Theologians still can't fully agree, but you're sure to believe after vibrating along with God Is Good. Chants and prayers, non-denominationally laid out with a heaviness that would make Heston-as-Moses blush.

Heather Leigh takes her Throne as queen of pedal steel with a suite of heartbleed ballads cauterised with burning riffs. After the rawness of its precursor I Abused Animal, Throne is a record of late night Americana and heavy femininity; intimate love songs smoked in sensuality. The songs on Throne are woozy, gorgeous and uncomfortable, smothered in thick layers of bass but lifted by multitracked vocals. These are rich song forms that stand in contrast to the stripped down steel in her duo with Peter Brotzmann. Prelude To Goddess sashays in wearing leopard print jeans under the twinkling fluorescent illuminations of the British seaside, like Brighton Rock with extra bass. It is followed in by Lena – arguably Leigh's Jolene – a perverse love song soaked in a subversive sexuality, weighed down with a heavy pulse. Soft Seasons is anchored with sunken beats shrouded in wailing, growling steel and an earwormy melody. Gold Teeth, the longest track on the record, crests and breaks in waves; ecstatic peaks balanced and echoed by melancholic troughs. It soars on an updraft, and from cosmic heights dives seaward into a gnarly and riotous pedal steel breakdown, before catching the breeze again. Days Without You and Scorpio & Androzani are shorter, intimate songs, in the latter the synths seethe and the steel bows and bends as Leigh's voice falters above a Greek chorus of shadows and reflections. But this isn't autobiography, and Throne departs on Days Without You, a confrontationally unfinished romantic song, anxious with half-thoughts and missed connections. It glides into the night on stilettos leaving unanswered questions, in a fug of psychic disturbance and lovesick sensuality. Leigh's artwork (which she photographed and designed) is a visual mirror of the songs on Throne. It is an album of cosmic echoes, abstractions and introspection, of characters and stories that make up Leigh's first best pop record, its melodies and hooks set alight with the fiery core of her unique and distinctive pedal steel.

Before coming to Europe, in 1970, pianist Manuel Villarroel was a vet in his native Chilli. A few years later, as leader of the Machi Oul Big Band, he returned to the animal kingdom. A very specific kind of animal, for sure, the Quetzalcoatl, also known as the Feathered Serpent. What is behind this title (also the name of one of the three original compositions on this album released on the Palm label in 1976), is first and foremost a sort of homecoming… After discovering the jazz of Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Villarroel was taken by the free jazz which was all the rage at the time in America and Europe, and this would inspire the first version of his Machi-Oul, project. This was a septet, with which the pianist would record, in 1971, the tremendous Terremoto (re-released by Souffle Continu FFL085). After this masterstroke Villarroel was invited to record with Perception (Perception & Friends) and with Baikida Carroll (Orange Fish Tears). While these were notable contributions, Villarroel was already looking into other combinations. “I had to deal personally with my situation as an expatriate, without disavowing it. I tried not to betray my roots, I tried to translate into my music what was essential to me, to reflect my origins – Latin America, its musical and above all human feelings – while remaining faithful to jazz, which is the mode of expression of the musicians in the group”. This then is the ‘homecoming’ we mentioned, which would incite Manuel Villarroel to compose what he would call “structured free music”. In January 1972 the pianist enlarged his formation to reach the size of a real big band: the Septet became the Machi-Oul Big Band. Three years later in January 1975, with producer Jef Gilson at the helm, fifteen musicians including those from the old Septet (Jef Sicard, François and Jean-Louis Méchali, Gérard Coppéré) worked on a rare form of jazz. From togetherness to dissonance, we danse to it “Bolerito” then shake it up on “Leyendas De Nahuelbuta”. As for the concluding serpent, it is a piece which is impossible to pin down: “Quetzalcoat” is as impressive as it is difficult to grasp. To remind ourselves of this, lets listen to it again.

