Roberto Cacciapaglia is an Italian composer and pianist who started out in the fertile Milan avant-garde scene of the 1970s, which included Franco Battiato, Giusto Pio, Lino Capra Vaccina, Francesco Messina, among others. After studying at the conservatory, he worked at RAI's Studio of Musical Phonology – an electronic music laboratory similar to NDR/WDR in Germany, GRM/IRCAM in France or BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Sonanze (Sonatas) is Cacciapaglia's debut album, a monumental work that was recorded over a two-year period and released in 1975 via seminal German label Die Kosmischen Kuriere (Ohr). While a "sonata" is traditionally performed by easily distinguishable instrumentalists (often soloist and accompaniment) and with repeated structural themes, Cacciapaglia flips this hierarchical form on its head – blending harpsichord, strings, brass and analog synths to create ambient mini-soundtracks. As the composer writes in the original sleeve notes, "I am aware, unfortunately, that I am a few millennia late in how I would like music to be understood, which today I find diluted in its primary powers, in an era that is destructive of essential values. Precisely for this reason, I want to search for it in depth and not on the surface, perhaps alternating the knob of a synthesizer with a marranzano (mouth harp)." Mixed in quadrophonic surround-sound under the auspices of Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser (celebrated producer of Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel), Sonanze remains on the fringe of Kosmische realms. Each movement explores hypnotic rhythms, intuitive arrangements, musique concrète techniques and a pure psychedelic awakening.

Blue Lake’s new offering ‘Weft’ sees its creator Jason Dungan unearth new musical terrain with a mini-album which presents the projects evolution. Finding inspiration in the craft of weaving and embracing a collective spirit as a band leader, all while readying a new studio album expected later in 2025. The earthy title track ‘Weft’ emerges with a sense of ease and familiarity as looping guitar riffs in open tunings bed in around a warm cello pulse that provides the essential heartbeat. These interlinking parts align to create his most explicit version yet of an American writing country music in Scandinavia. Dungan named the release ‘Weft’ as a reference to the weaving practice of his partner, Danish visual artist Maria Zahle, whose work “Torso” is featured on the album’s cover. With her works providing a constant source of inspiration to his music and practice as an instrument-builder, Dungan found a symbiotic connection between their mediums, which is reflected in the music on ‘Weft’. “There’s a not so subtle visual relation between the masses of strings on the instrument and the masses of thread on a loom. Weaving allows you to have an intimate relationship between the many individual parts of a piece, as well as the finished whole, and I think for me that watching her process on the loom for many years has deeply impacted the ways in which I think about music.” A unique element to the overall sound was an acute focus on first-takes and favouring instruments seldom used in previous recordings: piano, melodica, 12-string guitar. Three out of five tracks were fully or mainly recorded live, with the exception of ‘The Forest’ (originating in Andersabo, Sweden) with the rest recorded at his home studio in Copenhagen, during Winter 2023/24. Layered acoustic guitars slowly build and shape-shift, met with zither, piano, flute and clarinet flourishes. Even the faintly audible sound of Dungan’s own breathing all combines to form an endlessly morphing tapestry of shapes, forms, and colours with endless depth. Three key components form the tangible makeup of ‘Weft’ as Dungan reasserts his skills as a “songwriter”, whilst further developing his “live” practice, interplayed with the “studio” acting as a compositional space to investigate, re-shape and find final form. As we arrive at ‘Oceans’, a folk counterpart to the opener ‘Weft’ Dungan floods the listener with his own form of storytelling, but again, one told without words. Built from a single nylon guitar, some wisps of extra guitar and plucked cello bass – a narrative evolves triggering personal associations with a vast expanse. A reminder of the human strands ever present at the core of his writing. Dungan welcomes the Blue Lake band to the studio on ‘Tatara’, named after a Volcano in the Andes mountain range which became the life’s work of his geologist father. Written and developed in rehearsals for an array of upcoming live concerts; it features Carolyn Goodwin (bass clarinet), Tomo Jacobson (double bass), and Pauline Hogstrand (viola). The recorded version ended up being the very first take with the band seeking to capture an immediacy in their performance. Gathering found objects collected in the farmhouse in Sweden: metal, driftwood, a bicycle tire, Jason then added experimental percussive elements including his own handmade carved log drum, resulting in a firelit breakout that could depict a lone figure aware of the landscape’s indifference. ‘Strata’ closes the sequence with a beguiling live solo recording on a new 36-string zither, designed by Dungan and hand built by a local luthier. Its louder, richer and deeper tones ring out in abundance. ‘Weft’ is a collection of new works that casts a net into new sound territories with distinctive timbres yet always channelled through the refined lens of Dungan’s prism. Infused with an ongoing connection to nature, it furthermore expands his unique meld of off-kilter folk, jazz, country and left-field experimental ambience. ‘Weft’ then is an accomplishment of growth, of bolder objectives and of collaboration with like minds. The Blue Lake project takes a dynamic step forward venturing into new creative spaces while leaving some clues along the way. “Performing live, with the band and solo, was really opening up my thinking to ways in which the music could grow and develop, and make use of the dynamics of live performance.”

