A sequence of free improvisations -- eight duos, two piano solos & one tenor saxophone solo -- recorded at Gateway Studios. Recorded 9/28/03. 62 minutes.

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

Tracklisting: 1. Jump Start - 12:352. Gambade - 12:023. Capriole - 9:364. The Shimmy (For Tony Marsh) 34:50"Saxophone colossus Evan Parker is no stranger to the duo format with a pianist, and the recordings with the likes of Agustí Fernández, Sylvie Courvoisier, Matthew Shipp, Georg Graewe, Stan Tracey, Borah Bergman and John Tilbury are there to confirm it. His encounter with Alexander Hawkins isn’t just one more experience in that context, however. “Leaps in Leicester” may put him in known territory instrumentally (after all, which contexts hasn’t Parker seen over the course of his illustrious career?); but it’s not the context which provides the route to new directions here, so much as the personality of the individual with whom the dialogue is developed. A self-taught improviser and composer, Alexander Hawkins is one of a kind and the best partner possible for someone as unique as Parker. Although over recent years Hawkins has appeared in various Parker-led formations (ranging from trio through to a 15-piece large ensemble), this album captures the pair’s very first explorations in the duo format. It’s not the first time Clean Feed has released a CD featuring him – Hawkins is a member of The Convergence Quartet, playing with Taylor Ho Bynum, Dominic Lash and Harris Eisenstadt. His background speaks for itself, including collaborations with Louis Moholo-Moholo, Joe McPhee, John Surman, Mulatu Astatke, Wadada Leo Smith, and Anthony Braxton. Additionally, the work he has developed in the collaborative trio Decoy (with John Edwards and Steve Noble) has brought the possibilities provided by a particular instrument, the Hammond organ, to new grounds. Prepare yourself for something special."

"In the hands of John Butcher, the saxophone can sound like anything, from a piece of hollowed out brass baubled with pads and valves to an hermetically sealed feedback system, a miniature sound environment teeming with ever-evolving note-forms, or a huge echo chamber inflicting dub scale damage on every breath. The first half of the CD provides some particularly hallucinatory perspectives. The Oya Stone Museum was originally a working mine and it now consists of a series of enormous resonant chambers cut clean from the rock face. “From the first note I could almost physically feel the sound hanging in the air,” Butcher recalls. “lf solo improvising is to make any sense it has to respond to the particular acoustic of wherever you're playing. It's your partner, and it tests the flexibility, the usability, of your own language. The Oya concert makes for some very deep listening, with Butcher loosing darts of single notes and long oscillating currents deep into the bowels of the building only to hear them rebound as bat calls and foghorns. As the performance unravels, he starts to work real-time layers of overlapping call and response into a weave of ectoplasmic forms. The Tokyo club date, alongside no-input mixing board operative Toshimaru Nakamura, forms the 19 minute duet that caps the new CD. Butcher engages with the gulf of Nakamura's almost-sounds with shrill, sibilant hisses, squeaky balloon tones and luminous single notes that swell on the horizon like pregnant suns." WIRE - David Keenan.

JOHN BUTCHER - tenor/soprano saxophones, (feedback tenor on # 4) In the summer of 2022 Thomas Buhl-Wiggers, of the Cejero festival and label, kindly invited me to play inside the mammoth Brønshøj water tower. The very resonant spaces I’ve worked in before include a giant gasometer, a hollowed-out Japanese mountain, an underground reservoir, a Victorian mausoleum and a massive World War II oil tank. I’m still fascinated by how different these enormous environments all sounded and felt. They each inspired different approaches in trying to find the music for the actual space, and my recent experience within this extraordinary construction was no exception. The Brønshøj Vandtårn is a concrete water-tower, built almost a hundred years ago in the suburbs of Copenhagen. It’s 20m wide and 34m high - smaller than some similar shapes I’ve played in, but with a large, lingering reverberation. Some sounds seem to float away as if through liquid, others acquire a shifting haze, and some just prefer to sit around. John Butcher

Florian Stoffner - guitar John Butcher - tenor & soprano saxophones Chris Corsano - drums & half-clarinet Here, then, are three men who have, if you will, won the argument already. They don’t need excess volume or headline soloing to get their message across. Their message is inscribed in elegant lower-case and rarely used aural fonts. You will find yourself leaning forward because not a note or whisper should be missed ... (Brian Morton)

