Vatten Över Vatten ('Water Over Water') is the debut album by the Gothenburg-based act Eftergift. Heavily influenced by the Nordic nature, this is beautiful organic tape music that utilizes a range of different instruments over the course of 8 songs. Sort of the musical equivalent to slowly walking on foggy Swedish fields in the summer dawn.While comparisons could be made with the early Korea Undok Group transmissions or someone like Mattias Gustafsson when it comes to working with the magnetic tape and letting it become an integral part of the soundscape, the rugged lo-fi brilliance and homebrewed ambient of Eftergift is firmly rooted in its own vision and weirdly musical in all it's fucked up 4-track glory.

Grapefruit Records is proud to introduce Stenhjärta, a new duo consisting of Gustaf Dicksson & Magnus Jäverling. Both are active in the Swedish Underground music scene centered in Gothenburg. Gustaf is known for his shape-shifting prolific solo project, Blod, as well as his participation in the notable music collective, Enhet för Fri Musik. Magnus is somewhat newer to the scene, appearing on some Blod recordings as well as releasing a fascinating concept album called Bowdark on the Discreet Music label in 2022. As a duo here they are exploring classic prog-folk motifs with very Swedish influences. Gryning Kommer Röd is yet another gorgeous album delivered to us from the heads and hearts of two active musicians of the Swedish Underground.

Demeters Döttrar is the new trio of Ida Skibsted Cramer, Charlott Malmenholt and Astrid Øster Mortensen. Søndag I Spejlet ('Sunday In The Mirror') was mainly recorded in Gamlestaden, Gothenburg between 2022 and 2023 and consists of 8 tracks that lies somewhere in between 90's lo-fi experimental bedroom music and brash text-sound compositions channeled through the ever-inspiring cassette underground. Listening to Demeters Döttrar is like stepping into a parallel universe; a tiny unexplored corner with paper-thin walls or a very delicate bubble that is about to burst any moment. The instrumentation is sparse and mainly consists of guitar, vocals, prepared tapes and occasional harmonica. The recurrence of rain in different forms throughout the recording almost functions as a percussive backbone at times, the one thing except for the sound of the actual room that sort of keeps it all together. With one foot in Sweden and one foot in Denmark, the group is utilizing both countries' language in an uncompromising and peculiarly alluring way. The almost brutal intimacy brings the more mellow Deux Filles moments to mind, though music wise this owes more to Un, early Charalambides and at times groups like Dadamah. A daring, major statement and one of the most beautiful, strange and other-worldly debut albums we heard in quite a while. Mastered by Lasse Marhaug. Gloss laminated covers, comes with insert. Edition of 500 copies. 

n their latest transatlantic collaboration released through Forlag For Fri Musik, Blod and Shadow Pattern from Canada merge their distinct sounds with surprising synergy. Recorded during the winter of 2024 across Gothenburg, Sweden and Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, this project sees Gustaf Dicksson's introspective lo-fi folk intertwined seamlessly with Nathan Ivanco's raw and experimental concrete music. Mixed and meticulously arranged by Nathan Ivanco, with mastering by Aaron Hutchison, the album is presented in a limited edition of 300 copies. Each copy features screenprinted artwork on repurposed cover jackets, enhancing the project's minimalist ethos and environmental consciousness. Blod and Shadow Pattern defy geographical boundaries and genre conventions, crafting an ambient and acoustic landscape that invites listeners into a world of subtle textures and emotive storytelling. This collaboration not only showcases their musical dexterity but also underscores the power of international artistic exchange in pushing creative boundaries.

Māpura Music is a collaborative and spontaneous music making program for people living with disabilities set in Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland. Its facilitator, Stefan Neville (of Pumice etc.), has been active in the New Zealand underground for over thirty years, personifying an Aotearoa DIY sensibility that effortlessly links melodic song formats with open ended experimentation. On surface level, this collection of improvised group jams verges towards the latter, but soon structures of a playfully melodic sensibility reveal themselves and references beyond the Corpus Hermeticum / Kye axis can be considered. This is neither avant noise nor is it sound collage, but it also barely adheres to any (western) folk, rock or pop song formats. Kinship might be sensed with other disability music projects such as Reynols and Les Harrys, the anarcho stew of London's Triple Negative and even Basil Kirchin's elaborate 'Worlds within Worlds'. But whilst Kirchin famously used the voices of neurodiverse people as source material – with all its possible implications – here we have the people themselves taking agency and center stage. A wildly original sound vision is put forward by this fairly constant crew of ad hoc music makers (Jemima Aherne, Hugh Bawden-Hindle, Trevor Bull, Tom Cathro, Allyson Hamblett, Colin Harris, Dave Kane, Cheyenne Minhinnick, Thais Nesbitt, Stefan Neville, Sushannah Shaw, Yung Sung Chen and Kevin Tan) and a wicked sense of humour ripples through unusual arrangements and track titles like 'Here when You Don't Need Me'. Ominous clatter and drone rock give way to mantra-like vocalisations, slide-guitar workouts to sheets of dreamy keys, chaos is summoned and resolved into clarity. As Neville puts it: "every feeling that is possible is released into the air". 