L’Escalier des Aveugles, or The Stairway of the Blind, was commissioned in November 1990 by Spanish National Radio (Radio Nacional de España). Asked for a piece to premiere as part of the European Day of Music, Luc Ferrari returned with a radiophonic concept that organised his anecdotal music into montage form, sequencing short, elusive narratives in a successive way.The completed composition is formed of thirteen chapters containing a mixture of environmental and synthesised sound, commentary, chatter, and encounters with people and places. Each focuses on a small event within this playbook, and Ferrari notes that each “in addition to being a realistic photograph, will be the subject of a ‘setting to music’: fragments of voice and atmosphere will be sampled and will produce musical matter or a ‘song’.”The sonic language of Madrid forms the setting to which Ferrari lays out the persistent theme of the piece, that of the composer being guided throughout the city by a young woman. Using a game-like structure (liners for this edition include Ferrari’s “Regles de Jeu”, or “Rules of the Game” which act as a script or score to the piece) the motivation is posed: imagine that one day you are told “I know a place in Madrid that sounds amazing (or bizarre)”, to which you reply “Let’s go to it together.” The recordings toy with the relationships between guide and tourist, translator, director and actress, and masculine and feminine that emerge as Ferrari and the actresses follow this action, documenting the shared experience and connections they make as they visit these places.Six actresses guide Ferrari (and the listener) through locations simultaneously ordinary and sonically rich: the metro; the El Corte Inglés department store where we hear the gossip from changing rooms set against music emanating from the PA; vagabonds declaiming their political stance in the Conde de Barajas plaza; interactions buying apples in a market; the reverberant and spacious halls of the Prado Museum where one actress gives a moving description of her favourite painting - Goya’s The 3rd of May 1808.Ferrari replies in French to their comments in Spanish, and there are several self-referential plots, devices, and word games that flirt with the poetics and rhythm of language and sound. A recital of Lorca’s poem "La Casada Infiel" in “Hommage À Lorca” in amongst the location recordings feels striking, and the call and response of “La Nouvelle de L’Escalier”, where one of the actresses descends the staircase of the blind - a long stone stairway in Madrid proposed to Ferrari as an interesting location to visit during the trip by producer José Iges. She replies to Ferrari’s vocal enunciation of the place (and title) in French - L’Escalier des Aveugles - with the place-name in Spanish: La Escalera de los Ciegos.Using this repeated title and image of the staircase of the blind as a symbolic place, a line is drawn to a situational landscape experienced and diffused through snapshots and allusion rather than holistically overviewed, sound conjuring pictures within the imagination. In the sensorial qualities of Ferrari’s treatment of emotion and language—fortified with electro-acoustic motifs and musical properties—the piece accelerates towards a render that is truthful, beautiful, yet also surreal; somewhere between theatre and reality, a gonzo cinema of the ear.

Wonderful, previously unreleased recordings by Derek Bailey and his guests at Company Week in 1983. What's remarkable throughout this album is the respect and affection the musicians show for each other, exemplifying the dictionary definition of "company" as "the fact or condition of being with another or others, especially in a way that provides friendship and enjoyment." It starts with "Landslide", a brilliant, spiky, spluttering, twanging reunion of Music Improvisation Company members Evan Parker (tenor sax), Hugh Davies (electronics), and Jamie Muir (percussion). Next up, "Seconde Choix", with Joëlle Léandre's close-miked prepared bass and Bailey's acoustic guitar seemingly heading in different directions before coming together miraculously in just four minutes. The opening of "First Choice", a duet between Bailey and Muir, is a revelation for those who moan that the guitarist plays too many notes. His patient and truly exquisite exploration of harmonics is beautifully counterpointed by Muir's metallic percussion. On "Pile Ou Face" (Heads Or Tails) Davies concentrates on his high register oscillators, carefully shadowed by Parker's soprano until Léandre's deft, springy pizzicato lures them into the playground. "JD In Paradise" is a surprisingly delicate wind quartet, with John Corbett's trumpet, fragile and Don Cherry-like, punctuating the sinuous interplay between Peter Brötzmann and J.D. Parran (on sopranos, flutes and clarinet), while trombonist Vinko Globokar growls approvingly in the background. Igor Stravinsky's magnificent definition of music as the jeu de notes comes to mind listening to Bailey's duet with cellist Ernst Reijseger (executing fiendish double-stopped harmonics with staggering ease). Technical virtuosity has never sounded so effortless -- it is, as its title "Een Plezierig Stukje" simply states, a fun piece. On the closing "La Horda", Bailey and Reijseger team up with the horns for what on paper looks like it could be rough and rowdy sextet but which turns out once more to be a thoughtful, spacious exchange of ideas, shapes, and colors.

