Comic book artist, graphic designer and free jazz improviser are only some of the many talents from Beirut born Mazen Kerbaj. After appearing as part of various ensembles on the label, Ariha Brass Quartet (CREP46) and Johnny Kafta Anti-Vegetarian Orchestra (CREP22), Kerbaj finally lands a solo outfit of his own onto the Discrepant dancefloor of insubordination. 14 years after his first (and only) solo album "Brt Vrt Zrt Krt" (Al Maslakh, 2005) Mazen returns with a series of subtle compositions of his own with not one but two(!) solo albums of prepared trumpet that further cement his international position as a serial trumpet botherer. Whilst Vol. 2.1 showcases his (almost) (un)familiar arsenal of squawks, cackles, howls and squeals, Vol.2.2 goes deep into the nether regions of waltzing drones and bell tweaks so deep that would make most cetaceans loose their concentration. The notion of being transported to a luring mutant underwater alien community is still present on these long(er) trips with the added meditative pieces being occasionally pierced by noise creepers, nothing is what you want or expect and that’s the way it should be. If Vol. 2.1 is the classic follow up LP, this one is the beast from the deep, it comes surging and screeching from a deep oceanic sink hole, only to hypnotize you with perverted dance moves before diving back into the sinking, wettest and darkest cave in the world. Vol. 2.2 is a summons album; it shatters any bar there was with its intentional use of everything Vol. 2.1 was denied. It grabs you by wherever available way and it only releases you when you’re ready to listen to it again. Listen to both albums back to back, in no particular order and you’ll know that there’s nothing you can do but come back to it like a doped up seal stranded in a phantom island – appearing and disappearing as the music dictates it to.

The term ‘supergroup’ often comes with tacky connotations, but this is the real deal. Through hard work and a tirelessly inquisitive spirit, Nate Wooley, Dave Rempis, Pascal Niggenkemper and Chris Corsano have become some of the most versatile improvisers of their generation. As From Wolves To Whales, they turn their imposing collective strength into a relentless new whole. Relentless, not just because of the energy levels or the generous amount of freedom, but because of the consistent inventiveness they display. This takes place on an individual level (let it be clear that each musician is a monster on his own instrument), but also because they always keep the bigger picture in mind. As such, Dead Leaves Drop is a terrific example of what all great improvising bands aspire to: find the shortest route from thought to action and turn it into brand new forms that transcend the sum of their parts.

Available as 320kbp MP3 or 24bit FLAC  Tracklisting: 1. Chiltern - Side A - 19:50 2. Chiltern - Side B - 20:56  Conceived whilst wandering through the iron bark forests and gold fields of country Victoria the official debut by Melbourne’s Hour House gifts a musical blueprint marinated in mystery, beauty, sound and song. Hour House is the Melbourne based duo of Mark Leacy and Sam Kenna, formerly of the Newcastle based outfit Castings. Penultimate Press is proud to release their official debut LP Chiltern. Comprised of individual tracks folded into two side long suites Chiltern is an unique excursion through foreign encounters, warm surrounds and disorientating comfort. Field recordings, electronics, samples, guitars, voice and atmospherics all contribute to form a bewitching whole.Many questions are raised: Is this a soundtrack to a mental experience or an altered take on a familiar reality? Is section 3 based around the sound of a basketball court? Does section 4 comprise a song? Where do the original soviet science fiction soundtracks fit into all this? Is this sound or music? Simultaneously ambiguous and accessible Chiltern is a ride unlike another and resides as the consciousness tickling release of 2015. Mastered by Jason Lescalleet at Glistening Labs, and with stunning artwork by Alice Wormald.

