A tremendous collection of recordings from famed Fluxus poet and artist Jackson Mac Low (1922-2004).  Originally published on New Wilderness Audiographics as a cassette in 1977, these recordings have been cleaned up and remastered by Sean McCann in 2018.  Jackson’s beautiful text formulas are supplemented by stereo multi-tracking, creating a spatial jungle of wordplay. One gem of this CD is the live foray into tape manipulation from 1966 featuring the assistance of James Tenney and Max Neuhaus. It is fabled that they took Jackson’s voice and slowed it down to a guttural thunderstorm during playback, resulting in a manic blend of words darting through a black cloud of reverberation.  Only a small amount of Jackson’s sound poetry is available, making this collection a delight to swallow and digest. Produced with Charlie Morrow, we are thrilled to re-present this history to the ears of both young and old. Edition of 250 Glass-mastered CD housed in Jewel-case 8-page insert with scores and introduction by Charlie Morrow

Danish pianist Tom Prehn was one of the first Europeans to deeply explore free music. With his quartet featuring Fritz Krogh on tenor saxophone, Poul Ehlers on bass, and Finn Slumstrup on drums, Prehn recorded Axiom in October, 1963, for Sonet, though it went unreleased until 2015 because the band felt that their music had moved beyond it already. To hear the music they were talking about, one could only turn to two privately-made reel-to-reel tapes, Centrifuga and Sohlverv, recorded in August, 1964, and January, 1965, respectively. Both sessions took place under casual circumstances at Prehn’s summer cottage outside Aarhus, but the music was dead serious – some of the most adventurous improvising yet made by a group on the continent. --- Piano: Tom PrehnBass: Poul EhlersDrums: Finn SlumstrupTenor Saxophone: Fritz KroghRemastered by Sigurd Djurhuus ---TracklistA Side A 22:28B Side B 21:49 --- Released: Corbett vs Dempsey

Recorded live by Takeo Suetomi at Café Amores, Hofu, April 29, 1996.The CD version includes a bonus track (“Two Chaps 1“). New, unsealed, includes Obi

Of all the never-issued-on-CD items in history’s dustbin, A Well-Kept Secret is perhaps the most egregious. The beautiful studio recording, made under the watchful ear of über- producer Hal Willner, was first issued on LP in 1985 on Willner’s own Shemp label. With its unconventional lineup featuring steel drums, Latin percussion, and French horns, along with the co-leaders’ drum-kit and piano, it is among the most wonderful outings of its decade. Pullen was in top form, his inside-outside approach to the keyboard perhaps optimally heard on the exuberant “Double Arc Jake,” where the bright melody suddenly breaks into pieces, snapping back into miraculous shape. The band includes Hamiet Bluiett on baritone saxophone and Ricky Ford on tenor saxophone, along with Buster Williams on bass, Francis Hayes on steel pans, and a special brass section led by Sharon Freeman on the 17-minute “Goree.” All compositions by Harris and Pullen. With the original cover design by Ralph Steadman reproduced in all its glory, the CD was remastered from unplayed vinyl, as the tapes were destroyed in a fire. This is one of the classic records of creative music in the ‘80s, available for the first time in any digital form. Beaver Harris, drums Don Pullen, piano Hamiet Bluiett, baritone saxophone Ricky Ford, tenor saxophone Buster Williams, bass Francis Haynes, steel drums Candido, percussion (1) Sharon Freeman, Willie Ruff, Bill Warnick, Greg Williams, french horn