"Since my childhood I have been interested in listening under water. That's exactly what we do every summer in Bern, when we dive into the river Aare. A universe of sounds opens up." Edition of 200 vinyl, all copies numbered and signed by the artist. His work explores the relationship between sound, silence and action in space. He studied music in Basel, Paris and Zuerich, with a concentration in experimental music and improvisation. Kobi performs and creates with various musicians, composers and artists in context of long term partnerships with artists such as Phill Niblock, Jürg Frey, Taku Sugimoto and Keith Rowe. Since 2004 he curates the „zoom in“ festival for improvised music at the Minster of Bern. Christian Kobi teaches improvisation at the Bern University of Arts (HKB).2004 Founder and artistic director of »zoom in«, a festival for improvised music at Berne Minster.

Available as 320k MP3 or 24bit FLAC from the 16th June Tracklisting: 1. Potential - 22:50 2. Morning Star - 10:37     CD-R version comes in trigger case, with artwork printed on disc. No liners. Musician, writer and filmmaker, Sunik Kim follows up ‘The Bent Bow Must Wait to Be Released’ (Takuroku 2021) with their second LP - a deadly serious dismantling of the limits of contemporary computer music, delivered with playful dexterity and a touch of slapstick humour, a la Henry Cow.  Enlisting General MIDI to create frenetic, vital patterns of dis-organisation made up of gleeful synthetic trumpets, wry orchestral sweeps and brutal key clusters, Sunik Kim explodes a kind of simplistic sound into complex, beautifully uncertain structures. Rather than attempting to overwhelm or stun the listener into subjectivity, ‘Potential’ is ever shifting; regularly breaking form and unfolding, discreetly nibbling at the concept of the Spectacle and un-doing fatally closed systems of cyclic music.  On first listens we recalled Cecil Taylor’s Unit Structures, Stockhausen’s Gruppen, and even those weirdo attempts at making music from inside the world of Animal Crossing, Lil Jürg Frey. The overflowing ideas of Henry Cow (to which Kim dedicated a fantastically blended mix for the Wire in 2021) never drift too far from view, but contemporary counterparts lay few except for Yorkshire's most eminent polyceleratrix, Gretchen Aury, who we asked to write the liners. Gretchen’s words are unsurprisingly as extraordinary as the record itself, so we’ll close out the call to elicit a Media response to possibly the wildest OTOROKU yet with their words: “Potential reads as a rare honest response to the disaster capitalist era of the apparent nearing end of the anthropocene, a cyborg music which is not hopelessly psychotic like so much contemporary and especially computer-requiring music, but lucidly possessed with rapture, pain, madness, empathy, ecstasy, torment, fragility; all those vital feelings and incentives which our atrociously depressing times seem engineered to quash and bleed out of us. This sound is a blistering Electro Magnetic Pulse wave of revolutionary hope, exclaiming defiantly that History is not over, that the future is not ‘history,’ that there is still a vast multitude of ideas and identities burning brightly and resiliently, despite the fact that they are inconceivable to the tyrannical Hegemonic axis of global capitalist tech-culture. I ask of you, listener, if you truly wish to plunge beyond The Known, give yourself over in full to this record.” — Artwork by Sunik Kim Layout and design by Jeroen Wille  Liner notes by Vymethoxy Redspiders Mastered by Anotine Nouel at Sound Love Studios Track 1 edited by John Wall —

Sholto Dobie puts forth ‘23’ on Infant Tree, his debut solo LP. A wildly accomplished document of practice. After many years spent working with pipes and air, ‘23’ offers us his current developments. Recorded in a year in which the artist worked in Lithuania, Vietnam and Sweden, the record distills a broad approach to sound, using a wide net to gather recordings from performances, gatherings, walks and personal life. Sholto carefully leads the listener between distinct environments and the intimately documented network of compressed air, tubes, reeds, flutes and timers which he works with. In these recordings, life is welcomed in, interiors are heard and felt, obscured voices, insects, forests drift in and out of focus, as we are transported through an unfamiliar landscape.Sholto Dobie was born in Edinburgh and lives in Vilnius, he performs with self-constructed wind instruments, using a frankenstein-like set up which has evolved over many years. An air pump is attached to a series of reeded and metal pipes from various sources - organs, bagpipes and khene - which are brought to life by an interrelated system of timer modules, valves and swinging microphones. ‘23’ captures the rich world of pulses, beatings and breaths that have emerged from Sholto’s performance settings, whilst weaving them into a distinct and unique audio work.For anyone more familiar with Sholto’s work you will no doubt be warmed by recognisably delicate and evocative styles reminiscent of previous solo recordings such as ‘Nevery’ and ‘The Ringer’ as well as influences from friends and collaborators such as Judith Hamann, Malvern Brume, Ahti & Ahti, Rie Nakajima and Shakeeb Abu Hamdan.The 12” LP comes with beautifully matched artwork by Zoë Annesley and printed on reverse board, pressed by Monotype Pressing. Limited to 300 copies.

