We use the same method of what we did on Responses (Zappak, 2022): being in a place for a whole afternoon, but not playing together. We took turns on recording solo piece, and each session was a responses to the former one. Even the length was same with the former album (each one 7 minute). Only one difference: on this time we played outside but last time we played in room. There were lots of limitations from the lack of alternation electric power (and also the hot temperature and mosquito). But the open fields brought some possibilities on the other hand. Same as the former one, Sun Yizhou selected and paired these solos into duos, and I did the mixing work. I drew the cover of Responses, which was designed by Leo Okagawa. Thank you Leo, for accepting my submission and releasing it in 2022. It was the starting place of our new work.----Zhu Wenbo

Tracklisting: 1. Tools Of Imagination - 60:00"With Tools of Imagination we are treated to a tremendous long form improvisation from Evan Parker and Eddie Prévost recorded in the clubroom of Poland’s Pardon To Tu in September of 2017. Eddie Prévost, a co-founder of AMM and the group’s only physical constant is one of the foremost proponents and practitioners of free improvisation in the world today. His companion for this improvisation is the great English saxophonist Evan Parker, another pillar of the European free improvisation community that’s made this strange and wonderful music his life’s work. The two have recorded together fairly extensively, both as a duo and as part of a larger group, always with spectacular results. Here is no exception as the two masters interlace ideas unhurriedly and with great care for the details.The single track, Tools of Imagination, begins with the sounds of Prévost’s reverberating bowed metal to which Parker offers refined, bubbling shapes, surging occasionally into squelches of harmonics and resonance. Prévost is a master of atmosphere, having honed his skills in his 50+ year career as a professional noise maker. I have no idea how he achieves some of the sounds he does with his bow-work, but it’s fascinating to listen to. Groans and deep shudders are intermingled with piercing scrapes and razor barbs. Parker’s tenor gushes like an artesian well of molten chrome, a turbulent outpouring of aural globules that flow like a river across Prévost’s extraterrestrial atmospherics. At ~ 20 minutes in, the track shifts gears, the din receding momentarily before revealing Parker playing plaintively over gong-work that reminds me a little of La Monte Young & Marian Zazeela’s Study for the Bowed Disc. Parker continues to push forward, to weave webs of ectoplasm in his distinct cadence, his circular breathing technique tracing its heavy fractals in the thick ambience stirred up by Prévost. At around the midpoint the song shifts gears again and the musicians regroup into a quiescent hum interrupted intermittently by cymbal clatter and supine sax shapes. For the final half Prévost gets back to work bowing, scraping, and striking at his contraptions, framing Parker’s saxophone playing with a dense thicket of sound that he plays off and against, alternating between subtle percussive tongue slapping and breathy multiphonics. The final 10 minutes or so begin probing and sparsely adorned before bursting back into Parker’s woven harmonics and the groaning, squealing sound world of Prévost.There are certain practices that in my opinion really benefit from preparation and experience, free improvisation being among them. For as free as the playing is on this release, it’s refined in a way that is almost inexplicable to those that are not well versed in it. That’s not to say that there aren’t any surprises here, it’s just that these gentlemen know how to take surprises and run with them. A highly recommended release, there isn’t a dull moment with this one." - Free Jazz Collective

