Vinyl


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.

Alterations – Up Your Sleeve

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.

XT – Palina'tufa

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

Yoshi Wada – Lament for the Rise and Fall of the Elephantine Crocodile

LP / CD

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

Yoshi Wada – The Appointed Cloud

LP / CD

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.

Noah Howard – Patterns

LUKAS DE CLERCK brings the telescopic aulos, which his new interpretation of long-form expression coaxed forth on this tremendous recording. Lukas de Clerck explores a niche of archaeological research in music; the aulos is a historical Greek instrument that Lukas analyzed and reinterpreted by a luthier in modern times—navigating this impression as an artwork or living sculptural object, as there is an absence of historical partitions or written information about how to recreate technique on the instrument. Lukas de Clerck has interpreted information from the rare archaeological resources and visual art of the classical period to recreate both playing technique and possible sound timbres with the instrument. With his contemporary approach to drone, post-minimalist music, and contemporary folk, we find a deeply satisfying and compelling, even playful set of songs, timbral exercises and compositions. "The morphology of the aulos is defined by its reeds. The tubular memory inside the plant's fibre will ensure it closes and opens naturally, like the mouth that blows breath inside. The reeds are the core, the sound source—the naked instrument. They behave like two oscillators, bending high-pitched notes into beatings. The pipes are a context, a channel for the sound. They create a narrative." An essential document of new music meets contemporary archaemusicological research via Stephen O'Malley of SUNN O)))'s label Ideologic Organ.

Lukas De Clerck – The Telescopic Aulos of Atlas

Timothy Archambault’s unaccompanied flute pieces for this album have been inspired by Indigenous brontomancy (divination by thunder). Each piece highlights a different extended flute technique metaphorically related to types of thunder sounds: claps, peals, rolls, rumbles, inversions, and CG (cloud-to-ground). The Indigenous flute used in this recording is made of cedar respective to the traditional woods used by the Kichesipirini and other tribes who live along the Ottawa & Saint Lawrence Rivers. To the Algonquin the flute (Pibigwan) is the wind maker or essence of the wind. Unlike other tribal nations whom the majority used the flute as a courting instrument, the Algonquin generally utilized the flute for more contemplative singular usage to mimic the sounds of nature or as a signaling device during times of conflict. When love songs were required, they were usually more plaintive in character expressing sadness, loneliness, or concerning the departure of a lover. The album intro begins with the shaking of a necklace of otter penis bone, fish spine, bear claw, elk teeth and deer hide, gifted from Algonquin Elder Ajawajawesi. It is meant to focus the listener’s attention before the flute pieces begin. The warble or multi-phonic oscillation prevalent in all the pieces traditionally represented the “throat rattling” vocalization of the tonic note, sometimes known as the horizon of which the melody floats from. Due to the repetition of multi-phonic oscillation the performer will breathe erratically creating an altered state correlating with similar traditional ceremonial practices. An important document of new music meets contemporary musicological research via Stephen O’Malley of SUNN O)))’s Ideologic Organ.

Timothy Archambault – Onimikìg

Chita, the third album proper by Japanese guitar pop trio Usurabi, is their most elegant, stylish confection yet. Over the past four years, Toshimitsu Akiko (vocals, guitar), Kawaguchi Masami (bass) and Morohashi Shigeki (drums) have been recording, playing live, and releasing songs of rare melodic warmth, centring Toshimitsu’s unique musical vision, where melancholy and joy can co-exist, a split-second flick of her wrist switchblading the guitar from languorous sweetness to overloaded rock action. Chita expands on the smartly sculpted pop and rock songs found on their previous albums, Remains Of The Light (2021) and Outside Of The World (2023), while infusing the music with more of the rough-housing energy that also coursed through the live CD, Once In A Red Room, they self-released in January 2024. There’s still a through-line, of course, that connects the music here to Toshimitsu’s earlier groups, Doodles and Animone, ,but Chita feels more deeply like a sussed, sharp take on the crumbling edges of sixties psychedelic folk and rock: the harmonica that blasts through the opener, “Bansho”, is pure Dylan in effect. One of the many smart things about Usurabi, though, is that they never feel beholden to the historical moment. Soon after “Bansho”, we encounter “TurnOff”, a lush pop song that turns on a dime, with Toshimitsu tearing fuzztone notes from six strings that are like a more folk-reverent Kaneko Jutok. And there’s something about the guitar and bass riff that doubles through the thrilling two-and-a-half minutes of “Hakanonaka” that’s a dead ringer for the Only Ones. Flip the record, and things get more expansive, the spindly jangling of the title song spiralling ever inwards, before the sweet, sugary rush of “Kanata” resolves to the martial rhythms that pulse through “Aseranai”, winding the album down to its poetic, becalmed resolution.

