Black Truffle is thrilled to present “Reservoir 1: Preservation,” a gorgeous new piece by American composer/percussionist Sarah Hennies. Sarah's work explores a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer & trans identity, love, intimacy, psychoacoustics, and percussion. The “Reservoirs” are a series of three one-hour pieces based on the relationship between the conscious and unconscious human mind. Jung and Freud described the unconscious mind as a reservoir, a repository for memories that we don’t readily need access to, yet are kept forever somewhere in our minds. Specifically, Freud believed that one function of the unconscious mind is to store traumatic memories, filed away so that we don’t have to confront them every day. The conscious mind has no direct access to the unconscious, yet the unconscious is a constant yet mysterious presence in our lives. “Reservoir 1: Preservation” is scored for piano and three percussionists, performed by Phillip Bush and Meridian, the long-running experiment in percussion, improvisation, and interpersonal relationships that includes Tim Feeney, Sarah Hennies, and Greg Stuart. In “Preservation” the piano functions as a constant, pervasive, but almost subliminal murmur amid the percussion playing that cycles through a variety of timbral and gestural areas, including gentle droning, frenetic scraping, and bricks violently dropped into metal buckets. The percussion group never interacts with or responds to the piano, while the piano subtly absorbs aspects of the trio. “Preservation” was recorded, mixed, and mastered by Jeff Francis at the University of South Carolina and performed by Meridian: Tim Feeney, Sarah Hennies, Greg Stuart (percussion), and Phillip Bush (piano). Released in a CD digipak with design by Lasse Marhaug. Cover photo from Abby Grace Drake’s photo series, “Shopping Carts of Southside Ithaca. 

Please note this edition is in FrenchTwo revenant stories by Léon Bloy, with music by Nurse With Wound. Léon Bloy (1846-1917) was a French novelist and pamphleteer, friend and disciple of Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, close to Paul Bourget, François Coppée, Joris-Karl Huysmans and Jean Richepin, and famous for his partly autobiographical novel "Le Désespéré". A British music project formed in 1978 by Steven Stapleton, John Fothergill and Heman Pathak, Nurse With Wound (now Stapleton's variable geometry project) is an essential figure of English experimental and industrial music since the early 80's. With more than 150 releases, alone or with other musicians, Stapleton has swept widely different musical styles, from industrial music to mambo, through electronics, improvisation, electroacoustics, with a lot of humor.

Dorothy Iannone tells her Fluxus Story in a Berlin recording from 1979. “There, Maciunas and I looked deeply but impassively into each other's eyes, not knowing then that we would meet again on these pages. Perhaps he was thinking, ‘Who is this woman?'. Perhaps it might even have amused him, somewhere far back in his mind, to know that I am she who is the Fluxus woman artist who is not the Fluxus woman artist.”Dorothy Iannone Limited edition of 270 copies.   For more than six decades, American artist Dorothy Iannone (1933, Boston–2022, Berlin) attempted to represent ecstatic love, the union of gender, feeling, and pleasure. Today her oeuvre, which encompasses painting, drawing, collage, video, sculpture, objects, and artist's books, is widely recognized as one of the most provocative and fruitful bodies of work in recent decades in terms of the liberalization of female sexuality, and political and feminist issues. As Fluxus artist Robert Filliou declared as early as in 1972, "She is a freedom fighter, and a forceful and dedicated artist, skillfully blending imagery and text, beauty and truth. Her aim is no less than human liberation." A narrative element fed with personal mythologies, experiences, feelings, and relationships runs through all of her work, unified by her distinctive colorful, explicit, and comic book style.Active from the 1960s to the early 2020s, her work has been recently exhibited at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek (2022); the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2019); the Serpentine Pavilion, London (2018); the Swiss Cultural Center, Paris (2016); MAMCO, Geneva (2017); the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunt, Zurich, and the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2014); the New Museum, New York (2009).

Katalyst Entertainment presents Kabalaba, a live album by the Art Ensemble of Chicago recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1974 and originally released on their AECO label in 1978. It features performances by Lester Bowie, Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell, Malachi Favors Maghostut, and Don Moye along with Muhal Richard Abrams.

