n 1981, Joe McPhee culled together one of his greatest bands to record Topology, his classic outing for Hat Hut. Feturing an expanded version of Po Music, his ensemble with saxophonist André Jaume, guitarist Raymond Boni, and bassist François Mechali, the group included pianist Irene Schweizer, percussionist Pierre Favre, baritone saxophonist Daniel Bourquin, cellist Michael Overhage, and trombonist Radu Malfatti. One of the tracks left on the cutting room floor was a spectacular take on Ornette Coleman's composition "Lonely Woman," with McPhee on pocket cornet and haunting vocals by Tamia. Thirty one years later, Corbett vs. Dempsey is proud to present The Loneliest Woman, the full, uncut, 13 glorious minutes of music, available on this CD single for the first time ever. As McPhee says: "The Loneliest Woman is lonely no more!" Recorded in Boswil, Switzerland, March 25, 1981.

Peter Brötzmann Chicago TentetUltraman vs. Alien Metron12 inch, one-sided LPCvsDLP002In the first years of its existence, starting in 1997, the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet worked as a collective, inviting all and any of its participants to contribute compositions to the band's repertoire.  Eventually, the Tentet would jettison scores and pre-planned structures altogether, opting for free improvisation, but on their early tours and initial recordings they played pieces written by the various band members.  A marathon set of summer studio sessions in 2002, just off a U.S. tour, yielded material later featured on two CDs for Okka Disk, Images and Signs.  Of two Mars Williams compositions from the session, one was recorded but never issued...until now.  Featuring the original lineup of the band, which combined seven stellar Chicagoans – Williams, Ken Vandermark, Jeb Bishop, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Kent Kessler, Michael Zerang, and Hamid Drake – with Mats Gustafsson, Joe McPhee, and the band's namesake, the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet was a sensationally versatile free music ensemble, capable of going into all sorts of unexpected territory.  The group sports a four-saxophone frontline, with twin trombones (McPhee is on valve trombone here), two strings, and a ferocious drum section featuring Zerang and Drake, who had already worked together intimately for more than 25 years at this point.  Recently rediscovered in his vaults by Williams, newly mixed by original engineer John McCortney, Ultraman vs. Alien Metron is a lost classic of improvised music by one of the premier improvised music bands of its era.  With preposterous juxtapositions of mood, from mostrous lurching heavy rock (underpinning the Japanese Godzilla-esque theme) to hard-swinging freebop and even an incredibly delicate, poignant ballad section, this feature-length track (18+ minutes) is chock full of rock 'em sock 'em goodness.  For the maiden vinyl voyage of Ultraman vs. Alien Metron, Corbett vs. Dempsey has prepared a special package, with artwork and design by Brötzmann.  The format is a one-sided LP, with music on the A-side and the B-side featuring a silkscreen of artwork by Brötzmann.  Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet Ultraman vs. Alien Metron (Mars Williams/18:25) Peter Brötzmann, tenor saxophoneMars Williams, tenor and soprano saxophonesKen Vandermark, baritone saxophoneMats Gustafsson, alto saxophoneJoe McPhee, valve tromboneJeb Bishop, tromboneFred Lonberg-Holm, celloKent Kessler, bassMichael Zerang, drumsHamid Drake, drums

The artist record Call and Response brings together pieces created in connection with performances and exhibitions by Jimmy Robert, including a booklet wrapped around the record. These pieces provide insights into his collaborative practice in conjunction with his performances. The record is released following the exhibition la musique dans la chambre which took place in 2022 at Künstlerhaus Bremen. It addressed the question of how his performance works can continue to be shown apart from being performed again in exhibitions: How can one approach a performance work anew without re-staging it? The exhibition focused partcularly on sound and brought together videos, works on paper, as well as sculptural elements and sound created in the framework of his performances. Call and Response expands the exhibition and gathers sound pieces produced by Robert as well as by other artists—often in connection with Robert's works.Featuring Ain Bailey, Emma Hedditch, Jane Ellison, Rosa Barba, Jimmy Robert, Nadja Quante, Mason Leaver-Yap. Jimmy Robert (born 1975 in Guadeloupe, France) produces works on paper, photographs, collages, sculptures, videos and artist books. His artistic practice explores the points of contact between body and material, as well as the representations and material conditions of bodies.