The late percussionist Milford Graves was one of the most unique artists the world has ever seen. Born in Jamaica, Queens in 1941, he began his career in the early '60s as a part of New York's vibrant Latin jazz scene. His focus quickly turned inward, shifting towards a practice that explored the very nature of self. From his work in the New York Art Quartet and collaborations with Albert Ayler, Sonny Sharrock and more to his important contributions during NYC's loft era – he is, simply put, free jazz royalty. In April 1966, the duo of Graves and pianist Don Pullen played at Yale University. As John Corbett writes in the liner notes, "This performance was something of a turning point for Graves. Until then he had been working in other people's bands or collective ensembles. He was phenomenally busy. In 1965 alone, he recorded with NYAQ (two LPs), Giuseppi Logan Quartet, Paul Bley Quintet and Lowell Davidson Trio, and he made his first recording released under his own name, Percussion Ensemble. Every one of these is important in its own way, but none of them quite anticipate how radical was the music that he and Pullen would unleash that evening in New Haven." Originally released on the artists' own Self-Reliance Program label, this legendary one-night performance would be split into two volumes: In Concert At Yale University and Nommo. While rooted in African rhythms, Graves' music has its own sense of time. As the drummer stated in a 1966 DownBeat interview, "Time was always there, and the time I see is not the same as what man says time is. It works by impulsion." First-time vinyl reissue. Sourced from the original master tapes.

Variations On A Theme by OM" type="application/x-shockwave-flash">Variations On A Theme by OM" />OM reunites one of the most powerful rhythm sections in rock music: Al Cisneros [bass, vocals] and Chris Hakius [drums], both ex-members of the legendary Sleep. Variations on a Theme is comprised of three long songs employing a series of rhythmic chants whose cadence-like textural drive conveys flight. The album's numerous lyrics serve as symbolist vehicles to a state outside the field of time and space. Variations on a Theme is a series of vibrations and flow. The opening track,"On The Mountain at Daw" is the thematic blueprint of the entire album; a transportive series of differentiated verse with sets of solid groove. "Kapil's Them" furthers the motif while the closer "Annapurna" breaks the spell, where the final wash of sound reflects the infinite.

Sound Reporters was a Dutch publishing company that specialised in anthropology, religion, and history, releasing unique documents of the cultural multiplicity of human societies and their importance. These recordings were originally released on cassette in 1988, and consist of field recordings made on the Greek island of Amorgos, part of the Cyclades island group in the Aegean Sea. The release was jointly credited to the painter Harry Van Essen, who lived for several years on the island and recorded its soundscapes, and also to the ethnomusicologist and founder of Sound Reporters, Fred Gales, who mixed the recordings. The recordings consist of sketched amalgams of local sounds from Egiali, a port in the northeast of the island. The first half is a soundscape deeply rooted in the island people’s daily lives, alternating sounds of the sea with popular music, recitations of poetry, the sounds of fishing boats, people playing boardgames, a party. The second half takes us out of the village and into the mountains, unveiling the island’s unadorned natural environment: the sounds of cicadas, the buzz of honeybees, the bells of the large herds of goats left out to pasture, etc.

