CD 1, Unitarian Chapel, Warwick, 1994 and 2023:“Andy Isham organised a concert in the Unitarian Chapel, Warwick on 29 June 1994. As part of a longer concert I played a solo piece on soprano which is the first track on CD 1.  It was not long enough to issue on its own and things moved on. Since then I have kept coming back to it because I think it is some of the best solo playing I have ever done. The idea came to me that I should go back to the chapel and see what it was about the space which drew that playing out. As the idea took shape, the saying of Heraclitus about not being able to step in the same river twice started swirling around too. And there it was – I had the title. The “concept”, even – or at least, the conceit … ”CDs 2-4, a sequence of solo recordings made at Arco Barco, Ramsgate, 2018-24:“I was introduced by Matt Wright, the other half of Trance Map, to Filipe Gomes and his Arco Barco studio in Ramsgate on the Kent coast. The studio is located in the upper floors of one of the former chandlers’ work spaces overlooking the harbour. A loft space with control room, a live main room and a smaller, less reverberant room. The acoustic response of the live room and Fil’s passion for sound recording has made Arco Barco my favourite studio and I have recorded there as often as possible.
 Over the many visits Fil has tested various microphones and their positioning. The variation means that some recordings are noticeably “dryer” and/or “closer” than others. Much of the thinking was inspired by the work of the late Michael Gerzon and his pioneering ambisonics. What I brought to the occasions was variability in reed behaviour and embouchure and perhaps most importantly my state of mind.”
THE HERACLITEAN TWO-STEP, etc.
BOOK CONTENTS:-- Writing by John Corbett (writer, curator, producer; Corbett vs Dempsey Gallery, Chicago), Filipe Gomes (Arco Barco, Ramsgate), Richard Leigh (writer), Stephen C. Middleton (writer/poet) and Robert Stillman (musician).-- An extended interview with Evan Parker by Martin Davidson (Emanem label).-- An email exchange between Evan Parker and Hans Falb (Konfrontationen Festival, Nickelsdorf).-- Writing and visual artwork by Evan Parker. 

Helping to mark Evan Parker’s 80th birthday in 2024, the book compiles both historical and contemporary perspectives on Evan’s work, by a range of contributors as well as Evan himself. The book also includes a selection of Evan’s visual collages, which are shared publicly for the first time.

"Away, I was" is a collection of solo pieces created in, and for, some quite different situations. The two longest pieces are tenor and soprano improvisations recorded in concert at Dragon Club, Poznan (2024) and the famous Blow Out series, Oslo (2025). The shorter tracks range through saxophone-controlled feedback and multitracked works, a tenor sax version of Chris Burn's transcription of a Derek Bailey solo, studio improvisations and compositions and an audience recording of Butcher's opening amplified soprano burst at a Keiji Haino "Fushitsusha" concert.  Over 40 years of sustained performance and publishing, English saxophonist, improvisor and composer John Butcher has shaped much of what the soprano and tenor saxophone can do, and what their roles and vocabulary in improvised music might be. There’s a situated purposefulness to Butcher’s music. It is always concerned with its context, flexibility, space and company: how group playing works and flows; how aspects of improvisation fit into a living musical world; how and what the saxophone can be for.I’ve always heard Butcher’s playing as a kind of nose to tail saxophony, where the whole instrument from reed-tip to brim of bell is available, accessible and articulate. Few other saxophonists slice as sharply back into the physical history, material (and physics) of the instrument, across its near 200 year history through jazz, particularly Lester Young’s infinite permutations, to its speculative, hybrid origins. When Hector Berlioz wrote of his friend Adolphe Sax’s then fresh invention, “the varied beauty of its accent, sometimes serious, sometimes calm, sometimes impassioned, dreamy or melancholic”, he could have been imagining Butcher's distinctively clean but complex, enquiring soundworld.WIRE Primer by Seymour Wright