Edition of 250 copies with Yves Klein Blue innersleeve and A4 insert with score. First ever release of Yves Klein’s groundbreaking conceptual symphonie “Monoton-Silence” conceived 1947-1948. Scored for 20 singers, 10 violins, 10 cellos, 3 double basses, 3 trumpets, 3 flutes and 3 oboes, the piece consists of a single 20-minute sustained D major chord followed by a 20-minute silence. The Symphonie ”Monoton-Silence” was a precedent to Klein’s later monochrome paintings and to the work of minimal musicians & composers, particularly La Monte Young’s drone music or John Cage’s 4′33″ and transforms Klein’s monochromatic paintings and sculpture into a monotone auditory experience. Performed April 1998 at Chapelle Ste Reita, Paris Conducted by Philippe Arrii Blachette Yves Klein (1928-1962) was the most influential, prominent, and controversial French artist to emerge in the 1950s. A leading figure of Nouveau Réalisme, Klein developed a ground-breaking practice that broke down boundaries between conceptual art, sculpture, painting, and performance. He is remembered above all for his use of a single color, the rich shade of ultramarine that he made his own: International Klein Blue. But the success of his sadly short-lived career lay in attacking many of the ideas that underpinned the abstract painting that had been dominant in France since the end of the Second World War. Animated by a quest to ‘liberate colour from the prison that is the line’, Yves Klein directed his attention to the monochrome which, to him, was the only form of painting that allowed to ‘make visible the absolute’. By choosing to express feeling rather than figurative form, he moved beyond ideas of artistic representation. His practice revealed of new way of conceptualizing the role of the artist, conceiving his whole life as an artwork. “In 1947, at a time when the consequences of Schönbergian compositional technique were still being heatedly debated and wrestled with in new music circles, the young man from Nice was thinking up a symphony that refrains from all development. It was composed of a single consonant sound – at rest in itself – that is sustained for twenty minutes, followed by a silence of equal length in which the sounding tone completely dissolves, leading beyond reverberations into the immateriality of sound space. Yves Klein himself saw the »Symphonie Monoton« as his central work, whose »subject is what I wanted to make of my life.« Everything that would characterize his future work is already apparent in this symphony. In the reduction to one sound and the following silence, Klein anticipates the effect of his monochromes, while the concept of the symphony points toward his aim of dematerializing art. From today’s standpoint, one might be tempted to see Yves Klein’s work as a precedent for the avant-garde formulations of the ’60s. A great deal of what he introduced would have a later evolution, although much was developing synchronously.” – Valerian Maly “During this period of concentration, I created, around 1947–1948, a monotone symphony whose theme expresses what I wished my life to be. This symphony of forty minutes duration (although that is of no importance, as one will see) consisted of one unique continuous sound, drawn out and deprived of its beginning and of its end, creating a feeling of vertigo and of aspiration outside of time. Thus even in its presence, this symphony does not exist. It exists outside of the phenomenology of time because it is neither born nor will it die, after existence. However, in the world of our possibilities of conscious perception, it is silence – audible presence.” – Yves Klein “Overcoming the problematics of Art”, 1959 “Silence … This is really my symphony and not the sounds during its performance. This silence is so marvelous because it grants happenstance and even sometimes the possibility of true happiness, if only for only a moment, for a moment whose duration is immeasurable.” – Yves Klein “Truth becomes Reality”, 1960

Instruments: Bass guitar, bodhran, cello, clarinet, classical guitar, cowbell, cymbal, electric guitar, hosepipe, mattress, prepared piano, rain sound, shakers, spoons, violin, voice, watering can, wind chimes Improvised-composed and recorded 1st-4th September 2020. credits released September 18, 2020 All instruments by Luke Cowan, except: cello tracks one and four, by Rebecca Burden, and violin tracks three and four: Imogen Wood. Improvised-composed, recorded and mixed by Luke Cowan, and mastered by Rhys Copeland.

