Originally recorded analog between June 1983 and May 1984 in West-Berlin by Graf Haufen. First released on cassette in June 1984 (Graf Haufen Tapes 31) and simultaneously by various other labels around the world.The original master tape was carefully transferred to digital and painstalkingly remastered in 2017. released October 2, 2020Composed, performed, recorded and mixed by Graf Haufen.Transferred to Digital from the original master tape by Thomas Pargmann.Remastered by Lily Vice at Sacred Lust Studios, Japan in 2017.

Alec Livaditis is an improvising cellist, currently residing in Athens (Greece), where he regularly performs in solo and duo settings. Using the cello as a sound object, his music is concerned with space, pattern, timbre, and texture. He first appeared on the scene with Clear and Cloud, an LP released on Kye Records This is his second solo release on the formidable Regional Bears.

Where spring LP Omelette Of Disease was an orgy in painfully hard driven feedback, and the early summer cassette Overdrive focused on rumbling low-end, Benzedrine Bonanza brings a live all-at-once approach. Not unlike Schakalens Bror's earliest cassette excretions, yet now more refined and with the energy of his later live shows successfully transferred to tape. Fully fledged free form guitar noise in a league of its own. released By Regional Bears. August 22, 2018

This studio recording of Jason Kahn (voice) and Ilia Belorukov (modular synthesizer) is tense and taut, as dry, crumbling sonic swathes manifest both as machine and human, facilitating an almost ceremonial liberation. Kahn has historically been known for electronic sounds exhibiting stasis and abrasive, enduring minimalism; as of late his work has been primarily concerned with his own unaltered voice. Belorukov’s work exists within the realm of improvised noise and electroacoustics, as he prioritizes a wide range of collaborations. Kahn's voice provides a stark contrast to Belorukov's jagged synthesis, like examining oneself close-up in a mirror. Here, these prolific musicians share a unique, intimate intensity through drastically different approaches.

Artistry was Sirone's first album as a leader, recorded in 1978, just after the split of the Revolutionary Ensemble. Artistry has an Atypical combination of instruments, bass, cello , flute and percussion and delivers aplenty. Listen and you will know. Sirone ( Norris Jones) had an enormously prolific career as a bassist, both as a member of the Revolutionary Ensemble and playing with many of the best musicians of the 20th century - from Pharoah Sanders, Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, Gato Barbieri, Noah Howard, William Parker, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Sonny Sharrock,Marion Brown ... and the list goes on.

Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp’s latest album, “Ventre Unique”, is a dynamic exploration that seamlessly blends folk, krautrock, post-punk, and African rhythms, delivering an emotionally charged yet exuberant listening experience. Helmed by Geneva-based Vincent Bertholet, the orchestra’s ever-evolving lineup and distinctive sound pay homage to both African music traditions and avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp, while pushing the boundaries of contemporary music.Recorded over ten days in the outskirts of Paris at Studio Midilive, the album features an eclectic international cast of 12 musicians. The result is a beautifully organic sound that balances Bertholet’s simple, loop-based compositions with intricate arrangements of marimba, horns, strings, and angular guitars.Ventre Unique is the group’s sixth album and follows their acclaimed 2021 release, “We’re Ok But We’re Lost Anyway”. While their previous work captured the disarray of the world during the pandemic, “Ventre Unique” reflects on shared human experiences, inviting listeners to find common ground through music.

"Side A, ‘Swinging’, is so titled because the musicians hang three drums from the ceiling and have them create noise – aqueous, haunted, tense – with proximate contact mics and feedbacking mini-speakers. Perhaps improbably, this piece has a rock-adjacent sense of abandon to it, which is less the case for flip track ‘Oscillating’, though intrigue is inherent to these waves of sine (which occasionally coalesce into something foley effect-worthy) and their effect on taut vellum." - The QuietusThe second release from the trio of Conal Blake, Regan Bowering and Li Song. Two Movements extends the ideas which underpinned their first outing, ‘Music for Snare Drums and Portable Speakers’ (Infant Tree, 2023), by incorporating motion in two distinct ways. The two sides, ’Swinging’ and ‘Oscillating’, were recorded live at Cafe OTO and Hundred Years Gallery, London.Recorded by @billy_steiger and @hbrownsoundMastered by Taku Unami

