose Des Vents as such an approachable, listenable and lovely piece of experimental sound art. The conjuration of an emotional or psychological plane through musical and metaphorical synthesis allows the listener to situate themselves within the montage in a near cinematic manner, discovering an underlying sonority embedded in the psychic atmospheres of communal life."

"Gamelan and capoeira in dub. The collective behind this doesn’t like to talk much but their music is beautifully conversational. De Leon is the most organic and percussive of their shifting identities, developed on their Aught project in small-run, clear-shell cassette tape releases over the last few years. They've appreciated a cult interest for their takes on outernational rhythm, field recording, and the tension and relief on the knife-edge of dance music; all delivered with an impressive commitment to anonymity and clarity of vision through cut-and-dried aesthetic minimalism. These six pieces of music seem formed from wood, metal, air. Dramatic, balletic flourishes and tightly woven interlocking patterns are embedded in slowly changing and "live" atmospheres. The shadow of a hand over the mixing desk makes gradual adjustments to alter the pressure and dimension of the space. A number of tracks first appeared on De Leon's set for Blowing Up The Workshop in February 2016."

Rie Nakajima and Keiko Yamamoto are joined by violinist Billy Steiger and percussionist Marie Roux in a dozen deconstructions of Japanese folk music, for this pacy, engaging debut album. Rie’s baby orchestra of rice bowls, toys, clock workings, balloons and motors is by turns haunted, teased, adorned and laid waste by Keiko’s chanting, rumbling, whispering and stamping on the floor. The production by David ‘Flying Lizards’ Cunningham deepens and spooks the mix, which brims over with energy and wit, intimacy and presence, grace and mystery. "Suddenly we are closer to music being made than we have been for many years or longer even, so alarmingly close as to feel warmth and discomfort, as if studying the sole of a foot from a few centimetres away or holding a private whisper within an enclosed hand and feeling its trembling desire to be free; but also so far away distant as to feel each vibrant, pungent ingredient within its box or jar or bowl or packet or bottle or air-tight translucent container or brown paper bag painstakingly stirred, shaken, scattered, poured into the heated cauldron of what we call recording, its imaginary rooms and its production, though my better self prefers not to speak about or analyse the notion of ‘the studio’, this being a working up of spaces that are social, a vision of something beyond us but not quite beyond us because its existence as a listening object is real enough to make us pause and question how it was lost or never found." - David Toop --- Keiko Yamamoto / voice, melodica, flute, recorder, floor percussion, toy dog (1-7, 9-12) Rie Nakajima / objects, whistles, flute, cards, taisho koto, xylophone, piano, abacus, drain horn (1-12) Billy Steiger / violin (2,4,7-9,11,12) Marie Roux / percussion, thumb piano (2,4,7,9,11,12) --- All composition by Nakajima/Roux/Steiger/Yamamoto apart from Yobu, Hebi, Iroha, Kitsune and Are Kore (Nakajima/Yamamoto) and Futari (Nakajima/Steiger). Words by Yamamoto except 5 and 11. Iroha is a Japanese classical alphabet. Sojarobai is a working song from Miyazaki, Japan. Produced by David Cunningham.  Cover image by Marie Roux. Sleeve design by Ayako Fukuuchi.

"Alternatively banging and evasive, exhausted and unglued. Stepping along the rim of the silver screen. Diptera takes a near electro-acoustic approach to the DNA, texture and pressure of UK Garage with a debut release on Mana. Its four tracks teeming with material detail, the duo's musical collaboration operates like a relay. Initial tracks made by Activist DJ — short sharp affairs focused on swung drums and darkside — are passed on to Wesley to be broken apart, tinkered with, and slowly refigured into more anxious and impressionistic musical forms, etched with intricacies and mixed fidelity. The result is a distinctive and resourceful excavation of hardcore at its most agile. A fly on the wall may face some adversity, so if you imagine a human hand in basic swatting motion, maybe you will also couple the image with an evasive manoeuvre of some sort; usually there is a moment of hesitation where the human is unsure whether their aim was true. "Did I catch it?""

"Wild soundscapes from Benedict Drew, an artist splitting his time between installation art and music that hums and spills over with vivid material encounters; sounds are slurpy, runny, fizzy, spongy, hard as rock. Following digital releases, a tape for patten’s Kaleidoscope label, a musical score to accompany his De Re Touch video art project commissioned by Transport for London’s Art on the Underground, and many active years in London’s experimental music scene through work with the London Musicians’ Collective, as a solo performer, and via live collaborations with artists including Rhodri Davies, Chris Watson and Sachiko M; ‘Crawling Through Tory Slime’ is Drew’s debut long-playing record. Music on each of the record’s faces bleeds together continuously, recalling long improvisational sets, floor-sucking dub-wise, psychedelia, plunderphonics, and tight GRM-era electronic sound design pieced together with drum machines, cloudy synthesiser, bits n’ bobs. There’s a certain English charm, humour and taste for cheap science fiction and cobbled-together escape routes out of reality that follows a lineage set out by artists like Jeff Keen or Bruce Lacey, reset for the exciting horrors and delights of contemporary life. Benedict Drew’s solo exhibition The Trickle Down Syndrome runs from June to September at the Whitechapel Gallery, designed over the same period as the LP and "drawing on wide-ranging references, from the stage sets of classic Hollywood cinematographer Busby Berkeley to the Surrealist worlds of artist Max Ernst"."

"Pickelhaube is the solo album of one of the most active improvisers and music activists of today. This is the result of an unique and completely analogue recording and reproduction, and brings to you the very full body of a wooden battle ship of an instrument, the contrabass, and the breath of a musical mind." “This is a solo in duet with the current era of silent repression of every mind that’s not in line for the mental pawnshop. In these times, most shallow behaviors are presented as if the deepest of engagements and beliefs. We are dressed up in a fictional all-in-one hat, the helmet and the warhead: Die Pickelhaube. Blow yourself out of your own mind or simply step out of your helmet. And listen.”

The project “Lifework: A Unity” is an overview of Philip Corner’s music, performed by Ensemble Hodos, and covering the five periods of Mr. Corner’s music over five CDs to be released successively in 2014. This is the 2nd volume – and first to be released – of the recorded documentation of Philip Corner’s music by Ensemble Hodos. The disc covers the years 1960-75, when Corner, just back from Europe, took an extensive part in the New York Fluxus scene, and started to experiment with graphic notations, indeterminacy, performance pieces and happenings. The pieces in this volume are all in their own way challenging the notions of traditional music theory : Crash Actions and its companion piece In Intimacy – Pulsation are both dealing in a great variety of ways with the concept of pulsation ; Punkt as the title implies is only points, isolated sounds ; whereas Compare with “Exquisitely Sloppy Om” is one the many developments of Corner’s explorations of one sound. --- Recorded on Friday, March 1, 2013 by Etienne Graindorge. Mixed and mastered by Pierre-Antoine Badaroux & Sébastien Beliah. Artwork by Raffalëlle Bloch

