eo Genovese - Piano, sax William Parker - Bass Francisco Mela - Drums Recorded November 13, 2020 by Jeremy Loucas at Douglass Recording, Brooklyn, New York

Are you ready for magic? The master musicians Daniel Carter, Matthew Shipp, William Parker and Gerald Cleaver will provide access with this album, the first they have released after playing together for decades. Daniel Carter has been collaborating with William Parker since the early 70s and with Matthew Shipp starting in the mid 80s. This trio has played together on many recordings but by adding legendary drummer Gerald Cleaver to the mix they have created a masterpiece combination; a supergroup of sorts. This all-star project is presented in two parts/LPs. This is the first volume - with volume two scheduled to be published in the near future. Listen to Welcome Adventure! and experience the mystical journey of these masterful artists as they guide you through the realm of magic. Daniel Carter - Tenor Saxophone, Trumpet, Flute Matthew Shipp - Piano William Parker - Bass Gerald Cleaver - Drums

Outernational Sounds present a reissue of Nate Morgan's Retribution, Reparation, originally released on Nimbus West Records in 1984. A core member of the circle around Horace Tapscott, pianist Nate Morgan was a key member of the Pan Afrikan People's Arkestra, known as The Ark. Here is the second of his two LPs for Nimbus West. His first, Journey Into Nigritia had been a declaration of arrival laced with energies drawn from Cecil Taylor and Coltrane. One year later, in 1984, with nods to Herbie Hancock ("One Finger Snap") and Ellington ("Come Sunday"), Retribution, Reparation was a confident statement of purpose. Politically charged with pan-Africanist Black nationalism, and titled with uncompromising directness, the album focusses the sound world of the Ark into a surging, restless masterpiece of spiritualized modal jazz. Danny Cortez on trumpet and Jesse Sharps on saxophones comprise an explosive frontline. Fritz Wise and Ark regular Joel Ector hold down the rhythm section. Morgan's forceful, Tyner-like chords and virtuosic solos bind the music together. From the poised drama of the opening dedication to Tapscott's U.G.M.A.A. organization, through the propulsive militancy of the title track, "Retribution, Reparation" spreads the word: "Advance to Victory, Let Nigritia Be Free!" Fully licensed from Nimbus West founder Tom Albach.

These are recordings from the Berlin club Au Topsi Pohl where [ism] played 4-nights in a row, May 18-21 2022. For the concerts a Bösendorfer grand piano was brought in to the small club - the trio barely fit on stage, but the acoustic sound, all the more omnipresent and precise, was embraced by a highly crafted and risky playing evoking notions of dreams, form and human vibrations.  Maua means flowers in Swahili.

Brand new 2024 Clear Vinyl repress "Fast Edit is the second LP by Still House Plants, the Glasgow and South London-based three-piece collective made up of Finlay Clark, David Kennedy, and Jessica Hickie-Kallenbach. Written aided by mobile phones, dictaphones, laptop recordings of rehearsals, conversations and live shows, Fast Edit is a collage of different fidelities and headspaces, most tenderly exhibited on album centrepiece “Shy Song”. Overlays of past and current sit things on top of each other, fall over one another, get stuck, predicate. Fitting now, but reflective of a period doing shows in South America.The sentiment of the record is probably best described in part of an intervention written for what would have been the 2020 edition of Glasgow's Counterflows Festival by Frances Morgan:"Getting used to the idea of never getting anywhere except for between these three notes, these two words, getting tired, getting beyond it, getting locked in. Trying to get it down, trying to get it written. Like the song that didn’t get anywhere: it still moves, it doesn’t move.It is getting to you that this is heaviest verb to get across. Loaded and overloaded. Getting as in becoming, as in acquiring, as in catching, as in having, as in receiving, as in changing, as in arriving, as in moving through and over, it’s the same....How do you think we should do this. The song does something different now, puts the other foot forward. How do you know when it’s done. End on a verb and it becomes a command: run! Towards the next thing. Do – towards the next thing to be done.What have you been doing today, a day with nothing doing: watching a nesting falcon on a webcam, what’s it going to do. Googling the appropriate prayer, what does it say you should do. Bouncing the sticks off the snare, what does the sound do. How are we all doing. Doing, never done. Listening, never done."www.counterflows.com/intervention-one/     ---   Recorded & mixed by Shaun Crook and Darren Clark at Lockdown Studios, London. Mastered and cut by Helmut Erler at Dubplates and Mastering.Typeface by Still House Plants, layout by Maja LarrsonProduced in partnership with Blank Forms, New YorkBlank Forms Editions 013BIS005

Tracklisting: A1 The Solar Model - 13:51A2 The Laws of Motion - 03:28A3 For George Saliba - 03:42B1 The Oud of Ziryab - 04:46 B2 For Ibn Al Nafis - 04:17 B3 For Mansa Musa - 03:44 B4 The Birds are Singing - 06:01  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

