Finders Keepers Records' continued and unwaning commitment to preserving the archives of composer Suzanne Ciani pays off in an avalanche of dividends with this latest master tape discovery, placing further markers in the historical development of electronic music and cinematic composition. Developed at a lesser-documented axis combining Ciani's key disciplines as a revolutionary synthesist and an accomplished pianist, these early works from 1973 capture a rare glimpse of one of the world's most important electronic music figures embarking on the early throes of a fruitful career as a film composer and sound designer with this rare and previously unheard documentary music illustrating the first-ever skiers' decent from the peak of the tallest mountain in Alaska. Capturing innocence and optimism in its composition, but never less than masterful in its realisation, Denali takes what would later become the yin and yang in Ciani's versatile musical personality and provides unrivalled vistas from both side of the mountain, scaling a treacherous and fine creative line. Within the context of Suzanne Ciani's achievements the words “maverick” and "pioneer" have regularly shared sentences amongst a list of "firsts" when documenting her expansive CV as a Grammy nominated, million-selling recording artist, and genuine revolutionary in the progression of future music in all its early capacities. But it is with this important release of uncovered recordings from early 1973 that Ciani's "exploratory" compositions from her formative years find kinship alongside the exploits of other radical and historic trailblazers, as the music for the film known only as Denali finally achieves a wider vantage point. Commissioned in the early years of Suzanne's "professional" life, in a period that bridged her activities with art installations, experimental theatre and her rising reputation as a film composer and sound designer, the Denali tape reels preceed Suzanne's film work such as Lloyd Michael Williams Rainbow's Children (1975) and Bryan Forbe's The Stepford Wives (1975) by just 18 months, and capture Suzanne at her wide-eyed best two years after scoring her first-ever paid work providing synthesiser loops for aquariums in Middle America shopping malls (Fish Music, FKSP011). It was in 1972, whilst occupying a studio space in San Francisco, as one of a small group of prophets then celebrating the interpolation of Don Buchla's electronic instruments, that Suzanne was approached by a French speaking ski enthusiast and short film producer called Patrick Derouin to create "forward-thinking" and "otherworldly" themes and sound design for some amazing unseen footage of the first-ever people to ski down the death-defying face of Mount Mckinley in Alaska. Recognised as one of the tallest mountains in the world, this footage would mark a significant historic feat previously inconceivable outside the hat stand notions of a small group of French speaking European explorers and would also coincide with cultural pressure within the Alaska state legislature to lobby for the United States Board On Geographic Names to reinstate the mountain's traditional name Denali (a decision widely supported by The Koyukon Athabaskans who inhabit the area around the mountain for centuries). Given what is now widely recognised about Suzanne Ciani as a composer, it is plain to see that Derouin came to the correct place and as you will hear, for the first time, within the grooves of this record the collective aura of challenge and enlightenment is almost breathtaking in its precise narrative ability; striking similarities with Eno, Kraftwerk and Neu! at their melodic best but from a very different vantage point, with polar opposite means of execution, whilst operating on Ciani's unique and all-important feminine "wave" length. The music on this record was also commissioned two years before Suzanne's first Buchla concerts in 1974 and 1975, which were accompanied by her seminal National Endowment Paper, and would reveal Suzanne's proud commitment to the developed Buchla instrument and her confidence in its place in modern music, thus proving the likes of Denali to be an earlier showcase of the instrument in it's advanced infancy although still robust enough to carry the emotive and ambitious songwriting skills of the classically trained Ciani. After hearing this record it will come as little surprise that the track known as Ski Song would later be reappropriated (and rerecorded) on Ciani's globally critically acclaimed debut album Seven Waves (as the Fourth Wave), which was initially released exclusively in Japan before Turkish-born electronic music pioneer _lhan Mimaro_lu signed the record to his Finnidar imprint at Atlantic records, thus making musical history for Suzanne as a widely celebrated American-Italian female composer. It stands as testimony to the composer's determination and inventive nature that this single track, which would later make its way on to every future music best-seller list in the country, was originally composed on just piano and the modular synth model which she had helped to assemble on Buchla's production line ten years before her Tokyo debut. "Denali was composed using just Buchla and piano," explains Suzanne in 2020. "It was recorded at Rainbow Recording, which is the studio I found and shared with recording engineer Richard Beggs, who then sold it to Francis Ford Coppola after I fell in love and quickly moved to LA," she laments. "If I had stuck around I would have probably ended up doing sound for Coppola," she jokes. Instead, Suzanne would in a short time find her filmic feet in Hollywood (providing sound design for Michael Small's aforementioned The Stepford Wives soundtrack) which would later lead to her winning the accolade of first female film composer to single-handedly record a major motion picture with The Incredible Shrinking Woman in 1982. But it was ten years earlier with Denali that the ball had started rolling alongside the film reel sprockets at Rainbow Recordings. "I have very fond memories of first meeting Patrick and his thick French accent," Suzanne explained. "He was a rugged looking young man who literally looked like he had just stepped down from the mountain himself." The basic brief around Suzanne's musical journey was to be "The story of the arduous ascent and joyous descent of the mountain," which, with one of her most melodic and dynamic projects from her early years, she successfully illustrated with utmost aplomb. Although Suzanne would only see the short film a handful of times, mostly during intense late night recording sessions ("I used to dress like a sailor so I wouldn't get street hassle on the way home"), and never meet to actual cast of the film, she can still remember mind-blowing shots of the skier cascading down the mountains, images that have remained with her throughout the subsequent five decades as a composer. As mountaineering history denotes the first-ever skier to descend from the tip of Denali was indeed in 1972, in dates that correlate directly to Suzanne's meticulously kept tape library and studio diaries. The explorer's name was French speaking Swiss skier Sylvain Saudan, a celebrated household name amongst enthusiasts to this day. Like Suzanne, like Saudan, neither artist have diverted from their path, turned their back on a challenge, nor lost their footing in the face of adversity.