At the beginning of the 1960s, at the Berklee College of Music, Byard Lancaster met some feisty friends: Sonny Sharrock, Dave Burrell and Ted Daniel. It is easy to see why he rapidly became involved in free jazz. Once he was settled in New York, he appeared on Sunny Murray Quintet, recorded under the leadership of the drum crazy colleague of Albert Ayler. In 1968, the saxophonist and flutist recorded his first album under his own name: It’s Not Up To Us. The following year he came to Paris in the wake of… Sunny Murray. He would come back to France in 1971 (again with Murray) and in 1973 (without Murray for a change). This is when he met Jef Gilson, the pianist and producer who encouraged him to record under his own name again. On Palm Records (Gilson’s label), he would release four albums: Us, Mother Africa, Exactement and Funny Funky Rib Crib. “Funny Funky Rib Crib” is an unforgettable recording (made up of several sessions dating from the middle of 1974) of creative jazz overwhelmed by funk and soul. If Lancaster had already made successful albums in the same genre – notably New Horizons, under the name Sounds Of Liberation which he co-led with Khan Jamal –, this one is an homage to James Brown and Sammy Davis enjoying the company of a host of guests including François Tusques (electric piano), Clint Jackson III (trumpet), François Nyombo (guitar), Joseph Traindl (trombone)… Funny Funky Rib Crib’s cover is a three-quarter profile portrait of the saxophonist (who can also be heard on flute, piano and even vocals), however, on the record, it is the whole group, inspired and frenetic, that tests the melodies of “Just Test”, “Dogtown” or “Rib Crib” – the two versions of which display leader Lancaster’s art of nuance. On both sides of the album, the group also moves into a calmer groove, infused by blues and soul, “Work And Pray” and “Loving Kindness” are meditative tracks where listeners can lay back and relax before asking for more: Funny Funky Rib Crib!!!

"4CD homage to 4 drummers who have been a constant inspiration since the day I bought my first drum set back in 1972 - they are H = Han Bennink, E = Ed Blackwell, M = Milford Graves, P = Phil Seamen. It is a series of solos and duos with Alex Ward, Gabriel Wonck, Alan Wilkinson and James Allsopp." "My homage to the four drummers I came across on the day I bought my first drum kit and who have remained a constant source of inspiration to this day.  I am not trying to be them - just trying to convey what they have inspired in me over the last five decades. For each I have put together a specific drum and cymbal set up, attempting to get close to the sound I associate with each of them, and likewise chose the musicians for the duets accordingly.  The photgraphs are the first images I saw of them - hearing them came later.  I saw Blackwell and Graves live a couple of times, Bennink many times (and played with him on four occasions). Seamen? Not live - he passed away on Friday 13th October 1972 - but one of the first concerts I attended in London was the Phil Seamen Tribute concert at 100 Club on 31st May 1976 (when I saw John Stevens, Ginger Baker and Brian Spring for the first time).  Thanks to Alan, Alex, Gabriel and James and to all at OTO for their support in helping me realise this project. And especially to Shaun Crook who recorded, mixed and mastered all the material."

By the early '70s, Milford Graves had more or less stopped gigging. Having learned his lesson the hard way in multiple-night runs like a legendary Slugs' residency with Albert Ayler, he knew that the level of energy that he put out during a performance would be difficult to sustain over the long haul. A concert was a kind of absolute ritual for him, after which he would be totally spent, emotionally and physically. Graves rarely left anything on the table. Any musical performance was an opportunity to present an amalgamated version of all the things he had learned. He was an innovator and a teacher at his core, and the concert venue was one of his first classroom settings. In March 1976, Verna Gillis invited Graves to perform on WBAI's Free Music Store radio show. For the date, he chose to present a trio lineup which he had been occasionally playing – featuring two saxophonists who were dedicated to the drummer's vision. Hugh Glover is almost exclusively known for his work with Graves, while Arthur Doyle would gain exposure later for an obscure record that he made two years later, Alabama Feeling, which would become a highly collectable item among free jazz enthusiasts. Originally released in 1977, Bäbi remains one of Graves' most seminal recordings. The music played by the trio was ecstatic. Extreme energy music, buoyant and joyful. It relied on Graves' new way of approaching the drum kit, in which he had opened up the bottoms of his skin-slackened toms and eliminated the snare. Graves' art was always unblemished by commercial interests, and this album is its finest mission statement. First-time vinyl reissue. Sourced from the original master tapes.