Icelandic artist and musician Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson is known for his work with Stilluppsteypa, numerous solo albums and collaborations with other artists, such as Swedish composer BJ Nilsen. Into The Second Half takes the listener into a mysterious, yet calming sound world, where carefully composed textures weave hypnotically in and out of each other, as subtle as the changes of light in the forbidden zone in Andrej Tarkovsky’s Stalker.

Brunhild Ferrari returns to the scene with this new solo album. Extérieur Jour is comprised of two previously unreleased electroacoustic compositions – the first, a piece of cinéma pour l’oreille, a movie for the ears, and the second, a meditation on the loss and reappearance of memory and silence, recorded in various places across the globe over a period of 15 years.

nehan is a Japanese free improvisation/avant-garde rock quintet formed in 2022. Their performance is initiated by a 9HZ brain wave emitted from a testee who has been brought into a deep meditative state. nehan respond with gongs, typani, tabla and other percussion, crumhorn, bagpipes, oscillator and mellotron, passing tranformatively through a musical prism, from east to west, from traditional folk and classical to rock, jazz, and electronic.

The future is a flash-back! Having dynamited the end of the 70s, in the next decade, Philippe Doray was still alive and kicking. With Laurence Garcette, he juggled with keyboards and all their simulations to begin the “second period” of the Asociaux Associés (the Antisocial Associates). Labyrinthine programming lead to songs which go crazy: electro, pop, krautrock, no wave…? In a word, French chanson as it was never heard before or since. “Nobody Move!”, so says Philippe Doray and his Asociaux Associés (the Antisocial Associates)! Having dynamited the end of the 70s with two radical albums – Ramasse-Miettes Nucléaires in 1976 & Nouveaux Modes Industriels in 1978, both reissued by Souffle Continu – Doray still hadn’t finished singing. Throughout the next decade he began his Composant compositeur which would document the “second period”, as he calls it, of his Asociaux Associés. The record includes new schizo-electro songs which make the most of his association with Laurence Garcette, who also plays any and all sorts of keyboards. A prolongation of the first period of the Asociaux Associés, the duo updates Doray’s poetry: in reaction to the current overcast atmosphere, here are some hallucinatory fantasies to the rhythm of an infernal circle dance (« Le petit géant ») or an ecstatic waltz (“Bombés fluo”) or even coded messages stuffed into bottles and thrown into space (“Secoue le flipeur”, “Choc d’amour”). On the bonus CD there are further iconoclastic examples: rare recordings (unpublished or even “inaudible”) of the Asociaux Associés but also by Crash, a duo that Doray formed with Thierry Müller (Ilitch, Ruth). At the controls of their experiment-bending machine the musicians multiply the possibilities: peripheral rock, arias in orbit, broken swing, industrial mantras and other joyful falsities. Enough to make you lose your mind ? No… as Philippe Doray promised: it is the “jackpot qui frissonne” (the shivering jackpot) which is there to excite.