Fluence is the brainchild and first release of sound artist / provocateur Pascal Comelade. Recorded in Montpellier, France in 1974-1975, the project consists of exploratory electronic pieces in the Fripp & Eno vernacular with a Kosmische tinge. 'A Few Reasons To Stay / A Few Reasons To Split,' a title inspired by Swiss conceptual artist Urs Lüthi, features Comelade's kaleidoscopic arpeggios and Richard Pinhas' howling guitar, which variously resembles a dreamlike cello and ghostly human moans. 'Barcelona Tango's' off-kilter exotica with pocket trumpet and looping drum beats foreshadows Comelade's later work, which would create a stir in some avant-garde circles for his use of unorthodox instruments (plastic saxophone, toy piano, etc.) On the side-long 'Schizo,' Comelade's electric organ with probing, Terry Riley-esque swooshes collides with Gabriel Ibanez's thick, reedy buzz -- together forming a truly magical soundscape. These incendiary performances ably join the ranks of other dreamily cosmic, impressionistic guitar-and-synth masterworks like No Pussyfooting and The Serpent (In Quicksilver) as well as Conny Veit's work with Popol Vuh. Originally released in 1975, Fluence offers a remarkable emotional and textural range -- richly experimental and deeply progressive -- that sounds at once timeless and strikingly contemporary. This first-time standalone reissue is limited to 750 numbered copies.

While g a b b r o, Hanne De Backer’s baritone sax project, used a no frills duo concept for its debut album, things take a different turn on Granular. With Marc De Maeseneer again by her side, this album also involves fellow Belgian experimentalist Raphael Malfliet on electric bass, as well as singular vocalist Agnes Hvizdalek. Taken from studio recordings, as well as the quartet’s performance at 2018’s Summer Bummer Festival, Granular turns fragmentation and attention for detail, sound and space into an invitation to listen without prejudice and expectations. The result is a strikingly original impression of a universe full of unconventional techniques, which retains a balance between the highly personal and a remarkable openness, turning the granules of the title into a broader, organic whole.

Ben Ellul-Knight & Tom White - I’ve had it up to hear with fish & chips (CCP006) I've had it up to hear with fish & chips is a hörspiel about 'care work' of all kinds. In part it is auto-ethnographic, as it draws on Ben's experience working as a play worker, social worker and as a volunteer with refugee and asylum-seeker support services. More personal reflections are mixed with conversations Ben had with support workers, social workers, play workers and mental health nurses to form a script. Different speakers/singers were then invited to record themselves reading the script in any way they wanted and this was used as Tom's raw material for the composition. I've had it up to hear with fish & chips was first performed live in the Radiophrenia studio, Glasgow 2016.

Sabine Blödorn and Kai Drewitz return with their fifth album as Floating di Morel, presenting their work under that name with Thorsten Neu on the A-side and their work with Ulf Goretzki as Ulf / FdM on the B-side. As they put it, "The new (5th) Floatin' LP is divided in two parts. On one side you hear the last works together with Thorsten Neu, which you know from the records 'said my said' and 'goal less play'. The other side is a new more electronic experience with ULF." Recorded by Ulf / FdM. Mastered by Jan Wagner.

A posthumous duo LP featuring text and music by Conrad Schnitzler, music by Wolfgang Seidel, and artwork by Matt Howarth! Conrad Schnitzler and Wolfgang Seidel have been musical collaborators since the early 1970s when Seidel performed in Schnitzler's free-form group Eruption that had been founded as a successor to Kluster and featured a revolving cast of members. In the 1980s, they produced the duo albums Consequenz, Consequenz II and Con 3 where Seidel performed under his alias Wolf Sequenza. ** Edition of 300 with printed inner sleeve and insert containing a transcript of side A and liner notes. ** Shortly before Conrad Schnitzler's death in 2011, he handed Wolfgang Seidel a hard disk of his archive including a huge collection of music originally recorded to CD-R, subdivided into "solos" and "mixes", where solos are building blocks to be blended with other solos in a performance, and mixes are recordings of such performances. One of those solos turned out to be a spoken-word CD-R, aptly titled "CONtext", where Schnitzler gives an account of his musical philosophy – in a performative lecture with a lot of humour. It is not known what he intended this recording for, but its unique character made it a natural choice for a building block of a new piece. Instead of making a collage with other solos from Schnitzler's archive, Seidel decided to record his own music to accompany the text, inspired by the early-1970s Eruption recordings. The resulting 8-channel piece was mixed down to stereo for side A of this LP and features Schnitzler's voice and English text-to-speech subtitles for his non-German-speaking fans. Side B contains an instrumental posthumous duo for which Seidel used excerpts from Schnitzler's EMS synthesizer performance at the Gallery House in London in 1972. The cover artwork was created by US comic artist Matt Howarth and features Con, a character from his Savage Henry comic book series who is a "German synthethist" and member of the premiere insect-rock group, the Bulldaggers. "Any combination of sounds is just as valid as any other. Any means for the production of a group of sounds is just as valid as any other means. [...] Music is not what reaches our ear as a sound wave. It's not the sounds that are music, but what we've made out of them and what has been heard from them." - Conrad Schnitzler