Space in the Sun was one of Akio Suzuki’s major sound projects, a unique construction completed in 1988 and located on the merdian line, which took around 18 months to build. Its purpose was to allow Suzuki to spend one day, on the autumnal equinox, purifying his sense of hearing in nature. This release comprises a 44 page book containing plans and materials from the time alongside texts, and two CDs of environmental recordings created on site at Space in the Sun. To date only tiny fragments of the recordings made between those massive clay brick walls have been used in performances and no environmental recordings of the objective of the project, i.e. the space itself, have been released. The first disk consists of the first release of “person-less” field recordings made at the same spot that Akio sat at during the event (recorded in 1993, 60 minutes). The second disk consists of a performance that took place in the space. Space in the Sun’s earthen walls have since been demolished, so these recordings represent a return to life of their soft echo, an experience accessible nowhere else. CD1: A record of the space (60:00) An unedited one hour cut, taken from one of the three different recordings of Space in the Sun. Recorded by Yoshihiro Kawasaki. CD2: Playing in the space: Throwing and Following (41:30) A record of a performance by Suzuki at Space in the Sun using tree branches and small pebbles.

French musician & performance artist Manon Anne Gillis came to Japan to perform in 2016 following the 2015 release of the 5-CD archive box set from Art Into Life, which was a compilation of earlier recordings. Now at last, for the first time in 27 years since 1994’s “Euragine” in CD format, her long-awaited 7th solo album is completed. As she still continues to progress and evolve musically, this work is constructed primarily around primitive hiss noise and error sounds. Here she has woven a musical tapestry that is more blurred, obscured, and noise-oriented than her earlier work. With the strong cohesiveness of her disquieting singing voice in a thunderous roar bellowing from the inner depths, the repetition of the dense glitch sounds, and the nostalgic concept of the obscure rhythm track (track 5) will remind us of her days when she went by the alias Devil’s Picnic.

More amazing sounds from Will Guthrie (with Hong Chulki) on Erstwhile Hong Chulki - turntables, guitar, electronics Will Guthrie - drums, percussion, electronics

Killer drop by Jérôme Noetinger and Will Guthrie on Erstwhile Jérôme Noetinger: tape machine Revox, electronics Will Guthrie: drums, percussion, microphones, electronics

Kumio Kurachi is a Japanese singer-songwriter who has been active since the 1980's. This is his 11th solo album and only the second to be released outside of Japan following ‘Sound of Turning Earth’ (2018) on bison.Though his songs are written and performed primarily on guitar, “Open Today” is a return to Kurachi’s full, multi-instrumental recording style - featuring drums, bass, strings, keys and Kurachi’s rich, distinctive vocals in multiple voicings. Incredibly, all instrumental performances and arrangements were performed and recorded by Kurachi himself - marking a brilliant return to the fully fleshed out visionary world we fell in love with on Supermarket Chitose (Enban, 2006).The super fine detail and dense landscapes of ‘Open Today’ should come as no surprise really - Kurachi is an illustrator by trade and it bleeds right through to his music. Even to the non-native speaker Kurachi’s vocals hold centre stage - at times enormous and thundering over urgent guitar and toms, then switching to softly spoken words amongst keys. Frequently Kurachi multiplies, whether multitracking himself or summoning voices for the characters he writes from sightings on train platforms or supermarkets. His lyrics - translated to English for both formats - are more like poetry, and though written about the mundane they quickly become surreal, bringing the quality of dreams into the everyday. The hours spent on buses, trains or walking home towards a cheap flat - familiar to us all - are catalysts for microcosms of detail. Again, we shouldn’t be surprised - Kurachi is well known in Japan for winning the national championship of NHK's "Poetry Boxing" in 2002, which also might explain his amazing Discogs photo.Poet, illustrator, multi-instrumentalist - Kurachi is thought of by many as a genius. He’s worked with Jim O’Rourke, Tori Kudo, Eiko Ishibashi and Taku Unami (who did the mastering on this LP). There are lines to be drawn between Kurachi and Kazuki Tomokawa or Kan Mikami, but also Francis Plagne and Fairport Convention. Ultimately though there is nothing else like it - it’s a brand of strange songcraft that’s totally captivating.