"Joe McPhee's first international release, Black Magic Man, was issued on the newly formed Hat Hut imprint in 1975. It was a watershed moment for the 35-year-old musician. Based in Poughkeepsie, New York, he was too far away from Manhattan to have participated extensively in the Loft Jazz happenings of the decade. European exposure, however, would give McPhee an alternative circuit, something of an escape route from the trappings of American cultural myopia. "In support of the new record for this Swiss label, McPhee invited John Snyder on a European tour in October 1975. Snyder was a synthesizer player with whom McPhee had made the duet LP Pieces Of Light, released a year earlier on CjR. The two musicians developed an extensive repertoire, playing diverse spaces in the Hudson Valley. Geographically close gigs were a plus, since it took extra energy to hoist Snyder's ARP 2600. "McPhee and Snyder were invited to play at the Willisau Jazz Festival in Switzerland. If you compare this live record with Pieces Of Light, a studio effort, it's considerably more open. South African drummer Makaya Ntshoko is rolling thunder on the choral 'Voices,' shuffling under Snyder's bubbly beat on 'Bahamian Folksong.' It is quite a special combination, enough so that Hat Hut chose to release it as their next LP, Hat Hut B in their alphabetical series. The Willisau Concert represents the sound of Joe McPhee opening up, opening out, expanding his field of operations to include new figures, fresh experiences, new continents of sound."

Horace Tapscott’s Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra (P.A.P.A.) was one of the most transformative, forward-thinking and straight-up heavy big bands to have played jazz in the 1960s and 1970s. If P.A.P.A. doesn’t have the interstellar rep of that other famous Arkestra, and if the name Tapscott doesn’t ring bells like Monk or Tyner, there’s a reason why: in an industry dominated by record labels, a band that doesn’t record doesn’t count. And the Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra didn’t record for nearly twenty years. But recording success was never their concern — they weren’t about that. First formed as the Underground Musicians Association in the early 1960s, Tapscott always wanted his group to be a community project. From their base in Watts, UGMA got down at the grassroots. The group was renamed the Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra in 1971, and soon after they established a monthly residency at the Immanuel United Church of Christ which ran for over a decade, while still playing all over LA and beyond. But they never released a note of music. It was the intervention of fan Tom Albach that finally got them on wax. Determined that their work should be documented, Albach founded Nimbus Records specifically to release the music of Tapscott, the Arkestra, and the individuals that comprised it. The first recording sessions in early 1978 yielded enough material for two albums, and the first release was Flight 17. The album commences with the magnificent title track. It is effectively in three parts. It begins with unaccompanied pianos. Then the ensemble embark on a dense, circular and mechanical movement, a platform for horns and pianos to swoop and dive. We return to Earth with a beautiful solitary flute. The second track, the piano-centric, ‘Breeze’ is different to ‘Flight 17’ in intensity and also brevity but it is quietly as daring as the title track. It concludes with a moving lush wash from the full Arkestra, which sound almost like strings only more substantial. These first two tracks take full advantage of the texture of the unusual mix of the various instruments. Next though, it’s a significant change with ‘Horacio’, which is an exuberant Latin infused jingle. It’s unlike anything else on the album. I like to think it was named after the conductor’s Cuban alter-ego! ‘Clarisse’ gracefully switches between slow blues and bop and is bookended with a grand vaguely East Asian theme. The busy bass line introduces ‘Maui’. As with the previous track, it moves between a number of contrasting melody lines and rhythms but there’s still space for a tuneful sax solo. This is a must-have album. I think the first two tracks on their own make this release essential.

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.

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".

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.

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”.

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.

LP reissue of Collective Calls, the first duo LP from Evan Parker and percussionist Paul Lytton. Mythically alluded to as ‘An Improvised Urban Psychodrama In Eight Parts”, Collective Calls utilises electronics, pre-records and homemade instruments to wryly in/act self investigation. Having just recorded the cliff jumping Music Improvisation Company with Derek Bailey, Christine Jeffrey, Hugh Davies and Jamie Muir, Parker was at the point where [he] was thinking, ‘what’s the next thing?’ On Collective Calls, only the 5th release to appear on the newly minted Incus label, percussionist Paul Lytton arrives with an arsenal of sound making sources to push Parker into ever new territory. Recorded in the loft of The Standard Essenco Co on Southwark Street by Bob Woolford (Topography of the Lungs, AMM The Crypt), Collective Calls has more in common with noise or music concrete than with jazz; sitting comfortably alongside Italian messrs Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza or the husband-wife duo of Anima Sound. According to Martin Davidson, it was a Folkways record called Sounds of the Junkyard that Lytton was obsessed with around the time of this release - its track titles like “Steel Saw Cutting Channel Iron in Two Places” working to give you a good idea of the atmosphere of Collective Calls. Paul Lytton had encountered the use of electronics in music in 1968 when he was invited to play drums on the recording of An Electric Storm by White Noise (along with David Vorhaus, Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson). He had seen Hugh Davies using contact mics in the Music Improvisation Company, and soon set about assembling a Dexion frame akin to drummer John Stevens’, except that his own was armed with several single-coil electric guitar pickups, long wires and strings with connected foot-pedals to modulate pitch. Influenced as much by Stockhausen, Cage and David Tudor as he was by Max Roach and Milford Graves, Lytton’s percussion is abstract, expressionist and at times totally mutant. Sometimes rolling extremely fast, then screeching almost backwards over feedback, Lytton gives Parker room to play some of his weirdest work. Parker is listed as performing both saxophones, his own homemade contraptions, and cassette recorder - regularly thickening the already murky brew by playing back previous recordings of the duo. Imagining their set up in a 70s loft, it’s an assemblage more akin to what today's free ears might see at a Sholto Dobie show, spread out on the floor of the Hundred Years Gallery, the shadow of Penultimate Press lurking in a corner. It’s a testament to Parker’s shape shifting sound - the ever present link to birdsong being at its most warped here - terrifically free and unfussy, wild and loose from any of the dogma that might come in later Brit-prov years.