Play Monk arrives in a gatefold, reverse board 2CD designed by Maja Larrson. Cover photograph of Thelonius Monk at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco in 1968 by Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter. Inside photographs of حمد [Ahmed] by Stefan Lacandler. Recorded and mixed by Benedic Lamdin on Saturday 1st and Sunday 2nd March, 2025 at Fish Factory Studios, London. Mastered by Andreas LUPO Lubich. Produced by Seymour Wright/OTOROKU. After 6 albums re-imagining the work of Ahmed Abdul-Malik, أحمد [Ahmed] turn to the material of Malik’s bandmate Thelonious Monk in the group's ongoing search for future music.  Before going on to develop his own groundbreaking approach to jazz, Ahmed Abdul-Malik worked in Thelonious Monk’s late 1950’s quartets - appearing on seminal Monk recordings: Thelonious In Action (1958) and Misterioso (1958), and the more recently unearthed Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall (2005). Abdul-Malik and Monk share a critical engagement with time - specifically in challenging its linear trajectory and offering sites and modes of synthesis and rupture instead. In their music, fragments of time are scattered and re-arranged in the present, an idea central too to the project of أحمد [Ahmed]. Over several decades, all four members of أحمد [Ahmed] have engaged with Monk’s standards in various individual and collective ways, but Play Monk, recorded in the same three-day London studio sessions as Sama’a (Audition), is the first released documentation of the group's versions of Monk’s music which began with a spontaneous interpretation of ‘Evidence’ in Novara, Italy, 2023.   Across 2CDs, أحمد [Ahmed] atomize Monk’s ‘standards’ - transforming each composition into a shifting quantum time artifact. The melodic, harmonic, rhythmic and spatial gestures of each piece become complex vernacular forms, creating a dialogue in time and a (red)shifting lens through which to view our material present. Into the fissures of Monk’s form, أحمد [Ahmed]  pour their own play - colliding and dancing with Duke Ellington, Cecil Taylor, Caribbean diasporic music, European improvisation and Jah Shaka in their pursuit of future music. “Monk’s music is not played so much as grasped, condensed and catapulted through the vagaries of time,” writes Fielding Hope. “Monk famously used to dance in circles. In flight from the numerical bind, أحمد [Ahmed] make music that sounds like it could float on forever.”

PROIBIDÃO is the name given to a certain kind of electronic funk music produced in Brazilian favelas, especially in Rio de Janeiro where it started to appear in the beginning of the 90’s as a parallel phenomenon to the growth of drug gangs along the city’s more than 600 slums. A raw mix of live funk vocals and Miami bass structures, these anonymous funk tracks are spread illegally by DJs and gang sponsored parties. Proibidão is a raw musical genre that captures the dark side of Brazilian favelas. The explicit lyrics of apology to drug gangs and the violent content makes them illegal to broadcast through radio or as live public events. Proibidão can only be heard in the bailes or dances that the gangs organize and that run every day of the week in different locations in the slums around Rio. The production of a Proibidão occurs in different ways. A DJ spins Miami bass rhythms straight from sample CDs, and an MC talks on top of it, mainly live in street bailes and then recorded through a simple multichannel to a minidisk or simply straight. No mix is done and only sometimes an extra production is done. The gang leaders, to spread the respect and love for the gang as well as hate to the other gangs, finance the bailes and hire the DJs and sound systems. At most parties this is recorded live and spread then as an mp3 or CD to different other DJs and bailes. Its life runs a minimum of 6 months and depending on it’s popularity it can go on for more than one year. The selection featured on this CD compiles music recorded live during the beginning of 2003 in different favelas from Zona Sul, South Rio de Janeiro, a zone once controlled by the drug gang called Comando Vermelho, mainly responsible for the city’s growing rates of homicides and power corruption, as well as Rio’s and Brazil’s growing drug consumption. C.V Comando Vermelho (Red Command) is a criminal organization that was founded in 1979 in the prison Cândido Mendes, on the island Ilha Grande (RJ), as a connection of common prisoners and militants of the Falange Vermelha (Red Phalanx), which fought the military dictatorship. During the entire 1990's the criminal organization was the strongest in all of Rio de Janeiro, but today the principal leaders have been arrested or are dead, and the organization is not as strong. The Comando Vermelho still control parts of the city and seeing streets tagged with "CV" is common in many favelas in Rio de Janeiro. This CD is in no way an apology for these groups but a document to portray a moment in time in Rio de Janeiro musical and social history. All audio imperfections are left as they were when collected as these tracks are the only remaining documents of this music. Recorded and assembled by filmmaker Carlos Casas courtesy of some anonymous MCs and DJs in different bailes along the favelas of Zona Sul, Rio de Janeiro during March-April 2003.