"Mike Cooper returns to Discrepant with a recording of a live set recorded at the Controindicazioni Festival of Improvised Music in Rome in 2003The music moves very slowly through four movements: ‘’Reluctant Swimmer’’, ‘’Movies is Magic’’, Virtual Swimmer’’ and ‘’Dolphins’’. 'Floating in out of the exotic ether and disappearing like smoke, engulfed in the alien hugeness of nature... a very elegant set by a visionary artist.'Mike Cooper says 'the first half is played on my old 1920s National tri-plate lapsteel guitar and the second half on my vietnamese electric lap steel. I also sing two songs along the way. ‘’Movies is Magic’’ by Van Dyke Parks and “Dolphins” by Freid Neil. It was the first time I had ever sung the last song.'"With beautiful artwork collage by Evan Crankshaw.

The Clearing is the debut album by the late Los Angeles-based musician Barry Craig aka A Produce. As co-founder of the underground cassette imprint Trance Port Tapes, Craig managed to assemble local artists who were working within the realms of DIY electronics and rhythmic, spacious sound. Incubated over a three year period, '88 release The Clearing draws on the roster of TPT associates such as Scott Fraser (Kronos Quartet), Daniel Voznick (Afterimage) and guitarist Scott Marc Becker resulting an 'an album of conceptual space', owing equally to the guitar-based new-wave releases of the imprint prior as to the later, and deeper ambient trance sound that would follow. Coming at this intersection of styles, there are moments of deep introspection and sulking, minimal drum machines followed by pieces of more outward expression only to be plunged back into tense, oppressive atmospheres. Yet despite these shifts in style, the sense of mood and cohesion throughout is ever-present, giving a true sense of inhabiting a unique space - or 'The Clearing'. Stockport-based store All Night Flight Records is proud to present this official reissue, with the blessing of Craig's estate and artwork replicated by the original artist - renown designer Bruce Licher of Independent Project Recordings. Release by All Night Flight