Drums – Han Bennink Piano, Electronics [Toy Electronics] – Steve Beresford   Tracks 1 & 4: recorded 24 February 2000 live at Mahogany Hall, Edam Tracks 2 & 3: recorded 17 February 2000 live at Bimhuis, Amsterdam  

Bass Mamer Percussion Erik Recorded Zhang Dong

Constellazione Seconda is the follower of  the Lombardi 1978 "Costellazione" a piano sound exploration based upon a map of sky constellation, planned as the first step of a large work focused on the exposition and 'performance' of constellations maps, planetaria and maps of the heavens. This new work breaks up into 21 short piano movements, concentrating on incredibly short staccato notes that sting violently between fractured harmonics leaving plenty of momentum-puncturing silences to really heighten the sense of disorientation, as well as two long (over 20 minutes) piano excursions

Mutual Aid Has A History It points to the concept of community action and the human drive to provide succor to our fellow humans. Mutual aid is the primary ethic of an anarchistic utopia in which each knows what they have, is honest about what they need, and is prepared to give and receive accordingly. Every human want is met by a commensurate surplus and all are lifted equally above suffering. The music on this disc is, to a degree, about this political conception of mutual aid history but, rather than celebrating its primary act of what to give, it concentrates on the decision of how to give it. It asks the musicians to take stock of their gifts and to ask themselves, in each moment, how their use of that gift will affect the community (ensemble) of which they are currently a member. Will their addition provide: 1. A refined musical gesture that simply makes the group sound better 2. A raw idea that opens new sets of possibilities for the other musicians, or 3. The inspiration to others of making the difficult, selfless musical choice. This set of eight ensemble concertos sprouts from a compositional system that asks musicians to question what they add to the ensemble as human beings first and musicians second. Rather than the traditional aim of faithfully reproducing a score through its mastery, the members of the ensemble are prompted to make decisions that purposely force the music away from facsimile and toward a spontaneity that may feel awkward and uncomfortable. Each supports each in the search for something new and interesting; a music that is not only greater than the compositional whole, but has the potential to recast the way we think about the balance of virtuosity and improvisational spirit in our practice. After all, if we, as an ensemble can enjoy jumping off musical cliffs together within the relative safety of this compositional system, then what’s to stop us from trying to find that same exhilaration in the other music we make?    Nate Wooley - Trumpet Ingrid Laubrock - Sax Joshua Modney - Violin Mariel Roberts - Cello Sylvie Courvoisier - Piano Cory Smythe - Piano Matt Moran - Vibraphone Russell Greenberg - Vibraphone and Percussion

Alto Saxophone – John Zorn Artwork, Design – Karen Brookman Bass – Paul Rogers (2) Electronics, Keyboards – Pat Thomas Guitar – Buckethead, Derek Bailey Percussion – Paul Lovens Photography By – Martin L McGain Post Production – John Hadden Producer – Derek Bailey Recorded By – Matt Saunders, Paul Wilson (4) Trombone – Yves Robert Violin – Alexander Balanescu Voice – Vanessa Mackness Company Week is a celebration of freely improvised music and in 1991 musicians came together for five days improvising, most of them meeting for the first time.This CD is taken from the final two days (Friday and Saturday).The titles are derived from the initials of the musicians.

Alto Saxophone – John Zorn Artwork, Design – Karen Brookman Bass – Paul Rogers (2) Guitar – Buckethead, Derek Bailey Percussion – Paul Lovens Photography By – Martin L McGain Piano, Electronics, Keyboards [Keyboard] – Pat Thomas Post Production – John Hadden Producer [Production] – Derek Bailey Recorded By [Recording] – Matt Saunders, Paul Wilson (4) Trombone – Yves Robert Violin – Alexander Balanescu Voice – Vanessa Mackness Company Week is a celebration of freely improvised music and in 1991 musicians from the USA, Germany, France and Britain came together for five days improvising, most of them meeting for the first time.This series of three discs reflects the music developed over this period.Volume 2 is selected from the middle period (part Wednesday, Thursday, part Friday).The titles are derived from the initials of the musicians.