• Limited Edition of 100 LPs• 20-page color booklet with photos, numbered• ‘Spiky DJ’ stickerJubilee is an album of selections from the last five years of multifarious output by the art collective FPBJPC, including Jonathan Gean, Michael Pollard, Ben Schumacher, and Peter Friel. Including 8-hand piano arrangements of Schiller’s “An Die Freude,” helpful techno, free guitar quartets, music from their film The China Chalet Group, and more, Jubilee is an incomplete picture of FPBJPC’s life-long research into ways of hanging out. Side A ends with an anthemic Interpol “cover” performed at the collective’s own Responsibility Festival, which took over southern Ontario’s Wolfe Island for a weekend in the summer of 2019.  Everything in FPBJPC’s oeuvre requires you to tilt your head to adjust where the glare obscures the picture. Or there’s no glare, but we’re accustomed to thinking there ought to be one. I was in the audience for the 2019 Recital Earth Day Gala concert, and during FPBJPC’s set someone in the audience muttered to me, “perfect music.” At the Interpol concert, I was also in the audience. I didn’t know the words and didn’t feel like crowdsurfing, but I was very happy to be there. This music helps me remember how to learn how to love. Maybe in the last seventy years or so the loveless mistrust of fucks given has become the cruel, background fuck whose givenness is a given. FPBJPC invites us to relieve ourselves of that cruelty and, thereby, invites us back into love. Perfect music.

Label description: We’ve been great fans of ‘The Duchess of Oysterville’, the first outing from the duo of Chris Forsyth & Nate Wooley on cd some years ago on Creative Sources (with a follow-up later on Chocolate Monk), and had been looking for an opportunity to work with them if possible. Their duo is one of those cases that reveal different and unexpected qualities from the participants, and points to a third mind of shorts at play, a meeting that seems to open up the two towards an underexplored territory. With a palette consisting of guitar and trumpet, they make together music that often focuses on an ugly/beautiful scorched earth territory of hissing subtlety. ‘Third’ was recorded live in concert on March 16, 2013 in Philadelphia and mastered by Bhob Rainey. Chris Forsyth is a lauded guitarist and composer whose work often assimilates art-rock textures with vernacular American influences. Long active in underground circles, he’s recently released a string of acclaimed records of widescreen guitar rock, including 2014’s Intensity Ghost (No Quarter) that have brought his music to the attention of a wider audience. Forsyth first became active in the experimental scene in the 2000s as a founding member of the unclassifiable experimentalists Peeesseye (w/ Fritz Welch & Jaime Fennelly). He’s also collaborated with Tetuzi Akiyama, Nate Wooley, Shawn Hansen, Koen Holtkamp, Chris Heenan, and choreographer Miguel Gutierrez. He is a recipient of a 2011 Pew Fellowship in the Arts and resides in Philadelphia. New York based trumpeter Nate Wooley has performed on over 100 recordings. Increasingly acknowledged internationally, Wooley’s specific style is part of a burgeoning revolution in experimental trumpet technique with the likes of improvisers Evan Parker, John Zorn, Anthony Braxton, and Thurston Moore. His own compositions expand conceptions of linguistic based embouchure manipulation and utilize the trumpet to control amplified feedback. Design and photography by Thalia Raftopoulou