Michael Atherton is a writer, composer and educator from Sydney, Australia. Originally born in Liverpool, England, to Welsh-Irish and German parents, his family later migrated to Australia in 1965. Moving to the suburbs in La Perouse, he grew up in a mixed, multicultural community, where he fostered friendships with existing indigenous members and Iberian migrants. His formative migrant experience and his curiosity about vernacular, as well as notated music, led him to study music formally where he was attracted to ethnomusicology. From a self-taught guitarist to an accomplished multi-instrumentalist, Michael’s recorded output spans many different genres and styles – he was a member of the Renaissance Players, an early music group; Sirocco, a pioneering cross-cultural folk group; and Southern Crossings, an innovative ethno-classical ensemble. By 1990, he had moved beyond his earlier musical endeavours, and away from Australia, with ‘Windshift’ seeing him draw on resources from the Asia-Pacific and Europe. With an impressive arsenal of instruments, such as the didjeridu, hurdy gurdy, kulintang, saron and jaw harp, to name but a few, Michael adds intense colour to the recordings using samplers, synths and modulating effects. Recently remastered by fellow Australian-based musician and engineer, Mikey Young, and visually re-imagined by Glasgow-based artist, Jamie Johnson, ‘Windshift’ is now presented once again by Infinite Expanse with a first-time reissue on vinyl.

* ltd to 400, black vinyl, color silkscreened jacket with obi (white, dark blue), inserts and a postcard * Je prie pour que la goutte ne tombe pas (I pray that the drop does not fall) is the first international release by Japanese trio Chi To Shizuku. While they have released five albums and a 7” in Japan, their spectral, haunted rock songs haven’t yet reached a much wider audience overseas. With this album, then, a live recording taken at Koenji HIGH, Suginami, Tokyo on 23rd November 2021, the unique, quartz-like character of Chi To Shizuku’s music is writ large, the bleak bliss of their songs carved onto twelve-inch vinyl.

Official Mr Bongo reissue. Replica original artwork, including the insert with listening instructions, in Spanish and English. A1. Culto Solar - In Altepetl Tonal / A2. Suite Al Culto Solar - Xochiyaoyoloh / A3. Suite Al Culto Solar - Ketzalkoatl Yauh Miktlan / B1. Ipan In Xiktli Metztli Luis Pérez was born in Mexico City on July 11, 1951. From 1971 onwards he dedicated much of his time to the research of the pre-Columbian instrumentation of Mesoamerica. This research allowed him to travel the Mexican territory and study musical traditions of the native peoples of Mexico. He learned directly from the living sources of the music and collected samples of musical instruments and the songs of different native speakers including Maya, Nahuatl, Mazateco, Yoemem, Comcaac, Raramuri, Wixarika and more. His personal collection of native Mexican instruments includes ethnographic instruments still in use by ethnic groups, along with archaeological artifacts some of which are more than 2,000 years old. He continuously utilises these instruments in performances, concerts, lectures, exhibitions, and recordings, keeping them alive. ‘El Ombligo de la Luna’ delves deep into the past but also exists entirely outside of time, as Luis Pérez ‘Ixoneztli’’s offering to the world – the soul of Mexico channeled through the hands and heart of a master musician.

Via Bridman comes The Numbers, the latest outing of Michael Morley's (The Dead C.) solo alter ego, Gate, the project's first LP since 2018. Glacial, distorted guitar fuzz and drones meet downer folk, this is the best of Morley doing what he does best. Highly recomended!