‘Harmonium II’ is the new album from London-based artist Zheng Hao. Across two side long pieces, she manipulates feedback into clumps of pure tone and interruptions of chirping, chirruping high frequencies. It follows her recent album for Krim Kram, "Breaks", and more directly, "Harmonium", released on Hard Return in 2022. With her duo, Oishi (alongside Ren Shang), she released "once upon a time there was a mountain" on Bezirk in 2023. As Hao explains, Harmonium II should not be viewed as a follow-up to the first Harmonium but a parallel exploration of the same ideas and themes: “’Harmonium’ refers to a type of balanced feedback, more specifically, a resonance,” she says. Where the first Harmonium involved controlling tones from a harmonica, no traditional acoustic instruments are present on this installment. Instead, Hao explores loops of recording devices and listening technology fed into a modular synth. On the first side, 'I', she turns a Zoom recorder – a tool used by field recordists to capture sound - into an instrument. Placing headphones close to the Zoom’s microphones, she tuned the feedback tones generated into sine waves from her modular synth. In a poetic twist, this approach creates an electronic world with the verdancy of a soundscape. Low, rumbling tones give the impression of an aircraft passing overhead. Squeaking high frequencies sound like voluble wildlife. Hypnotic pulses and beating tones emerge as her movements shift the system. Through recursion and gesture comes a tentative approximation of organic life. “I’m moving the headphones around so that it feels a bit like insects coming in and out,” Hao explains. “There’s also a low frequency feedback from the Zoom recorder itself, and I’m fading that feedback into a modular generated low sine wave as a transition, and then gradually fade the modular sound to a phantom rhythm. Then again and again.” For the second side Hao uses a reverb pedal and a mixing desk. Opening with a bed of stridulating bleeps and buzzes, human gestures can be heard in the system once more, gentle sweeps and waves eventually held in a suspended drone. Equilibrium arrives as humming tones bend, curve and fold into each other. It’s a more meditative piece than the first side, a bed of sounds that could be coarse and jarring frequencies coalesced into something utterly other, and utterly compelling. In Hao’s practice, conventional relations between performer and sound sources are twisted. Sound becomes malleable. Graspable without the obstructions and limitations of a conventional instrument or a DAW. Reference points for her music could be the visceral sound explorations of Maryanne Amacher, the haptic feedback sculpting of Rafael Torral, and the no-input mixing board experiments of Toshimaru Nakamura. It undoubtedly also chimes with the recent release on Bezirk by Regan Bowering. Although using different tools and reaching different outcomes, for both, signal paths are hacked and rearranged, feedback is embraced, and gestures are translated into sonic phenomena. Sounds that are typically discarded or avoided are held onto for their affective, textural and interactive possibilities. The unfamiliar sensations residing in unconventional sound sources are embraced. “Feedback- for me, is less about the sound output and more about enjoying the 'control' during the performance process,” Hao explains. “It’s like a tug-of-war between me and the feedback, listening very intently to the sounds in the speakers, my fingers tightly pressing on the mixer knobs cautiously to prevent any distortions. I enjoy the feeling of this back-and-forth and the vibrations that occur when feedback happens, which feels warm to me, or maybe it’s because I’m usually sweating when I’m playing with feedback…” Zheng Hao is a sound artist and experimental musician, born in Wuhan, China, currently based in London, United Kingdom. She is a member of the duos Oishi (with Ren Shang) and ecm (with Joseph Khan). Her solo works explore electronic and electro-acoustic instruments, including modular synthesis and feedback. She has released music on Otoroku, Falt, Molt Fluid, Krim Kram, and Research Laboratories.

