This residency was produced in partnership with Professor Paul Hegarty as part of the funded project on Innovative music in Japan, with thanks to University of Nottingham and the AHRC impact ‘accelerator’ fund for support. Huge thanks to Paul Hegarty and Sam Thorne. “Chwalfa” (Welsh for “dispersal, rout, upheaval, upset, or a confused or chaotic state”) documents the first return of Incapacitants to the UK since 2016. With the windows boarded up and the subs doubled, two ordinary looking blokes Toshiji Mikawa's and Fumio Kosaka obliterate OTO’s usual whisper hush with clipped out, scorched earth tape loops and pedal chains - creating such an excoriating din it transports the room to the planet’s furnace core and back again. It’s all music, all at once -  a whorling vortex delivered at time bending velocity.  For Vymethoxy Redspiders, who writes the release’s extensive liners, “[the music] is a transcendental outpouring of raw consciousness and firmamental emotion, more in line with the “fire music” of free jazz players like Albert Ayler and Dave Burrell or Sun Ra in his most apocalyptic moments of Moog sorcery than most of the things I long came to associate with the practice of Noise. Incapacitants’ unholy racket morphs from vista of tormented glitch shimmer to crater of obliterated tape loop to deafening light pouring down on disaster fathoms. I'm struck by how Modal or Raga-like it sounds at points, where a deep tremor drone burrs like a wide open plain; for a “pure” noise that is often considered “not musical” it sure hits me where music hits most affectingly and more so than most sounds daring to call themselves music!”  “Chwalfa” contains two tracks, one from each night of the residency. It arrives as a glass mastered CD in a digipak. Edition of 500 with liner notes by Vymethoxy Redspiders.  --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO on the 6th and 7th of September, 2024 by Billy Steiger. Mixed by Oli Barrett. Deemed best left unmastered. Cover photo by Paul Watson. Layout by Abby Thomas.

"The seemingly irreverent approach to the instruments, the repetitive repeats of certain motifs; ‘institutional music’ could be something that comes to mind for the listener. The inmate, free of all musical convention, behaving childishly, almost manically. The result is a polyphonic counterpoint that comes close to falling apart and leaves the impression of being something new." - SAJ, 10-10-24 "The first major document of Johansson’s music since his passing, two days at cafe oto is a reminder of his galvanizing presence, his conceptual range, and his skill set as an instrumentalist. It deserves more than a passing mention in the commentariat’s attempts to cement his legacy." –Bill Shoemaker, PoDDrummer, visual artist and one of the original European free jazz players, Sven-Åke Johansson was never willing to settle for a single route of exploration. As a musician and composer he appeared on key recordings for the legendary FMP, delivered marine weather reports for Edition Telemark, crooned love songs for Ultra Eczema and was at the heart of the recent free music revival in Berlin via Umlaut alongside Joel Grip and Axel Dörner. “My work is not actually jazz, but rather the exploration of sounds,” he said. “In that sense, my music defies some categorizations. Jazz is only a small part of what I do”. When asked to play at OTO last year, Johansson proposed two nights with four musicians half his age - alto saxophonist Seymour Wright, his fellow [Ahmed] member and double bassist Joel Grip, and French alto saxophonist Pierre Borel. Grip and Borel both played alongside Johansson in Stumps; Wright had previously recorded a trio with  Johansson and Grip almost a year earlier in Johansson’s Berlin studio - due to be released later in the year via We Jazz as The Jazzy Stork. A quartet of two saxophones, bass and drums sounds like jazz, but all four players perpetually reach outside of the genre for inspiration. Opening disc one, Grip’s and Wright’s staccato melodies are drawn delicately together with the lightest of threads, little playful buzzrolls and tom taps: if this is jazz it's the gentlest sort we’ve heard in some time. Grip and Wright stretch a handful of notes over a trickle of toms, the room thick with listening.  For his next act, Johansson changes tack, bringing out his accordion. Like his frequent collaborator Rüdiger Carl, Johansson's work on the accordion is full of expression and humor - his sometimes short, pointillistic improvisations suddenly cohering into brief melodies that flicker with nostalgia. Grip picks up a swing, and the quartet head out on a warm adventure before the saxophones and accordion satisfyingly drift out of the room together.  It feels important to mention Sven-Åke Johansson dressed sharply.  He was a man of intention with a touch of melodrama and it kept his music from drying out. Amidst the great volume of German Free Music in the 1970s, Johannson's first solo LP ‘Schlingerland’ (1972) swishes cymbal and snare, tom and hi-hat, sometimes almost imperceptibly. Skin, metal, plastic and wood, always in a tank of developer; quite melodic, beautifully concentrated. Fifty years on, Borel, Grip and Wright continue this gradual investigation of music and there are no better collaborators for Johannson. All three can shred jazz into its microparts, can swing, can groove and shriek. Over Two Days at Cafe OTO, buoyed by Johannason’s light touch, a sort of minimalist bebop emerges - the last track dividing and multiplying melodic fragments until its motifs print the inside of your skull. It’s totally luxury music - full freedom, full commitment. If it doesn't hit the first time, you’re sure to come back for it. We’re blessed it was recorded and grateful to have shared in this music. Thank you, Sven-Åke Johansson. — Recorded live at Cafe OTO by Rory Salter on 8th & 9th April, 2025. Mixed and mastered by Werner Dafeldecker. Photos by Dawid Laskowski.