Henry House is a recurring dream song. Combining closely tuned instruments and sinetones, tape-music editing techniques, field recordings, and voice, this eighty-minute, five-part song cycle is an evolutionary step away from the spontaneity of the free jazz/noise aesthetic usually found in the music of Nate Wooley. Henry House expands on the ecstatic, durational work found in Wooley’s Seven Storey Mountain, a six-part composition that has been premiered over the last ten years by an ensemble that now includes multiple drummers, guitarists, a twenty-one-person choir, and the composer on amplified trumpet. But its ritual is more serene, more natural, slower.  Henry House is the first long-form piece that doesn’t feature Wooley’s trumpet. It is also the first to be constructed around his poetic writing. Wooley weaves a strange funeral mass for a fictional everyman from isolated phrases culled from essays, poems, and non-fiction written by Wendell Berry, John Berryman, Joseph Mitchell, and Reiner Stach. After organizing the fragments into a dream narrative, Wooley rewrote the text dozens of times, manipulating the stitched-together story until only glimpses of its sources remained.  These texts become a slowly developing story of care and too much care in living. They are spoken by Mat Maneri and Megan Schubert and set amidst masses of instruments. The outer and middle movements explore the interactions between slowly shifting sine tone frequencies and massed, slightly detuned instruments—vibraphones, brass, pianos—to affect a warmly wobbling harmonic pad that undulates and revolves under Maneri’s performance of the text. The remaining movements move quickly, combining field recordings with hard cuts of Schubert’s singing voice constructed into a massive, tape-affected choir interspersed with her readings.

"When I was around five years old in Kyoto, Japan, I followed my mother to our family’s Zen temple, where we listened to monks chanting. The chanting lasted a long time and became quite hypnotic. I almost fell asleep. These rituals were some of the first music I heard. "In 1972, I began studying with the great Indian master Pandit Pran Nath. His improvised style of singing was an important influence on me. I would take lessons from him when he stayed at La Monte Young’s studio on Church Street. I went once a week or when I could afford it. During these sessions, I learned to follow his singing with precise intonation. It was a difficult task but gradually I got into it with practice. I would get up around 5am and sing with tambura for at least one hour. After that I went to work. My lessons with Panditji were the best studies in music I had during my life. I realized singing is one of the most difficult ways of making music, more than playing most musical instruments. "In the mid-70s, I went to the Ethnic Music Festival in Queens, NYC, where I heard all types of ethnic music. There was some Macedonian women’s singing that was outstanding. They created fine tolerance in pitch by singing the same pitches together. This inspired me to try similar things out with male voices. "I started to develop group singing around 1976. After doing solo singing for a while, I noticed it was also interesting to sing with other people. I already knew Richard Hayman. He was running an artists’ bar called Ear Inn. I came across Imani Smith at a Sufi center in Manhattan. He was a Sufi follower and sang well. I wasn’t into Sufism but I was curious about their singing. I organized the male choir around modal improvisations from my solo singing. The interaction between the three voices singing closely in tune produced very clear microtonal partials. I later used this method in my pieces for bagpipes. "Singing in Unison was performed and recorded at The Kitchen, located in SoHo on Broome Street. It was a huge space with a lot of traffic noise. It’s been a long time but I still hear value in this work. Singing in Unison isn’t about New Age or avant-garde, it has to do with what we can communicate without words." —Yoshi Wada "Another stunning archival unearthing in this necessary series of historical recordings from Japanese drone/minimalist Yoshi Wada: Singing In Unison is a historically potent recording from a performance at The Kitchen Center, NY, on March 15, 1978 with Wada, Richard Hayman and Imani Smith using massively droning amplified and unaccompanied vocal chants to generate brain-massaging microtonal partials. The space was subject to heavy traffic noise, which comes through on the recording to great effect, with distant industrial sounds somehow falling into place in the background like the city itself has taken voice. Wada had studied singing with Pandit Pran Nath in the early 70s, when he was staying at LaMonte Young’s, and the music takes off on Nath, Young and Zazeela’s zoned tongue ascensions but w/a heady polyphonic/devotional feel that owes as much to early European religious music as it does to raga forms or even the Gyuto Monks. The trio pick out simple ascending and descending melodies, while moving parallel and just out of synch with each other in order to create areas of flux where the voices give birth to all kinds of sonic spectra. In many ways Singing In Unison comes over as a sort of ‘unplugged’ take on Wada’s pieces for invented bagpipes, locating his practice back in very dawn of the combinatory potential of music and language. This is a stunning recording, one that unites avant garde, psychedelic and folk-primitive techniques to dazzling effect, a form of ancient holy music set to levitate the future. Another massive side from Wada, beautifully presented with a fold-out insert featuring English and Japanese liners from Wada himself, very highly recommended!" —Volcanic Tongue  Composed by Yoshi Wada Richard Hayman, Imani Smith, and Yoshi Wada, voices Recorded on March 15, 1978, at The Kitchen, New York, NY