Xu Shaoyang makes music about the fragmented beauty of everyday life. Over the years, he has sustained a fresh spirit of amateurism by travelling and performing in many different parts of the world, occasionally as a member of the avant-pop group Maher Shalal Hash Baz. His songs are made of simple tunes, sometimes silly sometimes smart, sometimes delivered with a “backing band” of improvising musicians who he met and collected along the way. Sometimes the karaoke worked out musically, sometimes not.In spring 2019, Xu Shaoyang took a trip to East Asia. He performed two gigs in Beijing and Taipei with two small ensembles of local musicians, both taking place in a pedestrian underpass. For this journey, Xu Shaoyang prepared a songbook of 30 tunes he conjured while putting his newborn child to sleep. “When you are putting a baby to sleep, you find yourself having no time to sleep, and that’s when the familiar tunes deep in your heart flow out naturally”, as he explained to the crowd in Taipei.In both gigs, Xu Shaoyang sang these 30 songs with his microphone attached to a FM transmitter. Very different dynamics played out in the North and the South. In Beijing, Zhu Wenbo and Liu Lu smuggled their own composition game into the group jam: the two prepared 30 slips of paper with simple musical themes and instructions, randomly picking one each before a song was played, while a third musician, Ake, joined them with freeform improvisation. The Taipei backing band, consisting of Jyun-Ao Caesar and La-La Reich, improvised along simple principles provided by Xu, to explore the themes of expectations and failures.This cassette provides a documentation of a rare musical journey connecting the two Chinese capitals. Performed live, Xu Shaoyang’s lullabies turned into childish plays of bouncy melodic chaos, unrefined, unsettled, and cheerfully unconcerned. These recordings smell of the sincere joy of collective music making, the joy of connection and communication as well as miscommunication.

In mid-December 2021, Mamer flew from Ürümqi to Shenzhen to play a few booked gigs. Afterwards, he decided to stay on for a marathon music residency at the Old Heaven bookstore. From Dec 13 to 27, Mamer performed 14 concerts in 15 days, unreservedly presenting his vast creative world to a small but dedicated audience, who followed him throughout this journey. These performances were announced on each day with a theme decided often last minute, free admission offered. They were intended to be intimate and spontaneous, or in Mamer’s own word, “rehearsals”. Most of these “rehearsals” were sonically challenging, to say the very least. Years had passed since Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records released the album Eagle, which Mamer is still best known for in the Western world. Yet, among the listeners who followed him through the most recent decade, even the most nostalgic ones had come to the realisation that Mamer had left his “world music” identity long behind. The performances at Old Heaven showcased Mamer’s dialogues with a wild range of eccentric musical traditions, including industrial rock, heavy psychedelia, sample-based electronics, drone, and harsh noise. The Kazakh folk tradition, which predominantly defined the early works of Mamer and his band Iz, was most of the time barely discernible. On the fifth night, however, the audience found Mamer sitting alone with a nylon string guitar, delivering what would become one of his quietest public performances of the past decade. The night started gently with a reinterpretation of “Love”, a 90s ballad by Kazakhstani rock group Roksonaki, and it went on placidly, releasing into the air melodies from both folk songs and pieces originally composed for traditional Kazakh instruments. The setlist spans across centuries. Among others, it includes a dombra kui written by Ashim Dungshiuly, early 20th century master from Ili, and an ancient piece for sıbızğı (a sideblown flute) believed to be composed by Korkut Ata, the great hero in Turkic mythology. For Mamer, this is a songbook of memories. These tunes were once heard repeatedly on the radio during his youthful days in Xinjiang, and they all came back to him on this quiet winter night. The nylon guitar calmly inhaled in his hands, breathing out cold, whirling melodic currents, trailing around and round through personal and collective histories. In Kazakh language, “awlaⱪ” is a root word that denotes the state of being “off”, signifying an existence from afar and away. The word “awlaⱪta”, which Mamer uses to title one of his original compositions performed that night, literally means “outside” or “elsewhere”. In a more subtle sense, “awlaⱪta” implies a condition of sustained liminality, a voluntary exile of being a stranger in a strange land. This condition is one that has to do with the will to departure, the longing for a different place, and an utter resistance to the ease of belonging. For Mamer, it serves duly as an artist statement, but that night, the solitary drifter re-encountered home. Still Mamer refused to go gentle into the good night. After the last song, he grabbed an unused guitar pickup from the ground, and pressed it to his throat. With intense pitch shifting on the effect pedals, he summoned a long, ghostly howl, piercing through the tranquillity in the atmosphere. Amid resounding echoes, Mamer walked off the stage, on towards the next night.