THERMAL (John Butcher / Andy Moor / Thomas Lehn) formed in 2001, three musicians from different musical backgrounds, evolving along their personal routes to meet in free improvisations. For twenty years they’ve been taking their subtle and explosive music throughout Europe. Unsounds released their first album Thermal in 2003. In 2023 the trio of quiet giants comes back with Ice in a Hot World, a new album recorded live in Avignon. The Thermal powerhouse has become highly confident but spontaneity and intuition are at the core of their performance at all times. Twenty years of working together, and in other formats, turned Thermal into a powerful and intrepid unit, always searching for uncompromising, mysterious and unchartered sonic frontiers. Eyal Hareuveni

Jean-Luc Guionnet DYSLEXIC HARP (DECIPHERED IN THE DARK) For pedal harp solo / Pour harpe de concert solo Dedicated to / dédicacé à Rhodri Davies     Rhodri Davies: pedal harp / harpe de concert   Recorded, edited, mixed and mastered by Jean-Luc Guionnet / Enregistré, monté, mixé et masterisé par Jean-Luc Guionnet. Recorded 17th and 18th of January 2010 at q-02, Brussels / Enregistré les 17 et 18 janvier 2010 au q-02, Bruxelles. Design by / Concu par Anna Peaker. Etchings by / Gravures de Jean-Luc Guionnet.

Telyn Wrachïod Urquhart gan Ardival / Urquhart bray harp by Ardival. Recordiwyd gan Jethro Chaplin ar y 24ain o Awst 2023, yn Stiwdios Mwnci, Dolwilym. Recorded by Jethro Chaplin on the 24th of August 2023, at Mwnci Studios, Dolwilym. Ôl-gynhyrchwyd gan / Mastered by Sam Grant. Dylunio gan / Design by Anna Peaker. Darlun gan / Drawing by Jean-Luc Guionnet. Mae Cildraeth Sienco yn fyrfyfyriad sy’n seiliedig ar gyfuniad o nodiant a strwythur y darn Brandy Cove gan Angharad Jenkins â thiwnio tannau amgen ‘Cywair yn Nghywair y Wrach’ o lawysgrif Robert ap Huw. Cildraeth Sienco is an improvisation based on an amalgamation of the notation and structure of Angharad Jenkins’ Brandy Cove with the alternative string tuning of ‘Cywair yn Nghywair y Wrach’ from Robert ap Huw’s manuscript. Diolch i / Thank you to: Nia Daniel, Richard Dawson, Carl Ludwig Hübsch, Angharad Jenkins, Dafydd Roberts, Catrin Rowlands, Soundtrips NRW, Bill Taylor, Fern Thomas, Amy Treharne, Daniel G. Williams.

Stringing the Telyn Rawn from Culture Colony on Vimeo. --- "This album's 18 short improvisations on the instrument are brilliant. There is play and twang, a sense in which the instrument is being tested and sounded. Sometimes it sounds wobbly like a fawn on new legs, in other moments it has grit and shuffle. To make an instrument that hasn't been heard for 200 years, and then play brand new improvisations on it is bold and refreshing – a forward movement that brings the past along." - Jen Allan, The QuietusDating back to the 13th century in Wales, the Telyn Rawn is a nearly forgotten horsehair harp; UK improvising harpist Rhodri Davies researched the instrument and its unique sound, commissioning the construction of a harp on which he performs 18 improvisations of impressive technique and sonority, launching his new Amgen Records label with this album named for the instrument. Harp design by Rhodri Davies, body of harp by Alun Thomas, leather work by Gaynor Davies-Howell, pegs turned by Alan and Milissa Dewey, horse hide supplied by Barrhead Leather, plaited and wound horse hair strings supplied by Simon Chadwick. The building of the harp was made possible through a Creative Wales Award. Recorded, edited and mastered by Sam Grant.Recorded 22nd and 23rd of January 2020 at Blank Studios, Newcastle upon Tyne.Drawing by Jean-Luc Guionnet.Design by Anna Peaker. Diolch i / Thank you to: John Butcher, Richard Dawson, Audrey Evans, Delyth Evans, Robert Evans, Ann Griffiths, O’r Pedwar Gwynt, Robert Hadaway, Huw Ceiriog Jones, Michał Poręba, Llio Rhydderch, Gorwel Roberts, Sioned Puw Rowlands, Elan Closs Stephens, David Sylvian, Sesiwn Werin Tŷ Tawe, Bill Taylor.