In 1973, the Sound Sculpture Show took place at the Vancouver Art Gallery. An LP audio catalogue (with a booklet) of the exhibition, entitled “The Sounds of Sound Sculpture”, was released in 1975 under the supervision of the Canadian sound sculptor John Grayson and US composer David Rosenboom. Grayson had edited an important early book on the field, “Sound Sculpture”. The LP included rare takes of Rosenboom and Grayson, amongst others, playing famous pieces by pioneering sound sculptors including the Baschet brothers and Harry Bertoia, the latter best known for his Sonambient series. It also included some of the few recordings by Stephan Von Huene, who had begun to create his kinetic sculptures, and the profound atmospheric pressure systems constructed by the New York sound artist David Jacobs. The LP comes complete with a booklet of visually arresting photos and other materials about these historic sound sculptures.

Edition of 500 copies, featuring photography by Mark Fell. Mixed by Sasu Ripatti and mastered by Rashad Becker. Finally compiled on CD, Mark Fell & Will Guthrie’s Infoldings / Diffractions is an inspirational, almost 80 minute long study in four parts, informed by Gamelan and South Indian Carnatic musics. Essential listening if you’re into Autechre, Michael Ranta, The Necks, Milford Graves. Infoldings / Diffractions combines synthesis and acoustic percussion in unpredictable, pointillist arrangements where Guthrie plays against patterns derived from Max MSP patches by Fell. The album’s four longform expositions are in this sense different to the man-machine concept of Fell’s acclaimed ‘Intra’ album, where he triggered performances by Portugal’s Drumming Grupo De Percussão to play a metallophone designed by Iannis Xenakis. Here, the pair find common and sometimes contrasting purpose in a probing of rhythmic signatures, with groundbreaking results. Recorded at HFG, Karlsruhe (where Fell is guest professor), and finished later in respective isolation, the pieces were edited from iterations of call-and-response between Fell’s rhythmic patterns and Guthrie’s overdubs. They effectively propose beguiling solutions to electronic music’s problems with grid-lock, using generative processing to make physical actions seem unfeasibly effortless, while melting the computer’s clock to a real-time, free-hand syncopation. Taking the influence of gamelan and fusing it with the fractal computer music that Fell has obsessively picked-at over the last four decades, the duo zoom into a sound that’s completely captivating; mutating into polyrhythmic outer-realms and eerie universes of microtonality that are hard to fathom in a single sitting. There are trace echoes of free jazz hanging from the rafters, the post-everything chatter of Humcrush and Food drummer Thomas Strønen’s mind-expanding solo material or even Autechre at their most confounding. The genius here is that just as you convince yourself that the music could only possibly have been generated by a computer, Guthrie’s unmistakably human flex edges into focus - playing with perception and expectation in the most wild, liquid way imaginable.