The six works represented on these two compact discs might be heard as historical artefacts in the sense that they exist as documentation of performed events that are not repeatable in the same way that notated musical works generally are. However, while they involved improvisational elements, they are not to be regarded as improvisations since they were rigorously composed for the environmental circumstances in which they took place. They represent an attempt to articulate an aesthetic of environmental interactivity through sound-making, which occupied me over a fifteen year period. During that time I generated a diverse body of work from which these six examples have been chosen in order to illustrate the range of those activities. All of these works share the characteristic of having been outdoor performances. They also demonstrate a purposeful transition that my investigations pursued over those fifteen years: a progressive expansion of context, moving from my interactions with a single member of another species toward interactions with complex environments. Foremost in these experiments was a concern for sound as a means to explore the emergent intelligence of non-human living systems. My interest was in regarding the complex web of environmental sound-making as evidence of complex-minded systems – a way of experiencing what Gregory Bateson has called “the integrated fabric of mind that envelopes us.”These recordings were often made under less-than-ideal technical circumstances. The listener must tolerate a wide range of unusual acoustic spaces and an even greater range of technical quality. I recommend that listeners adjust their audio expectations to accommodate these eccentric demands through understanding that the non-studio production values were intentional and inseparable from the reality of the art.- David Dunn

Nyahh Records is delighted to present a collection of contemporary noise and experimental musicians from all across the island of Ireland. All crammed into this two disc set with wonderful artwork by Alan Doyle.This significant collection covers multiple generations of artists in the field of audio experimentation, including Danny McCarthy (turned 75 in 2025) and some new heads on the block like Francesca O and Enola Christ Metalizer. These 32 tracks cover noise, acoustic, electroacoustic, electronics, Musique Concrete, tape music, and drone. Some with academic backgrounds and some total bedroom studio weirdos who don’t get out much.We hope you enjoy this compilation and it brings you some kind of joy and/or discomfort.

“If stained glass windows could sing they would sound like Josephine Foster, and her interpretations of the songs of Víctor Herrero are as artful and finely detailed as motes of dust falling through shafts of light in the libraries of your childhood, engrossing in their restraint. Josephine's naked voice an echoing truth in repose against the existential question mark of Víctor’s guitar. In a world that can feel bewildering and relentless, this music is shelter. Adormidera is the sound of a hypnotised mind; the shadow-dance of old souls.”~ Alex NeilsonJosephine Foster is a Colorado-born singer, composer, and lyric poet. A former opera student turned visionary folk experimentalist, she breathes new life into archaic forms. Her music channels the spectral glow of the cultural archaeology of Harry Smith's old weird America while simultaneously conjuring a scrambled past that exists only in her vision. Across 25 years of singular work, Foster plays at the boundaries of psych-folk hymnody, country blues, lieder and avant-song, lending her characteristic mezzo-soprano and interpretive wit to collaborations with fellow underground musicians around the globe.As homage to her longtime collaborator, Josephine invited Spanish composer Víctor Herrero to curate a selection of his own songs for her voice. Herrero's classical guitar accompanies Josephine's gossamer singing, in compositions that reanimate the lineage of Amancio Prada and Victor Jara.

Kali Malone and Drew McDowall present Magnetism, their first collaborative album born from a decade-long friendship and ignited by a single day of creative synergy. When Malone stepped into McDowall’s Brooklyn home studio, a shared vision immediately took root and set the course for a remarkable collaboration between these two singular artists.On Magnetism, Malone’s poignant and evocative melodies manifest through McDowall’s signature timbral synthesis, creating a unified voice that soars freely and radiates with vitality. Technically, the duo employs an exquisite blend of Karplus-Strong synthesis, distortion and just intonation. Kali and Drew embrace these tools with refined grace while moving fluidly within their musical framework. Charged by the magnetic pull of repetition, saturation, and resonance, Magnetism pulses as a living music that captivates the senses and lingers long in the mind after the final notes fade.

LP is out-of-printCD includes two short duo sets originally available as digital-only bonus tracks. Download available as 320k MP3 or 24bit FLAC. This recording gathers all of the music from the final night of Otomo and Sachiko's first residency in 2009 which saw the pair joined by the long running trio of Evan Parker, John Edwards and Tony Marsh and special guest John Butcher. Butcher played duos with both Otomo and Sachiko and joined the quintet for a rousing sextet: stunning twin saxophone interplay, the unparalleled open-ness of the Marsh/Edwards rhythm pairing, Sachiko's deft high frequency interventions and Otomo's guitar at the centre - moving between abrasive textural invention and suggestive single note runs of ever-shifting melody. REVIEWS "As for indicating a place in the curiously sculpted bridges between improvised music and sound art, well, the simple singularity of these daring and committed performances should bear out their significance." Clifford Allen, Tiny Mix Tapes "This Quintet/Sextet album is recorded beautifully and it needed to be to capture all the nuance involved ... These are musicians at the top of their craft." Free Jazz Blog "...fresh and inspired. The recording stands as a finely-honed classic of classically approached free improvisation: the players dance and flow smoothly and effortlessly with and around the sounds of their partners." - Henry Kuntz Point of Departure Review