Relics of the Horsehair harp This collection is a companion piece to my solo album ‘Telyn Rawn’ AMGEN 001 (2020). I have invited some of my favourite musicians to respond to the eighteen improvised pieces on ‘Telyn Rawn’. I asked each contributor to imagine that the musical material improvised in 2020 was an ancient musical form that had fully existed in the medieval period, and, that each of their responses were to have happened centuries after the imagined formation of the ‘Telyn Rawn’ pieces. This album therefore proposes a new imagined repertoire that emerges from an already speculatively built instrument and equally re-imagined repertoire. As guitarist C Joynes comments, these creative responses offer a kind of ‘speculative fiction’ approach to the source material. At the point where this music reaches you, it has been filtered through imagined passages of time, various musical languages and histories, and channelled through the fictional ecologies of musicians, locations and instrumentation. The title given to this album of imaginary musical histories, ‘Creiriau y Delyn Rawn’ or ‘Relics of the Horsehair harp’, is inspired by the title Edward Jones gave to his manuscript ‘Musical, Poetical, and Historical Relicks of the Welsh Bards and Druids’ (1802), a title I have always loved. Rhodri Davies, Abertawe

Syed Kamran Ali (Hunter Gracchus, Harappian Night Recordings) introduces ‘Dog Wearing Dracula Fangs’; the first album from his newly minted Fish el Fish project. As if to kick the existing ideas of his Harappian Night Recordings work into all new orbits of singularity, ‘Dog Wearing Dracula Fangs’ wrenches a dense throng of voices, electronics and busted instrumentation thrashing and wailing through filters of avant-psychedelic glimmer, mock exotica and atrophied, fusion-esque sheen. A dry, mysterious spoken prose underpins the sonics, appearing to speak in terms of daunting geopolitical allusions in one breath, then glib, tongue in cheek piss-taking sarcasm the next. These narratives pull you immediately into what feels like an entire universe of vivid though scarcely penetrable imagery, begging to be decoded and explored in detail.Yet even through repeat listens of this enticing work it is difficult to fathom exactly the type of thinking this music has sprung from. Far too crude and homespun to be the product of arch cultural strategy, ‘Dog Wearing Dracula Fangs’ is possessed of a blown out fidelity indicative of untarnished, DIY spontaneity and the willingness to let things emerge as they will. Clear as day from the moment of playback, however, is a confident, fully realised other worldliness to this music that is anything accidental. Comprised chiefly of shortish, song length pieces, each notably varied in shape and feel, there is a fully formed ‘proper album’ quality to ‘Dog Wearing Dracula Fangs’ which only reinforces curiosities about exactly where the fuck this has all come from. Whatever the answer, whatever its secrets, this is probably the most weird and wonderful release adhuman has had the pleasure to take on so far.

Polish composer and sound artist Robert Piotrowicz presents his first work for Penultimate Press, one which outlines an uncanny sound world with a series of fictional organ pieces.Whilst resembling a pipe organ alongside other acoustic sources all material is strictly synthetic. The impression of air being swept through the bellows… false. The spatial organisation suggesting it was recorded in large physical space, false! The long middle solo passage in Noumen must have been performed by some kind of wind instrument, no? False.All of these are elaborate tricks of the ear.The music of Afterlife is an artificial construct, one that is not able to be played on a traditional 12-tone organ, especially as one encounters a tuning based on 1/3-tone intervals. The result are three compositions which comprise a rather unique harmonic composition. One that comes across both familiar and foreign.Afterlife is an ambitious exploration of sound modelling and sound manipulation. Manipulation of both the tools deployed and to the listener with regards to the synthesis of acoustic deception. The result is a bold and dramatic shimmering mass of music. A fluid and visceral audio rendering with sheets of colourful sound pouring around the listener.Like much of Piotrowicz’s output this is more extraordinary exploration of the constituent relationship between harmonic and frequency components whilst investing a deep engagement with the synthetic as acoustic ruse.