With But remember what you have had, Stephen O’Malley continues and expands his musical approach by transposing it to multiphonic electroacoustic writing and acousmatic listening. Drawing not only on his extensive experience as a composer and live instrumentalist, but also on the countless studio production and mixing sessions he has taken part in the course of his many projects (in solo, with SUNN O))) or KTL, to name but a few), Stephen O’Malley’s work on this new piece is ambitious, engaging in an inspired research that delves into the deep intricacies between polyphony, intonation and timbrality, enhanced by melodic motifs. To do this, O’Malley summons up his own very personal sound universe, constellated with amplified textures, instrumental sustained tones and raw energy, in order to diffract them into wavefronts, waves and blows that weave a complex, rich and fascinating matter. But remember what you have had stands out as an important work in Stephen O’Malley’s repertoire: it brings together the multiplicity of his musical approach in an exemplary way, while laying the foundations and promises for the future of an already extraordinary journey.

What?? is a focused and grounding work produced by Swedish composer Folke Rabe in 1967. From his interest in sound phenomena and harmonics Rabe was able to make one of the most deep, moving pieces of sustained sound generated in this formative era of minimalist electronic composition. Initially reissued on Dexter's Cigar in 1997 and now available on Important with expanded packaging including archival materials furnished by the composer. Amplified infinity. "My interest in the makeup of various sound phenomena began many years ago. The basic physical preconditions were familiar to me, but I wanted to experience the components of the sound with my hearing. I attempted to 'hear into' the different sounds in order to grasp the components that made them up. I experienced how the overtones in a tone sounding on the piano change slowly as they die away. I also attempted to grasp the brittle arpeggio of formants that arises when a vowel is slowly changed at a particular pitch. I also tried, as far as possible, to train my hearing to tease out the complex processes that occur at the origin of sound. "At the same time as this listening, I was concerned with monotony. My first feeble attempts yielded little: later, more systematic repetitions led to findings. I found methods by which the transitoriness of sound could to some extent be compensated. Small details and micro-variations between the repeated elements that would not have been noticed in a context richer in contrast then come to the fore. Extended sounds that change and move into one another very slowly have a similar effect. "Hobby experiments of the sort described, as I conducted them, are of course primitive from a theoretical point of view. But this basic experience was exactly what was important to me. "The musical field indicated here is perhaps somewhat foreign to the Western musical tradition. In other living cultures it is entirely relevant. This state of affairs is, I believe, connected with the development of musical notation. As this method of fixing sound developed, all the subtler qualities of pitch, sound, and time relationships had to be leveled off. On the other hand, systems of notation first made possible meaningful musical constructions. This fact compensated for the loss just described, making possible the great tradition of European music. "In Western composition, intervals, rhythms, and tone color – to the extent that they eluded notation – were subordinated to a philosophical idea, or at least a motivic/formal one. The sounding fact as such retreated into the background, and the West, in ethnocentric self-idolization, erected its own cultural tradition (be it Beethoven or Coca-Cola) as an example to the world. "But there are in the world many fields of music in which the qualitative element grows from the immediate sound. In such music, one looks in vain for formal elements in the Western sense; this music may thus seem primitive, senseless, or even provocative. In reality, however, these are two different possibilities of musical organization. "Indian musicians said to me that Western music is certainly good music, but they found its technique of phrasing incomprehensible: 'The music always breaks off before it has begun!' "What What?? means: As you will hear, What?? is constructed from harmonic sounds. These sounds move into one another by means of enharmonic melding of the partials. I chose harmonic sounds because a pleasing richness results from them, but more particularly because the partials reinforce one another through their inner hierarchy, and can thereby produce certain illusions. "I chose the extended, seemingly endless form in order to enable peaceful journeys of discovery in the sound, but also in order to work with this particular material. Electronic devices have no muscles. 'Breathing' expressiveness is contrary to their nature; their characteristic quality is an enormous, tireless endurance. "About 85% of the material is made up of electronically generated tones, which however are never present in their static, original form. Each partial has been specially treated in itself, which can at times yield a very rich result.