Razen is the collective consciousness of core members Brecht Ameel and Kim Delcour, who since 2010 have realized themselves through virtuoistic and highly expressive improvisations with lesser-heard instruments. Experimenting with repetition of tones through controlled breathing and phrasing, Razen arrive at a synesthetic playground of auditory textures and colorful imagery. The ensemble is carefully orchestrated for every occasion with the intent and desire to escape to environments unbeknownst to them, taking shelter in the fleeting ego-dissolving moments that arise, whether divine or disturbing. While the formula of instrumentation and like-minded peers may appear mundane on paper, it’s Brecht and Kim’s outlook and imagination beyond musical references that’s the immeasurable catalyst to their peculiar pursuits. Conversations about paintings, books, or films ultimately manifest themselves into live performances or album recordings - with the philosophy of embracing playfulness and exploration through the lens of a child’s eye. Only six collaborators have been invited to their inner circle to date. This is mainly attributed to the rarity of finding spiritual counterparts that are seeking freedom outside the confines of written musical scores. Trading notes and rhythms for strokes and color, the band embodies emotive and meditative drones that demand a deep listening state. Joined by Will Guthrie and Paul Garriau, Razen venture into their vision of Arcadia through Regression, proudly presented by Marionette. On this album, Brecht Ameel turns to his trusty prepared harmonium and celesta, while Kim Delcour controls air and breath on various wind and reed instruments. Featuring Will Guthrie on tuned and melodic percussion (timpani, glockenspiel, marimba, vibraphone), the recordings have a distinct flow and fluid movement when compared to some of Razen’s previous works where rhythm is taking a backseat. Hurdy-gurdy specialist, Paul Garriau, plays accompanying melodies and drones on Moon, Aether and Nebula. The album's earthly elements deal with survival, timelessness, and simplicity; such as the life affirming rewards of finding refuge and the wonders of observing the interstellar. The unearthly elements pitch this narrative into the realm of mythology and superstition, in the hopes of trying to understand our primeval universe and thrive in the unknown. Regression also addresses Razen’s fascination with inhospitable places and how to adapt to the sorrows that come with this sort of brutalism. The resulting destination is a mind and time bending zone - one that can be reached by riding sound waves that transcend the past, future, and present. Razen on this occasion is: Brecht Ameel: harmonium, celesta Kim Delcour: winds, reeds Will Guthrie: percussion Paul Garriau: hurdy-gurdy on Moon, Aether, and Nebula

Ali Buh Baeh Records / Editions Memoire White Vinyl. Edition of 300 Jean-Luc Guionnet - electric organs, electronics, alto saxophone Will Guthrie - drums, percussion, microphones Recorded at Studio (H)Indre in 2019 Mixed at Ty Karr Mastered by Joe Talia Maxed out and burning hot nasty, Electric Rag brings together the electric organs, electronics and alto sax of Jean-Luc Guionnet, with the closely amplified drums and percussion of Will Guthrie. After years of playing together in the minimalist pointillist free jazz noise core trio ‘The Ames Room’ (with Clayton Thomas on bass) Electric Rag offers up another point of view on a musical history of nearly 15 years of playing together. The 8 titles of Electric Rag draw on their various experience in electronic music, free improvisation and experimental sound research, however the music is deeply rooted in their love of jazz, in its most potent, aggressive and antisocial form.

Real Real World is the first collaborative effort from Nantes-based Australian drummer/percussionist Will Guthrie and Australian keyboardist/composer James Rushford. --- Primarily recorded in a fluid, spontaneous studio session in Nantes, with overdubs added later in Melbourne and Nantes, Real Real World presents five spacious, unhurried pieces that inhabit a unique sound world characterised by wheezing, half-voiced organ chords, chiming metal percussion, and eruptions of small sounds. Beginning with the eerily beautiful, shakuhachi-esque sound of Rushford performing on detuned portative organ, the opening title track is abruptly transformed by the entry of Guthrie’s sizzling cymbals, deep gong strikes, and rustling hand percussion. On the epic ‘Lumbering’, which occupies the majority of the record’s first side, organ chords define a space in which a kaleidoscopic succession of amplified thuds, chiming bells, rustled and dragged objects, and abruptly silenced clusters advance and recede in an oneiric blur, eventually making way for a passage of Guthrie’s virtuosic polyrhythms, itself unexpectedly overtaken by waves of melting fairground organ. The record reaches an energetic climax mid-way through the second side with the stunning ‘Slakes’, where lugubrious chords in the organ’s lowest register are joined by Guthrie’s skittering rhythms, which somehow manage to call to mind both the most chaotic moments of Balinese Gamelan and the stochastic breakbeats of late-90s Autechre. On this piece, Guthrie and Rushford are joined by Melbourne saxophone maverick Scott McConnachie, who contributes an alto sax solo of burning precision, working with a single-minded palette of piercing long tones and wild intervallic leaps. Though it makes extensive use of overdubbing, Real Real World retains a strong sense of having been performed, rather than constructed: while at times the fleeting succession of events can recall electroacoustic music, its primarily acoustic nature and unhurried pace is also reminiscent of the music of AACM affiliates or Marion Brown’s classic Afternoon of a Georgia Faun. Immediately engaging while also hiding countless details in the folds of its polychrome fabric, Real Real World is a relaxed and joyous document of collaborative musical invention.  --- Percussion: Will Guthrie Keyboard/Composer: James Rushford --- Artwork by Patrizia Bach. Layout by Lasse Marhaug. Mixed and mastered by Joe Talia at Good Mixture, Berlin. Black Truffle, 2021