O’Rourke’s process – sourcing resonant sounds to enmesh together into a music that supersedes their resident parts – makes a fitting soundtrack for Kyle Armstrong’s “prairie gothic” tale of down-on-the-farm horror way up north in Canada. His minimalist score inhabits the wide open, big sky landscape, flowing into suddenly-deep (and opaque) emotional waters, then panning out to a chilly omniscient remove.

2023 marks the 35th year of Idea Fire Company’s ongoing commitment to the radical avant-garde. To mark the occasion, Horn of Plenty is proud to present the band’s latest campaign statement Bathroom Electronics. IFCO’s core members are Scott Foust and Karla Borecky who operate from rural Massachusetts. Early despatches came via Scott’s Swill Radio imprint alongside titles by The Shadow Ring, RLW, and Asmus Tietchens. The last decade or so has seen them work with other notable labels including Kye, Recital, Feeding Tube and Ultra Eczema. Early IFCO releases included mission statements like the Anti-Naturals manifesto where they outlined their pursuit of a new total-aesthetic to challenge the ongoing pervasion of the Spectacle. Their growing catalogue, although honouring these early intentions, also nodded to the sacrifices undertaken in their pursuit. References to being Lost At Sea, or coming Live From The Impossible Salon acknowledged a wry sense of resignation and a dogged romanticism. By avoiding sequencers, computers and overdubs and focussing on drawing the most from their instruments and recording equipment their music carries a seductively human character that allows the music to breathe and puts the listener in the room with the band. Although rooted in their formative post-punk / early industrial years, IFCO have incorporated kosmische, minimalism, jazz, classical and avant-garde techniques into their always-the-same-but-always-different sound. Staying true to an original concept yet constantly pushing it in new directions is no easy task but IFCO can claim the mantle and show no signs of tiring. On Bathroom Electronics Scott and Karla are joined on two of the four tracks by long-term compadres Matt Krefting and Timothy Shortell. As the title implies, the LP consists of electronic instruments recorded in bathrooms. The stark interior certainly plays a role here. Side A’s three tracks have a compellingly unsettling and claustrophobic feel. Side B’s The End of the Line (alternative versions of which appeared on a limited Recital tape in 2018) feels like a long, ambiguous goodbye. It’s what not said here that speaks the loudest though, this is much more of an odyssey than a comfort break. Bathroom Electronics marks IFCO’s 35th year in confident and uncompromising fashion. Here's to the next 35 years and, as ever, here’s to love!

Early acoustic guitar improv performances from the Bhutanese expat, who’d come to Asheville, NC to study in 2000 and discovered worlds of anarcho-punk and avant garde such as he’d only dreamed. Having made recordings of his newly-located improvisational conception, he intuited a desire to go deeper in his explorations of the recorded sound of the guitar, melding and colliding traditional music with his feeling for the range of textures within. All tracks except "April" recorded by Flora Wolpert Checknoff and Michael Flanagan, Nov. 2012 Lipinsky Studio. "April" recorded by Dorji, at home, Nov. 2012 Artwork by Luciann Waldrup aka Housefire

