Christopher A. Williams (born 1981) is a contrabassist, composer and theorist of experimental and improvised music whose artistic research takes the form of both academic publications and practice-based projects. "On Perpetual (Musical) Peace?" (PMP) is one of his projects – an experiment in musical cohabitation with large improvising ensembles. It is inspired by Immanuel Kant's essay "Zum Ewigen Frieden: ein Philosophischer Entwurf" which speculates that nations do better for themselves by sorting out their differences through an international federation instead of through warfare, thus proposing a path to lasting peace. (It later influenced the UN Charter and EU Constitution.) Williams argues that Kant's idea of hospitality, publicity (transparency), and perpetuality (sustainability) may help players in improvising ensembles to articulate and transform their ways of playing and thinking, thus opening up new ways of interacting with each other. Composing in this way becomes less about giving the players a compositional structure to realize, and more about tweaking inherent constellations that are already present within the ensemble. This LP features the results of PMP realized in Mexico City in 2019 with Liminar, a Mexican ensemble that works at the boundaries between composed and improvised music, performance and sound installation, and regularly performs in Mexico City's main chamber music halls as well as in museums, galleries and alternative venues. An extensive PMP concert took place at Bucareli 69, an art and concert space in a late-19th-century villa near the city's historical centre. The recordings for this LP were made afterwards in the studio NAFF. Edition of 300 pressed on UN-charter-blue vinyl, with printed inner sleeve.

Tracklisting: Side A - 17:21 1: LAURIE’S ARRIVAL2: CORNER OF A ROOM WITH SOUND3: DISARRAY SEQUENCE Side B - 19.36 1: PNEUMATICS2: VOICE CORRESPONDENCE3: MEMORY IS CURRENT"Obstacle #79: MEMORY IS CURRENT offers a sequence of works for player piano, a device which captured Rick Myers’ imagination in 2017. Divining a method from mathematical measurements and intuitive drawing systems, Myers obstructed piano rolls using adhesive tape. Performed in this altered state on a player piano in the hallway of Easthampton Machine and Tool in Easthampton, Massachusetts, the music embedded in the rolls was extricated from its history and given fresh life. Restriction forged a pathway to expanse. Here are the enchanting results.The workings of the machine are evident throughout, wistfully recalling music box fantasias, even as the tumbling notes confound expectations. The meticulously constructed scenarios invariably run amok, and in between chaos and melody, frustration and freedom, an impossible helix fashions its own celestial music. The sounds grumble against one another, summoning subterranean promises and unearthing unexpected delights.As the tracks run into one another, Myers interposes spoken dispatches, detailing aspects of the story behind the record. Like the sounds of the piano, they transcend mere reportage. Increasingly obscured over the course of the two sides, these ghostly interjections are part of the sonic fabric, enhancing both the narrative and acousmatic aspects of the project.Rick Myers is an artist whose decades-long career has studiously disregarded the confines of medium – there are books, drawings, sculptures, installations, exhibitions, videos, performances, design projects, texts, and combinations thereof. Sound, as evidenced by his recent focus on recorded material, is but another potent arrow in his quiver. Plus, it’s nothing new – he cut his teeth as a DJ.This record is an interior travelogue shot through with ecstatic truth. In furthering the process of obstruction by which the player piano makes its music possible, Myers is, in his own words, looking to “cast and dislodge time.” Like God or Loss or Love, Time is one of the bedeviling bottomless wells from which the most affecting art springs. This is the real thing.Rick Myers is not in search of lost time, he is attempting to lose it, and in so doing to chart the inevitable trajectory of that loss, of its apparent disappearance, its peculiar habit of hiding in plain sight." - Matt Krefting --- Released on Vinyl LP in an edition of 250Jackets screenprinted by Alan Sherry

After a near decade of solo and collaborative projects, Up in Air is Ben Pritchard's most confident foray into songwriting yet, nestling lopsided experimentation into a bed of lowslung blues and reflective folk. Up in Air is sewn from threads of everyday life: trails of thought, small stories and conversations with his daughter. Collecting, layering and condensing the world around him, his musings spill out in a palimpsest that renders both the material and metaphysical world. From describing a time where he inadvertently found himself on a hunting trip, recalling stories from doing role play and drawing together with his daughter, or scribing observations on the strange dedications people make in their lives, he explores the banal and the fantastical; the whimsical and the serious; the light and dark. Each line, aphorism or vignette carries with it weight that is looking to free itself, to embrace the impossibility of life distilled into simpler parameters. Ben's music acts as a motor for his words, weaving wistful melodic mantras and creaking guitar lines in and out as each song finds its feet. Although the album finds a rich array of influences dancing in an awkward balance, the emotive register of the music drinks from the fountain of the US rock continuum, with Supreme Dicks' uneasy indie, Low's slow unfurling grace and Neil Youngs' heart-worn drawl lifting each song to new heights. Expanding on this soundworld are collaborators Sholto Dobie (self-built organs) and bassist Otto Willberg, who provide drones, dissonant jolts and detuned paths for the music to open itself, but also curl into its own. Sounds are folded into one another, birthing new shapes, layers and sonic possibilities. Ben describes the album as "permeated by the sense that came from being around this sort of connection to the world where everything is immediate and fundamental." The album is representative of this shift inwards: on his own, socially, as a parent. But with that it also represents a confidence to deal with everything. The album is an excavation, both finding strange joy in simple findings and an unburdening himself of everything else, letting every thought and feeling whisks itself away up in the air. -- Fielding Hope (curator Cafe Oto, London)