2023 repress of the OTOROKU re-issue of the legendary English free improvisation LP 'The Topography of The Lungs' by Evan Parker, Derek Bailey and Han Bennink. This was Evan Parker’s first recording as a "leader" and was the first release on Incus, the label Parker founded with guitarist Derek Bailey and drummer Tony Oxley. This re-issue has been produced from an original vinyl pressing from Evan's archives - carefully transcribed and restored by Andreas [LUPO] Lubich at Calyx in Berlin and features the original liner notes from Parker along with updated notes penned in 2014. "To talk further of the music we play is difficult. It’s criteria for success exist, but are elusive and indefinable beyond the intuitive level. We operate without rules (pre-composed material) or well-defined code of behaviour (fixed tempi, tonalities, serial structures etc.), and yet are able to distinguish success from failure." - From Evan Parker’s original liner notes (1970) This pressing of The Topography of The Lungs comes in a limited edition of 500 copies.

Blood Blood is a connective tissue. It nourishes. Cleanses. Regulates. Only a living being can create it. Attempts to engineer synthetic blood have not been successful, to date. Thus, either we "produce" it ourselves, or there will be none... Blood is always in motion. It travels throughout our bodies. In each of us, there are an estimated 96,000 kilometers of blood vessels, that pump our blood. If blood is not in motion, it clots within a few minutes. It begins to die... od is not in mi Every minute someone needs blood. One in ten patients is a recipient. One unit (450ml) is capable of saving three lives. On the other hand, in cases of severe burns, up to twenty units are needed for one patient. In Poland, 2.4% of the population donates blood, while in European Union countries the average is about 8%. "For the life of the flesh is in the blood." (Leviticus 17:11). For centuries, in all cultures, religions and beliefs, blood has held the same significance. It has been synonymous with life. In ancient Mesopotamia it was believed that the first humans were created from the blood of a slain deity. In Egypt, blood was removed from the body before mummification, to prepare it for eternal life. In the Old Testament, consuming blood was forbidden. This is still the case in Judaic teachings. It contains the life force. Upon death, this force should return to God. Blood saves. "And they shall take the blood of the lamb, and sprinkle it on the doorframes and on the thresholds of the house where they shall eat it. [....] The blood shall serve you to mark the houses, in which you shall dwell. When I see the blood, I will pass by, and there shall not be a destructive plague, among you when I punish the land of Egypt." (Exodus 12:7-13). The God of the Old Covenant will spare the lives of those, whose house is marked with the blood of the Passover lamb. By doing so, a person will make the passage (pesach - literally to pass over, leap over) and be free, just as the Chosen People were liberated from the rule of Egypt. Blood cleanses and justifies. "Then one of the elders addressed me: 'These in white robes,' he asked, 'who are they, and where have they come from?' And I said to him: 'Lord, you know! And he said to me: 'These are those who come, from the great tribulation, and have rinsed their robes, and in the blood of the Lamb have whitened them. Therefore they are before the throne of God, and in His temple they worship Him day and night. And the One seated on the throne shall spread a tent over them." (Revelation 7:13-15) What does blood mean to you? Blood is life and holiness. In the Christian tradition, it is a symbol of eternal life. Blood of Christ gives life and is life, because it is Christ's body. In art, blood is a symbol of emotions. A blood brotherhood, blood pact, or a document signed in blood, are eternally binding. Blood is a bond, a fellowship - this is why in Polish we say related-by-blood and blood-relatives. If you donate blood - someone becomes your relative… The concept for this record began in February, 2023. It is an audio-portrait of the Regional Centre of Blood Donation and Treatment the name of prof. dr hab. Tadeusz Dorobisz in Wroclaw, enriched by the music of Piotr Damasiewicz and Jakub Wójcik. It is not background music. It is music that requires attention and focus. Detachment and meditation. An immersion into its depths. "Blood" is an invitation to experience a journey. A journey of living fully, through stopping, to rebirth and a new existence. "Blood" is YOU and your interpretation of the world and its hues.