Milo Thesiger-Meacham’s Audible Heat is an extended documentary, a fitful academic essay, a mass-media probe, an idiosyncratic piece of travel writing, a densely illustrated sound-art montage, and a deep dive into man’s complex relations with the seemingly eternal sound of the cicada as ‘audible heat’ in human consciousness.Featuring original music and field recordings, and spoken contributions by writer and translator Cristina Viti and filmmaker Ahmed Yassin Aldaradji, Audible Heat ranges across continents, embracing Greek tongue twisters, the poetry of Ibn Quzmān and Harry Crosby, African-American mathematician Benjamin Banneker’s lost wooden clock, Plato’s Phaedrus, cicadas on the film sets of Sergio Leone’s ‘Spaghetti Westerns,’ the body language of Clint Eastwood, the apocalyptic premonitions of the Wampanoag, Geronimo’s hatred of telegraphy, and botanist Donald C. Peattie’s terror of the inescapable buzz of mortality.Equal parts academic argument, travelogue, and critical collage, this synthesis of ideas pulls upon a wide-ranging bibliography of materials to examine the omnipresent sound of the cicada throughout human history and culture. Herein, this climatic sound acts as a conduit between ecology, identity and mortality, and the cicada’s sonic inference emerges as a codification of the unknown and unfamiliar—as a spiritual weathervane in desert settings—and as a means of teasing out the sensorial limits of human understanding.Audible Heat was written, read, recorded, produced & scored by Milo Thesiger-Meacham. It was first commissioned and broadcast as a work for radio by Radiophrenia, September 2023.

Frames that lean, pictures that roam’ is a collection of instrumental works by Ailie Ormston for tape, electric guitar, cello and double bass. This ensemble of instruments achieves a complex sound ranging from fully electronic (tape) to fully acoustic (strings), with the guitar occupying space in-between. The freeing of fixed material is the common thread throughout these six works – riffs and motifs are established before being reinvented and reimagined, bending and twisting within the bounds of their own frames then reemerging in new pastures. This is employed using different methods in each voice – through processing in the electronics, improvisation on guitar, and detailed notation for the strings.Ormston crafted the foundational electronics by processing fragments of improvised recordings using household objects and instruments, then assembling the results. These source materials are repurposed and brought back into real time as filters which the guitar is channelled through, subtly revoicing them and providing space for new melodic flares. The guitar is further abstracted through preparation with paper woven through the strings to disguise its well-known timbre and to afford new ways of playing. Ultimately, Ormston uses the guitar as a percussive device and sampling tool, bridging the gap between electronic and acoustic realms within the group. Ormston adds further dimension to the ensemble with cello and double bass parts that ground the abstract textures with nourishing melodic passages, informed by pitches, rhythms and gestures found in the other voices.Early interactions of these works were written as part of a commission for experimental music festival Tectonics in 2022. They were further developed whilst in residence at Church Walk, Aldeburgh and completed at home in Glasgow in March 2024. For this album, Ormston is joined by Joanna Stark on cello and Rhona MacDonald on double bass, for whom the string parts were written. Recording of the string instrumentation, as well as studio production on the album, was made possible through support by Help Musicians.  released March 19, 2025

Very pleased and grateful to announce this ‘Home Comfort’ reissue by Mark Glynne and Bart Zwier, originally self-released in 1980. Maybe a bit of an unexpected title to appear in the LSD catalog but my love for this album goes back to my late teenage years and has had an addictive effect since, like a spleen infused magnet.  With this album Glynne and Zwier (†), based in the Netherlands and connected to the Ultra scene, drew an insular blend of intimate post-punk and chamber (bedroom) songs with surreal scenic reflections. Probably its naked singularity defying categorization has left it so unnoticed, even 43 years after the making. It also features a reciting Marlène Dumas still quite unknown at the time. With biggest gratitude to Mark Glynne who instantly felt confident with my proposal to reissue this silent witness of lasting beauty.   My long-time Japanese friend You Ishihara (White Heaven, The Stars) who bought the LP when it came out in 1980 still considers it as one of his all-time favourites. This is what he writes about ‘Home Comfort’:   “Resignation and fear in a desolate mental landscape. This album, which exists like a shelter for those who have quietly escaped through the backdoor of the world, vividly reflects the inner depths of the devastated Amsterdam of the early 80's. A beautiful and sad, unmistakable masterpiece.”

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