Andrew Batt-Rawden is a Sydney based composer, performer & publisher. His practice is cross-platform & all-embracing. Though initially stemming from an almost traditional sense of ‘the composer’, Andrew fuses elements of gesture, choreography, new technology, text, performance art & mixed-media into his work & has a wide-ranging history of inter-disciplinary collaboration. His current focus is on incorporating all the senses into the audience experience by integrating data feeds to affect live electroacoustic performance, particularly with the use of heartbeat & movement data & by building algorithmic software that works with both light & sound; a collision of chamber/art music & technology. Chris Mansell has been called 'a significant voice in Australian poetry’. She began as an editor & poet in the 70s & since then has chosen to live an isolated rural life. She is the recipient of multiple awards for her work & continues to publish with regularity. Her writing has been described as ‘stylistically & thematically ground-breaking’. One emerges from the experience of reading it disturbed & challenged. Its haunting rhythms do not easily let go. Seven Stations is a collaboration between a young composer & a multi-award winning poet, combining elements of contemporary chamber music, electric instruments, electronics & voice with a vivid text. A cheerfully profane song-cycle, using the railway stations of the city’s centre as the focus of its imagery. "Like every city, the soundscape is a constant hum of people, traffic lights, cars, buses, birds. Depending on where you are, you also hear water, trains, music. Depending on when you are, your ears pick up the scurry of rats & possums, the asymmetrical rhythm of drunken steps in cloppy heels punctuated by profane outbursts, laughter & conversation in many languages. Some people open their mouths & the sound of bank notes flap with their tongues. Others speak with a smile full of shark teeth, ever-ready to take a nip. The lucidity of the dream that created the structures holding this city together - something beautiful yet strange.” - ABR

Zubin Kanga is a modern day David Tudor. He is at the forefront of 21st century avant-garde piano music, not only as a performer but also as a prolific commissioner of new works. Zubin has collaborated with many of the world’s leading composers including Steve Reich, Beat Furrer, Thomas Ades & Michael Finnissy. His teacher & mentor Rolf Hind was a pianist signed to the infamous Factory Records (Joy Division, Cabaret Voltaire) who instilled a borderless view of ‘classical’ music in him. Zubin has performed for the BBC Proms, ISCM World New Music Days & The London Festival as well as with the Bang-on-a-Can Allstars, Eighth Blackbird & Ensemble Plus-Minus. The heyday of the graphic score was the 1960s. A small group of composers like Bussotti & Cardew picked up on the ideas first put forward by pioneers like Morton Feldman & Earle Brown, developing non-conventional music notation into elaborate & artistic scores. Not Music Yet for solo piano is a watercolour graphic score by Berlin-based Australian composer, David Young. Composed for Kanga, the performer is to consider it a time-space score (pitch read on the vertical axis & time on the horizontal). They should make three equal passes, reading left to right, playing only the black parts of the painting first, followed by white then blue. The work can be performed in either 7 or 42 minute versions. Young recommends the use of a stopwatch to aid exact timing. Further, every attempt should be made to realise the graphics’ contours & shapes as carefully & precisely as possible. Recorded with incredible detail on a 102-key Stuart & Sons piano (1 of only 6 in the world).