In Chinese, “big ghost” is a phrase sometimes used to convey a sense of utter out-of-placeness. If you see a big ghost, you find someone who walks the corporeal world in their own preposterous ways. A big ghost is not a ghost, it does not terrorise, but neither does it belong. It occurred to Li Weisi that this speaks to the very essence of outside music making. One of these days, he started saying “I saw a big ghost playing last night” after going to a very good gig. Ghostmass, then, are a collective of such big ghosts doing music together. Started in 2021 as an improvisation unit based in Beijing, the project gathers kindred souls who share the vision for an open musical space where ghosts feel at home. To this day, the lineup has evolved into some kind of a supergroup of the capital’s music underground: Li Weisi and Li Qing are known more widely as the retro-manic electro-acoustic duo Soviet Pop, and as two thirds of the cult alt-rock act Carsick Cars; Yan Jun has been a veteran experimenter of sounds, words, and ideas for decades across various scenes; the most recent addition to the group was Yang KuKu (YKK), a professional aquascaper who plays music in a band for the first time. While the project grows from a joint passion for drone, doom, and extreme metal, each ghost attends its own duties in building and rebuilding the collective sound of Ghostmass, which stumbles across a trackless delta of harsh noise and free improvisation. In 2023, Ghostmass recorded an improvised session for Dusty Ballz on a hot summer day. The label was told that they would do something jazz. The two tracks on Side B are titled to pay homage to the legacy of late Coltrane. Side A presents an array of ghostly references from an everyday Chinese context: a martial arts fiction masterwork of the Taiwanese “ghost school”, an ancient Taoist master heralding from the ghost valley, a French DIY-music wizard who wanders in Beijing hutongs calling himself “ghost uncle”, and the famous ghost caverns in the Wuyi Mountains where smoky dark oolong tea grows – these references have warrantably turned into ghosts themselves, paling under translation. In a time when being human gives way to humanism, perhaps being ghost promises a more real living reality. Perhaps hell is what we live in right now - who the hell knows - perhaps this is what jazz music should be.

"A classically trained Chinese bamboo flutist, Lao Dan picked up the saxophone again around 2013 as he went wildly astray in the world of avant-garde jazz and free improvisation. While demonstrating an ever-growing ability to deliver explosive force and intensity in his free playing, Lao Dan keeps a brutal honesty in his approach to the instrument. He plays ‘jazz’ as what it is, not what it’s supposed to be. Navigating constantly between the East and the West, Lao Dan embraces a unique aesthetics which fuses all his past influences into a voice of glorious mayhem and sheer zaniness.Recorded in June 2019, this is a solo set in which two instruments – tenor saxophone and Zheng, also known as the Chinese zither – were played successively and simultaneously by hands and feet. The recording was made in one go with no overdub or effect added. Lao Dan never learned to play the Zheng properly before this very first attempt. As a result, he didn’t struggle at all to play it in an awkward way, while with the saxophone he did, as always, try very hard to do that.The cover art, created by Shenzhen-based artist Tiemei, is a portrait of Shennong, the Deity of medicine and agriculture in ancient Chinese mythology. The three tracks in Chinese Medicine are named after three species of herb each believed to have unique medicinal properties. It is our responsibility to remind you to take them with extra caution. In Chinese medicine, after all, every drug is a thirty-percent poison."