The original soundtrack performed by Tomeka Reid & co. for the critically-acclaimed, feature-length 2014 documentary, "Hairy Who and The Chicago Imagists," directed by Leslie Buchbinder of Pentimenti Productions. "Hairy Who and the Chicago Imagists" is a lavishly-illustrated romp through Chicago's art history, and the first film to tell the Imagists’ whole story. The narrative begins with the artists' explosion onto the scene in the 1960s, follows their precipitous fade from prominence in the 1980s and '90s, and concludes with their 21st century resurgence in popularity. Over the last 50 years, the Imagists have influenced generations of artists, including contemporary figures like Jeff Koons, Chris Ware, Kerry James Marshall, Peter Doig, and Gary Panter. The Imagists' roller-coaster ride through art history is re-created in this film with a wealth of archival footage and photographs, and over forty interviews with the Imagists themselves, critics, curators, collectors, and contemporary artists. Chicago-based cellist and composer Tomeka Reid, a mainstay on the Windy City scene and an important contemporary member of the A.A.C.M., was commissioned to create original music for the first documentary to chronicle the Imagists, Chicago’s hometown post-surrealists who exhibited together starting in the mid-1960s. Reid composed theme music for the film and made a wide range of multi-track improvisations based on moods, creating a tableau from which the film drew as it unwound the artists’ circuitous tale. For the CD, Reid returned to the studio to make new versions of some of the tracks and to transform the extant material into a fully realized suite of music. It retains a sense of light-heartedness and depth, whimsy and melancholy, adding voice and percussion to her indelible cello.

Recorded at the ICP Jubileum, a festival in Uithoorn, Holland, in 1978, Yi Yole brings together the core of the Instant Composers Pool – pianist Misha Mengelberg and drummer Han Bennink – with legendary South African alto saxophonist Dudu Pukwana. Longtime member of the Blue Notes, Pukwana was a beloved figure in European free music after he left South Africa in the mid-sixties and settled in London. There he worked with all of the leading lights of free improvised music, recording extensively with the Brotherhood of Breath and eventually releasing LPs under his own leadership before his untimely passing in 1990 at the age of 51. What the three tracks on Yi Yole make clear is how surprisingly well the Dutch and South African sensibilities fit together, an overall relaxed vibe leading to unforeseen directions in the music. Han Bennink ranges far beyond his drum kit and its metallic add-ons, playing trombone, clarinet, and viola; his collage design for the record, as with all ICP productions, is brilliant and perfectly matched to the music. This is the only time these three prime movers of free music would record as a trio, hitting just at the moment when the Instant Composers Pool was gaining momentum and South African jazz was growing in international stature. Released on ICP, Mengelberg/Bennink’s self-produced label, Yi Yole saw limited distribution and attention in its time, but it remains an absolute classic of improvised music, presented here in all its glory with Bennink’s design, remastered from original tapes, the box of which is reproduced on the interior spread, replete with never-seen hand notations. 

The long out-of-print first solo record by American violinist Billy Bang (1947-2011), recorded in 1979 and first released on Hat Hut Records, featuring his own compositions, extrapolated at length in the intimate live concert, as well as traditional and improvised material. Remastered from original tapes and augmented by newly discovered recordings from the same concert. Part of the large cache of historical Hat Hut records that Corbett vs. Dempsey continues to release. Original cover, reprinted in all its glory with a tip-on gatefold. Classic American creative music on CD for the first time!

From David GrubbsThis recording documents Manuel Mota’s and my first public performance as a duo. We had played together previously for a recording session—a relaxed afternoon at Lisbon’s ZDB, where I recall zoning out, guitar in my hands, watching the endless throng of people Sunday-strolling past the plate glass window next to the stage. That deeply pleasurable afternoon session felt like a live accompaniment to a film.This recording also documents, for the both of us, a first indoor collaborative performance since the beginning of the pandemic. It felt familiar—I do remember how to do these things—and yet upped in its intensity of focus, and afterward that much more imprinted in memory, even prior to sitting down with this recording. It seemed I could have narrated it after the fact, its various twists and turns, which is not often the case for me with improvised concerts, details of which often vanish—to return who knows when—or transform into a series of disconnected impressions.One of the things that I love about Manuel’s playing is that as a listener I quickly abandon my search for the logics of continuity that apply to most performers. With Manuel I rarely feel that I anticipate the shape of a given phrase in the time of its unfolding—as a duo we’re definitely not finishing one another’s sentences—nor do I sense that I’m tracking larger structures in the making to serve as signposts for the performance as a whole. The two of us first met more than a decade ago, but throughout many conversations we haven’t spent much time speaking analytically about playing, never really compared notes from inside. It’s not that we’ve chosen not to talk about music, or that there’s a barrier or unspoken ideology to doing so. There’s always something else to talk about.This concert took place in the Biblioteca Municipal of Barreiro, a smaller city to the southeast of Lisbon across the Tejo River estuary. “Na margem sul” means “on the south bank,” and is commonly used to refer to the area south of the Tejo. For a first time returning in many months to playing in an indoor setting, the library seemed an especially welcoming location. 