Jack Symonds is a composer, conductor, pianist & the Artistic Director of Sydney Chamber Opera. SCO is a resident company at Carriagworks, Australia’s answer to The Park Avenue Amoury. His productions are always daring, both musically & theatrically. They tend to garner 5-star reviews and affronted walkouts in equal measure. He studied composition at the Royal College of Music, London & the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, where he received the university medal. He has written pieces for Jane Sheldon (John Zorn Band) & New York’s JACK Quartet & staged almost 20 modern opera productions included 3 of his own - Nunc Dimittis (2011), Climbing Toward Midnight (2013) & Notes from Underground (2011 & rewritten in 2016 for Carriageworks). Jack has conducted works by Pascal Dusapin, Fausto Romitelli, George Benjamin & Gyorgy Kurtág. He has been involved in the Sydney Festival, Sydney Biennale, Bendigo Festival of Exploratory Music & Resonant Bodies Festival. Jack on the pieces - The pieces on this album reflect my obsession with miniaturisation & love of song. They are all related by a desire to cannibalise - in the most loving way - vocal works I find endlessly fascinating from composers as diverse as Schubert & Sciarrino. Song Cycle, the earliest work here is modelled on the proportions of the songs that its various movements reflect. At the time I wanted to find a rigorous way of making a very personal ‘history of art song’ coexist across purely instrumental movements of extremely diverse expression, without pastiche or sarcastic deconstruction. It has been an ongoing preoccupation of mine to filter a kind of Romanticism through what I believe to be a still-living tradition, & Song Cycle showed me the way to find hundreds of points of connection along the complex continuum of harmonic history. This is equally true of Ein Fremder in fremden Land - another suite-like piece but here a portrait of a single composer who I shockingly omitted from Song Cycle due to received ignorance - Zemlinsky. I find enormous personal resonances with the way he viewed the world & the music around him. The two smaller violin works perhaps betray my immersion in Kurtág as I was preparing to perform his life-changing song cycle …pas à pas- nulle parte… Dealing with his music for an extended period applied a harsh mirror to any extraneous development or gesture & I felt a healthy compression of my own ideas take place. These pieces’ focus on warped classical processes gave me a platform to apply the same to actual song: the Rilke Lieder give literal & metaphorical voice to the whole gamut of my preoccupations, all in the smallest possible space. 01 - 06 Still the Light Burns (10’) 07 - 11 Ein Fremder in fremden Land (20’) 12 - 19 Two Rilke Lieder (8’) 20 - 28 Song Cycle (33’) 29 - 33 Five Postscripts (5’)

Bud Petal is the stage name of musician Eran Asoulin. His music has been described as ‘cerebral art-folk’ & ‘the music Lord Byron would be making had he lived in the 21st century’. Bud is a true outsider, a freak-folk wunderkind who has been compared to Syd Barret & Daniel Johnston. But don’t for a minute think him primitive or naive - Bud is worldly & word-wise beyond his years. He was ‘discovered’ when his self-produced first album was pulled from the trash at a local radio station. A self-taught musician from The Levant, he spent his teenage years immersed in the bohemian/DIY art scene of Newtown, Sydney. His music collides Mediterranean 70s/80s folk pop (Lucio Battisti, Nada Malanima, Aviv Geffen), the Middle Eastern/Arabic music of his childhood (Marcel Khalife, Oum Khaltoum) & from the West: early Joan Baez & elements of free jazz. His voice is a glorious, effortful glissading din with stuttering vibrato. Lyrically you’ll find an oddly surreal, socialist-utopian world with strands of Emile Zola, A. B. Yehoshua, Yaakov Shavtai, Andre Breton, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn & Stephen J. Gould. The making of Fabric Cordial was a two year adventure. Written in small German towns, cities of The Levant & the inner west of Sydney. It sees Bud Petal create an idiosyncratic world of sounds & stories. Folk songs dressed in screeching sax, free-form guitars, makeshift choirs, droning e-bows & Bud’s mesmerising voice.