This manifesto of outsider orchestrations, teenage symphonies and cultivated concrete is the debut album of experimental Irish avant garde and electro acoustic innovator Roger Doyle. A pianist, composer and improvisational jazz drummer with a penchant for experimentation that would marginalise him from traditional seats of learning in his native homeland but embrace him to the bosom of Europe’s leading forward-thinking research centres for electronic and computer music. Here he would piece together two highly sought after experimental albums before returning home to channel his multi-disciplinary work ethic into the agit pop theatrical company Operating Theatre and play a leading role in the burgeoning Irish new wave scene as an early signing to U2’s Mother Records. A collection of some of Doyle’s earliest works as an indomitable scholarship student of composition at the Royal Irish Academy Of Music in Dublin and then as founding member and drummer of experimental jazz rock outfit Jazz Therapy (who would later become Supply Demand & Curve), this patchwork 1975 debut long-player draws from what was an already bulging portfolio that included academic assignments, living room compositions and soundtrack collaborations with Irish filmmakers. Originally part-recorded and subsequently aborted when the would-be label vanished without trace overnight, Oizzo No was shelved indefinitely until a scholarship at the prestigious Institute Of Sonology at the University Of Utrecht in Holland afforded Doyle not only the opportunity to partially revise his humble opus in their state of the art studios (as well as those of the EMS Studios in Stockholm) but also the money to press a limited run of 500 copies and help further cement the foundations of his future status as one of Ireland’s leading and most versatile contemporary composers.

This is really something, don't miss the wholly unique world of the 1990s hidden classic. Frank Dommert’s debut album was one of the first significant volleys from Cologne in the new decade. His history stretched back through the second half of the 80a, as he’d already released a number of cassettes via his label Entenpfuhl, and had collaborated with Hirsche Nicht Aus Sofa (H.N.A.S.), the Aachen-based surrealist-noise-junk outfit led by Christoph Heemann and Achim P Li Khan. Their connection with English cut-up/industrial project Nurse With Wound (NWW’s Stapleton released an early H.N.A.S. album on his label, United Dairies) can be heard in Kiefermusik as well, a disorienting collage which, as Dommert says, “is pretty much a [LSD] trip, intentional and in a large portion, unconscious.” Dommert’s music has a peculiar logic to it that marks it out from the pack, though, perhaps due to his growing fascination with “Art Brut and naïve stuff”. Kiefermusik is simultaneously a rough-as-guts album of collapsing architectures and an intelligent, sensitively sculpted masterpiece of editing, with Dommert winding a psychedelic spool around loops that could spin out into eternity. --- - Fresh remaster by Frederick Alstadt- Added interview insert sheet with Frank Dommert- Limited edition pressing of 500 --- Pacific Sound Vision, 2017

Dog Life explores free improvised music on a high-energetic plateau, descending from the outskirts of free jazz, and further towards a harder, darker and undefined terrain. Their debute album was critically acclaimed in Europe as well as in the US. On their new album Fresh From the Ruins, Doglife continue to push the freejazz-punk limits and sets out new directions with elements of doom and noise. --- Anna Högberg: Saxophones Finn Loxbo: Electric Bass Mårten Magnefors: Drums --- Omlott Records, 2018

SLE008.5 shows Parisian artist D.K.'s concern for the nostalgia-tinged 90s electronica and second room IDM that inform not just his compositional practice but also our own tastes here at the label. Recorded live at the intimate South Korean venue The Edge, this limited 12" births fleeting moments in a late night music bar into physical form. Propulsive rhythmic tension, heavy doses of reverb and glassy, cavernous sound design across six movements.

Typhonian Highlife is the new moniker of Spencer Clark. Clark is the ultimate shape shifter, a trickster continuously mutating from a sci-fi hero, into a mystic guru or into a speculative visionary. As Typhonian Highlife he assimilates juxtapositions of the natural world and fantastic technology to reanimate the manieristic tradition. His compositions envision possible futures and speculative pasts. They imagine a new vision upon mankind, as a mythical underwater creature who creates meaning through a prosaic mysticism. His latest record, "The World Of Shells" works as an dream expedition that has overflowed itself into real time. Through continual material-world visualization a technological nature music unfolds as series of movements outlining the existence of Mythological African creature. Travelling through Hollywood, Hanging Rock, Australia, and The Ear of Dionysus in Sicily the creature was placed, and has enacted a music and art form that explores a sci-fi aquatic and wind-blown desert fusion to uncover the life and wanderings of this non-material being. --- Written, performed & produced by Spencer Clark Artwork by Spencer Clark Mastering by Christophe Albertijn --- Released 2016