vinyl copies have a seem split on top, and are marked down / cheap to reflect that Black Truffle is pleased to announce The Leisure Principle, a new solo LP from London-based bassist and sound artist Otto Willberg. A key player in the London underground, Willberg is often heard on acoustic and electric bass in free improv settings and bands with Laurie Tompkins (Yes Indeed) and Charles Hayward (Abstract Concrete), as well as the fractured No Wave unit Historically Fucked. His previous solo releases have ranged from extended technique double bass to explorations of the acoustics of a 19th century artillery fort. But nothing Willberg has committed to wax so far prepares a listener for The Leisure Principle, six unashamedly melodic improvisational workouts created almost entirely with heavily filtered bass harmonica and electric bass.On the opening ‘Reap What Thou Sow’, a single-note bass harmonica loop pulses along underneath a roaming bass solo, the side-chained envelope filtering (where the dynamic behaviour of the bass determines the filter for both bass and harmonica) fusing the two instruments into a single stream of burbling shifts in resonance. After several minutes of patient exploration of this low-end landscape, the music suddenly opens up in widescreen with the entrance of Sam Andreae’s graceful melodica chords, spreading out across the stereo field. From this epic opener, each of the remaining pieces goes on to explore a slightly different aspect of the terrain. On ‘Shadow Came into the Eyes as Earth Turned on its Axis’, a similarly buoyant harmonica bass line provides the foundation, but this time playing a soulful descending riff, its almost R&B; feel abstracted and half-obscured by the filtering. On ‘Mollusk’, echoed bass arpeggios skitter between elegiac chords somewhat reminiscent of the opening of John Abercrombie’s ‘Timeless’, before settling into a hypnotic groove.On the record’s second half, Willberg pushes further into the possibilities of his idiosyncratic instrumentation. On ‘Wetter’, bass and harmonica come together into a monstrous, growling jaw harp; on ‘Had we but world enough and more time’, the subtly shifting pulsating patterns start to feel almost like a kind of evaporated, drum-less dub techno until an eruption of wheezing bass harmonica gives the piece a comically folkish turn. Willberg’s melodically inventive and virtuosic bass performance calls to mind any number of fusion touchstones, from Jaco Pastorius to Mark Egan’s singing tone in the early Pat Metheny Group—even Anthony Jackson’s work with Steve Kahn. But with its radically reduced instrumentation, The Leisure Principle is also an exercise in minimalism, and the absence of percussion gives even its funkiest moments a strangely abstracted quality. At times, its uncanny blend of the abstruse and the immediate suggests the fried pop experiments of David Rosenboom or the skewed but deeply musical DIY of 80s underground groups like De Fabriek. Both easy on the ear and profoundly strange, The Leisure Principle proudly takes its place among the most eccentric offerings on the Black Truffle menu.

"You can hear it before it’s been said, and before you hear it, the space for its anticipation is someplace you’re already in. And if you were there, you would have seen it, taking place, taking shape, becoming, between them, an event, no less a body than a route, no more a method than a calling or a having been called, an affirmation of the phantasmatic nature of the divide separating the arrhythmia of improvised music from dance music’s foundational investment in the number four. An affirmation which is also an affective, questing, generative disinvestment in this opposition, a negation set in motion by a trialogical listening and playing into materiality new conjunctures of space, time, thought and sound." (Edward George, 2024) ----- YESYESPEAKERSYES is the first vinyl release of the remarkable collaboration between Chicago foot-work founder Kavain Wayne Space (aka RPBoo) and London duo experiment XT (drummer Paul Abbott and saxophonist Seymour Wright). The trio’s synthesis of rhythms, sounds, strategies, technologies and traditions collapse genre, distance, boundaries and preconceptions into a total, and totally unique, brain... morecreditsreleased March 15, 2024 Kavain Wayne Space/XT (Paul Abbott + Seymour Wright) – Trio ----- Kavain Wayne Space – CDJs Paul Abbott – real and imaginary drums Seymour Wright – actual and potential saxophone ----- Recorded live Friday October 8th, 2021, at Cafe OTO, LondonRecorded by Shaun CrookMixed by Billy SteigerMastered by Amir ShoatCover paintings by Benedict Drew Thank you – Fielding Hope, Jackson Burton.

Feedback Moves kicks off 2023 with a new record by @xcrswx and Lolina. @xcrswx are Crystabel Riley (drum-/human-skin) and Seymour Wright (saxophone), they released ‘Call Time/Hard Out’ on Feedback Moves in 2020. Lolina is an electronic and digital musician, who has previously released music as Inga Copeland and was a member of the band Hype Williams. Their collaborative relationship stems back to 2020. Lolina invited @xcrswx to contribute new work to a radio residency on NTS. They made 3 pieces played across 3 episodes. After these were broadcast, further ideas were exchanged which led to a collaborative audio-visual piece, streamed on Cafe Oto’s website in February 2021. They also performed as a trio live at Café OTO in 2022.The artists now present a split 10” vinyl. @xcrswx weave the above-mentioned pieces into a 10 minute piece titled ‘FIXES’. The duo strip their sound to bare components. Beginning with the sound of fireworks, the pair then work through stuttered snare shots and warbled, interplaying saxophone.Lolina presents ‘FM’; some of her strangest and most subtle work to date. Echoing and furthering the abstract turntablism found on previous records ‘Who Is Experimental Music?’ and ‘Fast Fashion’. We hear found sounds, close and distant, rhythmically gathered and dissolved in a swirl of dub tone and timbre.