Made over a period of five years, Luc Ferrari's Cycle Des Souvenirs is a large-scale electoacoustic work that revisits numerous periods from his five decades of composition, a veritable "best-of" composed of entirely new material!

Three Things is a new full-length album of pieces conceived, performed and recorded by long-term collaborators Luciano Maggiore and Louie Rice. The pair are known for multi-pronged activities as artists and organisers which have quietly but surely informed the shape of the United Kingdom's experimental audio underground for many years. Under the guise of NOPAON, they developed a series of events and performances in which they realised scores by Alvin Lucier, Robert Bozzi, Ken Friedman, Emmet Williams, Walter Marchetti and of their own creation. These outputs, described by the duo as 'unrewarding task-based actions' or simply 'two people in a room, doing something’ have resulted in an ongoing performance practice based on prompts actions and scenarios which they continue to explore.A persistent quality in Maggiore and Rice's work is a wilful embrace of humour and the acknowledgement of their performances as a basis for absurdity. This element runs throughout Three Things, starting with Hissing for White Shoes (#6), where an otherwise unremarkable recording of a drive around London is punctuated by loud hissing whenever their vehicle passes an unwitting participant in the street, their footwear acting as a prompt for the vocal intervention. The same sense of humour looms large in Pocket Fascinator (#7) where audio derived from EMS Stockholm's Buchla synth is played back and re-recorded via mobile phone speakers in the duo's pockets as they attempt to walk in sync with its pulses. Phone Work, the first piece realised outside of the project's typical real-time approach, is a sequence of voice recordings exchanged via WhatsApp where they mimic each other's contributions until all memory of the original has been lost. The results are set to synthesiser in a nod to the duo's long-standing interests in electronic music as solo artists.Like everything Maggiore and Rice turn their hands to, the maddening audacity of Three Things is fundamentally driven by sincere observations of the historic avant-garde. At the heart of these recordings lurk conceptual strategies recalling the core methodological projects of Fluxus, classical sound poetry, field recording, electronic music, movement-based performance and contemporary composition. Their willingness to direct such methods toward nakedly silly outcomes whilst poking subtle fun at the emergent tropes of these cultures reinforces an entirely serious inquiry into the modern-day application of avant-garde technique in sound creation. When accepted in full, Three Things is a challenging, amusing assertion of genuine commitment to experimentation and aesthetic stress-testing.

Thomas DeAngelo, known otherwise as T.D. or for his participation in Melkings, Zwangsbeglucktertum, Association Copy as well as his sadly departed Crisis of Taste label/mailorder, returns following his well-received Nothing New Under the Sun cassette (Gift of Music, 2022). From a distinctly leftfield position relative to the gnarled, textural tape noise works of this last output, DeAngelo in Voiceprints… offers an obscure, bloody-minded take on Sound Poetry and voice-based sound art over the course of this full length CD album.AdHuman - 2023