Keefe Jackson - Tenor and Sopranino Saxophone Oscar Jan Hoogland - Piano Joshua Abrams - Double Bass Mikel Patrick Avery - Drums Epistrophy & Bemsha Swing written by Thelonious Monk Gotta Get Some Sleep written by Dewey Redman The Happenings written by Herbie Nichols Wimpel & Aanhanghuis written by Oscar Jan Hoogland Arrangements on Gotta Get Some Sleep, The Happenings & Bemsha Swing by Oscar Jan Hoogland Recorded at Bimhuis Amsterdam on April 29, 2016

Previously released in 1980 on David Toop’s Quartz label at a time when improvised music in London was settling into a long spell of excellence. The players here are Steve Beresford, Peter Cusack, Terry Day and David Toop. Terry had been a member of The People Band in the 60s, one of the groups forming part of the first wave of British improvisation. The rest of the group could be regarded as pioneers of a second generation of improvisers who emerged out of the explosion of musical development that came in the wake of AMM, Derek Bailey, SME etc. Out of this burst of musical energy a platform soon emerged in the form of the London Musicians Collective. A permanent venue and an open network were soon established and the seeds were planted for a wide range of new and exciting players to explore the possibilities of free improvisation. The first Alterations LP from 1978 exemplifies this, with new ideas literally brought to the table - alongside the numerous conventional instruments played by the group, a plethora of simple musical toys, sound makers and home made instruments were used. Up Your Sleeve is their 2nd LP and operates in a similar territory, but takes things to another level with its casual embrace of noise and feedback, and somewhat controversially for improv; fragments of familiar songs and a hearty indulgence in rhythm. In short, Up Your Sleeve is free improvisation drawn from a very broad range of components. It should be said that all the members of the group were also at the same time in bands that played songs, most notably Steve’s involvement with The Slits and The Flying Lizards. David also briefly basked as a Lizard, but all 4 members were singing the same tune in both The 49 Americans and The Promenaders. Maybe it’s not so surprising to hear stylistic clashes exploited on this record. London was awash with musical development in the early 80s. Apart from the burgeoning LMC scene there were many post punk and experimental groups like This Heat and Swell Maps that enriched the creative atmosphere. London labels like Quartz along with Recommended Records, It’s War Boys, Incus, Industrial, United Dairies and countless others were all releasing ground breaking experimental music. It was arguably the best time for experimental music in London. There was certainly something in the air. Released in an edition of 500 with a numbered 4 page insert.