"This unique repertoire is the result of a thorough work of transcriptions and rearrangements from recordings and scores, including some unpublished material found in New York. Under the direction of Pierre-Antoine Badaroux, the fourteen musicians from the French jazz new avantgarde, pursue their work of highlighting forgotten figures of the jazz history, with a generous and communicative enthusiasm. From the Harlem Public Library basement to the wooden floor of the Lavoir Moderne Parisien theater in Paris, it is a special invitation to enjoy together here and now an ageless music." --- Pierre-Antoine Badaroux / direction, sax altoAntonin-Tri Hoang / alto saxophone, clarinetGeoffroy Gesser, Pierre Borel / tenor sax, clarinetBenjamin Dousteyssier / alto, barytone, bass saxophonesBrice Pichard, Louis Laurain, Emil Strandberg / trumpetFidel Fourneyron, Michaël Ballue / tromboneRomain Vuillemin / guitar, banjoBruno Ruder / pianoSebastien Beliah / double bassAntonin Gerbal / drums --- Recorded live at Lavoir Moderne Parisien on April 19-21, 2018, in Paris, FranceRecorded, mixed and mastered by Augustin MüllerTexts by Pierre-Antoine BadarouxArtwork by Sven-Åke JohanssonDesign by Dominique Hamot

Grip, Denzler and Johansson, respectively in their early thirties, early fifties and early seventies, found each other through the intertwining scenes between Paris and Berlin. When taking a look at their previous musical activities you will get an exquisite account of the contemporary history of experimental improvised musics (yes, plural!) in Europe. It is a dense heritage in service of forming a new model for a creative process. Emerged through the questioning of methods, Neuköllner Modelle combine bipolar procedures in creating something which could be likened with a retarding ballad of the insistent up-tempo murmur accelerating in the backdrop-world of today. "Neuköllner Modelle is a gathering of musical ideas which function really good together. Our instruments and unique way of handling them formed the model serving the creation of Neuköllner Modelle. First there was an idea of the music, then there was the band. Our language is individually different and slowly changing, therefore we have something to say when we play. We are common in being different. A common thought is sometimes more reducing than a dissident. Anyway, without tension or friction, no music. In my music these opposing elements are of great importance. "Sektion 1-2" is an ambitious production in the sense that we have made (and make) our best to make it reflect the first idea we had. The questions of our age-differencies are not so interesting for me. It is more of an obvious and natural fact. What is more sad, maybe, is that not so many musicians today work across the invisible generational borders.'' Joel Grip, interviewed on the Free Jazz Blog "Pairing Denzler, a musician with an astute approach to minimalist saxophone (check out Tenor (Potlatch, 2012)), with Grip, a collocating musician who ties many disparate European improvisational forms together, and Johansson, the Swiss army knife (although he is Swedish) of drummers, is a genius amalgam of musicians." - All About Jazz --- Bertrand Denzler / saxophone Joel Grip / double bassSven-Åke Johansson / drums --- Recorded by Andrew Levine at Sowieso, Berlin, November 2015. Mastered by Werner Dafeldecker. Cover design by Teresa Iten. Notes by Bastian Zimmermann. Produced with the support from The Swedish Art Council.

Following up from Sektion 1-2, Neuköllner Modelle are joined by pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach. Their music evokes questions on swing: how it is heard today and fed back to us historically. “Neuköllner Modelle is perhaps the first serious attempt to swing once again without playing standards. The musicians develop jazz as a form of instant composition, with the energy of not only the blues but also bebop, and in the classical hierarchy of a rhythm section consisting of double bass and drums. However, all four musicians come from the areas of Free Jazz, of improvised music, or even, in Johansson’s case, of performance and conceptual music.” The excitement, and here lays perhaps the keys of swing, is connected to the way Neuköllner Modelle voices out the positioning of strong independent and co-existing ideas. Their music is striving towards a common somewhere asserting their differing assumptions and expectations. --- Bertrand Denzler / saxophoneJoel Grip / double bassSven-Åke Johansson / drums Alexander von Schlippenbach / piano --- Recorded by Andrew Levine at Sowieso, Berlin, November 2015. Mastered by Werner Dafeldecker. Cover design by Teresa Iten. Liner notes (in german and english) by Bastian Zimmermann. Produced with the support from The Swedish Art Council.

اسم is a name written in ink. A dash through European creative music. A round trip, Berlin – Oxford, via Paris. اسم is Pat, Joel and Antonin in a dotted silence without name. Acoustically, the trio creates abstract forms close of written contemporary music with sounds reminding us of traditional jazz trios. The groove which appears in this music is dense, extreme but always quiet. Music in a continuous flow of high voltage charges. In Arabic, اسم is a way to connect between different cultural and imaginary worlds. --- Joel Grip / bass Antonin Gerbal / drums Pat Thomas / piano --- Recorded at Eglise Saint-Merry, Paris on June 2, 2014.

"'Lost In Shadows' is American composer/performer Ashley Paul's bewitching Slip debut: an expansive, deeply personal excavation of recent motherhood, told through songs dissolving and re-crystallising at the threshold of free improvisation. At the LP's heart is Paul's mercurial multi-instrumental style, which renders the primal wails, clunks, and twangs of clarinet, saxophone, percussion, and guitar uncannily melodic, alchemised by frank, vulnerable vocals. The deft negotiation of the fragile and the coruscating evidenced on Paul's ‘Line The Clouds’ (2013) and ‘Heat Source’ (2014) has now reached a kind of hesitant sublime. Recorded over 3 weeks at a FUGA residency in Zaragoza, Spain in December 2016, 'Lost In Shadows' documents a cathartic outpouring; the first time Paul had been able to write since the birth of her daughter 11 months earlier. The record is completely influenced by "many hours spent awake at night in a dream like state of half consciousness, darkness and solitude; an overwhelming feeling of loneliness and exhaustion made light by a profound new love", with Paul's solo playing bolstered by additional baritone saxophone, cello, tuba, and percussion. This ensemble set-up, which premiered much of this work at 2017's Counterflows festival, gives the LP a fresh sense of luxuriousness, bounce, and rich possibility.'" — Artwork by Gayle Paul. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.

"'111 angelic MIDI cascade' is Ralph Cumbers' exquisite Slip debut: a finely forged collection of joyous electronic music built to surge and heal. This is Cumbers' first deliberate Bass Clef album since 2012's 'Reeling Skullways' on Bristol institution Punch Drunk, and a forceful departure from the bubbling, rogue club 12"s since issued on The Trilogy Tapes, PAN, and Idle Hands. Drums are almost entirely absent, making way for a braiding of soaring machine melodies, and taut harmonic threads. To be clear: this is no ambient record. No drifty clouds, no cocoons, no sonic platitudes.Recorded in Rotterdam in August 2018, amidst an immersion in the history of clairaudience, scrying, and natural philosophy, '111' is a leap into pinpoint mysticism, with Bass Clef as happy alchemist." --- Written and Recorded by Bass Clef. Mastered by Stephen Bishop. 

"'brace, brace' is Julia Reidy’s soaring Slip return: a dread-tinged incantation unfurling from breath-down-the-neck field recordings, auto-murmured voice, synthetic hum, and irrepressible guitar kinetics. Reidy’s signature 12-string playing - precise, burrowing, rhapsodic - dominates the LP's outer cuts, framing a plaintive electric centre. Blooms of arpeggiations and desolate strums re-inflect slow-moving pitch sequences; the music feels at once on fire and graceful, inevitable.Perhaps most surprising is how organic 'brace, brace'’s expanded palette feels. Reidy’s electronics are subtly eerie extensions, alien resonances of her playing, both embedding her instrument and making it somehow unreal. This strange smear of body and apparition is neatly nailed in Reidy’s sung-to-herself vocals, coaxed out and encroached upon by autotune Succeeding recent issues of her work by Feeding Tube and Room 40’s A Guide To Saints, 'brace, brace' is a definitive statement from a blazing, restless talent.The LP tours with visuals from Suze Whaites. Whaites’projection environment is built from the coruscant light sources and surface reflections with which her video footage is made, creating mutable vistas at once microscopic and panoramic, domestic and sublime." --- Mixed and recorded by Sam Slater. Mastered by Joe Talia. Artwork by Suze Whaites.