Farida Amadou, Liz Kosack and Dag Magnus Narvesen came together for a gig in Berlin, organised by Pattern Dissection in February 2020, at which they shared the stage for the first time — resulting in a sweaty winter night and a cheering, overwhelmed audience. Their idiosyncratic line-up of electric bass, synthesizer and drums is foundation to spectacular group improvisation, pushing through seething soundscapes and incredibly dynamic interplay to agile free jazz attacks of astonishing intensity. They met again six months later for a day in the studio to record their debut album and the inaugural release on the Pattern Dissection record label. Dag Magnus’s down-tuned drum set builds the ground for relentless legwork and hectic wrestling, shaking the floor when confronted with Farida’s high string slaps on the bass guitar, which they occasionally swap for droning vibrations and scorching fingerpicking, neither shying away from a heavy riff nor stripped back momentum. Liz’s synth is an idiosyncratic creature of its own, birthing sounds rarely graspable but utterly fascinating, swift in taking turns and always one step ahead of any expectation. Before meeting as a band the three artists cut their teeth in numerous projects and constellations as well as finding a highly personal voice in playing their respective instrument: By challenging possibilities and limits and navigating to unknown territory, CIRCUIT will keep you on the edge of your seat. All music composed and performed by Farida Amadou, Liz Kosack and Dag Magnus Narvesen, recorded in Berlin on July 28, 2020.

Beside Myself is the second full-length release from Canadian sound artist Crys Cole. Known to many through her extensive collaborative practice with artists such as Oren Ambarchi, Leif Elggren, and James Rushford, in her solo work cole uses contact microphones, voice, simple electronics, and field recordings to create sonic environments that linger uneasily at the threshold of perception. Demonstrating how cole's work has developed and deepened since the relative austerity of her first solo LP Sand/Layna (BT 017LP, 2015), Beside Myself offers two lushly immersive side-long pieces that explore ideas of compositional drift. 'The Nonsuch' is inspired by the aural hallucinations experienced in the hypnagogic state during the onset of sleep. Opening with scratching contact mic textures and unintelligible vocal murmurs, the piece threads together live and studio performances with field recordings of urban environments to create a texture that is at once seemingly consistent and marked by constant transitions. Individual elements rise up from the background thrum only to disappear just as we become conscious of them; heterogenous sounds and spaces succeed one another with the unassailable logic of dreams. 'In Praise of Blandness (Chapter IX)' also focuses on drift and transition, but in a much more single-minded way. Over a rich, slowly-evolving organ drone, cole reads a passage from the French sinologist François Julien's book In Praise of Blandness (1991) exploring the concept of 'blandness' in the Taoist aesthetics of sound. Beginning crisp and clear, cole's voice becomes gradually less distinct over the course of the piece, the spoken words blurred by resonant frequencies à la Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room until we are left with only the rhythm of incomprehensible speech. The text that cole reads acts a perfect description of her aesthetic project: 'We hear it still, but just barely, and as it diminishes it makes all the more audible that soundless beyond into which it is about to extinguish itself. We are listening then, to its extinction, to its return to that great undifferentiated matrix'." --Francis Plagne (November, 2019) Includes download code; edition of 300.