From David Toop What are field recordings? “My memory is not what it used to be, David,” my grandfather, Syd Senior, said to me as we huddled round a fireplace in 1979. Thanks to a cassette tape I have the memory of his gradual loss of memory, hearing him speak of Queen Victoria’s funeral and the severity of patriotism back in those old days, 1901. Syd Senior is long dead, no longer part of the field of living relations but still within the field of memories that can be revived by technology, albeit an old one that squeaks like a mouse, hisses like a cat.Where is the field? The field is populated by all the ravishing, painful, poignant, nondescript moments of remembered life. Field recordings forget, just as memories forget. My recording of Ornette Coleman forgets that he fell asleep as we were talking together. I sat quietly, waiting for him to wake; the tape machine continued its work, oblivious.During lockdown, a warm spring day, I sat working in the garden. A small fox appeared close to me, started, retreated into the shelter of plants by my pond. I took a photo with my phone but when I looked at the image no fox was visible. Earlier that day I had been reading Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, a collection of short stories written by Pu Songling during the course of his life in the late seventeenth/early eighteenth century. In many of these tales, fox spirits inhabit the physical spaces of living humans in a variety of guises. Some are malicious; some benign. Their presence in the material world is wrong and yet accepted as either a temporary nuisance or a blessing that would later be regretted.“All the memories are very incomplete,” said Annabel Nicolson during a conversation I recorded with her in the early 1990s. “It’s like trying to substantiate something that was important to us . . . When I was younger I thought that didn’t matter. I thought everything could be transient because people would always be creating more . . . when you get older it seems rather different because you realise many wonderful things have just vanished. Which in some ways doesn’t matter but it also means that they can’t be shared with anyone other than those who were there.”

CD in gatefold carboard case with booklet and accompanying postcard prints by Katya Kukol "waves extinguish the wind. archive" was a collaborative audiovisual project between musician Elina Bolshenkova and artist Katya Kukol, created in 2022. The authors wanted to create immersive entry points into a version of their future, merging soundscapes with drawings, and reflecting on the political crises in their home country. This artwork helped them provoke a conversation about the future and heal a little. They hope it can help others in a similar way. This is a digital and physical documentation of their artwork, presented in a form of compact discs and actual sized prints of the drawings. It is recommended that you listen to the soundscapes and view the corresponding images at the same time.

The Trost label presents a live recording from the trio Sonore, featuring Peter Brötzmann (tenor and alto sax, clarinet and taragato), Ken Vandermark (tenor sax and clarinet) and Mats Gustafsson (baritone sax). All compositions by Brötzmann, Vandermark and Gustafsson. Recorded at Café OTO, London, for Jazz On 3, BBC Radio 3, April 20th 2011.