Dawning On is Australian, Berlin-based guitarist Julia Reidy’s Slip debut: a razor-sharp précis of pent-up, blazing melancholy on a lone 12-string guitar. Reidy’s playing is lucid and poised, teasing out elegant inflections from half-melodies, rugged strums, and curious tunings. Her compositions are lingering streams: barely-shackled attacks give way to introspective arpeggiations before resurging again, all spurred on by a yearning, nervous energy. With the album’s single-track A-side clocking in at just under half-an-hour, this is by some measure Julia’s most comprehensive solo statement to date, and a luxurious listen which revels in the 12-string’s generous resonance. For our money, it’s up there with the finest work of her fellow Aussies The Necks, Anthony Pateras, and Jon Rose.

'Solo' [SLP016] is the Slip debut of Berlin-based composer Andreas Dzialocha: a collection of lilting electric bass melodies refracted through a tangled network of live computer processing. 'Solo'‘s ruptured nocturnes are intimate duets between instrument and machine, with Dzialocha eloquently responding to randomised pulsing reverbs, filters, and compressors, which snatch his delicate motifs into virtual space in real time. Andreas studied art history, musicology, and computer science, and is founder and director of Berlin-based Serenus Zeitblom Oktett, and upstart publishing platform BLATT 3000. 'Solo' interactive website: solo.andreasdzialocha.com ---Mastered by Hannes Fritsch. Artwork by Rian Treanor

“’Got Gills?' [SLP015] is the exigent Slip debut of Manchester-based Otto Willberg, and a commanding introduction to the double bassist’s assertive, heady style. This unhinged collection of live acoustic takes (no amps, no overdubs) marries rasping grit and mesmeric repetition, and announces the arrival of a precocious instrumental talent.  Otto is a double bass player living in Manchester, interested in improvisation, experimental and contemporary music. He is a core component of caustic psych outfit Desmadrados Soldados De Ventura, and of Manchester's ever-blooming underground.”

Soft streams of air.aeolina 1, aeolina 2 and aeolina 3. "There is hardly anything you may hear. The organ – its windness being rediscovered over and over again – releases as a jewel each single sound; each stream of air; each noise: disappearing into the space of the hall." --- Tracklisting: 1. Aeolina 1 -25:372. Aeolina 2 - 26:373. Aeolina 3 - 7:00 --- Eva-Maria Houben / organ Recorded by Bileam Kümper in Magdalena, Dortmund-Eichlinghofen (Germany).

Bruno Duplant: là où nos rêves… two organ pieces:
là où nos rêves se forment (to eva-maria houben)
 là où nos rêves s’éffacent (to jakob ullmann) Le rêve de la nuit est un rêve sans rêveur. (Gaston Bachelard, La poétique de la rêverie, 1960). Der Traum der Nacht ist ein Traum ohne Träumer. The dream of the night is a dream without dreamer. --- Bruno Duplant / organ ---

drei choräle für klavier (penser à satie) (2007) (arr. for organ by Eva-Maria Houben) Eva-Maria Houben / organ Recorded by Milo, Christianskirche, Hamburg-Ottensen (Germany), 2011. Intalniri fugitive (flüchtige begegnungen) (casual meetings)  12 short sketches Eva-Maria Houben / organ Recorded by Bileam Kümper, St. Marien, Witten (Germany) 2010 Twelve-tone chords – single tones – silence. There is a very long silence at the end of the piece. You listen to the space of the hall. Eva-Maria Houben / organ. Recorded by Bileam Kümper, St. Marien, Witten (Germany). Five mouvements: 1. maestoso, un poco pomposo; 2. andante cantabile; 3. scherzo. giocoso; 4. andante amoroso; 5. grave. un poco misterioso.For Milo.Eva-Maria Houben, organ.Christianskirche, Hamburg-Ottensen (Germany).Recorded by Milo (live, concert in 2011).

A long drone of the organ: overtones singing melodies.The organ: endless breath. Finished – unfinished. One hour fifteen. --- Eva-Maria Houben / organ. --- Recorded by Bileam Kümper in 2013, St. Marien, Witten (Germany).

Recorded ocean sounds, a walk through different soundscapes on the seashore. One hour fifteen minutes. Recorded by Eva-Maria Houben. 

Eva-Maria Houben und Bileam Kümper : landscapes 1-4 for one or two players (2012) Recordings of soundscapes and instruments. "Houben’s ear for how sounds, both instrumental and environmental can be put together has always driven her work. She has spoken and written about hearing music in everyday life and the silences between events in our lives and how she uses this in her work. Landscapes is then a very simple, and yet stunningly beautiful set of studies that extend these ideas. In Kümper she seems to have found a like mind and a valuable collaborator. Combining acoustic instruments with field recordings in this way isn’t a new idea, but the pair’s touch here, the ear for fragile beauty and the way sounds come together to form new sounds again make this a truly lovely release." - Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear landscape 1 (organ and train) 11:39landscape 2 (tuba and wind) 6:06landscape 3 (viola d’amore and steps) 4:02landscape 4 (bar chimes and balcony) 6:00 --- Eva-Maria Houben / organ and bar chimes.Bileam Kümper / tuba and viola d’amore. --- Recorded by Eva-Maria Houben and Bileam Kümper at Thomas Morus, Krefeld (Germany).

Exclusively released through OTO, 'Priest's House' documents The Seen's Dorset outing, with a line up including Dominic Lash and Seth Cooke alongside local improvisers. Mark Wastell has been organising larger formations of musicians, collectively known as THE SEEN, for over 10 years, and thanks to Stuart Riddle the group were able to travel to Wimbourne Minster to form a new South West iteration. Using predominantly improvised material with occasional instructions or themes distributed to individual musicians just prior to performance. No formation has ever been repeated, THE SEEN never stays static.  Register of previous participants include Tetuzi Akiyama, Mattin, Michael Duch, Graham Halliwell, Andrea Neumann, Rhodri Davies, Paul Hood, Takehiro Nishide, Annette Krebs, Lee Gamble, Matt Davis, Joe Williamson, Wolfgang Fuchs, Burkhard Beins, Tomas Korber, Paul Abbott, Ben Owen, Jonathan McHugh, Jane Dickson, Olie Brice, Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga, Bertrand Denzler, Angharad Davies, David Toop, Chris Burn, Richard Sanderson, Dominic Lash, Yoni Silver, Graham MacKeachan, John Butcher and Jason Kahn. “With The Seen, everything is up for grabs. Even the act of listening – so sacrosanct in the world of improvisation – becomes problematized, for in such a tapestry of sound and silence how can one process what’s happening at any one moment? Yet this impossibility of total response provides opportunities to form clusters within the whole, that break apart and reform in different configurations as things develop. For listeners, too, there are possibilities for moments of both detailed focus and wider-scale immersion.” (Paul Margree) --- Adrian Newton / electronicsTom Cleverly / guitar, trumpetPaul Allen / drums, percussionStuart Riddle / soprano saxophone, electronicsSeth Cooke / resonatorDominic Lash / double bassMark Wastell / tam tam --- Recorded at the Priest's House, Wimbourne Minster, 21.09,2018 by Adrian Newton. Mixed by Adrian Newton. Thanks to volunteers at The Priest’s House Museum.