Building upon a standing commitment to the work of artists who worked in international obscurity under the shadow of 1960s and '70s fascist Spain, Alga Marghen returns with "El Artilugio”, a never before issued body of work by Manuel Calvo. Bridging the contexts of installation, sound art, sound poetry, and experimental music / noise, its stunning two sides - issued in a limited edition of 200 copies on vinyl, housed in a gatefold sleeve with an accompanying large format 8-page booklet with in-depth liner notes by musicologist Gabriele Bonomo - open a visionary creative universe, too long hidden by the history's weight. Over their decades of activity, the Italian imprint, Alga Marghen, has illuminated a near countless number of historical artefacts at the juncture of visual art, experimental music and avant-garde deployments of language, helping to radically reshape our understanding of 20th Century creative practice. Embedded within their ever-growing discography lies a small window, via releases by Zaj members Walter Marchetti, José Luis Castillejo and Juan Hidalgo, into the avant-garde happening occurring in Spain during the '60s and '70s, while the country lay under the final decades of fascist rule. Now, Alga opens access to this radical world with El Artilugio, a stunning LP of previously unavailable sonic art by multidisciplinary artist, Manuel Calvo, created in 1966. Creatively thrilling and existing outside the larger historical vision of experimental practice occourring in Europe during that decade, its stunning sounds are issued on vinyl in a gatefold sleeve, accompanied by a large format 8-page booklet with in-depth liner notes by musicologist Gabriele Bonomo, in an edition of 200 copies. As important as world-premiere releases come.Born in 1934, during the 1950s and '60s Manuel Calvo emerged as a forerunner and a protagonist of geometric abstract painting in Spain, working against the odds attempting freely expression within the context of fascist rule in Spain that had taken hold during the early years of his life. During his early career, he was closely aligned with groups like Equipo 57 and Grupo Parpallo, artists who were active around Valencia and held strong connections to the rest of Europe, developing the principles of an analytical art in opposition to the main currents of informal art and lyrical abstraction.This restless questioning increased to more radical tendencies in his work, a period spent in Paris and then Brazil, before returning to Spain in 1966 where he fell into contact with artists like Juan Hidalgo and Walter Marchetti, who had founded the Zaj group in Madrid in 1964, and begun creating some of the most subversive means of aesthetic communication encountered during that period.Calvo’s new phase of radicalism, embarked upon between 1966 and 1967, centered around the transformation of his studio into a laboratory where he could hold a permanent exhibition of his works, opening it to the public with no temporal limits, in the hope to reverse the standing perceptions of what an exhibition was. Within this space, Calvo created El artilugio, a participatory installation where the effects of light variations were randomly activated through simple buttons by the audience, opening the potential for open structures of unlimited possibilities for random variation. In addition to this, through a process similar to that applied to the light, Calvo introduced a reel-to-reel recording machine and a pre-recorded magnetic tape as a sonic element, recording the parasitic noises of an old electric engine that were then introduced into the installation via the reel-to-reel. It is this sound component of the installation that makes up Alga Marghen’s incredible LP, El artilugio, opening long overdue access to this singular creative world.El artilugio comprise two side long tracks. The first encounters the brilliant, randomized sonic universe that accompanied the installation of the same name, appearing somewhere between sound collage - split and juxtaposed by the participant’s push-button activated manipulation - and a microscopic journey across the surface and generative possibilities of the machine whose sounds it captures, rattling, clicking, scratching, droning, and buzzing as it goes, before fading out in a glissando after nearly half an hour.As a fascinating juxtaposition, the second side of El artilugio features the performance of an Austrian soprano singer reading out phonems, alliterations of single words, tongue twisters, and texts in different languages, repeated obsessively into states of abstraction that offers a stunning counterpoint to other forms of sound poetry being created during this period across the globe.Issued in a vinyl edition of 200 copies, in a gatefold sleeve that also includes a large format 8-page booklet, with El artilugio Alga Marghen has offered yet another triumphant window into the incredible world of singular artists working against the odds within fascist Spain, expanding their long-standing commitment to illuminating under-celebrated artefacts from the 20th Century, and changing history as they go. Absolutely incredible, and a must for any fan of sound art, sound poetry, and experimental music at large.

'Studies / Studien / Etudes' is a collection of pieces on synth by Rotterdam-based artist Joost M. de Jong jr., inspired by the first wave of Krautrock, Wendy Carlos and straight-to-VHS soundtracks. His music is both abstract and melodic, playful and austere, highly experimental and endlessly replayable... TEXT ↓It turns out that ‘Joost M. de Jong, Jr.’ is just one of the incarnations, in name and character, of the man sitting in front of me. As a person, he is apologetic about being chaotic and about being a millennial. As a musician, he goes by a number of monikers, past and present. Oliver Oat makes pop music, Boze Adelaar raps, and Jose Happa does Casio Latin. Joost also lends his musical assistance to many other bands. It was in one of these bands, Bonne Aparte, that Michiel Klein, who runs the cassette label DeHef, noticed Joost’s doodling between songs on the MoPho, a one-voice synth with sub-oscillator. He encouraged him to keep playing around, to record some segments and forward them to him for a future tape compilation release. This provided a focus for the heretofore ‘unguided’ doodling and arpeggios; they now had a purpose and a goal.In much the same way, Joost’s earliest musical inclinations at the age of five were directed into piano lessons by his parents, to formalise his fiddling. This led to a sequence of musical adventures through his childhood, including participation in a church choir and playing Swedish folk music; violin- and singing lessons; and pop-music lessons. Later on he studied sublime poetry in Edinburgh, Scotland; picked up the accordion and the ukulele; messed with PCs and SCSI hard-disk recording; then went on to the guitar, melodic death metal, and radio-promo productions.Joost’s classical training can be clearly discerned in the arpeggiated tracks on this album, influenced by Béla Bartók, Bach’s fugues, eighties soundtracks, Krautrock, and electronic pioneers such as Wendy Carlos. The tracks were recorded on VCR using a combination of Roland JX-3P, Korg Mono/Poly, Roland Juno-60, an old mixer, an Echolette suitcase delay machine and more. Klein’s curatorial input was responsible for losing a drumtrack and looping some shorter pieces.So, listen closely and let the mathematical intricacy of synthesised arpeggios take you on a ride over some imaginary moviescapes. Text written by Danny Bosten, Rotterdam