Empty Editions presents Palina’tufa, the newest work from saxophonist Seymour Wright and percussionist Paul Abbott’s long-running duo XT. Wright and Abbot’s respective practices have been marked by a simultaneous engagement (with) and desire to challenge the limitations (of) the British tradition of improvised music - represented by groups such as AMM and John Stevens’ Spontaneous Music Ensemble. This album charts a new trajectory for Wright and Abbott, as they draw on recent live collaborations with RP Boo and Container in developing a sound which hybridizes the spontaneous interplay and timbral experimentation of free improvisation with the recursive formal structures of dance music. The album’s title is an enigmatic portmanteau of “Palina” (taken from the name of a species of butterfly sighted by the duo during recording) combined with the word “Tufa” -- a type of rock composed of ash ejected from a vent during a volcanic eruption; the bedrock of the island of Hong Kong. Compellingly, the green sheen of the Palinurus butterfly is not produced by pigments, but emanates from the microstructure of it’s wing scales. Similarly, XT’s Palina’tufa contains a brilliant internal logic of stacked component parts all amalgamated into a singularly iridescent instrumental structure. Recorded during a two week studio residency in Hong Kong, Palina’tufa departs from XT’s previous albums - primarily documentations of live performances - in its embrace of the recording studio as a form of instrumentation: a tool to sculpt, overdub and (re)assemble their chimeric sounds. The result is a striking cybernetic version of the classic sax-and-drums duo pioneered by legendary groupings such as John Coltrane and Rashied Ali, Evan Parker & Paul Lytton, and Jimmy Lyons & Andrew Cyrille. Palina’tufa turns the implied (and frankly, somewhat tired) tropes of this form on its head, pushing restlessly forward into the domain of a synthetic post-genre music. Wright's unconventional use of feedback and Abbott's heavily deconstructed electro-dance textures expand upon this simulated space, unfurling their instrumentation into an authentically liberated territory. Across four dynamic fifteen minute cuts, the duo craft an esoteric response to the real (and imagined) landscape(s) of Hong Kong. Interpreting their experience of the island as a kind of extended metaphor, Palina’tufa translates chance encounters, pockets of cultural history, vernacular architecture, and local wildlife (among other phenomena) into organizing principles for the creation of speculative music. Palina’tufa is a brilliant showcase of Wright and Abbott’s composite sound: naturally synergistic, with careful attention paid to how psychogeographical experience is transposed into the deeply considered interplay of their respective instruments. A stunning listen, the album’s various movements respond to scenes in proximity to the Tin Wan (Aberdeen) area: the past/future poise of Permanent Cemetery; the human densities of Duck Tongue Island; the black garlic/gypsum of Empty Gallery itself. Palina’tufa expands on this emerging style of electronically mediated improvised music by further compartmentalizing their playing through a series of concepts, limits, and methods to organize their materials into distinct classifications. This approach creates an album architecture, a time/space organized into “Stacks” (recalling vertical cylinders, tubes, pipes, columns), “Orbits” (recalling Chinese folk music, weather systems, paths travelling upward), and “Angles of Incidence,” (a concept inspired by Pere Portabella and Cecil Taylor) that responds to the social, physical, and temporal forces of a city. Loosely, these structures spatially reorganize the “time” in their playing, reversing, eliding, truncating, and magnifying content. This technique recalls everything from Anthony Braxton’s diagrammatic lines, colours, and figures that encode structural and vibrational elements of sound, through the pentatonic scale of Chinese folk music that was integrated into a symbolic matrix referencing the movements of the seasons, planets, and body-politic, to Alejo Carpentier’s search for a musical origin in fiction.

What Is Not Strange? is the first full-length solo album by Los Angeles-based composer Tashi Wada, comprising his most far-reaching and impassioned music to date. Written and recorded over a period that encompassed the death of his father and the birth of his daughter, the album sees Wada reflecting inward to explore broad narratives—being alive, mortality, finding one’s place in the world—through new modes of ecstatic, song-based expression. While the denser forms, stark contrasts, and overt surreality may carry a different weight than Wada’s earlier work, which elicited perceptual effects with minimal means, the heart of What Is Not Strange? is still in experimentation and unforeseen outcomes.