For the 1983 edition of Company Week held at London's I.C.A. in May of that year, guitarist Derek Bailey once more invited a typically eclectic collection of guests. Cellist Ernst Reijseger is a mainstay of Dutch new jazz (ICP Orchestra, Clusone Trio...), American wind virtuoso J.D.Parran a veteran of the Black Artists' Group and Anthony Davis and Anthony Braxton ensembles, while saxophonists Evan Parker and Peter Brötzmann, as titans of European free improvisation, need no introduction. French bassist/vocalist Joëlle Léandre is equally at home playing free or performing works by Cage and Scelsi, while Vinko Globokar is an acclaimed composer as well as a trombonist of monstrous virtuosity. He and British electronics pioneer Hugh Davies served time with Karlheinz Stockhausen, and before a brief stint with Robert Fripp's King Crimson, percussionist Jamie Muir was, with Davies, on the very first (Music Improvisation) Company outing in 1970. Bailey once described playing solo as a "second-rate activity"; while at the other end of the spectrum, large improvising ensembles can, if they're not careful, descend into the musical equivalent of a rugby scrum: dangerous, but thrilling -- listen to what happens when Brötzmann comes barreling into the final track here. Sometimes one instrument takes center stage, as Parker's circular-breathing soprano does at the beginning of "Trio Five", but knowing when to lie low, as he does in the brief austere "Trio Three", is just as crucial to the success of the whole. Muir makes sure he doesn't get in the way of Globokar and Parran's leisurely exchanges on "Trio Four", but the trombonist is all over the place on "Trio One" -- transcribe what Globokar does here and it might be the most difficult trombone music ever written -- with Léandre racing up and down her bass and Davies all spikes, squeaks and squiggles, after which "Trio Two" is a lighter affair, Parran's flute and Léandre's vocals twittering together while Derek's acoustic twangs merrily along. With a touch of dry Bailey humor, two of the seven tracks aren't trios at all: "Trio Minus One" is his duo with Reijseger, running the gamut from crazed polyrhythmic strumming (imagine Reinhardt and Grappelli playing Schoenberg and Nancarrow simultaneously) to what must be the fastest cello pizzicati ever recorded. And on the closing ecstatic nonet, Brötzmann and trumpeter John Corbett prove that too many cooks don't necessarily spoil the broth but sure as hell spice it up.

After years of exchanging ideas, Translation from Unspecified marks David Grubbs and Jan St. Werner's studio debut locking horns as a duo. Evolving from a microscopically disordered set of sounds and words into a reconstituted monolith of sound, it’s clear this deck-clearing collaboration was long overdue.

Arthur Petronio – LP Metaphon 016 – 2023 With fold-out poster and original sleeve design by Alain Geronnez Arthur Petronio: Born Switzerland 1897. French-Italian musician, poet and painter. Lived in Belgium and The Netherlands between 1910 and 1924 and since then in France. Young violin virtuoso studying with Belgian master violinist Eugène Ysaÿe. Played solo violin for Belgian King Leopold II, at the age of 9. Attracted to the avant-garde and visionary ideas of Gesamtkunstwerk. Develops and presents his “Verbophonie” in 1919, integrating sound poetry into regular music scores. Friend with Kandinsky, Mondrian, Cocteau and Picasso. Published several avant-garde journals and poetry books with participation of like minded artists. Wrote many scores for solo instruments, small ensembles, orchestral works, opera,… Met Henri Chopin in 1950 and extended his musical ideas with new possibilities of tape composition. His one and only LP, now reissued by Metaphon, was originally published by the Belgian Igloo label in 1979. An extravagant DIY montage of musique concrète and sound poetry. In addition to Petronio’s voice several female readers/performers contribute to this theatre of voices as guest vocalists. An album as unusual as his lifecycle.

Thrilled to announce the reissue of Nikolaus Utermöhlen’s ‘Karlsbad’ album, originally released in 1989. Utermöhlen was a founding member of Die Tödliche Doris and this is his sole solo release. A collection of 23 witty oddball compositions for clarinet, accordion, percussion, recorder, violin, guitar, organ. It definitely has a Doris dose but even more so it shines for its totally singular mélange of tribal dada chamber folk, dilettante dissonant poetry, hard to compare with anything else. A slice of flamboyant wellness. The recordings of this album were made for the ‘Georgette Meunier’ film by Tania Stöcklin and Cyrille Rey-Coquais. Issued from the original master tapes and includes the 8 page booklet with engravings from the Karlsbad spa era.