The second release on the Henning Christiansen Archive is a compilation of four works from 1967-1972 including a poem set in a bath, an unknown musical work, the musical backdrop to a horse sacrifice and a soundtrack to a school play. What binds these works together alongside the period when written is their basis in ‘song’ and some traditional ‘musical’ elements. What separates it from said tradition is that they were composed by Henning Christiansen. Op.41 Badet is a simple work featuring 3 elements: Charlotte Strandgaard reading her poem Badet (The Bath), Henning playing melodica and the sound of water splashing in a bath. The result is an unusual and evocative lo-fi setting to the resigned nature of the reading. Not a lot is known about Kom Frem For Satan (Come Forward Satan). Possibly a soundtrack of sorts? It certainly carries that mood with it’ jazz inflicted interludes, melodic organ moments all interlaced with the diegetic sounds of cars, footsteps, gunshots, etc. The result comes across like a gangster tinged musique concrete radio play. Kom Frem For Satan also shares musical motifs that appear in Op.72 on side two of the lp. Min Død Hest was previously released as a single sided 10” under the name Hesteofringen, here restored under it’s correct name. Min Død Hest (My Dead Horse) was written to accompany the Bjørn Nørgaard performance Hesteofringen (The Horse Sacrifice) on the 30th of Jan 1970, one of the most notorious performances in Danish art history. Featuring a poem written by Lene Adler Pedersen, this is a recording made after the performance with Lene Adler Pedersen singing, accompanied by Christiansen on piano (as opposed to the green violin he used in the performance), Min Død Horse is a beautiful haunting fragile song laden with metaphor, a sad lullaby is as simple and unusual as anything in Christiansen’s output. Op.72 Bondeføreren Knud Lavard is a the soundtrack to a school play performed on at the Fanefjord School on the island of Møn, Denmark, where he lived, in 1972. Another surprising work in Christiansen’s oeuvre the 6 pieces that make up this work shift between the sinister and sweet, often in the same track. Falling within the same period Henning made the soundtrack to The Executioner, Bondeføreren Knud Lavard mixes the melancholic romantic mood of that soundtrack whilst deep organ chords, military drumming and an acoustic guitar solo (played by Henning’s first son Esben Christiansen) all make an appearance. This is an sublime collection from one the 20th Centuries most diverse composers at the bridge between his romantic and avant-garde phases. Limited LP in an edition of 500 copies with:  Large bespoke fold out sleeve on craft board with white reverse Printed inner sleeve A2 poster  Postcard Compiled by Thorbjørn Reuter Christiansen and Mark Harwood Design and Concept by Maja Larsson Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi

Icepick is the super-power trio of some of the busiest musicians on this planet – American, Brooklyn-based trumpeter Nate Wooley, Norwegian, Austin-based bass player Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, and American, Upstate New York-based drummer Chris Corsano. Hellraiser is already the third album of this trio and was recorded live in February 2018, on the occasion of a gathering supporting the Option series at Experimental Sound Studios (ESS) in Chicago. Originally, this performance was slated for another Wooley-led group, and only last-minute travel issues led to the rare occasion where all three members of Icepick happened to be free for the date in Chicago. The ESS continues to host and facilitate online Quarantine Concert Series even in this coronavirus lockdown era, reminding all of us what we used to celebrate not so long ago. The infrequent meetings of this trio do not affect the immediate flow of the music and the profound, telepathic interplay of Wooley, Håker Flaten & Corsano, all are masters of free-improvised format. The three collective, improvised pieces highlight their great experience and focus on structuring loose compositions through improvisation techniques, on account of powerful, wild eruptions but, still, with the fiery excitement of such a performance. Håker Flaten & Corsano build mighty yet quite flexible rhythmic patterns on the opening piece «El-Bound», fueling the soaring flights and deep whispers of Wooley. Wooley sketches «Chicago Deader» as a moving ballad while Håker Flaten & Corsano color his singing melody with disturbing, restless colors, slowly building a massive pulse. The last and longest piece, the 17-minutes «Blueline» cements the reserved atmosphere of this performance. The fractured rhythmic patterns of Håker Flaten & Corsano are the basis for Wooley’s intense employment of an array of extended breathing techniques, but soon enough all three musicians calibrate perfectly on their own dance. First in wild moves but later in more suggestive, poetic moves, repeating, again and again, the simple, melodic theme, all the way until the ecstatic coda, without raising hell, but still in perfect shape. --- NATE WOOLEY - Trumpet INGEBRIGT HÅKER FLATEN - Bass CHRIS CORSANO - Drums --- Released 2020; Astral Spirits