Absolute solo burner by Peter Brötzmann, originally issed by FMP in 1976 REVIEWS "Brötzmann is completely over-powering both in the mastery of his instruments and his overwhelming inventiveness. Here he runs the range of music from Rollins to Lacy to Bird, and touches on music from the blues to the comedia del arte, in an absolute festival of invention.... This record and FMP 0160 – The Globe Unity Orchestra – are two of the finest recordings I’ve heard in 1977." --Bob Rusch, Cadence Magazine "Overall, 'Solo' is a fascinating document, both musically satisfying for open-eared listeners and for late coming Brötzmann fans interested in learning his roots." --Bob Olewnick, All Music Guide Peter Brötzmann: clarinets, alto, tenor, bass saxophone Recorded by Jost Gebers in May 1976 in Berlin.

The only LP featuring a band under Peter Kowald's name, Peter Kowald Quintet comes from a vital moment in the German bassist's career. A close colleague of Peter Brötzmann's in their formative years, including the saxophonist's debut For Adolphe Sax and the classic Machine Gun, Kowald had by 1972 broadened his circle of collaborators, eventually working with a who's who of global creative music. Recorded live in Berlin, released on FMP, this date documents a tensile ensemble, with an unusual lineup featuring two trombones – Londoner Paul Rutherford and the German maestro Günter Christmann – together with the less-well-known Dutch alto saxophonist (and sculptor) Peter van de Locht and brilliant German percussionist Paul Lovens. Kowald adds to the low brass when he turns from double-bass to tuba and alphorn. Spacious and fiery, these four tracks are exemplary European free music led by one of the music's foremost originals – Kowald's rough and ready bass, which was anchoring (and de facto leading) the Globe Unity Orchestra of that period, is echoed in the take-no-prisoners music of the fivesome.Mastered from original tapes, this first-ever CD release features a facsimile version of the original cover, which featured artwork by ten non-musician friends and unique hand-additions. Track Times: Platte Talloere (13:08) Wenn Wir Kehlkopfoperier Te Uns Unterhalten (7:09) Pavement Bolognaise (14:01) Guete Luuni (2:38) Peter Kowald, bass, tuba, alphorn Paul Rutherford, trombone Günter Christmann, trombone Peter van de Locht, alto saxophone Paul Lovens, drums

Until now, the earliest recordings anyone has heard by Joe McPhee come from the period around his 1968 debut album, Underground Railroad. McPhee had just started playing tenor saxophone at that point. A couple of years earlier, the bassist featured on all of McPhee's early recordings, Tyrone Crabb, led a band of his own, the Jazzmen, in which McPhee was featured on his first instrument: trumpet. Indeed, McPhee was a trumpet legacy – his father was a trumpeter. In the mid-'60s, Joe was a serious young player with deep knowledge and an expansive ear. Performing around Poughkeepsie and across the Hudson Valley, the Jazzmen were one of the very first ensembles recorded by Craig Johnson, who would go on to form the CjR label expressly to release McPhee's music. The fledgling audio engineer was clearly learning the ropes when he documented this incredible 1966 performance, but despite a few excusable acoustic blemishes, it's a beautiful window into McPhee's trumpet playing, suggesting that, had he stuck to that instrument alone, he might well have been considered a major figure on the horn (of course, he is such a figure on the pocket trumpet); the opening track, a version of "One Mint Julep" as arranged by Freddie Hubbard (on his Blue Note record Open Sesame) shows McPhee's lithe stylings to good effect. McPhee's musical cosmology was much bigger than a single axe, however, as is evident on the sprawling second track, which, over the course of half-an-hour proceeds from an excoriating yowl to a version of Miles Davis's "Milestones" taken at a sweltering tempo. A fiery portent of the free jazz to follow and a marker of McPhee's foundations in hard bop and soul jazz, Nineteen Sixty-Six features the entire reel-to-reel tape long thought lost, simply labeled: "Joe McPhee, 1966, trumpet."  JOE MCPHEE trumpet, recorder HARRY HALL tenor saxophone, recorder REGGIE MARKS tenor saxophone, recorder MIKE KULL piano TYRONE CRABB bass, bandleader CHARLIE BENJAMIN drums Recorded June, 1966, in Newburgh, New York.