Absolutely beautiful LP of intimate drifting lo-fi piano nostalgia from Hokkaido’s Mashu Hayasaka on the store's own imprint. Looking out from our corner of the musical landscape a certain kind of solo piano composition feels elemental. Satie’s miniatures invented a whole dreamtime realm of deft and delicate abstraction. And 120 years later we are still revolving slowly in the space they mapped out. This makes writing about records like this difficult. Listening feels like breathing. The responses it provokes are so deeply programmed that attempts to consciously discuss them produce a kind of profound blank. However when you hear it you know it. What makes Karla Borecky totally transporting and Max Richter totally blah? The specifics are unknowable. But part of it is balance, it is dangerous to wake a sleepwalker but you need some unexpected detail and at least a little grit to keep the dream alive. This record has that quality. The clunk of a tape recorder begins a series of wandering happy/sad piano studies that recall Robert Haigh in his Sema guise, John Cage’s ‘In a landscape’ and Duke Ellington’s blurred chromatic solo piano performances.  Mashu leaves nowhere to hide, his playing is poised and cooly controlled, focusing on the beauty of simplicity and purity.  The fidelity plays a part too, these recordings are clearly diaristic, caught close up, granular and beautifully blown out in places, adding a level of cohesion to a genuinely special suite of music that melts so effortlessly into the everyday.

Since the 1970s Mario De Leo works as a musician and visual artist. His mechanical paintings are hybrid works that reveal the cosmic spiritualism hidden in the meanders of electronics. With Riccardo Sinigaglia (Futuro Antico, Correnti Magnetiche, Doubling Riders) De Leo consolidates an artistic and human partnership with Lettera Cosmica, a work unpublished to date, produced and recorded in 1981. In a wacky electronic vision of the succession of time, the tracks trace the four seasons in a fine process of analog loops, prepared tapes of strings and piano, time and pitch shifts, filtering with Synthi Ems and Teac 3340 4-track recorder. On this seemingly cold palette, De Leo deploys his own personal Mediterranean fingerpicking, with vocal timbres peculiar to the music of the South of Italy, but no longer circumscribed to the origins of his Pugliese regionalism, as much as to an expressive range seasoned also with irony and avant-garde.The sound writing harmonizes with the evocative cover, in which emerges a warmest human note of "technological peasant”.

Pat Thomas returns to OTOROKU for his fourth collection of solo piano improvisations, this time recorded in a studio setting at London’s Fish Factory.  For 25 years now, beginning with Nur (Emanem) and continuing through Al-Khwarizmi Variations (Fataka), The Elephant Clock of Al-Jazari (OTOROKU), and now The Solar Model of Ibn Al-Shatir, Pat Thomas has drawn on the Arabic world for titles for his solo piano work - specifically the long-standing Islamic tradition of astronomical invention. For Thomas, the work of the polymaths he dedicates his music to has been sidelined by Eurocentrism, just as the Arabic origin of “jass” and the scalar, intervallic and polyphonic contributions made by Arab musicians have been routinely overlooked. Islamic innovation is at the heart of Thomas’ solo projects and draws a direct link between his Sufi faith and a totally unique style of playing. Each of his solo piano records is a dedication - not just to the innovators Thomas names but to the beauty of the universe in all its complexities.    Starting standing up with one hand inside the piano and one on the keys, ‘The Solar Model’ begins with single staccato bass notes appearing like chondrites in the darkness, occasionally tumbling towards a rhythm and then falling out of it. Metallic string work starts to pull towards an unseen centre and eventually notes from the upper registers appear, clear and light. With both hands drawn to the keys, Thomas builds towards scintillating beauty, carried through “The Laws of Motion” and propelling us towards the A-side closer, “For George Saliba”. Notes fall rapidly, colliding to form a crowded core with a warped sort of bebop in its middle - distinctive Pat with a nod to the Duke’s groove. The whole landscape of the A side swings with this one movement, until its energy is spent on one last sweeping rotation.  On the B-side, “The Oud of Ziryab” notes to the instrument maker who added a 5th pair of strings to the Oud. The single bass notes of the first side are swapped for clusters, bursting together and decaying in space. Making use of the sustain pedal and the silence of a studio setting, it’s one of the most open, lush recordings of Thomas at the piano we’ve heard - more Muhal Richard Abrams than Monk, the lower end thundering under rapid, crystalline blues.  “For Mansa Musa” brings back a swing instantly recognisable as Pat, with a huge euphoric lift halfway that crowns the record but the album’s end title “The Birds are Singing” is more celestial, more chromatic - a reminder that the spiritual matters just as much as the physical for Thomas. --- Released in an edition of 500 LPs and 500 CDsRecorded at the Fish Factory, London on Wednesday 6th March, 2024 by Benedic LamdinMixed by Benedic Lamdin Mastered by Giuseppe Ielesi Photographs by Abby Thomas Pressed at Vinyl Press UK