Recorded At – Cafe Oto hand numbered edition

That night at Café Oto -September of 2019 it was- is one of those gigs that I’d really like to attend. Having listened to and watched live my share of free jazz, like many of you, I’m not easily impressed, or at least I pretend not to be. But this duo of two important figures of the London free jazz/free improv scene surely makes a difference. Wright’s duos and trios (to name a few: Gamut with Eddie Prevost, Blasen with Sebastien Lexer, About Trumpet and Saxophone with Nate Wooley) are mostly playful, less noisy and surely introvert events. EFV, on the resurrected Steve Noble’s Ping Pong Production, is much different than the aforementioned. Noble and Wright have known each other for quite some time, played together a lot. On this live date their focus seems to be the transcendence to a higher level of energetic and passionate playing. I mentioned Wright’s playing earlier because his free jazz blow outs (now that’s an aphorism, I know) were audible in rare moments in his recorded playing. On the contrary on EFV, he lets his voice be heard with intensity. At the same time his playing leaves enough room both for the listener to focus but also for Steve Noble to adjust, play along or lead. Since you follow this site, you are probably familiar with his prolific career that spans over three decades. Noble is one of the most important percussionists of our time in improvisation and that is no exaggeration. I, the listener, am the receiver of a constant flow of ideas and sounds from his drum kit. He has built a unique style of his own that engulfs total flexibility, in adapting with fellow players. But what about their playing as a duo? Well, in the small interview that accompanies this text, I am wondering if EFV is, something like at least, a culmination of their playing together. This is improvised music and the most enjoyable moments (I won’t say the “best”) come unannounced and impromptu. This cd provided the thought that certain ideas, like sketches, existed beforehand, materializing, though, into something not exactly as predicted. Which is great, isn’t it? I mean, this is the essence of improvisational music, if I’m allowed the liberty to give it some kind of definition… So, probably the biggest quality of this cd (apart from their playing which I enjoyed) is that you do not know what to expect next and that is the greatest quality in music I believe. (Free Jazz Collective)

Five chamber works by Tim Parkinson, performed by Apartment House One violin solo, two pieces for violin and piano, one quintet and one septet. Apartment House: Mira Benjamin, violin Siwan Rhys, piano Kathryn Williams, flute Heather Roche, bass clarinet Mark Knoop, piano Gordon MacKay, violin Bridget Carey, viola Anton Lukoszevieze, cello cover photograph by Tim Parkinson

64-minute piece by Antoine Beuger, composed in 2004, and beautifully realised by Apartment House. "It’s from a series of pieces I composed, each for a different number of players, from two to twenty. And the number in each piece is really important, because everything that happens can only happen in a situation where there are, in this case, six people. The question I was really involved with in this whole series was how is it to play with this particular number of musicians? It’s quite easy to see that to be two is somehow different from being three. But with five, six, seven, it becomes less easy to grasp the difference. But there will always be differences."   --- Apartment House: James Opstad (double bass) Mark Knoop (accordion) Heather Roche (bass clarinet) Mira Benjamin (violin) Joe Qiu (bassoon) Bridget Carey (viola) Artwork by Jack Vickridge   ---   Another Timbre. 2021

Second CD release by Adrián Demoč following his highly-regarded debut 'Ziadba'. Four beautiful chamber works, three performed by Apartment House, one by an ensemble from the Janacek School of Music in the Czech Republic. The title track, Hlaholika, was commissioned by Another Timbre as one of the label's 'quarantine commissions' during Covid lockdown in 2020. The front cover shows a stone tablet engraved in Glagolitic script --- Another Timbre, 2021