GENESIS : Jean-Luc Guionnet and Claire Bergerault have been working as an organ/voice duo in various churches since 2007. The challenge being, each time, first of all to adapt to the configuration of the building and the organ; and then to stretch their music on the breach of this singularity. AIRS TROUVÉS: The melodic forms, when they arrive, Jean-Luc Guionnet and Claire Bergerault approach them in the manner of a found air as one speaks of a found object. At the crossroads of attention, to the detail of the voice and what is unique about this organ — such an unusual register, such an impossible chord, such a disagreement on such a key with such an orchestration. As if the timbre, when you listen to it as closely as possible, induces a set of lines that would have to be drawn. These tunes are ultimately found through experimentation and it is the structure taken by the search that profiles the result. "Previously our music was inhabited by abstraction, by going towards these found tunes, we opened up to a concreteness that we might want to touch with our fingers: rather simple forms, which neither we want nor we don't want, and that once in hand, we work with the air of a slight relentlessness ... a relentlessness that goes with big holes and long full ones, suspense in both, then dives inside long turnings, bringing us closer to traditions very little known to us, or half-dreamt of, that usually keep close to them the weathered old people and the noise of the work of dancing clogs.

The debut full length from Facit after a few years of silence. Often working as a duo consisting of Joakim Karlsson and Mai Nestor, Facit released a couple of fantastic EPs between 2013 and 2016. --- Beach Music is a rapid turn from the previous recordings, with barely no traces left of the minimal wave and synth-pop of the past. Recorded by Joakim Karlsson alone at the island of Hönö in the west coast archipleggio outside of Gothenburg in the summer of 2020, Beach Music is an entirely guitar-based album. With an old Vantage guitar, Joakim has created a beautiful morning light soundtrack. 10 shimmering instrumentals stripped down to the bare minimum. --- Joakim Karlsson Mai Nestor --- Discreet Music, 2021

Debut LP from this new Philadelphia four-piece whose members include Siltbreeze, Blackest Ever Black, Vitrine, Cor Ardens, & Kashual Plastik alumni. With one sought-after tape behind them the band attempt a surreal approximation of nice music. Their general merriment and creative fervour was captured in recordings over a few chance family dinners and channelled through a selection of poorly tuned instruments and detritus. Songs collapsing into abstraction, or vagueness uniting in melody, Sift captures the moment between one thing ending and another beginning. Teen girlfriends mumbled bedroom jams striking the secret chord. Alchemy from the ashes. The sound of ideas and ideals. Although conceptually akin to fellow Philadelphian Sun Ra’s Strange Strings, Sift likens to sounds from the early 4AD catalogue, Flying Nun’s slowest hitmakers, or Förlag För Fri Musik’s stock-in-trade. Presented on black vinyl in a printed disco bag with an A4 riso insert & obi band.

Vague Enough to Satisfy is Atlanta author and musician Philip Frobos's debut novel, an observation on aging millennials and their definitive label-less relationships through the eyes of a thirty-something from the South. Robert finds himself on holiday in Germany after weeks of traveling with a music group. At a cafe table for two in the hip and "dangerous" Leipzig, he and his new German friend, Geoff, analyze others actions and mediocrity while jostling insecurities and life's simple impulses around the neighborhood. Under a blazing summer sun, Robert and his friends begin to dig a man-sized hole in Geoff's garden with no end in sight. From lake trips in Saxony surrounded by naked sunbathers and bicycle rides through South Atlanta country trails turned developments, they ramble around to the wee-hours meeting various characters in their natural habitats. Geoff acts as a 21st century Virgil providing blatant advice that proves hard to come by, a rope ladder from the clutches of his own uncertainties. Robert's fiancée arrives in Berlin at the end of the week..