Yoshi Wada's "Lament For The Rise And Fall Of The Elephantine Crocodile," originally released in 1982 on India Navigation, remains one of the most remarkable flowers to grow in the rarefied air of American minimalism—akin to Terry Riley's "Reed Streams" and Pauline Oliveros' "Accordion & Voice," yet with a wild, liberated energy all of its own. After graduating from Kyoto University of Fine Arts with a degree in sculpture, Wada moved to New York City in 1967 and quickly fell in with the community of artists known as Fluxus. In the early '70s, he began building his own instruments and writing musical compositions, studying with La Monte Young and Hindustani singer Pandit Pran Nath. Recorded during an epic three-day session in an empty swimming pool in upstate New York, Wada's first album brings together two of the oldest drone instruments—the human voice and bagpipes—to simple and glorious effect. A visit to the Scottish Highlands spurred Wada's interest in bagpipes, which the composer integrated into these sparse, otherworldly sounds heard on "Lament." "That swimming pool was quite hallucinatory," recalls Wada. “It was another world. I felt it in terms of resonance. I slept in the pool, and whenever I moved, I woke up because of the reverberations.... The piece itself is an experiment with reeds and improvisational singing within the modal structure." _____ "Yoshi Wada’s masterpiece bends the boundaries between expansive ambience and the intimate harmonics of the inner self, imbuing the world of avant-garde sound with a remarkable and deeply personal sense of humanity." —Bradford Bailey, Soundohm

Saltern present a remastered edition of Yoshi Wada’s The Appointed Cloud (1987), a work which Wada has often said is his favorite of his own. Staged at the Great Hall of the New York Hall of Science, The Appointed Cloud was Wada’s first large-scale, interactive installation and featured a custom pipe organ, among other homemade instruments, controlled by a computer equipped with a customized interface and software designed by engineer David Rayna, known for his work with La Monte Young. This recording captures the opening performance for which Wada brought together four musicians on bagpipes (Wada, Bob Dombrowski, and Wayne Hankin) and percussion (Michael Pugliese) to perform with the installation, operated by David Rayna. In Wada’s own words: “This performance [of The Appointed Cloud] was one of the most memorable performances I've done. The space itself—the Great Hall of the New York Hall of Science—was incredible. The building was designed for the 1964-65 World’s Fair and had spaceships hanging from the ceiling so people felt like they were traveling in outer space. It was an amazing experience with the sound of the pipe organ, sheet metal, pipe gong, and bagpipes all together. 60 minutes may seem like a long duration, but it didn't feel like it.” --- Composed by Yoshi Wada Sound installation instruments—pipe organ, sirens, tall sheet metal, pipe gong, etc.—provided by Yoshi Wada Computer interface engineering and software: David Rayna Bagpipes: Yoshi Wada, Bob Dombrowski, and Wayne Hankin Timpani and tam-tam: Michael Pugliese Recorded live by John Driscoll on November 8, 1987 Digital transfer by Sonicraft A2DX Lab Mastered by Stephan Mathieu --- Saltern, 2021

One of the greatest that ever was, Noah Howard, captured in 1971 with  Han Bennink, Misha Mengelberg, Earl Freeman, Jaap Schoonhoven, and Steve Boston, reissed on Viny for the first time Released in 1971, this experimental jazz album stands as a defining moment in Noah Howard's career, capturing his vision of music as a "sound painting." A blend of free jazz and Dutch improvisation, the album features Howard's alto saxophone alongside an eclectic mix of musicians, including Misha Mengelberg (piano), Han Bennink (drums) and Earl Freeman (bass). The album opens with a disorienting space duet between conga and electric guitar, setting the stage for a primal and intense exploration of sound. As the musicians join in, the music evolves into a fierce clash of American free jazz and European avant-garde, where rhythmic energy and dissonant piano clusters intersect with Howard's lyrical yet passionate saxophone lines. The album's complex interplay of structure and improvisation reveals Howard's quest for originality, influenced by jazz legends but never imitative. It showcases his belief in the spiritual essence of jazz, channeling cosmic energy through his compositions. Despite challenges, such as guitarist Jaap Schoonhoven's discomfort, the session results in a high-energy fusion, full of vivid contrasts and sonic exploration. This work remains a powerful, enigmatic piece in Howard's catalogue, illustrating his distinct, boundary-pushing approach to jazz.