Usurabi – Chita

We Jazz Reworks is an idea that repurposes some of the label’s output 10 albums at a time. That is, we invite producers whose music we love on board, and one by one, they tackle 10 albums worth of source material, of which they are free to use as much or as little as they choose. The series evolves chronologically, so this volume being number two, the source material is pulled from We Jazz LPs numbers 11 through 20. The artist has complete freedom. Volume 2 in the series happens with Carl Stone, a legendary figure in creative music. His career spans decades of unlimited musical innovation. Stone’s recent output on Unseen Worlds, the label who has also been instrumental in issuing some of his remarkable earlier work, ranks among the most original art of our time and renders notions such as ”genre” virtually meaningless. Here, We Jazz originals by Terkel Nørgaard, OK:KO, Jonah Parzen-Johnson and more are met here with a fresh sense of discovery, spun around and delivered ready for the turntable once again. Carl Stone says: ”It was wonderful that We Jazz gave me carte blanche to work with any materials from the set of ten releases in its catalog. This freedom to work with everything could have been a mixed blessing though, as it could be a challenge to try to deal with so much musical information. In the end I did what I almost always do: Let my intuition be my guide and to seize upon any musical items that seemed to fit into an overall approach.” ”To make a new piece I usually start with an extended period of what really is just playing, the way a child plays with toys. Experimentation without necessary expectation, leading to (hopefully) discovery of things of musical interest, then figuring out a way to craft and shape these into a structured piece of music. Each track uses a different approach, which I found along the way during this play period.” This conceptual approach becomes complete with the design, in which album graphics are treated in a similar fashion, reworking what’s there. This time around, the artwork is reinvented by Tuomo Parikka, a great friend of the We Jazz collective and a regular cover collage contributor for the We Jazz Magazine.

Carl Stone – We Jazz Reworks Vol. 2

A heartfelt thank you to the beautiful audience that came out on the 10th Feb 2022  to Cafe Oto (London) to make this such an enjoyable show. We came as a blank page, one that had been scrunched up for the years of this horrific pandemic. Upon it all we had written was ‘we must play!’. And so to finally seeing the light of day - as we tentatively unfolded this venture into life - in what we (I hope not prematurely) believe was a slow emergence into a new ‘normal’ (sadly to soon be overshadowed by warfare in Europe joining too many conflicts all around the world, and containing the same imbalances in society as the old normal). This was a pure performance circumstance.  A debut performing together in this format, we have played in different projects over the years - but this particular trio is literally being born on this recording. Mark and Neil are internationally known as masters in multiple fields involving improvisation. Their creativity and interactivity here is both incendiary and inspirational.  The album title ‘Towards The Flame’ - came from my studies with Andy Wasserman. His mentioning a quote from McCoy Tyner - that playing with Coltrane was akin to ‘stepping into the flames’ - every night. A place that is pure spirit, complete commitment to totally connect and the disappearance of the self. We love this and hold every wisdom as a vital guide in times that are ever more threatening to pull us apart. In honour of the incredible shoulders upon which we stand and remain inspired - this band is named The Flame. This is the first set of two. We hope you enjoy!

The Flame (Robert Mitchell, Neil Charles, Mark Sanders) – Towards The Flame, Vol. 1