Tracklisting: A1 The Solar Model - 13:51A2 The Laws of Motion - 03:28A3 For George Saliba - 03:42B1 The Oud of Ziryab - 04:46 B2 For Ibn Al Nafis - 04:17 B3 For Mansa Musa - 03:44 B4 The Birds are Singing - 06:01  Pat Thomas returns to OTOROKU for his fourth collection of solo piano improvisations, this time recorded in a studio setting at London’s Fish Factory.  For 25 years now, beginning with Nur (Emanem) and continuing through Al-Khwarizmi Variations (Fataka), The Elephant Clock of Al-Jazari (OTOROKU), and now The Solar Model of Ibn Al-Shatir, Pat Thomas has drawn on the Arabic world for titles for his solo piano work - specifically the long-standing Islamic tradition of astronomical invention. For Thomas, the work of the polymaths he dedicates his music to has been sidelined by Eurocentrism, just as the Arabic origin of “jass” and the scalar, intervallic and polyphonic contributions made by Arab musicians have been routinely overlooked. Islamic innovation is at the heart of Thomas’ solo projects and draws a direct link between his Sufi faith and a totally unique style of playing. Each of his solo piano records is a dedication - not just to the innovators Thomas names but to the beauty of the universe in all its complexities.    Starting standing up with one hand inside the piano and one on the keys, ‘The Solar Model’ begins with single staccato bass notes appearing like chondrites in the darkness, occasionally tumbling towards a rhythm and then falling out of it. Metallic string work starts to pull towards an unseen centre and eventually notes from the upper registers appear, clear and light. With both hands drawn to the keys, Thomas builds towards scintillating beauty, carried through “The Laws of Motion” and propelling us towards the A-side closer, “For George Saliba”. Notes fall rapidly, colliding to form a crowded core with a warped sort of bebop in its middle - distinctive Pat with a nod to the Duke’s groove. The whole landscape of the A side swings with this one movement, until its energy is spent on one last sweeping rotation.  On the B-side, “The Oud of Ziryab” notes to the instrument maker who added a 5th pair of strings to the Oud. The single bass notes of the first side are swapped for clusters, bursting together and decaying in space. Making use of the sustain pedal and the silence of a studio setting, it’s one of the most open, lush recordings of Thomas at the piano we’ve heard - more Muhal Richard Abrams than Monk, the lower end thundering under rapid, crystalline blues.  “For Mansa Musa” brings back a swing instantly recognisable as Pat, with a huge euphoric lift halfway that crowns the record but the album’s end title “The Birds are Singing” is more celestial, more chromatic - a reminder that the spiritual matters just as much as the physical for Thomas. --- Released in an edition of 500 LPs and 500 CDsRecorded at the Fish Factory, London on Wednesday 6th March, 2024 by Benedic LamdinMixed by Benedic Lamdin Mastered by Giuseppe Ielesi Photographs by Abby Thomas Pressed at Vinyl Press UK

Tracklisting: 1. Aoshi 2. Dany Boya 3. Ankotsubaki Gaiden 4. Taria 5. Kamome 6. Furusato 7. Narayamabushiko 8. Maronie 9. Shiroi Inu"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

In Beijing, slated for release around June, fuses free-improv, chaotic noise, and avant-garde electronics into a ^*{}$}$\ sonic experience.Debutantes, known for their genre-defying somewhat ”industrial” approach, have appeared on labels like sensei Tom Lax’s legendary Siltbreeze. Meanwhile, Zhu Wenbo, a mainstay of China’s underground scene, brings his signature brand of strange & clatter.If you’re into twisted textures, fractured (non-)rhythms, and music that unravels itself at every turn, this is your AOTY. La théorie des ensembles, quand appliquée à l’ontologie, révèle des paradoxes fascinants sur la structure de la réalité. You knooow!

‘Essential Tremors’ is the debut solo showcase of Cathal Roche, an improvising saxophonist based in Co. Sligo, in the Atlantic north west of Ireland. The extended performance for baritone, alto, and soprano saxophones was recorded at St George’s Church and Heritage Centre, Carrick on Shannon, 2021, in the Nyahh label’s native Co. Leitrim, by Willie Stewart.Here, left to his own devices, Roche colours the air with a seductive display of versatility and virtuosity; initially hovering around liminal levels of extended instrumentals, and stealthily growing to a more full-bodied silhouette, and around the 1o minute mark commanding swarming dynamics comparable to Alex Zhang Hungtai. Cathal’s disciplined control of volume and tone is key to its grip, as he proceeds, pregnant with noirish dread, to blow ribbons of anguished blues - sax keys audible in the space - that hits all the right notes for lovers of late night musical introspection.Comes in lovely gatefold card with art by Alan Doyle