IST went to New York in April 2001 to participate in Derek Bailey's Company Week at Tonic. Before Company proper started however, the two UK groups (the other being the Derek Bailey / Will Gaines duo) took part in a preview concert playing in their habitual groupings. The resulting trio recordings have never been previously released; as a special bonus the album also includes an unreleased quartet of IST + John Zorn, which took place during the Company event itself.  --- Rhodri Davies / harp Mark Wastell / violoncello Simon H. Fell / double bass John Zorn / alto sax [track 6]  --- Recorded at Tonic, Norfolk St., New York, 17 & 19 April 2001

"The Sealed Knot are one of the great free improvisation groups, comparable to the classic 1980s SME line-up of John Stevens, Nigel Coombes and Roger Smith for edge-of-your-seat attentiveness and sheer inter-group telepathy. Rhodri Davies, Mark Wastell and Burkhard Beins have been a unit since 2000, a melding of London and Berlin. Recent sightings have been rare, but they played in Berlin this May, and now Wastell's revived Confront label is releasing this live album from January 2009. The purpose of the 2009 show was to celebrate Another Timbre's release of And We Disappear, recorded live in Switzerland at a 2007 festival titled Ear We Are. That album was about the yawning gulf between Davies's high, piercing ebow work and Wastell's glacial double bass. Whereas the new record has Wastell switching to tam tam, and all three musicians employing electronics - but lo-fi mechanical electronics, rather than digital processing. So there's a pleasing, subdued industrial fury lurking beneath the music. Filigrees of rapid clicking make way for subterranean pulsing, and Beins adds the super-pure tones of bowed cymbals, to blur the electric/acoustic distinction further. Around 18 minutes the group contemplate silence, before launching into a further 13 minutes of patient exploration and metallic mystery. Wastell has grumbled that critics are "always 12 months behind the flow" when it comes to describing what musicians are up to, and here he is, helping us along by releasing a four year old recording. Never mind that the trend-buzz around Lower Case Improv, New London Silence & co has worn off; with music of this quality we're dealing with simple excellence, and any opportunity to see this group at work should be seized." (Clive Bell, The Wire) --- Burkhard Beins / percussion, electronicsRhodri Davies / harp, electronicsMark Wastell / tam-tam, electronics --- Recorded live at the 'Another Timbre' Festival, Cafe OTO, London on January 21st, 2009.

Originally released in a tiny edition of 50 copies in 2000, this recording officially marks the beginning of The Sealed Knot as a regular group. Interestingly, the liner notes that accompanied that release make mention, for the first time in print, of the terms 'the new silence' and 'Berlin reductionism' ......... although listening now, all these years later, the music sounds far from silent and/or little reduced."The music on this cd was recorded live at All Angels, West London and documents the exciting ongoing collaboration between young musicians working in London and Berlin. Although all three performers have travelled between the two capital cities since the early 1990's playing in various combinations, this is their first concerts as a trio. Beins co-runs the 2.13 Berlin improvisation club, with guitarist Michael Renkel, in conjunction with it's sister organisations in London and Athens. All three clubs are named after a stopped clock at the original London venue. Critics have dubbed Wastell and Davies' music 'the new silence' and Beins' German counterpart 'new Berlin reductionism'. Categories aside, this is improvised music concerned with space, texture and time, emphasised by the gently ticking clock at the back of All Angels as sounds fade into silence." (Original liner notes) --- Burkhard Beins / percussionRhodri Davies / harp Mark Wastell / violoncello ---Recorded live in concert by Tim Fletcher at St. Michael & All Angels Church, West London on 14 April 2000.

"...Overall, they give the impression of a gradual ebb and flow of layered soundfields over a bedrock of silence. Confronted with the trio's intricately plaited tones, sometimes it's hard to tell the provenance of a particular sound - like many musicians exploring extended techniques, they're at war with their instruments...Gradual shifts and the kind of communication that develops within longstanding musical relationships are central to the group aesthetic. The slow, deliberate movement of The Sealed Knot's music often sounds semi-composed, a testament to the close bond that they have developed over the years..." - The Wire --- Burkhard Beins / percussionRhodri Davies / harpMark Wastell / double bass --- Recorded live in concert at the Red Hedgehog, Archway, London, 29 October 2006. 

Berlin is truly the spiritual home of The Sealed Knot - with the trio having played there numerous times since it's debut in the city at Ramschift Zitrone in 2002. In more recent times we've been lucky enough to have had the opportunity to perform at regular yearly intervals, the most recent of which is the concert captured on this recording from Exploratorium in March 2015. Many thanks to Matthias Schwabe for the invitation. --- Burkhard Beins / percussionRhodri Davies / harpMark Wastell / double bass --- Recorded live at Exploratorium, Berlin on 19 March 2015 by Johannes von Wrochem.

Having first played together here in 2010, it was immediately evident to everyone in the room that something had clicked between Ikue Mori and Steve Noble and a very special combination had emerged. Apparently operating according to some sort of shared dream logic, Mori and Noble’s music is always unpredictable but never incoherent, switching suddenly between ominous abstract soundscapes and exuberant rhythmic interplay, peppered with strange recurrences, idiomatic fragments and vertiginous changes of perspective, and characterized by a strong sense of forward momentum. From her beginnings drumming with the seminal no wave unit DNA, Mori has always had a distinctively percussive sensibility, and her deft electronic manipulations merge perfectly with Noble’s fiercely physical handiwork. Drums and their digital double: the similarities and differences overlap and interrupt, crystallize and dissolve, split and converge into a fast-flowing torrent of compelling musical activity. "This is not an arid exercise in sonic exploration, however, and Mori extends her electronics beyond the merely imitative. She conjures up some wonderfully rich colours, such as the thick, smeared chords in Combustion, heard over Noble’s totemic drumming." - Free Jazz Collective --- Ikue Mori/ electronics Steve Noble / drums, percussion --- Recorded on 16 November 2011 at Eastcote Studios, London. Mixed and mastered by Rupert Clervaux at Gray’s Inn Road. Music by Ikue Mori (Tohban Djan Publishing BMI) & Steve Noble (PRS). 