ALL THE MANY PEOPLS Liner notes by Drew Daniel “Who died by stuffing a chicken with snow?” The astute listener has barely had the time to clock this garbled rendition of Sir Francis Bacon’s death, and with it, the grimly poetic ironies that haunt even the most mundane scientific pursuits, when an even more pressing issue is raised: “How do vampires get boners?” I thought you’d never ask. With manic intensity, caustic wit, and an acute ear for the symptomatic points where linguistic clichés crack open to reveal human fears and longings, Jennifer Walshe has found our culture’s search history, and she is singing its network into vibrant being. When queried about the ingredients from which ALL THE MANY PEOPLS is constructed, Jennifer Walshe offers a list whose voracious breadth of polyglot reference constitutes its own cultural argument: “Lojban, a language constructed entirely according to the rules of predicate logic; the cast of Lohengrin; certain sections from Watt by Samuel Beckett constituting the first examples of process composition; The Public Enemy (1931) starring James Cagney; KRS-One; U.S. and British soldiers making cell-phone videos of themselves blowing things up and uploading the videos to You Tewbe; Even Dwarfs Started Small; Amazonkom message boards about vampire physiology; Dashboard Confessional; sferics; conspiracy theorist Francis E. Dec; detritus from video game voice-overs; Jackie Stallone; August Strindberg’s Inferno; Cymbalta Discontinuation Syndrome; a Hibernian version of “The Signifying Monkey” as response to the 19th century practice of describing/depicting the Irish as “simian”/apes; The Typing of the Dead; cult Irish martial arts film Fatal Deviation; the collective unconscious as evidenced by Googull Autocomplete; Couradge Wolf; 4Tchan” Whether this sounds like a crawling, schizophrenic chaos or like a typical day online depends upon how you spend your time. Confronted by the turbulent intensity of the internet as an immersive manifold of mutually competitive media, all users become bricoleurs, scavenging content from film, literature, video games, social media, philosophy, science fiction, pop music, message boards, and search engine ephemera. Far from succumbing to a blur of non-differentiation which levels down distinctions, in the face of this overplus the online self becomes simultaneously more fluid (open to anything) and more selective (you’ll know it when it you find it): customizing, editing down, prioritizing. There’s another word for this process: composition. At a key point in this one-woman roaratoria, Walshe bursts at breakneck speed into an incantation to the “worldwide computer god Frankenstein containment policy brain bank,” a found fragment of schizophrenic speech which in fact articulates rather precisely the constructivist principles that fashioned ALL THE MANY PEOPLS. The global information ecosystem of the internet (the “worldwide computer god”) is broken into morcellated, dead pieces and fragments and reassembled into an organic body (“Frankenstein”), whose sections are selected according to their expressive intensity and mutually animating rightness of fit (the “containment policy” of composition) and this living body is stored and re-performed by a single, thinking, feeling, art-making human being (the “brain bank” of Jennifer Walshe, composer and performer). Tilting beyond post-modern parlor games in which “high” culture and “low” culture rub shoulders (as if there could be a singular, common parameter with which to negotiate this kind of surplus, as if the top down structures of expertise and gatekeeping were still in place), Walshe’s “brain bank” operates at lightning speed and a high temperature, offering us what, to take up the parlance of Henri Lefebvre, one might term a “rhythmanalysis” of our media day. This striking solo performance draws upon all of the intuitive nuances and micro-adjustments of a highly skilled vocalist, mimic and free improviser, but Walshe marshalls these immanent interpretive archives of body memory and gut level directness in the service of a conceptually ambitious and radically democratic agenda: revealing the way that the social multitude—the “many peopls” of Walshe’s title—constitutes the raw material from which the assemblages that we call selves emerge. Against the backdrop of a world of contemporary music which all too often seems trapped in a sterile endgame of funding-driven citations of arts council agendas and formerly “avant garde” gestures stripped of force, we need Walshe’s fearlessness, speedy metabolism, and critical ear more than ever. The progress bar has loaded.

Jennifer Walshe – ALL THE MANY PEOPLS

2xLP; DVD, libretto, large 16p Booklet in printed cardboard box A music drama composed by Sven-Åke Johansson and Alexander von Schlippenbach, performed and recorded at Hebbel Theater, Berlin, 12.11.1994 In the programme, Johansson describes his observations of construction workers who "spend a good part of their lives – when it rains or snows, while changing clothes and so on – in these so-called construction wagons, usually set up in the immediate vicinity of the construction sites." The drama thus at the core employs an approach very typical of him: observing everyday activities and reinterpreting them artistically. What makes it unique is the combination of art forms: (absurd) theatre, dance, song and free jazz all are equal parts. Never, one of these becomes a simple accompaniment of the other. They alternate and mix, eventually leading to a Babylonian confusion that becomes meaningful in itself. Despite or maybe even because of its uniqueness, this opera is one of Johansson's key works. "... Über Ursache ..." was performed three times between 1986 and 1994. The audio recording of the premiere at the Stuttgart State Opera was released by FMP as a standard double LP in 1989. The 1994 audio and video recordings from the Hebbel Theatre in Berlin are presented here for the first time, packaged as a lavish box set with two LPs, a DVD, a 16-page booklet with photos and liner notes by Johansson, Konrad Heidkamp and Peter Ablinger, plus 20-page libretto – an edition that this spectacular work has deserved for a long time.  Cello – Tristan Honsinger Harp – Anne Le Baron Percussion, Drums – Paul Lovens Piano – Alexander von Schlippenbach Saxophone, Clarinet – Wolfgang Fuchs Saxophone - Dietmar Diesner Vocals – Shelley Hirsch Vocals, Accordion – Sven Åke Johansson Libretto-text by Sven-Åke Johansson & Shelley Hirsch Design by Teresa Iten Cover and Drawings by Sven-Ake Johansson

Sven-Ake Johansson & Alexander von Schlippenbach – ...über Ursache und Wirkung der Meinungsverschiedenheiten beim Turmbau zu Babel by