On Chorus is a national public sound artwork by Christopher Steenson that broadcast field recordings of Dublin's inner-city spring dawn chorus across Ireland, using Ianród Eireann's network of train station PA systems. These sounds were played every morning between 8am and 9am, from 16 November to 29 November 2020. By transmitting the sounds of lockdown, the artwork sought to highlight the use of listening as a connecting act during times of social distancing, as well as using sound as a way of ‘listening to the future’ and imagining new architectures for cohabitation between human and non-human species. This artist LP collects two field recordings made by Steenson, which document the birdsong being transmitted in two Irish train stations. Side A features a recording from Friday 20 November 2020 at Dublin Connolly Station. Side B features a recording of Dún Laoghaire Station on Sunday 29 November 2020. The LP is pressed on 180g black recycled vinyl, and is housed in a gatefold package designed by the artist. An 8-page booklet features 35mm photographs taken by Steenson during the artwork's creation, as well as a specially commissioned text by visual artist Ann Maria Healy, which uses the format of an LP lyric sheet to expound on ideas related to potential futures, hyper-reality and communal listening.

Second LP release by The Oval Language on Edition Telemark after Hibernation in 2017, this time showcaseing Klaus-Peter John's Waldkonzerte (woodland concerts), recorded in 2016.The Oval Language is an autonomous art project founded in 1987 in Leipzig, East Germany, by Klaus-Peter John and Frank Berendt. Since Berendt left in 1995, it has been continued by John, sometimes with collaborators, but recently mostly for solo activities. Its fields of activity have included sound-noise performances, conceptual works in open spaces, installations, land art projects, photography, and more.From the beginning, the space or location itself has been a central aspect within many of their site-specific sound-noise performances. When working at a certain location, the performers tried to not bring in anything from outside, but exclusively use material already available at the space. This way, it becomes possible to thoroughly feel out and explore the site, allowing a distinct site-specific sound to emerge that is integrated into the performance. Throughout the 1990s, the sites used often were abandoned buildings in Leipzig, available in nearly unlimited quantity, from vacant factories to unused former public bathing facilities.   During the recent years, Klaus-Peter John has focused on a minimisation of means and developed a unique vocal technique without amplification that he has used in a number of performances. In 2016, he attempted to integrate his voice into pure nature, in his own words the biggest challenge to date. His goal was not to perform any kind of singing or the like, but to use voice as a means similar to the site-specific tools used in previous performances by The Oval Language.He performed five concerts without audiences in a forest ravine in Döben, near Grimma, between June and November. The concerts parallel the course of the seasons and their related acoustic changes and conditions.This double LP is presented in a die-cut single sleeve with two printed inner sleeves. The inner sleeves contain one photo made during a Waldkonzert on each side. By switching the order of the inner sleeves, four different front sleeves can be generated.

Liam O'Gallagher's audio work, People's Opera aka Aerosol/or the Computer That Couldn’t Hear: An Inter-Media Opera, features nine transistor radios (four tuned to FM stations and five to AM stations), a telephone system, and soloists on tambourine, flute, oboe, and French horn. Here are the notes on the presentation, by O'Gallagher's himself: “The ‘conductor’ signals the operators of the radios to approach the microphones or recede from them. Soloists play according to any predetermined plan. Two soloists play in the studios and two phone into the studios and play their parts through the phone system. The ‘scorer’ works from the main broadcast control room of the radio station and controls the mix and effects of the various inputs. He determines the final signal or output. The ‘orchestra’ selects their stations and maintains them throughout the performance. If possible, stations should represent various genres or segments of the community, such as Chinese language, soul, Spanish language, rock, popular tunes, spiritual- and Bible-toned stations. The time limit is agreed upon in advance by the participants. Drop out, turn around, tune in.”

As an artist and a thinker, Massimo Magee has been consistently drawn towards patterns: traditions, lines of influence, schools and the unexpected intersections of each. This album, Toneflower, presents a solo programme, meditating on many of those concepts. As an entirely improvised set of pieces, it is also inspired by Anthony Braxton’s solo alto tradition and the larger solo saxophone canon. Similarly, it draws from Magee’s prior percussive experimentations with Tim Green and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s use of contact microphones. In Magee’s words, it offers rich parallels with many other saxophone schools, “the ceaseless streams of broken air column wizardry of Evan Parker, the angular atonalism of Tim Berne, the earnest beauty of a Pharoah Sanders melody, the breakneck urgency of Kaoru Abe, the sinuous and unpredictable ebullient elegance of Eric Dolphy, the eerie whistling of Tamio Shiraishi, the satisfyingly round-toned repetition of Steve Lacy, the heavy low-end honking of John Coltrane in a certain mood. The listener might even hear a dash of the motivic minimalism of Terry Riley.”  Throughout the album's 5 tracks, Magee pays close attention to the siloed divisions of each school, as part of a larger interrogation of a music industry that privileges singular musicians, cultivating musical traditions and loyal fanbases. Following diverse and distinct musical lineages, Magee curates an informed, thoughtful constellation of influences and traditions, captured through his particular lens of reinvention.