Mohammad’s own brand of ecstatic music takes elements from Middle Eastern and North African music to create an atmosphere of joy, love and happiness.WHO IS MOHAMMAD SYFKHANMohammad Syfkhan is a Kurdish/Syrian Singer and Bouzouki player. He began playing music in 1980 while he was in college studying nursing. When he got his degree in 1983, Mohammad moved to the city of Raqqa, Syria where he began working as a professional singer and started his own band, The Al-Rabie Band which played concerts, parties, weddings and festivals all over Syria. The Al-Rabie Band were a much sought-after group. Their live sets included Kurdish, Arabic, Turkish and some Western songs as well as Mohammad’s own original material.

Ultan O’Brien is a fiddle player and composer from the wilds of County Clare in the West of Ireland. Ultan is a performer as well as a regular at sessions all of Ireland and can be found by chance in any pub in Dublin, Cork or some remote village on the edge of nowhere, flying jigs and reels around the room. Ultan was reared in the rich tradition of Irish music which is so commonly found and heard in Co Clare, but he also delves deep into sound art and experimental music. He has often been heard in the back of a car after a few pints quoting lines from Alvin Lucier or speaking at length about improvisation and it’s place in modern Irish music. Ulatn O’Brien is a fresh and vital player who has much to offer with his unique approach and technique to a tradition so old and ever ready for a subtle change every 100 years or so.Ultan has played and recorded with people and bands such as Skipper’s Alley, Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin, John Francis Flynn, Slow Moving Clouds, Cuar, Laura Jurd, Martin Green, Natalia Beylis, Paul Roe and Nic Gareiss.‘in its [Ultan’s fiddle playing] sincerity of tone it reminds me somewhat of those great caoineadh which were played with such elusive grandeur by Denis Murphy and Pádraig O’Keefe’Adrian Scahill

'A slow air is a type of tune in Irish Traditional Music marked by the absence of strict metre or structure, melodically "open ended" and generally derived from the melody of a sung song but instead played on a solo melodic instrument. The melodies are often drawn from the sean-nós solo singing tradition.”Nyahh Records is delighted to share with you it’s second instalment of our Trad Series. This time we bring you a collection of traditional fiddle tunes called Slow Airs. Slow Airs differ from other Irish trad tunes as Airs are more contemplative, melancholy and the style is based more on the singing style of Sean-nos. Other traditional tunes like jigs, reels, hornpipes and marches are meant for dancing. Much like the sean-nos singing, slow airs are for listening and are prone to evoke many emotions, either reflective or sad and give the listener a chance to sit quietly listening, almost in a meditative state. It would not be uncommon in a pub during an air to see some fella or other having a little cry in to his pint during the playing of an air.Much like ‘A Collection of songs in the traditional and sean-nos style’, where the singers mostly recorded the songs themselves on phones or digital recorders, the musicians have done the same. This has produced a very warm and roomy set of recordings. No effects or too much mixing. Just the raw sound of the playing in a room.Nyahh is honoured to be able to present this collection of airs to you from some of Ireland’s best fiddlers.

This very special and wonderful solo performance by Oxford based Pat Thomas was recorded in Dublin during the first ever Reception Weekend event at the Complex. The piano Pat was playing had been very unique as it had copper plating on the interior giving the piano and strange and magical resonance. Nyahh Records is very grateful and excited to be able to share this performance with the world and to have Pat Thomas added to our list of artists.

In the early 1970s San Diego was a sleepy Southern California Navy town on the Mexican border and a seemingly unlikely gathering point for some of the most innovative, unclassifiable American artists of their era. Yet the presence of Harry Partch - hobo composer, iconoclast and inventor of instruments such as the Harmonic Canon and Quadrangularis Reversum - and a newly established and highly experimental music department at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) ushered in a revolution that was as much social as it was musical. Drawing from the occult, self-realization and radical political movements of 70s Southern California, these artists sought to dismantle the established control systems of American life, looking to the future even as they sometimes referenced a distant, idyllically imagined past. In their pursuit of “Irrelevant Music” - Kenneth Gaburo’s term for an untainted music free of constraint and compromise - these disparate artists constitute a shadow history of American experimental music far removed from the European and East Coast models of the time. Sonic Meditations, compositional linguistics, microtonality, invented instruments, cutting edge electronics, underwater synthesizers, Tibetan throat singing, environmental sound and pure noise were their tools. My 2023 book, Alien Territory: Radical, Experimental and Irrelevant Music in 1970s San Diego, presents the story. In this collection are the sounds.