‘Karnofsky’s Score’ is the imagined soundtrack of a film yet to exist and of lives dealing with existence itself. Inspired by the Karnofsky Performance Scale, a scoring system widely used in medical oncology where 100 equals ‘normal’ and 0 equals ‘dead’, artist Teresa Cos undertakes a journey where numbers are shuffled and time is stretched. Part of a body of work that includes visual scores and a forthcoming film sharing the album’s narration, ‘Karnofsky’s Score’ may indeed be guided by the ghost of David A. Karnofsky himself, the pioneer oncologist of the 1950s and 60s who had earlier conducted experiments with the US Army Chemical Warfare Service. He died of cancer aged 55, becoming subject to the system he created.Recorded and mixed while on artist residencies across Europe, the album is built from a composition of guitar improvisations running through a four-track looping recorder, delay, and pitch-shifting pedals, with additional harmonica on the last twin tracks. The left/right monitoring that persists throughout the composition echoes a wavering between the extreme poles of the 0/100 scale, but is contradicted by a whole palette of emotions, at times scattered, at times doomed, at times joyfully playful. Minimal and lyrical, the atmosphere is haunting, occasionally eerie.Nothing lasts too long. The play of ‘Karnofsky’s Score’ is in the interval between two octaves in music, the extremes of a scale which in the abstraction of western notation run upwards and downwards to infinity, in reality until the limits of embodied perception are met. 

11 track album of previously unreleased music for a ballet choreographed by Philippe Talard. Composed, performed and recorded by Michael Ranta in 1988/1989.  

Even though only being fully terminated 50 years after its conception, ‘Azabu’ can be regarded as the starting point of Michael Ranta’s creative self-discovery. The recordings that form the base of ‘Azabu’ were mostly made in the Tokyo district with the same name (Azabu-Juban). Next to abstracted field recordings ‘Azabu’ is also pervaded by a rich variety of percussion, string and wind instruments, all played by Ranta himself. Subsequently Ranta edited, layered and processed the recordings at the NHK electronic music studio in Tokyo. Both pieces display a vast array of acoustic, electronic and concrete sound events meticulously sequenced to a complex fusion symbolizing the entire spectrum of earthly and heavenly sounds. Dynamic extremes evoke a restless flight through space, or through the depths of human subconsciousness, between dream and reality. Ultimately the music disappears, like a dot in the sky gradually fading into nothingness – an “ascension” that closes the loop in a ritual of life that can begin anew again at any time.

Sealed original copy of the Great Wall/Chanta Khat CD privately released by Michael Ranta on his Asian Sound label back in 1991. 1- The Great Wall : Recorded at Asian Sound Studio and Conny Plank’s studio – (45’46”) 2- Chanta Khat : Realised in 1973 at the NHK Electronic Music Studio, Japan – (29’02”)

Multitrack composition for pre‐recorded sounds and live percussion performed by Michael Ranta (entirely different work from the Yuen Shan CD released in 2005). All material previously unreleased. Yuen Shan (Round Mountain in Chinese) was conceived in 1972 and finalised in 2014. It's a major work in Ranta's oeuvre (his first solo release in almost 25 years), highly personal and spiritual. A musical cosmogony in 4 cycles based on different levels of ancient asian spiritual principles. …All returns to the origin, to the silence, to the void. This is the way of nature. All things arise and disappear. One observes their eternal recurrence…

Conducted by Mats Gustafsson for two 9 piece chamber ensembles, 4 soloists, tape machine, turntable Recorded at the Avant Art festival, Warsaw, Poland, 2022 Mixed by Mikael Werliin and Mats Gustafsson spring 2023 Mastered by Mikael Werliin 2023 Produced by 'In Between Norway & Poland Culture / Avant Art'', Mats Gustafsson and TROST. Original art and images for Hidros 9 Mirrors by Mathias Pöschl Graphic Score by Mats Gustafsson

Recorded by Mikael Werliin May 5th, 2022, At CODES Festival, Lublin Additional recordings by Mikael Werliin Sept 30th 2022 at Polish Radio, Warsaw Mixed by Mikael Werliin and Mats Gustafsson autumn 2022 Mastered by Mikael Werliin April 2023 Produced by 'In Between Norway & Poland Culture / Avant Art'', Mats Gustafsson and TROST. <