Black Editions present a reissue of Kazuo Imai's far and wee, originally released in 2004. Kazuo Imai is one of the few artists to traverse both Japan's early avant-garde and free jazz movements. Kazuo Imai is one of the few artists to traverse both Japan's early avant-garde and free jazz movements. Though he began performing in the 1970s, his 2004 P.S.F. album far and wee was only the second under his name. In a series of thrilling acoustic guitar improvisations -- Imai's playing crackles with dynamic tension and physicality as well as a subtlety and nuance that reveals him as one of the instrument's true masters and innovators. In 2004, Kazuo Imai (Marginal Consort, East Bionic Symphonia) recorded a series of nylon-string classical guitar improvisations at the request of P.S.F. founder Hideo Ikeezumi. far and wee, the resulting album, vibrates with the inherent duality of nylon: the strings stretch and snap back like rubber tautened and released, and paint the softest of caresses in silky washes. Imai was a student of two of the foundational artists of the Japanese avant-garde: Masayuki Takayanagi, the pioneering free-improvising guitarist and Takehisa Kosugi, the visionary Fluxus composer also known for his work with Group Ongaku and the Taj Mahal Travelers. A sense of inquisitiveness about how far he can push himself and every part of the guitar pervades these performances as Imai makes everything from the pegs to the bridge to the strap pin explode with resonate. For over 20 years, Imai has been a driving force behind Marginal Consort a collective of Japanese avant-garde musicians devoted to collective improvisation, known for their incredibly layered and varied annual performances that last for three continuous hours. Using a blend of homemade and traditional instruments, electronics, and sculptural and natural forms, they create auditory experiences of exceptionally unique color and vibration. The same dedication to vitality and variety is found in Imai's guitar music, and it is via the guitar that his vast studies in philosophy and music come together in extreme focus, allowing him to tease and extend the history of the instrument while interrogating the limits of its edge. far and wee continues the tradition of the Soloworks concerts that Imai has been giving for several decades, and allows the listener to breathe in the unique space of Imai's thought processes. He attacks the instrument: the nylon strings explode against the guitar. And he caresses it, soothing each centimeter of string with delicate force and concentration. Pressed to high quality vinyl at RTI. Heavy tip-on jackets; includes download. --- Kazuo Imai: guitar, chair --- All music by Kazuo ImaiLive recording by Takeshi Yoshida, April 24, 2004at Plan B “Kazuo Imai SOLOWORKS Vol. 41”Mixed and mastered by Takeshi YoshidaProduced by Hideo IkeezumiDesign by Kazuo Imai

Last time we checked in with Dan Melchior, he was Playing The Greys (see Ever/Never # 21). What has he been up to lately? Melchior is as aesthetically restless as he is endlessly creative, so in between recording an album with Austin TX art-punk trio Spray Paint and a myriad of tape and vinyl releases, Dan found the time to gift Ever/Never with another classic slice of Melchiorcore (please, shoot the messenger for that one). Road Not Driving is a 12” EP that covers a fair amount of ground during its runtime. “I Got A Feeling” starts out as a feel-bad ode to, well, feeling bad, and then finds itself truly sinking into the muck as the track distorts beyond all reason, until coming around full circle at the conclusion. Climate change has got us all down, but at least you can commiserate with the guitar slicks and (gulf jet)stream-of-consciousness lyrics of “Another Oil Spill.” In the icily observant “Cold Town,” Dan’s previous locale , Ohio -- and the lake-effect of the Midwest pokes its head through the (grey) clouds. The storm clouds hover over side two’s “Relics,” which finds Dan casting about for some kind of connection. Those bleak months -- half a year really -- can weigh a man down but they leave plenty of time to come up with creative ways of dealing with the isolation. Yet, when connection comes in the form of “Bus Stop Ghouls,” perhaps it’s preferable to be alone after all. Melchior closes out this potent dip into his stewing brain with the title track and all we can say is Godspeed, sir. -e/n