Working both inside and outside the instrument's body, Pat Thomas presents a compelling vision of what the piano can do in the 21st century. At times playing with recognisable musical material and at others going deep into sonic abstraction, Pat's playing encompasses massive extremes: solidity and flow; seriousness and laughter; uproar and imperturbability. A major solo statement, Al-Khwarizmi Variations traverses the history and the physicality of the piano. Pat rules. "Thomas runs the gamut of techniques, splashing clusters, weaving contrapuntal lines and building elaborate structures from the inside out. Despite their variety, they share a fundamental quality – they truly sound like spur of the moment creations, not the final draft of ideas mulled over for weeks, if not months on end. Their impact is enhanced by one of the more effectively engineered piano sounds in recent memory, one that puts the piano right in your lap. The value of this is felt immediately, as the first variation is brimming with above-the-staves clusters that are wincingly bright. Conversely, Thomas creates china-rattling thunder when he plunges into the bass register." - Bill Shoemaker, Point of Departure  ---  Pat Thomas/ piano --- Recorded and mixed by Rick Campion at City University Music Studios on 19 June 2011. Mastered by Rupert Clervaux at Gray's Inn Road. Artwork from a 15th century Mamluk tile, adapted for print by Paul Abbott. With thanks to Trevor Brent  ---

Fascinating combination of two uncompromising saxophonists. Seymour Wright grew up listening to Evan Parker's radical reshaping of the saxophone and both develops and deconstructs it in his own playing. Together, the two interrupt and augment each other incessantly, creating tight spirals of difference and similarity that crackle with ideas and energy. "Wright’s penetrating attack stands out throughout, providing an effective foil for Parker’s more serpentine phrasing. One thinks here of Parker’s duo outings with reed players like Steve Lacy, Anthony Braxton, Wolfgang Fuchs, or Lol Coxhill and Wright certainly holds his own." - Michael Rosenstein, Point of Departure --- Evan Parker / soprano and tenor saxophones Seymour Wright / alto saxophone --- The title comes from the writing of Daniil Kharms. Thank you Ute, Evin, the Kernel Brewery, Geoff and Derby Jazz. Recorded by Sebastian Lexer on 5 October 2014 at the Kernel Brewery, London (1-2) and by David Reid on 12 October 2014 at The Studio, Derby (3-5). Mixed and mastered by Rupert Clervaux at Gray’s Inn Road. Artwork/Design by James Vickery. Music by Evan Parker and Seymour Wright. Produced by Trevor Brent

Sebastian Lexer (piano+) and Steve Noble (drums and percussion) first played together in the winter of 2011 and what seemed like an unlikely, even oppositional, pairing quickly proved itself to be an extremely well-matched one. Noble's sharp vertical hits and Lexer's sustained horizontal textures echo, disrupt and enrich each other, producing music full of complex slants and intricate resonances. "They sync together immediately, entwining natural resonances of strings and cymbals, percussive attack of keys and drums, and the variegated textures of electronic processing and shuddering, abraded percussion. The two leave behind any notion of conversational give-and-take, instead diving in to the development of a constantly morphing collective voice." - Michael Rosenstein, Point of Departure "a dialect nourished by sequential superimposition and counteraction of alien, nigh impossible noises, they spawn incongruous yet mesmerizing musical patterns" - Antonio Poscic, The Free Jazz Collective "the descriptions 'drummer' and 'pianist' are barely adequate, only scratching the surface of what each of them does" - John Eyles, All About Jazz "It’s incredible what strange and beguiling music they make. As well as the tinks, plinks, taps and crashes that you might expect, here are planar whorls and laminal tones closer to electronic music than anything in orthodox pianism; and amid the stacked metal clatter, percussive emphases and taut skin and rim shots of Noble’s playing sit shimmering tones and plaintively vocal-like sounds, either scraped-up or bowed from sympathetically resonating materials. These sonics out-strange anything most percussionists ever dream of. And better yet, this is all done with as much restraint and sensitivity as animation." - Tim Owen, Dalston Sound --- Sebastian Lexer / piano+ Steve Noble / drums and percussion --- Recorded by Giovanni La Rovere at Cafe Oto, London on 25 October 2011 (1) and 18 June 2014. Mixed by Sebastian Lexer. Mastered by Rupert Clervaux at Gray’s Inn Road. Artwork/Design by James Vickery. Music by Sebastian Lexer and Steve Noble. Produced by Trevor Brent

About Trumpet and Saxophone brings together New York based trumpeter Nate Wooley and London based saxophonist Seymour Wright for a series of intensely material duo improvisations that inhabit the tricky overlap between these two instruments. Recorded on their second encounter, there's an intriguing balance of freshness and reflection in the music here, one that matches their deep knowledge of improvised music's various pasts as well as their commitment to experiment and discovery. "a spiky, raw collection of brief improvisations that see them pushing at each other rather than slipping into comfort zones . . . full of a palpable tension but somehow also very simple and unadorned . . . a fine set of recordings that showcase the act of improvisation in its bared boned glory." - Richard Pinnell, The Wire "Wooley and Wright have both made extraordinary solo recordings: these duets might represent their sum and difference or their square root. About Trumpet and Saxophone is eminently worthy of close listening. It might enrich or impoverish a listener in a new way." - Stuart Broomer, Point of Departure "if the history of jazz can be told via great trumpet/saxophone pairings (Bix/Tram, Diz/Bird, Chet/Gerry, Miles/Trane, Don/Ornette, Kenny/Evan...add your own favourites) separated by stylistic quantum leaps, then the pairing of Nate/Seymour might just represent the latest such leap." - John Eyles, All About Jazz — Nate Wooley / trumpet Seymour Wright / alto saxophone — Recorded by Rick Campion at City University Music Studios on 4 July 2012. Mixed and mastered by Rupert Clervaux at Gray’s Inn Road. Edited by Trevor Brent. Cover painting by Geoff Wright (Svetlana, 1968). Music by Nate Wooley & Seymour Wright

At times barely more than breathing, at others breaking into full-throated song, A Doughnut's End is a highly concentrated sequence of solo improvisations that captures the full range of Minton's vocal powers. As he says in the accompanying notes, while there is continuity between this record and previous "doughnut" albums, this latest offering is "less optimistic than forty years ago" when he still "thought stuff would get better", an optimism diminished by the continued political dominance of "slush-spraying doughnut-scoffers". A Doughnut's End is a stark and affecting testament to one man's ongoing exploration of the potential of the human voice. "Minton has forged an alternative lexicon, one that seemingly forgoes the constraints of tradition and language. The result is a perverse, evocative set, the kind of performance that forces a reaction and demands attention be paid to it — music that has the power to cause unrest and revulsion in the listener. . . . An air of fragility lingers throughout, a reminder that even Minton’s finely honed, idiosyncratic delivery is all too susceptible to the inevitable pitfalls of existence. . . . The primal outpouring of A Doughnut’s End is all-consuming, and without language to dirty the proceedings, it is as much a personal meditation as it is a display of pure virtuosity." - Soe Jherwood, Tiny Mix Tapes "Many of the sounds on the album’s 15 short tracks are unpleasant, but they’re all the more powerful for it. This work is in no way deprived of wonder, and you have to marvel at the breadth of what Minton can do. “Breaking News” bleeds from high pitched warbling to multiphonic density, the throat pushed to the weirdest limits of its potential. “There’s A Reason” reprises this sonic field, almost electronic in texture, while “Set In Stone” takes these techniques and flirts with the operatic. “Grandish”, the album’s final track, works through a series of high pitched peeps that could come from an as yet unidentified beast." - Matt Krefting, The Wire "Things flap and billow a bit more than they used to, which Minton accentuates in the formation of starker, more striking vocal shapes – unstable vibratos, phlegmy belching baritones. What if it isn’t volume and clear articulation that renders a voice audible amongst the masses, but visceral wordless eccentricity?" - Jack Chuter, ATTN Magazine --- Phil Minton / voice --- Recorded (April & June 2013) and mixed by Rick Campion at City University Music Studios. Mastered by Rupert Clervaux at Gray’s Inn Road. Photography by Jocelyn Low. Music by Phil Minton (PRS) Produced by Trevor Brent