As well as being a return to public programming, this live event is also a record launch for The Mystery J, CvsD's new vinyl LP which features improvised music by Joe McPhee, violist Jen Clare Paulson, and Brian Labycz on electronics. Recorded in 2014 at Okka Fest 6 in Milwaukee, it contains some of the most bristling trumpet work ever heard from McPhee's lips, in a super-responsive, sometimes uncommonly quiet musical context. Another side of the master improviser – subtle dialogue with two younger maestros. Taking its title from the rum-running yacht on which McPhee's father sailed from Nassau to Miami, The Mystery J is CvsD's inaugural long-playing vinyl, lovingly pressed in Chicago at Smashed Plastic and featuring a design with artwork by one of the original Chicago Imagists, Richard Wetzel. It is available in a limited edition of 500 copies. --- Released: Corbett Vs Dempsey

“Mediterranean Music Water (Mare nostrum in moedium terrae) op. 203”, a never before issued tape composition, belongs to a body of work embarked upon during the 1980s and 90s connected to Sicily, the other most notable and available being “Op. 201 L’Essere Umano Errabando, La Voca Errabando”, issued by The Henning Christiansen Archive in 2020. These works were an extension of Ursula and Henning Christiansen’s meeting and befriending the Sicily based couple Carlo Quartucci and Carla Tatò, with whom they regularly visited and collaborated. Like its predecessor, the aforementioned Op. 201, “Mediterranean Music Water op. 203” is a conceptualization of abstract theatricality at the connection of place and its relationship to the sea. Performed by Ursula Reuter Christiansen and Henning Christiansen and recorded at a small performing arts theatre in Erice, Sicily – Teatro Gebel Hamed – during December of 1991, the abstract for this work reads: “In the morning (after the storm), on the beach. The sea has thrown some things on the beach. Blue light – some mist? On the ground. Ursula’s slides on the wall. Henning is rolling from the background of the stage slowly, very slowly, towards, in a fish net. I come in looking for the things the sea has left and discover him. I roll him out of the net, he’s nearly dead, and try to get life in him. Light in the background in rainbow colours. Ursula wears a partlett dress, as a siren.” These images lay a foundation and context for the sounds that emerge over the album’s two sides, a fascinating conjunction between the power of water and the human spirit. Through the processing of heavy delay and reverb, we encounter the howling utterances of violin tones, vocalizations, and countless unplayable instrumental and non-instrumental sound sources, gathering in a vast and sprawling serious of sonorous expanses that seem to echo the power, movements, and myths tied to the Mediterranean.

Reading Group is very happy to announce the release of Blue Monday, a new LP from Zara Joan Miller and Ute Kanngießer. The LP is the result of the first live collaboration between the poet/artist Miller and the cellist/improvisor Kanngießer, recorded at London’s Cafe Oto in January of 2023. Kanngießer’s searching, intensive cello lays an amorphous terrain beneath passing fragments of Miller’s poetry (from her 2022 book of the same name from JOAN Publishing), billboards dotting the interior freeway of liminal perception. The micro-world of spectral and textural details within the cello sound seems to dramatize or mirror the micro-world of unspoken implications left unsaid in the gaps between threads of language. At times, these worlds produce a dull anxiety or a quiet fervor, only to be scattered by the occasional swerve to a poetic delivery reminiscent of slow-motion jokes (“I once saw a sign on the side of a road it said SLOW DUST”), a fortuitous error (“a seagull shitting on my face is home”), a mysterious interruption of domestic boredom (“someone’s girlfriend called to say don’t answer”). Occasional dates progressing through time give the sense that we are being driven through a year of blue Mondays, the cello wandering as if seasonally. The live set having been accompanied by a literal slideshow of some cumulative, fictive vacation adds to this sense of the year in review. But the imperceptibility of (tonal and narrative) space between these entry/fragments bring us beyond the stark view of the calendrical and into something less measurable: the space of a syncope: “to witness your life unfolding she said / is the key getting stuck.” "Yesterday I watched Blue Monday performed as a dialogue between voice and cello by Zara Joan Miller and Ute Kanngießer. A series of images shown on a 35mm slide projector triangulated this conversation, and the darkness of the room protected us all from the terrible blueness of a January afternoon. Images of scarecrows in smiling fields flash by slowly as the solidity of the projector’s mechanism creates a soft thunk against which the sound of the cello is a knife’s edge, the bow moving across a cluster of nerve endings, somehow this unpeeling feels good." (Bella Marin for Map Magazine, January 2023)