Between 1984 and 1989, my acousmatic work was focused on processing and merging the four fundamental substances. Each « element » gradually became articulated with the others, thus crystallizing my subjective perception of their materiality. Over the years, helped by the enthusiasm of a Greek friend who propelled me into the Socratic universe, what started out as an exploratory path has become a circular, spherical unity, in which each occurrence simultaneously belongs to one of the four substances as well as the whole. These four sections, of uneven durations, embody the different resonances of each « element » upon my imagination. The movements are ordered compositionally and range from the intangibility of the air to the extreme density of the earth. In Eterea, the dual nature of air, a space for the dissemination of sounds and an environment for mobile masses, shaped the work and the development of its forms. Whether it be the vast expanse of particles as organised movement or the displacement of sources in our three-dimensional perception, ethereal air fills the space and drives the immaterial motions and gestures. Aquatica locates the materiality of water in relation to its amazing extremes: from the drop to the ocean, an extensive journey unfolds through the various phases of the reinvented liquid. Still waters, deadly waters, raging waters follow one another, leading to the aerial fusion of a primordial equilibrium eventually retrieved. Then comes Focolaria and the unsteady fires, the elusive and wild will-o’-the-wisps that open and adorn the gates leading to the depths of the earth. The land of Terra is devoid of atmosphere, a land of matters before the advent of life. The sounds of the original matter merge and evolve into purer forms. The motions trigger progressions towards new equilibriums of forces, the ultimate fusion, the very last attempt, needed for the emergence of life. The sphere is now complete, the world ready for creation… Daniel Teruggi — While the theme of the four elements has been a constant source of inspiration in the arts, its setting to music using electroacoustic techniques seems highly auspicious, since the notion of matter and its transformation is consubstantial with the concrete approach. In Sphæra, Daniel Teruggi precisely addresses this question, transcending matter with the help of novel digital audio techniques so as to draw out forms, trajectories, layers, and musical objects, all of which result from the merging or sublimation of primordial sounds. Indeed, this is where Daniel Teruggi’s music and compositional approach stand out: by engaging sounds, with strength, will and inspiration, in a close encounter with energies, whether tectonic or electrical. Such collisions, such metamorphoses, are then appeased in the whole space of the composition, a fascinating landscape, the final destination of all transmutations. François Bonnet, Paris, 2021

The origin of CRACKFINDER dates back to the concert of SONO GENERA – the trio of Anna Zaradny, Robert Piotrowicz and Jérôme Noetinger – at the Sacrum Profanum festival on October 7, 2016. That evening, the audience experienced a clear aesthetic breakthrough; something important was happening, something special. I instantly felt that the new thing that emerged could not be left unrecorded. Zaradny is a composer, instrumentalist and visual artist; Piotrowicz a composer, author of sound installations and virtuoso of analog synthesizers. They founded and curated the Musica Genera festival and label. Noetinger, an improviser, publisher and instrumentalist from Marseilles, specializes in electroacoustic collages full of permutations on his tape recorder and using all sorts of electronics. What connects these musicians are their methods of work: experiment as the basis of action, controlled accidents, repetition, processing and processuality. CRACKFINDER is intense and saturated, intriguing with fragments that are rhythmic yet distant from the repetitiveness of minimalism. They give a degree of structure to the otherwise loose amalgam of raw electroacoustics and instrumental improvisation at times evoking free jazz (when Zaradny reaches for the saxophone). At any time, however, the division of roles is clear, an impressive feat at such a high density of sound texture. CRACKFINDER the album comprises of two distinct parts. The first is extremely intense and eventful, creating a strong tension, giving the sense of an immense effort or even wrestling between the musicians; a clash of ideas and values. This dialog is not monotonous but dynamic, full of changing and new hypotheses – as if in a process of reaching the truth. We can suppose that these investigated issues are philosophical and existential, giving the impression of greatness and overwhelming significance. The second part evokes a kind of a soothing stabilization. One may think that the interlocutors have reached a consensus. However, no-one is celebrating, and the mood is somewhat melancholic. The discovery proved to be depressing and the truth is not liberating – it becomes a burden. There is a poignant feeling of failure or unfulfilment, despite concluding and solving the task. Finally, we are left with silence, and even emptiness – with a symbolic and absolute dimension of the end. The effort of the first part, motivated by the conviction of the significance and need for proving something, is confronted with the disillusion brought by the end of the road. The effort, however, was not in vain – the discovery of the truth, although painful, can be purifying. The album offers more interpretative hints than just its expressive title. The artwork on the cover is a frame from the video art piece ENJOY THE SILENCE by Anna Zaradny: symbolic flares and cracking of matter in complete silence. The intensity of the image, however, creates a strong suggestion of sound. The back of the sleeve is spread with photos of the musicians holding the #BLACKPROTEST banner, in remembrance of the wave of pro-choice protests in Poland in 2016. Cracks – both material and metaphorical – do not have to be the negative effect of an abrupt event. They can be the beginning of change, an opening for the new, an impulse for action. It is, therefore, worth continuing the search for the 'portals of change'.