The Topography of Ascending Frameworks marks the final instalment of the Constructions Trilogy; a longform conceptual recording project that explored a large scale idea-based framework to guide improvised composition. The trilogy began in 2011 with The Geography of Collapsing Structures, a study of deconstructive forces as applied to composition. In 2012, Cycle~ 440 recorded The Cartography of Shifting Planes, an exploration of the musical potential of the line and of constant variation through minimal gestures. Finally, 2015's The Topography of Ascending Frameworks explores the power of growth, utilising musical structures characterised by excessive development & departure. The Topography of Ascending Frameworks boasts a strikingly scientific title, but it is by no means a cold or clinical listen. It ticks forward with quiet, sanguine momentum, bubbles under its still surface, surges with warped strands of noise pitted against contemplative piano chords & seethes with ominous drones & unsettling oscillations. Every moment exudes a unique blend of granular detail & zoomed-out expansiveness. - Lyndon Blue

A Hiss of Light is the first recording made by sound artists Alanas Gurinas and Sholto Dobie. Both artists work with acoustic sound sculptures and self-made instruments made with everyday materials. In the case of Gurinas, vibrating and taught paper objects emit pulsing sine tones, organic chirps and shimmering noise that drift like weather fronts whilst in Dobie’s work, air is the main material, compressed and channeled through a set of valves, tubes and timers, into pipes of various origins. In these pieces, assembled and recorded in Dobie’s studio in Vilnius, Lithuania their sonic world's combine, and fold into an embrace with each other. Forming invisible landscapes and channels, in which the listener, with an ear to the ground, moves through.

A beautiful edition of only 150 glass mastered CDs in a clear poly sleeve with hand stamped cover and a 22 page full color booklet featuring photos, drawings, and text by Laura Steenberge, with additional text by Michael Winter, Rebecca Lane, and Catherine Lamb. "In medieval chant, music seems to have come from elsewhere. It is the angels that are singing, they said, like gourds hung up for purple martins. By the time notation started coming around, hundreds of chants were already hundreds of years old. New chants followed in their footsteps, trying to seem unwritten. In some monasteries, the monks sang for six hours a day. Through the daily toil of reenacting eternity, subtler shapes become audible. Sometimes the angels show up when the consonants are taken away, or some other change is made that renders the language unintelligible. Swedenborg said there are some angels who speak with U and O and other angels that speak with E and I, but that in the center, inmost heaven, language is made of patterns of numbers. The labor required to hear the angels is mundane and physical. Singing for hours a day sounds idyllic but also laborious. Singing for so long in such reverberant spaces, I wonder about the complexity of harmonics, combination tones or whatever other sonic artifacts that the monastic singers gained sensitivity to. In this collection there is a piece for one performer, a piece for two performers, a piece for three performers, and a piece for four performers. But even in the solo it is about relationships, as the two parts are created with the same breath. The demonic energy is in between things, the sounds cast shadows upon each other." - Laura Steenberge all music by Laura Steenberge Performers: Rebecca Lane - bass flute, voice Catherine Lamb - voice Julia Holter - voice Yannick Goudon - voice Evelyn Saylor - voice

Limited edition of 300 glass mastered CDs in gatefold card with arwork by Gwendolyn Lovequist  "Recorded in one sitting in 2016, the four pieces of Natural Realms present a rather crude, yet elegantly networked system of musical logic combining natural harmonics, rhythm, and feedback. Ringing in increased zones with the shimmer and tempo of audible processes, Lopez and Eubanks assemble visions of a music both old and novel. Foreshadowing the sonic edifice of their 2019 collaboration Wave Forming with Catherine Lamb, this is truly a music at play with the proliferation of ellipses, bifurcations, and doublings and in the sabotage of time and number." - Jenny Haniver Between 2014 and 2018 Bryan Eubanks and Xavier Lopez developed an analog networked duo music based on the harmonics of random feedback, using this information to shape generative rhythms and other juxtapositions in real time. Adding soprano saxophone and percussion to the mix made what could be a stable machine system human again – a machine is not a thought - flaws and fluctuation giving life to momentary crystal time forms. The music in this debut recording captures this idiosyncratic work at it’s height, recorded on an August afternoon in the front room of Studio 8, a bar in Berlin-Wedding which regularly hosted concerts from 2013 – 2018. The recordings are raw, unprocessed improvisations, capturing a decisive music at work.