Totally beautiful and rare piano performance from Loren Connors, joined on guitar by long time collaborator Alan Licht.  Celebrating thirty years of collaboration, Loren Connors and Alan Licht performed for two nights at OTO on May 5 and 6th, 2023. On the second night, with the stage lit in blue, Connors took up a seat on the piano stool whilst Licht picked up the guitar. What followed was the duo’s first ever set with Connors on piano - one of only a few times Connors has played piano live at all - here captured and issued as The Blue Hour. Its spacious warmth came as a total surprise live, but makes complete sense for a duo whose dedicated expressionism takes inspiration from a vast spectrum of emotion. Both opening with single notes to start, it doesn't take long before a surface rises and begins to shimmer. A run up the keys, the drop of a feedback layer on a sustained and bent note. The two begin to exchange notes in tandem and brief touches of melody and chord hover. After a while, Connors picks up the guitar, stands it in his lap and sweeps a wash of colour across Licht’s guitar. Sharp, glassy edges begin to form, open strings and barred frets darkening the space. When his two pedals begin to merge, Licht finds a dramatic organ-like feedback and it’s hard not to imagine Rothko’s Chapel, its varying shades of blue black ascending and descending in the room. When Connors goes back to the piano for the second side, the pair quickly lock into a refrain and light pours in. It’s a kind of sound that Licht says reminds him of what he and Connors would do when the duo first started playing together 30 years ago. It’s certainly more melodic than some of their more recent shows, and the atonal shards of At The Top of the Stairs seem to totally dissolve. What is always remarkable about Licht is that his enormous frame of reference doesn't seem to weigh him down, and instead here he is able to delicately place fractures of a Jackson C Frank song (“Just Like Anything”,) amongst the vast sea of Connors’ blues. Perhaps it's the pleasure of playing two nights in a row together, or the nature of Connor’s piano playing combined with Licht’s careful listening, but the improvisation on The Blue Hour feels remarkably calm and unafraid. There’s nothing to prove and no agenda except the joy of sounding colour together. Totally beautiful.  --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO on Saturday 6th May 2023 by Billy SteigerMixed by Oli BarrettMastered by Sean McCannArtwork by Loren Connors Layout by Oli BarrettScreenprint by Tartaruga Manufactured in the UK by Vinyl Press.  Edition of 300 standard LPs, 100 LPs with screenprinted artwork by Loren Connors printed as inserts. Also available on a limted run of 200 CDs. 

The Intercommunal Free Dance Music Orchestra was created in 1971 by an “old hand” of French free jazz, François Tusques. Free Jazz, was also the name of the recording made by the pianist and other like-minded Frenchmen (Michel Portal, François Jeanneau, Bernard Vitet, Beb Guérin and Charles Saudrais) in 1965. But, six years later Tusques had had his fill of free jazz. After having wondered, together with Barney Wilen (Le Nouveau Jazz) or even solo (Piano Dazibao and Dazibao N°2), if free jazz wasn’t a bit of a dead end, Tusques formed the Inter Communal, an association under the banner of which the different communities of the country would come together and compose, quite simply. If at first the structure was made up of professional musicians from the jazz scene it would rapidly seek out talent in the lively world of the MPF (Musique Populaire Française).{French Popular Music, ndlt} Compiled of extracts from concerts given between 1976 and 1978, L’Inter Communal is not the first album from the Intercommunal Free Dance Music Orchestra. But it is the one which shows with the most exuberance the “social function” which inhabited free jazz and popular music at the time. All the more so as, to head up the project, the group (made up of wind instruments: Michel Marre, Jo Maka, Adolf Winkler and Jean Méreu) called upon Spanish singer Carlos Andreu. Andreu, claimed Tusques, was a griot “who created of new genre of popular song improvised with our music, based on events going on at the time”. L’Intercommunal can start the festivities: on “Blues pour Miguel Enriquez”, it is first Thelonious Monk who is invoked in an homage to one of the leading figures of the Chilean revolution, and a victim of Pinochet. The circumstances may be serious, the music, though, is not. The musicians light a bonfire to bring together on the same frequency France and Spain, the Americas and Africa: “L’heure est à la lutte” (the time to fight is here ndlt), is the new song offered by the l’Intercommunal Free Dance Orchestra… As if proof were needed that their music is still more than timely! 