Third solo record from Corsano. One drum set augmented by various re-purposed metal objects, modified reed instruments and bowed strings stretched across drums. 19 tracks--9 of which are interwoven throughout the record in a very loose retelling of the Calon Arang story portrayed in Balinese gamelan music. --- Chris Corsano / percussion --- Tracklisting: 1. Twice Removed - 4:062. The Widow - 0:383. Shank And Spindle - 3:414. The Four Apprentices - 1:165. Scalpels - 1:446. The Attendant - 0:357. Famously Short Arms - 4:208. The Widow's Daughter - 0:269. These Things Are Not Fancy - 6:5410. Two Leyaks And A Minister - 1:3711. Not Now Not Later Not Ever - 4:3212. The Disciple - 1:0813. Fed Ex'd Gorilla - 3:4614. The Irate Prime Minister - 0:5715. My Face, Spited - 2:3016. The Sacred Beast - 0:1117. Regrets, I've Had A Few - 2:0518. Warrior With Dagger Pointed Inward - 0:3319. Suppli E Domanda - 1:58 --- Recorded January-March 2012 except #1 (December 2009), #5 (March 2008), #13 (December 2011) and #15 (May 2010). All acoustics, no overdubs, some edits here, some fades there. 

First meeting of Mette Rasmussen and Paul Flaherty, with Corsano providing connective tissue behind the drums.   "There's plenty of all-out, high energy playing on Star-Spangled Voltage, but there's also an underlying sensitivity to musicality and collective sound, so the proceedings never turn into a battle of egos. And the group has freely improvised/spontaneously composed architecture, breaking down at times into solos and duos. 'Salt', a duet between Rasmussen's prepared-sax and Corsano's bowed metal, builds an alien inner-ear landscape of difference tones, unisons and near-unisons to end side A. The album closes with a sax duet, 'In the Light of Things,' with Rasmussen and Flaherty already sounding like old friends." - SoundOhm. --- Mette Rasmussen / alto saxophone Paul Flaherty / alto & tenor saxophone Chris Corsano / drums --- Recorded June 14, 2014, at Never Ending Books, New Haven, CT, USA by Chris Corsano. Mixed by Chris Corsano. Mastered by Patrick Klem. 

Chris' no drum solo record. "It wasn’t an exercise in constraint necessarily; it was just what I was feeling. I made that record because those were the sounds I was hearing in my head. The first solo record [Young Cricketer]...it wasn’t like it changed the world, but it did change my little world. It was a first statement, and that’s a powerful thing—it gives context to everything that comes after it. Since there's no point in saying the same thing twice, I felt like the second solo record should be as far away from the first as possible, while still feeling honest to me." Chris Corsano - Bomb Magazine --- Chris Corsano / keyboards, electronics, microphone --- Recorded April 10 & 15th, 2006.

"The Young Cricketer plays out like a showreel for Corsano’s miraculous dexterity and virtuosity as a drummer. It’s a set of recordings made during Corsano’s time living in Manchester back in 2006 utilising all manner of objects and apparatus to offset and treat his drumkit, often morphing its sound into something unrecognisable. The Young Cricketer is a beautifully recorded album, with Corsano’s expanded kit occupying a vast stereo field, and every percussive gesture allotted its own distinct place in the mix. Consequently, this is probably the most thorough representation of Corsano’s near peerless drumming yet committed to record and stands as a pretty indispensable document for all lovers of free music and percussive invention. Stunning.” - Julien Héraud  --- Chris Corsano / percussion --- Recorded in Manchester England Feb 1-3, '06 (Except for side a track 2, recorded Jan. 6). Using drums, cymbals, baritone & alto saxophone mouthpieces with plastic tube and/or funnel, and/or shower attachment apparatus, pot lids, lamp base, scotch tape, violin-string-snare-drum contraption, bows, sticks, butter knives, and a superball on a stick, some distortion used on side B when mixing tracks 7 and especially 8, but other than that, no electronics either.

Fantastic trio made up of three of the best London free improvisors. Lol's lyricism combined with the depth of skill and restraint in the Noble / Edwards rhythm section is as good as it gets.  --- Lol Coxhill / soprano sax John Edwards / double bass Steve Noble / drums --- Tracklisting: 1. Tijuana Rendezvous - 5:482. Episode No.1 - 6:303. Coming Through - 5:074. Hook Point - 7:475. The Set Up - 5:596. Stray Dog - 3:337. Out Of The Past - 10:108. 3 Tales - 5:279. Endgame - 6:25 --- Recorded by Mick Ritchie at Barefoot Studios on 11th January 2004. Post production by Noble & Ritchie. Sleeve design by Noble & Denning. 

Noble's duo with Bailey, 'Out of the Past' documents the two in duel modes - that sensitive drumming we've come to know so well with Noble with the more percussive aspects of Bailey's playing style, alongside thick, distorted guitar and fuzzed out drums on the aptly named, 'Time Regained'. --- Steve Noble / drums, cymbals Derek Bailey / electric guitar --- Tracklisting: 1. The Long Wait - 3:302. Four For 4 - 2:463. Breakaway - 4:154. Raw - 5:075. Unfiltered - 3:306. Motion - 5:417. Out Of Sight - 2:288. Bright Moments - 4:349. Pick Up - 4:2110. Decoy - 1:4611. Time Regained - 2:3712. 7 Shades - 7:13 --- Recorded by Tony Robinson at Moat Studios, London, February 1999. Produced by Steve Noble. Post production by Mick Ritchie & Steve Noble. Thanks to Karen Brookman Bailey & Tony Robinson. Design by Noble & Denning. Original photo by Amalia Pistilli.

First release on Steve Noble's Ping Pong Productions. Having recorded Say What! and Transmutating with together a few years earlier, the trio was reunited in London for more hard hitting free improvisation. A truly unique trio - Davey Williams' history in rock music pushes this further into Noble's 'Rip, Rag and Panic' days, yet Oren Marshall's unique FX laden tuba techinique brings compelling experimentation to their sound.  --- Steve Noble / drums, turntables Davey Williams / guitar Oren Marshall / tuba --- Tracklisting: 1. Can It All Be So Simple?... - 0:502. Flathead Reunion - 3:013. Early Days - 4:034. Episode No 7 - 4:105. I Could Presume - 0:296. Out Of Any Gain - 5:027. Shadows - 1:518. 59 Farewells - 2:559. All Too Soon - 9:0910. Forever & 4th - 0:5911. Say What? - 5:2512. Coming Through - 1:5113. Just Another - 3:3014. Double Play - 0:3315. Hog Stomp - 4:2516. …Some Final Thoughts - 4:17 --- Recorded in London, September 1995. Post production by Dave Hunt and Steve Noble. Thanks to the LMC.

Second release on Steve Noble's Ping Pong Productions. Noble on percussion, Oren Marshall on tuba and Steve Buckley on reeds. Having made three records for Incus already, and produced his first Ping Pong record 'Flathead Reunion' with Oren Marshall, Noble invited Buckley to the studio.  --- Steve Buckley / alto saxophone, bass clarinet, tin whistle Steve Noble / drums, turntables Oren Marshall / tuba --- Tracklisting: 1. Bud Moon - 10:032. The Cane Pilling Dance -7:503. Xantung - 7:134. Big Juice - 3:065. Episode 58 - 2:216. T Blower - 6:277. Spoon Tongue - 2:048. Tails With Tales - 2:099. Drunken Intimacy - 2:4110. Shimmy Shally - 4:3211. The Declining Use Of Reckless Grooves (Part II) - 7:20 --- Recorded by Dave Hunt in London, February 1996. 