An extremely limited numbered and stamped edition of 50 glass-mastered CDs with individual covers painted by artist and philosopher Tim Bradley. Packaged in a beautiful painting on paper and polyvinyl sleeve. Three live recordings of an electro-acoustic work developed and performed in 2013. A mesmerizing fusion of sine tones, open-circuit electronics/feedback, samples, and tuned noise, these structuralist compositions navigate the intersection of compositional rigor and the spontaneous energy of live performance. Captured during a double solo tour across the Northeastern USA alongside Hong Chulki in February 2013. Series (E/A) [2013[ sine tones, noise, samples, open-circuit electronics Bryan Eubanks

Magazine is a new work for solo cowbell by Sean Meehan. It began with the serendipitous purchase of a small cowbell from the bric-a-brac section of a charity shop, and was composed initially on walks in the city and country, as the bell was an easy companion. As the piece was beginning to take form Meehan was visiting Governors Island, off of the southern tip of Manhattan. There he happened upon the powder magazine of Fort Jay and began finishing the piece over returned visits. The powder magazine is an underground vault and therefore very quiet (rare in New York City). It is also entirely made of stone, has an arched ceiling and no parallel surfaces, so it is live and responsive but with a quick decay. Ideal conditions for recording an entirely staccato work. Just as the acoustics of the space began to inform the piece, so did thoughts of the room's history and purpose, its modern day equivalents, and their mutual futility. Though not originally intended (or desired), these ideas became inseparable from the work for Meehan

CD in Digisleeve case with bi-lingual text in June 2024 MAI mai visited London on a family holiday. He was asked to play 2 concerts, one at Hundred Years Gallery with Zheng Hao, Li Song & Blue Harbour. The second at a private address with The Real Leyton Library, Conal Blake, Li Song & Rory Salter. This CD documents 2 sets from the second concert. MAI mai : amplified guitar (electric & acoustic), voice & feedback Li Song : laptop Rory Salter : amplified guitar (electric) & self oscillating amplifier