AFJ-Series is short for Actions For Free Jazz. This was the slogan for Smalltown Superjazzz, borrowed at the time from Don Cherry & Penderek's The New Eternal Rhythm Orchestra track “Actions For Free Jazz Orchestra” from the 1971 album “Actions”. AFJ Series will be a series and a subsidiary label within the Smalltown Supersound label. The inspiration for the label is BYG Actuel, Incus, Freedom and ESP-Disk.

Long awaited repress of Hivemind's acclaimed debut LP, Maalem Mahmoud Gania's Colours of the Night. Easily among the best Gnawa records ever laid to tape, from one of Morocco’s great masters of the form, known among jazz fans for his wonderful collaborations with Pharoah Sanders, Peter Brötzmann, Hamid Drake. Hive Mind Records are proud to present Colours of the Night, the final studio recordings of deep, hypnotic Gnawa songs from the late, great Maalem Mahmoud Gania. The recordings see their first release outside of Morocco on 8 September 2017, and are available as a double vinyl LP and digital download. The release has been licensed directly from the Gania family and comes with the support of all who were involved in the original recordings. Colours of the Night is his first album to receive a vinyl release. Maalem Mahmoud Gania was one of Morocco's most famous Gnawa musicians. Gnawa is a musical and spiritual tradition originating in sub-Saharan Africa that has survived as a subculture within Moroccan society for centuries. The roots of the blues can be heard in its hypnotic rhythms.

New York-based Zoh Amba first cultivated her musical passion in the lush forests of the Appalachian mountains, playing to the woods around her home, before she studied at classical conservatories. Her music honors her roots, full of folk melodies, mesmerizing refrains, repeated incantations and powerfully-executed Free Jazz. Her sound is courageous and bold, soaring from muted hums to squeaky trebles, producing a confident sound imbued with an innate spirituality. On this project, Zoh Amba is joined by legendary artists William Parker (Bass, Gralla) and Francisco Mela (Drums), named the 2021 musician of the year by The New York City Jazz Record, who temper her daring saxophone with a lush percussive foundation and a steady flow. The second installation of this collaboration, O Life, O Light,

Originally from Kingsport, Tennessee, New York-based Zoh Amba is a notable rising star in the avant-garde music scene. Growing up in the Appalachian mountains, Amba practiced saxophone to the forest that surrounded her home before she later traveled to study with David Murray in New York, and also at the San Francisco Conservatory Of Music & New England Conservatory in Boston. Today, her music is full of folk melodies, mesmerizing refrains, repeated incantations and powerfully executed Free Jazz reminiscent of Albert Ayler. Her sound is courageous and bold, commanding her instrument with a loving force that soars from muted hums to squeaky trebles, producing a confident sound imbued with spirituality.  On this project, Zoh Amba is joined by legendary artists William Parker (Bass) and Francisco Mela (Drums), who temper her daring saxophone with a lush percussive foundation and a reassuring bassline. On one of the album’s 4 tracks, Amba also opts for flute, cutting through the noise with a quieter, adventurous tone, and offering listeners a more exclusive look at her multi-instrumental prowess. The album, O Life, O Light, Vol. 1 will be released on CD (available 5/20/22) and on black and limited color vinyl editions planned to arrive late 2022 but available for pre-order now—the vinyl editions will also include an extra bonus track. If you enjoyed this album please look out for Vol. 2!

A unique dialogue between the electronic textures of Saint Abdullah with the live drums of Jason Nazary (Anteloper).Saint Abdullah consists of Tehran-born brothers Mohammad and Mehdi Mehrabani-Yeganeh, who have been exploring a diverse palette of sounds over their releases to date, including collaborations with Eomac on Nicolas Jaar’s Other People label, and Model Home on Purple Tape Pedigree, as well as their own duo album on Important Records.Jason Nazary is a drummer and composer from Atlanta and based in Brooklyn. Fascinated by the intersection of acoustic and electronic music, Jason has been a force in New York's creative music scene for over a decade. As well as his own solo work he also co-leads a number of ensembles, among them the dystopian electro noise duo Clebs with singer Emilie Weibel, and until recently Anteloper (International Anthem), an improvising modular beat shredding duo with the much-missed Jaimie Branch.