Resourcefulness is sometimes presented as a humble quality born of necessity. But it’s a foundational tenet of the exceptionally unconstrained members of improvising trio Tamarisk, consisting of Christina Carter, David Menestres, and Andrew Weathers. Their latest is a continuation of the interplay they’ve developed for a few years now on a handful of releases and while touring. Like the most bizarre sort of jazz combo, Tamarisk grazes the orbits of outré free improv, moody balladry, object play, staccato scraping, and the contemplation of vistas and landscapes. Vocals vacillate between polished and raw, reaching bravely toward the upper and outer ranges, long-intoned, with spoken word elements and dramatic pauses between broken phrases and wordless utterances, all awash in arrivals and departures. The recordings are anchored with a broad array of techniques that admirably deconstruct an understanding of pacing and conventional movement in music, instead favoring constantly fluctuating textures and timbral variety. Unhinged chords, dissonant counterpoints, sprinklings of prepared work, scraping, and bowing. This is a trio of sharp listeners who are unafraid of intimacy or dynamic extremes, and it enables a deep exploration into their own core. Tamarisk seems to ignore time altogether, dropping into a shared state of receptiveness that yields strange and compelling results throughout the album. --- Christina CarterDavid MenestresAndrew WeathersRecorded at Wind Tide, Littlefield TXMarch 29 - 31, 2022Mixed and Mastered by Andrew WeathersAlbum sequenced by E. Lindorff-ElleryArtwork by E. Lindorff-ElleryPrinted by Small Fires Press

"Born in 1945, Guo Yongzhang has performed zhuizi - a traditional Chinese style of narrative singing - for half a century. An artform whose history spans over a century, zhuizi originated in Henan province. Its main musical instruments are the zhuihu, a two-stringed bowed lute, and the zhuibang, a wooden percussion played with foot tapping.  Almost completely blind, Guo Yongzhang is known for his peculiar, resounding yet smooth vocal style. He sings with deep feelings and great verve. Lyrics deal with both the hardships and good values of life while always maintaining a sense of humour. Despite being long regarded as a folk master, Guo has continued to play tirelessly among ordinary people, often travelling from village to village and performing for a whole day at a time. As he nears the end of his life, Guo regrets that nowadays, few people wish to learn the art ofzhuizi. He worries that this precious art form may soon be lost.  This release, titled after one of Guo Yongzhang’s most well-known songs, Lao Lai Nan, commemorates his performance at the 5th Tomorrow Festival. Guo co-headlined the last day of the festival with French prog-rock act Gong on May 20, 2018. His performance was recorded live and is due to be released on both CD and LP by the Old Heaven label in November 2019. --- Guo Yongzhang /  Zhuihu, Zhuibang, Vocals --- Recorded in the late-1980s, Released in 2018

One more to round out what has been a very busy year for Mole. "Nothing had been heard for some time now...not a sound, and the animals had fallen into a deep sleep. The dishes were done, the fire burnt out. There sat an unfinished puzzle on the dining table, a messy pile of scrawled poems on the sideboard and a partially enjoyed novel strewn over the arm of a chair. Yet in all of this quiet, a faint rumble and clatter began to sound. Not one of mechanical origin but certainly something moving closer...and most certainly in a hurry…" --- All music by The SprigsImages by Beverley GoodingInspired by Kenneth Graham’s ‘The Wind in the Willows’Introductory text by The SprigsAdditional text by Wesley Knowler included in cassette version.

Available as 320k MP3 or 16bit FLAC Tracklisting 1. Project Space - 20:37 2. Clock Tower - 19:38 Ute Kanngiesser's first cello solo release, recorded direct to tape at two locations: The Cafe Oto Project Space, and the clock room at St Augustine's Tower, Hackney. --- Ute Kanngiesser / cello --- Recorded and mixed in Spring 2015 by Edward Lucas and Daniel Kordik.Embroidery by Meghan Springer Thanks to Cafe Oto and Hackney Historic Buildings Trust.