Recorded the same year as the legendary Osaka Bridge was released, “Bill Wells Presents” is a document of a life changing tour of Scotland and its Highlands by Bill Wells and his friends Kazumi Nikaido, KAMA AINA, Maher Shalal Hash Baz and Tenniscoats. Brought together via Stephen Pastels’ Geographic Records, “Bill Wells Presents” is a reminder of the life affirming musical relationships that can form with the support of labels and funding bodies who act with open minds and hearts. “Bill Wells Presents” contains a condensed version of the Scottish tour, featuring previously unrecorded music from KAMA AINA, Kazumi Nikaido and new compositions written on the occasion of the Scottish tour by Tori Kudo.“Kazumi Nikaido was introduced to me by way of Koki Yahata who was working for the Japanese label P-Vine who had released Also In White (Geographic, 2002). When I toured Japan with Maher Shalal Hash Baz in 2004 Nikaido joined for a couple of the dates and also appeared on GOK (Geographic, 2009). When I first heard her he thought that she was a remarkable artist and mesmerising performer. Similarly, I met Takuji (KAMA AINA) while on the same tour; we did some recording together and he also played and recorded as part of the band in Tokyo. I knew about him previously as we were both on Stephen Pastel’s Geographic Records.That was also how I met and got to know the Kudo family and Tenniscoats. Regarding the music; this record is an attempt to make a condensed version of the full show that was played nightly on the Scottish tour. Everyone played different sets each night, though some were more different than others. However, as far as I know, the CD features the only recording (at Wick) of pieces which Tori wrote for Maher Shalal Hash Baz while on that tour.” - Bill Wells  --- Kazumi Nikaido - guitar, vocalsTakuji Aoyagi - vocals, banjo guitar, percussion, bassSaya - vocals, keyboards, pianoUeno Takashi - guitarReiko Kudo - vocalsTori Kudo - keyboards, piano, guitar, vocalsNamio Kudo - drums, percussion (Tolbooth)Mitch Mitchell - drums, percussion (Aberdeen & Wick)Robert Henderson - trumpet (Tolbooth)Bill Wells - keyboards, piano, bassTracks 1, 4,5, 10-14 & 23 recorded by Dave Lewis at the Tolbooth, Stirling on 13.4.2006Tracks 3, 9 & 21 recorded by Bill Wells at The Lemon Tree, Aberdeen on 16.4. 2006Tracks 2, 6-8, 15-20 & 22 recorded by Bill Wells at Lyth Arts Centre, Wick on 21.4.2006Tracks 1-3 written by Kazumi NikaidoTracks 4, 6 written by Takuji AoyagiTrack 5 written by John OxenhamTracks 7, 9, 10, 11 written by Saya & Ueno TakashiTrack 9 Trad arr. Saya & Ueno TakashiTracks 13 ,14 written by Reiko KudoTracks 12, 15- 21 written by Tori KudoTrack 22 written by Bill WellsTrack 23 written by Reiko Kudo & Bill WellsCover image by Jad Fair, design by Hannah Marine.Thanks to Jackie Shearer, Wendy Niblock, John the bus driver, Alasdair Campbell, William Wilson, Evan Henderson, Gordon Maclean, Koji Saito, Koji Shibuya and Thorsten Lütz.Bill Wells acknowledges the support from the Scottish Art Council’s ‘Tune Up’ award scheme.

If Alan Licht ever continues with his revered Minimal Top Ten lists then Sam Esh would surely be added to the pile.Penultimate Press is proud to release one of the most audacious and unrelenting entries in the entire minimal cannon. A collection of recordings from a true American eccentric maverick pioneer, Sam Esh. Originally available as 2 x cassettes in tiny editions on Mike Rep Hummel’s Old Age / No Age label these are now bound together on a 2CD set which does not interrupt the unrelenting creativity of Mr Esh. What does it sound like? Picture Moondog taking a turn for the far worse morphing into a way further crazed Legendary Stardust Cowboy who eschews any song tradition for an unrelenting hypnotic acoustic hurricane complete with glossolalia vocals.This is raw primitive repetitive street blues, an acoustic freight train barreling through your brain. It is unlike anything you have encountered prior.

Luc Ferrari -- along with Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry, François Bayle, and others -- is one of the pioneers of the particular style of tape music known as 'musique concrète'. More significantly, he must be counted as one of the most complexly, most idiosyncratically compelling of post-War composers. Ferrari has time and again ranged far afield of musique concrète, and Interrupteur/Tautologos 3 is one such foray into instrumental music. But what a setting-forth! Mon dieu! These particular realizations came about through Ferrari's directed improvisations of Konstantin Simonovitch's ensemble, and the recordings were originally released in 1970 by EMI in their 'Perspectives Musicales' series. 'Interrupteur' is largely static music, a music of long tones periodically interrupted by aleatoric events. If it references musical minimalism (particularly Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Robert Ashley), this surely counts as an intuitive, very personal result. 'Tautologos 3' pursues the idea of the superposition of cycles of different lengths that, once set into motion, will continually result in new events. Conventionally understood, a tautology is a redundancy in which the same meaning is expressed in different works; the same things are 'said' repeatedly in 'Taulologos 3', but as the context shifts through the displacement of the various cycles, how could there be no gain, no furtherance of both logic and sensation? In a world: exhilarating.""Interrupteur" is from 1967 and features the following instrumentation: English horn, clarinet, bass clarinet, French horn, trumpet, violin, viola, cello, two percussions, two electric organs. It is one of the most outright powerful and devastating recordings within the avant garde realm. "Tautologos 3" is form 1970 and features: flute, oboe, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, viola, cello, double bass, electric guitar, electric organ & vibraphone.