"Atlantis is an exhilarating listen, equally thanks to its fierce free jazz and brightly textural abstraction" Antonio Poscic, The WIRE, Feb 2020 Following closely on the heels of his ravishing solo album Tomorrow is Too Late, Stockholm-based synthesist and improviser John Chantler switches gears to unleash the stunning second album by his trio with saxophonist Seymour Wright and drummer Steve Noble, Atlantis. Chantler is well-known for his solo electronic work, which frequently explodes richly layered ambient soundscapes into visceral explosions and thrilling physicality, to say nothing of his imaginative experimentation with the organ, heard in radically transformed mode on the recent solo recording. But Chantler is equally invested in real-time improvisation and he’s developed a dazzling rapport and sound world with Wright and Noble, two of England’s most distinctive, active, and turbulent figures in spontaneous music over the last couple of decades. The pair has worked together in numerous contexts over the years, but it took Chantler to create an ongoing context for them, and since forming in 2017 the trio’s rigour and level of communication have steadily expanded.“My fantasy idea in the beginning when I wanted to do this trio was thinking about taking Derek Bailey’s role in the Topography of the Lungs trio,” he says, referring to the classic 1970 album with Evan Parker and Han Bennink. “That’s not what happened, but that was my way of imagining how I could make the synthesizer have the kind of range and ability to both comment on stuff and guide and push in certain ways, like Derek did in that group. That remains a kind of ambition even if aesthetically it doesn’t feel very close to that, but that’s how I first thought about what my role would be.” Indeed, Chantler serves as a pesky interrogator, his serrated tones and viscous globules cutting through the kinetic din dished out by Wright and Noble, and on the new album his integration is more fully realised to the point where it’s often impossible to decipher where the output of one musician ends—the sibilant bowed cymbals of Noble or the feedback-laced lines of Wright—and the pushback of another begins.The album was cut and mixed in a single day with in-house engineer Janne Hansson at Stockholm’s legendary Atlantis Studio, a facility made famous by the chart-topping albums recorded there by Abba in the 1970s, when the place was known as Metronome. Prior to entering the studio the trio spent an exhausting, all-in week rehearsing at the arts space Fylkingen—where they also played a show—in addition to playing a handful of gigs in Norway. Locked in, they discovered much different acoustic qualities at Atlantis from what they’d previously encountered. “There’s a very specific sound at the studio, and we’d been playing for a week together at Fylkingen, so we started to develop a thing that really works in that room, and then you move somewhere else, and the drums in particular sounded really different, and in some ways they had a bit more of a rock ‘n’ roll kind of feeling.” explains Chantler. Responding to that radically different, reverb-soaked ambience, he and Wright took advantage of a pair of matching Fender tube amps, charging their individual signals to match the booming, resonant sprawl of Noble’s pinpoint clatter.Compared to the group’s debut album Front and Above—a live recording of the trio’s very first performance at London’s Café Oto—which Chantler edited to emphasise the sparser expanses of the raucous, performance, the new album reveals a more open-ended spectrum, from delicate to crushing. Noble’s beautifully metallic rustling and throbbing snare bombs hang pregnantly in the air, and Chantler and Wright thicken the atmosphere with twinned abstractions, alternately ethereal and punishing. The transitions between calm and chaos are sometimes seamless, sometimes abrupt, but the full landscape transports the listener to another realm regardless of how ferocious or gentle the attack may be. As strong as the trio’s first album was, Atlantis marks a massive step forward. “The more you play together the more it starts to cohere into some kind of specific language,” says Chantler. “You start to understand the point of what a particular constellation might be.” With Atlantis there’s little doubt these three improvisers know exactly what the point of it all is, which thrillingly means that many new paths in the future have opened up.    ---   John Chantler / synthesiser   Steve Noble / drums   Seymour Wright / alto saxophone   --- RECORDED AND MIXED AT ATLANTIS GRAMMOFON AB, STOCKHOLM 24 JANUARY 2018ENGINEER: JANNE HANSSONMASTERING: STEPHAN MATHIEUPAINTINGS: LESTER WRIGHT   RECORDING SESSION MADE POSSIBLE WITH SUPPORT FROM THE AUSTRALIA COUNCIL FOR THE ARTS

Japanese free jazz saxophonist Akira Sakata meets with his long-time collaborators Giovanni Di Domenico, Jim O'Rourke and Tatsuhisa Yamamoto to release the second album under their name Bonjintan. It combines contemporary Avantgarde and Free Jazz in a beautiful way. ---Akira Sakata / sax, clarinet, voice Jim O’Rourke / double bass Giovanni Di Domenico / piano, hohner pianet Tatsuhisa Yamamoto / drums --- Recorded Jim O'Rourke at Hoshi to Niji Studio, 30th June 2018

Recorded in 2012, Musik Der 135. Aktion, Kuba captures the controversial performance from Herman Nitsch's Orgien Mysterien Theater ("Orgies Mysteries Theater") as part of the Havana Biennial art exhibition. For more than fifty years Nitsch has been an influential and striking figure of Austrian art ("Vienna Actionism"). In his Orgien Mysterien Theater Nitsch uses actors, blood, animal bodies and entrails, fruits, symbolic crucifixion, music, processions, and ritualistic gestures to enact a new form of Gesamtkunstwerk: pagan ceremonies that aim to a kind of collective catharsis. "Dionysos gegen den Gekreuzigten" ("Dionysus against Christ Crucified") was performed by 150 musicians and 30 actors, including the University's Symphony Orchestra ISA and the artist himself, celebrating Afro-Cuban rituals and ceremonies. Released In cooperation with Nitsch Foundation.