Patrick Kessler is not afraid to stare death into the eyes. Twelve times in June 2020, he challenged people to a duel, although duelling has been outlawed in Switzerland since 1937. But no fear! Patrick Kessler, founder and director of the Chuchchepati Orchestra, challenged his opponents, who arrived by train and were armed with an instrument, solely musically. When the train arrived at 12:12 noon each day, Patrick met with the challengers for freely improvised tonal battles on the gravel square in front of the bucolic Rietli station in the canton of Appenzell Ausserrhoden. The project called “Low Noon” references the famous movie “High Noon” by Fred Zinnemann. It tells the story of an imminent fight between Sheriff Will Cane and gangster Frank Miller, whose arrival at the Hadleyville train station is expected at midday. In Kessler’s adaptation, the arrival of the “gangsters” was postponed by twelve minutes for scheduling reasons. But this only heightend the suspense until the train came to a screeching halt at the Rietli station house. The rules: arrive,get off, play, get on, get out! The duels lasted twelve minutes each, then the guests hopped on the next train. The rivals that Kessler met, armed with a double bass and a drawn bow, make up the Chuchchepati Orchestra. Some of them, you will hear, make music faster (or slower) than their shadows... The twelve duels at Rietli station were recorded. You are holding one of the ­limited edition vinyl copies. Frank Heer

'Sometimes the old hands tell the truth. Cherry made it known some years ago that the cosmic hummus resonates. Bound by bread & blub High Wycombe Wullie (Harrison) & The Guildford Grouch (Murphy) took to Roedale Valley allotments some years back to sow the seeds for 'Slow Lightning'. Which is neither a split or a collab, but rather a love letter forged between close pals of the sonic ital. Let the Lion's gaze turn the weeds to stone! Harrison shows his delicate hand with thin precision loops and strange little snapshots. Scuttering gadgets wheeze ominous scents into the faces of yelping robotic kittens and the dictaphone player in yr mind just keeps intoning “let the low tide tingle, fella!” Murphy proves he is no recycled revenant with a brave and bold bowl of text-sound tit pickle. Huff the high fidelity and let tribute be paid to those voices as they have teachings. The loops and the breaks keep it simmering nice, while flabbergasted turntables press cheeks with prime Bohman-esque yabber. Like Don probably never said “Let the duck honk rasp yr brain, man! ' Dylan Nyoukis, October 2020 Mastered by Julian Tardo at Church Road Studio Photography by Eddie Nuttall Released Sham Repro

After studying with composers John Cage and Earle Brown, Joe Jones became a prominent figure in Fluxus, contributing to the movement's first "yearbox" alongside La Monte Young, György Ligeti and Nam June Paik. Beginning in late 1961, Jones began constructing his own music machines – drawing inspiration from the calliopes, automata and orchestrions of the 19th and early 20th century to create self-playing ensembles of stringed instruments, percussion and woodwinds – "played" through an elaborate (yet decidedly lo-tech) system of rubber bands, balls and tin foil. Christened the Tone Deaf Music Company, this battery of automated musical instruments generates the sounds on In Performance (originally released in 1977 on the Harlequin Art imprint). With exacting conceptual precision and varied subtleties of natural motion – not unlike Harry Bertoia's sounding sculptures – Jones' machines produce richly-textured strata of sound and serve as engines of paradox. While bringing the figure of the artist-composer to the foreground, the machines ultimately dispense with the need for the performer entirely – a cunning subversion of the fetish for virtuosity and individual genius. Limited edition of 500 numbered copies on clear vinyl.