Available as 320k MP3 or 24bit FLAC   Tracklisting: Gnarlage Of Self 1. 10 Banks Of The River Nein 2. Extinct Lord 3. Galling Truth 4. Bent Oath Scenario 5. It's A Fuck On (From Jeuvre's "Time Under Hark") 6. Decalage For 3 TVs In Layering Off Dario 7. Decalage In Vivid Counts 8. Degnarlage In Test Card Frame 9. Prelude To Speedo Foyer 10. Make Your Own World Now (From Hadbegor's "Sleep Yer Lives") INTROSPEX / ORTRESPOX 11. INTROSPEX12. ORTRESPOX "The  Godfather  of  Wild  Pop." "'Trouble  Number'  is  a  major  retrospective  of  four  decades  of  peerless,  visionary,  and  feral  production  from  Gwilly  Edmondez  -  the  dad  from  Yeah  You.  This  90  minute  package  cherry  picks  from  hundreds  upon  hundreds  of  hours  of  psychoanalysis  through  pop  waste,  performed  by  Gwilly  upon  himself  since  the  founding  of  his  '80s  outfit  Radioactive  Sparrow.  Bewildering  and  basically  incomparable  in  its  entirety,  'Trouble  Number'  mongrelises  strains  of  hip-hop,  black  metal,  folk,  power  balladry,  more  more  more,  with  a  properly  prophetic,  popwise  soul.    Pay  your  respects." Says  Gwilly: Gwilly  Edmondez  just  grew  as  a  character  project  in  the  mid-1980s,  offshoot  from  the  to’l-spon/non-com/pop-kak  invention-pool  that  was/is  Radioactive  Sparrow,  itself  founded  by  a  group  of  Bridgend  (13-year-old/non-voter)  elements  in  1980.  Gwilly  is  a  solo/collaborative  improvisation  that  started  out  making  fake,  unwritten  rock,  then  progressed  in  the  1990s  to  real  unaccompanied  rock,  before  settling  into  a  mode  of  practice  defined  by  sampling,  tapes  and  vocals.  Over  many  years,  Gwilly  has  struck  up  many  material  partnerships  and  misadventurist  associations  of,  with  the  likes  of  James  Joys,  Val  Persona,  Faye  MacCalman,  Karl  D’Silva,  Tobias  Illingworth,  Laura  Late-Girl,  b-cátt,  Odie  Ji  Ghast,  THF  Drenching,  Tony  Gage,  Richard  Bowers,  People  Like  Us...  But  in  the  end  none  more  so  than  Elvin  Brandhi.  ‘Gnarlage  of  Self’,  the  C30  album,  was  made  on  Newcastle’s  hottest  day  in  2017,  in  an  upstairs  room  in  Heaton,  recorded  by  Dario  Lozano  Thornton  with  Schoeps  MK2/MK8  pair  to  Sonodore  preamps  in  one  take  subsequently  edited  and  disorganized  by  Dario.  ‘Gwilly  Edmondez:  A  Retrospective  Mixtape  Made  Questionably  &  Unquestioningly  by  Himself’  started  out  as  a  kind  of  slapstick/slapdash  best  of...  but  quickly  became  its  own  entanglement  of  old  stuff,  new-but-unused  stuff  made  for  the  C30,  and  bits  of  recent  live  sets.  The  first  half,  side  one,  tries  to  bungle  blindly  into  the  nature  of  supplication,  confession  and  self-condemning  introspection  –  find the  self  then  kill  it;  side  two  starts  on  the  other  side  of  death  inhaling  wafts  of  cheap  air  freshener  as  a  means  to  hallucinate a personal  history  that  never  could’ve  happened  anyway,  before  scrambling  back  through  the  rear  end  of  personality  only  to  be  consigned  to  liturgical  palliatives  in  a  manner  carried  out  by  his  countless  forebears  of  the  cloth.  It  could  only  end with “Walken’s  Kiss”,  a  sardonically  pronounced  cliffhanger.  --- Music  & Artwork by Gwilly Edmondez. Mix and Edits by Dario Lozano Thornton and  Gwilly  Edmondez.