Fresh output from John Chantler's 1703 Skivbolaget - the new duo from two masters of very different string instruments. ‘The Air Around Her’ beguiled its audience when recorded live in a bakery at Edition Festival in 2016, and carries beautifully through to this release. Microtonal timbres meet gnarled defiance - the result is surprisingly symbiotic. Ellen Fullman’s Long String Instrument has been a long-term life-work of incredible ambition and dedication. The result is immediate, exciting and inspirational. Okkyung Lee has completed rewritten the possibilities for the cello in solo and group improvisation whilst maintaining a steadfast defiance to the many attempts to contain her work within pre-defined genres. ‘The Air Around Her’ was recorded on 20 February 2016 during the First Edition Festival for Other Music in Stockholm, Sweden at Kronobageriet — the former bakery to Swedish Royalty that dates back to the 17th Century and is now the site of the city’s Performing Arts Museum. The Edition Festival was given access to the space while renovations took place and Fullman allowed the requisite time to install and tune her long string instrument along the full 26 metre length of the room. --- Music by Ellen Fullman and Okkyung Lee. Recorded during the First Edition Festival for Other Music, Stockholm on 20th February 2016. Concert producer: John Chantler. Recording Engineer: Maria W Horn. Mixed by Ellen Fullman and Thomas Dimuzio. Mastered by Andreas [LUPO] Lubich at Calyx, Berlin. Artwork by Bill Nace. Made possible in part by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists (2015). The title, "The Air Around Her" is a quote from "Vermeer Interiors" a poem by Margaret Rabb, from her book, "Granite Dives". This release has been supported by the Swedish Arts Council. © 2018 Ellen Fullman (BMI) / Okkyung Lee (ASCAP) Released by 1703 Skivbolaget in cooperation with Ideell Edition

Still Light, Outside is the fourth album by John Chantler, and one which marks his departure from London and his relocation to Sweden. Over the four month period leading up to his departure, Chantler made several hours of raw recordings of the pipe organ at London’s St John-at-Hackney church. These were then subject to extended processing at Stockholm’s Elektronmusikstudion EMS and combined with additional electronic parts created there. Still Light, Outside is an extended suite in four parts that combines passages of stark minimalism centred at the bodily invasive extremes of the organ’s register with striking explosions of colour; massed chords shot through with heavy distortion and electronics that operate according to their own dream logic. --- Recorded August–November 2014 at St John-at-Hackney, London & Elektronmusikstudion EMS, Stockholm. Additional recording/mixing January–March 2015. Mastered by Andreas [LUPO] Lubich at Calyx, Berlin. Design: John Chantler / Photography: Fabio Lugaro  --- John Chantler / pipe organ, processing --- Recorded August–November 2014 at St John-at-Hackney, London & Elektronmusikstudion EMS, Stockholm. Additional recording/mixing January–March 2015. Mastered by Andreas [LUPO] Lubich at Calyx, Berlin. Design: John Chantler / Photography: Fabio Lugaro. Thanks to Bradford Bailey, Lawrence English, James Hammond, Mike Harding, Carina Thorén & Kate Walters. This work was made possible with support from the Australia Council for the Arts, the Australian Government’s arts funding and advisory body.

This recording shares music from the first time public concert of a new trio formed by John Chantler — best known for his solo synthesizer recordings and work with pipe organs — and two instantly recognisable voices in improv — drummer Steve Noble and saxophonist Seymour Wright. --- John Chantler / synthesizerSteve Noble / drumsSeymour Wright / alto saxophone --- Tracklisting: Front 1 - 5:45Front 2 - 3:20Front 3 - 6:00Above 1 - 12:20Above 2 - 5:07Above 3 - 5:38 --- Recorded 7 May 2017 at Cafe OTO by Shaun Crook. Mix/edit by John Chantler. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu.

This is a recording of the ten minute piece kindly commissioned by Alan F Jones for the Organ for the Senses festival held annually at the Spreckels Pavilion in San Diego using their open air organ. The music was performed by Justin Murphy-Mancini and recorded by Alan Jones. This audio is from a rehearsal performance a few days before the public premiere on 27 May 2017. --- Justin Murphy-Mancini / organ --- Tracklisting: 1. Move Along, Nothing To See Here - 10:14 --- Recorded by alan jones/laminal audio at spreckels pavilion organ, san diego, may 2017

Selected works from John Chantler's time at Stockholm’s Elektronmusikstudion EMS.  --- John Chantler / reed organ, serge synthesizer --- Tracklisting: 1. ( part I ) 13:02 2. ( part II ) 08:44 3. ( part III ) 14:47 --- Recorded and arranged March 2016—November 2017 at EMS, Stockholm; ZKM, Karlsruhe; NOTAM, Oslo and 1703, Stockholm. Thanks to staff EMS, ZKM and NOTAM for their help and support. KM residency was supported by The Australia Council for The Arts. Elements of '( part III )' originally commissioned by Audiorama, Stockholm.