Block Gifts is a collection of three works for organs composed by James Rushford between 2015 and 2018. Using harmonium, portative organ and electric organ, each piece is linked by Rushford’s idiosyncratic combination of strict intervallic systems in different tunings (Werckmeister, quarter-tone, equal temperament), and haptically-informed rhythmic and expressive freedom. Creaks, stutters and sweeping fingers on keys become instrumental sounds in their own right, creating a further logical layer in Rushford’s compositional world. An intimate, nocturnal, and slightly suffered dialogue between the instrument and the body building a shining and fragile monument to the ephemeral nature of the organ, one of the most intriguing and ancient families of musical instruments in history. Mixed by Joe Talia, mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi, cut by Daniel Krieger at SST, Frankfurt am Main. Composed and recorded 2015-2018 at Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart), California Institute of the Arts (by Sam Dunscombe) and Chinatown Studios, Melbourne (by Joe Talia). Cover artwork and fold out poster by Graham Lambkin.

**Second edition of 250 copies, 20 page photographic book** Henning Christiansen was an incongruous mirror for the paradoxes of 20th century creative practice. He gave his context what it demanded - visionary and singular work, but was so radical that almost no one knew what to do with him, forcing him into the position of an outsider. Of all the composers working within the cradle of Fluxus, his work falls among the closest to its primary intent, destroying hierarchy, orthodoxy, and categorization - dissembling long cemented ideas about what music was understood to be - a truth, crystallized through the purity of ideas, which threads its way across the two releases in our hands. Schafe statt Geigen (Sheep instead of Violins) and “Verena” Vogelzymphon (Bird Symphony) were composed in 1988 and 1990, first appearing as a tiny CD gallery edition issued by Bernd Klüser. Both works, each occupying a single of this LP edition, extend from one of Christiansen’s long standing conceptual strategies - deploying recordings of animals as stand-ins for musical instruments, cows (with dogs) and birds respectively. While each work allows these source to take the natural lead, at times masquerading as field recordings, both feature subtle tonal and electronic interventions by the composer, creating strange and brilliant compositions which shift the terms and subjects of music as they were long understood. Brilliant and beautiful challenges to the ear and mind, laying out of reach for decades, this stunning LP, issued in a limited edition of 500 copies, comes with a 20-page photographic booklet. Essential for any fan of avant-garde practice, artist music, and experimental sound. Accompanied by a twenty page booklet featuring drawings and texts by Henning Christiansen, as well as pictures by René Block. Translation from German by Michael Muennich. The sound installation Schafe statt Geigen is owned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde, Denmark. "Verena" Vogelzymphon op. 194 (1990) is dedicated to Verena and Bernd Klüser on the occasion of their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Text by Robert Musil: Nachlass zu Lebzeiten (Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, 1936).  Lacquer cut at SST, Frankfurt am Main. Cover artwork by Henning Christiansen, 1985.