A duo for saxophone and synthesizer. Johns/John lock into a series of cycles and frequency systems that while loosely in the tradition of the patterned saxophony and accompanying string drone of La Monte Young and the Theatre of Eternal Dream Music’s B Flat Dorian Blues. The pair obliterate the instrumental hierarchy that Young espouses for an altogether more unknowable intensity of experience. -- John Chantler / synthesizer Johannes Lunds / alto saxophone  --- Liner notes: Two Dreams For Endless Skies Music makes my mind drift uncontrollably. When I saw John Chantler and Johs Lunds perform at Copenhagen’s Mayhem venue I had a vision: I awake suddenly to discover that I have been sleeping on a beach. It’s a rainy early morning and I’m laying on my back in the open on the sand, the hood of my jacket blinding my peripheral vision. I have no idea how I got there and only see grey clouds above and hear the waves and wind. I stare into the sky blinking from light speckles of falling rain, my mind reeling from two dreams. I try to stem the rapid decay that dreams inherently suffer from: 01 Static I’m a child living on a west coast Canadian island and the nights I hate most are the silent ones. To fall asleep to anything other than silence is preferable – rain the best, howling wind reassuring, a violent storm just fine – it’s an emptiness broken sporadically by a creaking tree, a snapping branch and other terrifying small sounds that emanate from the encroaching forest. It’s the terrifying absence of background sounds that makes me aware of how far away from everything I am here. It makes me claustrophobic – the dark edges of the forest encroach, the only thing keeping them from closing in is the light outside the front door washing the dark green trees, ferns and rocks with a creepy dim light. Around this time, while I start to understand my fear of silence, I am given a portable radio. I spend nights slowly panning the tuning dial through the shimmering static noise of the radio spectrum, picking up the odd AM channel that somehow has made itself audible all the way out here where I am. Faint songs blend into speech into rich hisses into warbling glissandi and squeaks and pops – engrossing noises that I imagine come from orbiting satellites, distant planets and other worlds. 02 Waves In the next dream I travel with my father to the northern tip of Vancouver Island. We hike through the forests of Cape Scott Park towards the sea. It takes us all day to get there. Along the trail I listen to the relentless roar of the wind and crashing waves coming off the ocean. The coast persistently seems just over the next hill but doesn't appear – the white noise grows more wearing and the hike turns to a slog. The park we are in contains a series of overgrown fields and dilapidated farm houses. Built by late 19th century Danish colonists, they were abandoned just over a decade later when the roads and utilities the government had promised didn't materialise. The settlements have a spooky peacefulness, beautiful but mournful in the subsuming nature. Through ghost farms and fields, then some low bushes, we finally arrive at the shore. Here the white noise of wind and waves takes full hold. The white-capped sea churns out to the horizon and the pale bright sandy beach stretches to either side of us for kilometres. Far down the beach we see a number of large dark lumpen shapes plonked upon the sand. As we walk towards them the shapes slowly reveal themselves to be a colony of recently deceased sea lions. In the heat of the blaring sun some of the giant cadavers have become bloated enough to cause their boiled and steaming guts to explode out onto the beach. Dotted in constellations around the carcasses and across the shore are hundreds of brightly coloured size 10 Nike running shoes, all for the left foot. A shipping container must have fallen off a freighter during a heavy storm, breaking apart and dumping the left footed shoes into the sea, where they drifted to the shore and washed up on this beach. They look so peculiar and fake against the guts and endless nature – vibrant running shoes, floating through infinite space, bobbing across the swelling grey sea, in the brilliant rays of sunshine, or the luminous light of the moon, blown on by howling wind through the slow motion murk of my memory. A large black bear emerges from behind one of the giant sea lion carcasses and raises itself up onto its hind legs. I jump up but instead of the beach I am back in the venue and my ears are ringing. Finish There’s an idea that the essential human use of music is as a mask – that at its core music is a way to drown out all the external noises that our most inner primordial self automatically processes as a warning, setting our nerves alight. What this understanding of music might mean for, say, love songs, dance or noise music is hard to fathom, and the idea becomes too reductive to be interesting. But it is useful sometimes, inasmuch as the idea connects music directly to animals, landscape and endless cosmos – dumping us humans and our machines and activities into what was once called nature. Sound and silence drift uncontrollably, endlessly, until they find music. Music makes our minds drift uncontrollably but gives us an interface with the world. Nathaniel Budzinski 

Long out of press mighty gamelan collab from members of US drone collective Pelt, the UK's Part Wild Horses Mane on Both Sides and New Zealand guitarist Michael Morley aka Gate. Recorded at 2012's TUSK festival in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the huge ensemble folded up into a mid-size room in a little corner of England and tapped into the music that has long transfixed the world - but with as much raga and hillbilly influence as Indonesian. Be warned, this is not 100% holy. Soon, avain hymns give way to drones akin to those of Vibracathedral Orchestra, and low, slow tones eat at your redeeming thoughts. A one time super-group and damn were they super. Official MIE press release: "In October 2012, at the Tusk Festival at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, noise emissaries from three continents came together on a Sunday to make music for an hour or so. From the United States came Mike Gangloff, Nathan Bowles, and Patrick Best of the mighty Virginia drone collective Pelt. Representing the United Kingdom were sonic pilgrims Pascal Nichols and Kelly Jayne Jones of Part Wild Horses Mane on Both Sides. And from Oceania came the transcendent New Zealand guitarist Michael Morley of Gate and, of course, the legendary Dead C. This summit proceeded without words. Their chosen means of deliberation was the gamelan: an array of gangsa and saron metallaphones and singing bowls sprawled out on the patchwork oriental rugs; a rig of gongs; the flurry of hammers and mallets; a few dozen onlookers seated cross-legged or just laying prostrate on the floor. And everyone and everything was transported. - Brent S. Sirota ---  Recorded at TUSK Festival 2012 at Star & Shadow Cinema, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Live sound by Steve Nicholson and Stosh. Recording by Sam Grant. With thanks to Henry MIE.  www.tuskfestival.com

Effigy is Pelt's first new batch of new recordings since 2007, and their first album since Jack Rose's death in 2009. Simultaneously frenetic and meditative, it's a raga seared in pulsating low-end piano, scorned and mournful strings and swarming harmonium.  “What separates Pelt … is the willful sonic escalation from monk chant and Appalachian bowed sitar to Blue Ridge mountain grinding ear-death. … They’ve not become giants; they’ve become the mountain.” - The Washington Post From the original MIE press release: MIE Records are unbelievably honoured to be releasing, the first album recorded since 2007 by the acoustic-only droners Pelt. Recorded live in June 2011 in an old yoga studio in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin and a decommissioned synagogue called the Gates of Heaven in nearby Madison, the band have laid down their most accomplished and fully realised work to date. Epic in every sense of the word, Effigy is a sprawling journey through their singular plan on the musical map. Layer upon layer of droning strings melt over never-ending harmoniums which threaten to engulf you whilst peals of gongs ring out to mesmerising effect. Effigy sees Pelt reaching their blissful sonic enlightenment. Effigy is a testament to the ancient animal shaped mounds called ‘effigy mounds’ which dot the landscape in and around Madison, Wisconsin. No one has yet managed to work out who built these creations. Over the centuries they have greatly reduced in size but still the largest can measure up to 400ft in length, and the outlines of birds, lizards, deers and bears are all clearly visible to the observer. Soil would have been carried from afar to construct these huge monuments with only crude implements to hand. The erection of the monuments would have surely have to have been carried out by practically an army of workers or inhabitants and taken a very long time to build indeed. --- Recorded by Pelt. Mixed by Jason Meagher. Mastered by James Plotkin. Artwork by Jake Blanchard. With thanks to Henry MIE. 'Ecstatically dedicated and indebted to eternal spirit of Jack Rose.'  

Blood n guts folk from the Anglo-American duo. Searing harmonies and sparse, vital instrumentation breath new life into timeless tales of love, loss and death. Originally released to critical acclaim by No-Fi Recordings and then reissued by MIE Music in 2011, Dumb Supper is by all means one of the most interesting and exciting revivalist recording of traditional songs we've heard in years. Cath and Phil believe in folk retaining its original storytelling function, so all the songs on the album are adaptations of songs they have unearthed or which have been passed on to them through family members, musical collaborators, and their own love of the original information highway - folk music. If you missed the physical, snap this up and get yourselves down to see them here this Thursday. “Dumb Supper is one of those rare modern folk albums that will find a home in both the longstanding ‘traditional’ music community and among those attracted to the form’s more experimental and lo-fi possibilities….It’s a weird looking-glass effect many folk fans will be familiar with: the straighter you play it, the stranger it gets…Shirley Collins always understood this and so do Cath & Phil Tyler.” – Frances Morgan, Plan B Magazine --- All songs traditional except: Farewell My Friends & Morning - adapted from Sacred Harp. Death of Queen Jane - Words trad. Music Tyler Yellowhammer - Tyler Dewdrop - Words trad. Music Tyler Wild Stormy Deep - by Homer Cornett Slumber Boats - by Alice Riley/Jessie Gaynor  --- Recorded at Summerhill Square, Newcastle Upon Tyne in the first half of 2007. Arranged by Cath and Phil Tyler. Artwork by Jim Oss. Produced by Andrew Hodson.