Having each followed their own distinct trajectory of exploration for decades - interweaving rigorous experimentalism with transcultural conversations - and building upon roughly 20 years working as a duo, Jessika Kenney and Eyvind Kang return with Azure, their third full-length with Ideologic Organ. Among their most riveting outings to date, comprising five new compositions recorded in Seattle during the spring of 2022, this remarkable body of sonority culminates in a singular gesture of contemporary minimalism that slowly unfolds across the album’s length. Emerging from the Pacific Northwest, Jessika Kenney and Eyvind Kang have retained a strong presence within the context of North American experimental music since the mid 1990s, each producing some of the most grippingly original music to have appeared over the subsequent years. Kenney is a vocalist and composer internationally regarded for her spellbinding timbres and her in-depth study of oral traditions. Her work takes the form of sound installations, talismanic scores, music for film, electronics, and choir. She released the groundbreaking experimental gamelan album Atria (Sige) in 2015, and has collaborated with Lori Goldston, Holland Andrews, Niloufar Shiri, Tashi Wada, Alvin Lucier, Sarah Davachi, Melati Suryodarmo, Ensemble Nist-Nah, Sunn O))), and numerous others. Kang, a multi-instrumentalist, composer and arranger, works across genre and discipline, bringing subtlety, fluidity, and emotional intensity to each of his varied projects. In addition to creating a striking body of solo works that has traced its way across the last two and half decades - most recently including Sonic Gnostic (Aspen Edities, 2021) and Ajaeng Ajaeng (Ideologic Organ, 2020) - he has played on albums by Bill Frisell, Joe McPhee, Sun City Girls, Ikue Mori, Laurie Anderson, Blonde Redhead, William Hooker, Animal Collective, and numerous others. Since beginning to work together as a duo in the early 2000s, Kang and Kenney have collaborated on sound installations, music for orchestra, choir, and mixed ensembles in addition to releasing numerous widely acclaimed full-lengths: Aestuarium (2005), The Face Of The Earth (2012), Live In Iceland (2013), At Temple Gate (2014), Reverse Tree (2016), Seva (2017), The Cypress Dance (2020). A hypnotic return to the duo’s unique expression of “unison music", Azure is among Kenney and Kang’s most pared-down efforts in more than a decade. Its five compositions are underscored by allusions to the natural world and drifting temporalities, producing a profound calm that rises in arcs of tonal color. The album’s opener, Eclipse, is a composition built around the phrase “eclipse…inside the eclipse”, drawn from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s book, Dictee. Leaving aching silences between each utterance - Kenney’s sparse vocal interventions enmeshed with Kang’s delicate viola d’amore tones - the piece’s collective elements produce a remarkable tension bubbling within its spacious calm. The title track, Azure, takes its name from a pun on the Persian "az u" or "from her/him/them”, and is a meditation on the closing rhymes of ghazal 413 from the Divan of Hafez, such as mâh az u, râh az u, and âh az u, “the moon from them, the path from them, the sighs from them”. Imbued with sorrow and release, across the piece Kenney’s vocals and Kang’s viola d’amore weave and dance against a shruti drone, calling forth echoes of lost moments in far off worlds. This is followed by three pieces that incorporate traces of wide-ranging techniques into their forms. Ocean is an experiment with different intensities of pulsation, with inspiration from ring modulation’s use of two simultaneous frequencies, which assemble an enveloping expanse of intoxicating harmonics and vibrato. For Forest Floor, Kenney’s long-tone vocalizations play on the meanings of ‘tan’ or body, and ‘nur’ or light, and the town names of ‘Chegel’ and ‘Khotan’ from ghazal 327 from the Divan of Hafez. Dancing at the boundaries of sorrow and joy, her voice, paced in perfect harmony to Kang’s viola, seems to propose alternate realities of what ecstatic music might be. The album’s final piece draws upon Glenna Cole Allee’s book, Hanford Reach, incorporating photographs and words spoken within by interviewees living or working in the tribal territories of Wanapum, Yakama, Cayuse, Umatilla, Nez Perce, and many others on or near the Hanford Nuclear Site in the state of Washington. Among the album’s most dynamic and powerful efforts - drones and pizzicato tones playing counterpoint to Kenney’s soaring vocals - the duo, inexplicably, imbues strong impressions of that landscape. As Suzanne Kite states in the album’s liner notes, with each of Azure’s discrete expressions Jessika Kenney and Eyvind Kang “ask our ears to hold/stop/wait/listen closely to the edges of knowability, while the world continues around our sounding bodies… [they] draw our ears so closely that if we are not careful, the listener’s breathing could interfere, our blinking could interface with each tone, and we would blindly intercede into what is a landscape being formed before our ears. Azure pushes us to find a deeper rhythm, to move, grow, and form our listening bodies towards each composition.” Azure is available via Ideologic Organ as a vinyl LP, mastered by their original sound collaborator Mell Dettmer, cut by Andreas Kauffelt at Schnittstelle and pressed at Optimal, CD, and digital download, with sleeve photos by Glenna Cole Allee / Text by Suzanne Kite, and a live photo by Kali Malone.