Following two singles, two albums, and a bunch of compilation tracks, Ultra Eczema is proud to present Miaux’s third LP. Mia Prce, originally from Sarajevo and a Belgian resident since 1989, was reared on a psychedelic diet of Krautrock and similarly serpentine music by her artist parents who were part of the Antwerp-based (and over fifty years old) Ercola collective. Beautiful songs that break hearts without using a sharp object! More tears for the creatures of the night.

TEETH001 comes from Malvern Brume, who has already notched up releases on cult labels like Low Company, Alter, Infant Tree and Kashual Plastik. Brume’s practice is something akin to audio collage, a layering of sounds each with a strong sense of time and place but nevertheless otherworldly and disorientating. The title, Pacing The Hollow Path, was initially the name of a collaborative piece between Brume and Wes Knowler which ended up on the cutting room floor. However the discarded text from the collaboration, which focussed on the act of walking - Brume’s principle obsession, came to inspire this record. Pacing The Hollow Path is inspired by a daily walking practice that saw the artist return to similar places again and again, such as Sydenham Woods, Catford and Nunhead Cemetary. During those walks he visualised the scores and text which would become the six tracks on the album. The result is, in the artist’s words “both an emotional response and I guess an explanatory process to recounting these walks.” Sonically, rough textural notes combine with insectoid drones and distant crackle against the occasional entry of more familiar, albeit ruptured, instruments like the piano.

Remastered from original tapes by Paradigm Discs' Clive Graham, 'Rock and other four letter words' is a genuinely psychedelic obscurity originally pieced together and released in 1968. The work of one J Marks (1930-2001) and his buddy Shipen Lebzelter (1942-1986), it revolves around a stockpile of cut-up quotes taken from Marks' interviews with rock stars of the time for his eponymous book (essentially a book of photos by Linda Eastman, soon to be McCartney). The likes of Pete Townshend, Jimmy Page, Brian Wilson, Grace Slick etc. all feature, spliced with progressive rock, wigged-out electronics, tape loops and even gospel songs about baked beans in a unique conflagration of sound poetry, Stockhausen-esque compositional strategy and free-ranging, experimental '60s psychedelia. It's understandably achieved cult status since then, not only for its sampled sources, but also an illustrious cast of contributors including jazz players Alan Silva, Andrew Cyrille, Roswell Rudd and Burton Greene, alongside the studio assistance of John McClure, who produced this, along with 100s of other recordings at CBS, including the Harry Partch records. Placed in context with other seminal records of that pivotal year - Zappa's 'Lumpy Gravy', Terry Riley's 'In C', Walter Carlos' 'Switched On Bach' - it stands out as a real anomaly, offering similarly positive, mind-boggling sorts of sonic possibilities on one hand, whilst providing an incisive, perceptibly sardonic attitude towards the times, on the other.

New release from London's Mosquitoes out on Knotwilig Records, due to land in April. *UPDATE - NOW DUE MAY 12th* "Music fans, journalists and so on have been puzzling words and phrases to describe the impact of the music of Mosquitoes. I am indeed talking about "impact".Lumping them in the nowave/postpunkdub/rockdeconstructivism bin is way too easy. Of course there are references, but then again: not really. I honestly believe every single second they released not only set a bookmark, but also stands out as a landmark in music history such as PIL's Metal Box, Oval's Diskont and Stockhausen’s Kontakte for instance.Every note is an evolution in an oeuvre which specialises in having an immediate impact on the listener. Reverse Drift / Reverse Charge is a natural progression, and a step forward from their previous output. Like ocean waves gently invading dune territory.Muffled vocals, haunting bass fragments, deconstructed loops/guitars and a crumbling rhythm in a world which barely holds itself together. This music deserves to be played through grant speakers, even in silenced mode.Everyone who ever had the chance to catch them on a stage know what impact they have on an audience. Mostly baffled, speechless and holding breath because your guts just tell you so. The new tracks are of a similar calibre. They immobilize you instantly in whatever you are doing. You simply need to surrender and listen to it, again and again and again... What would the world be without these 22 minutes of sheer beauty?"

Thomas Bonvalet is a self-taught multi-instrumentalist. Having commenced his vocation as a bassist he cemented it as a guitarist at the heart of the band Cheval de Frise (1998-2004). Progressively straying from the guitar, he began to integrate foot tapping and various wind and percussive instruments into his performance, incorporating mechanical elements and stray amped-up objects into the soundscape. This formed the guiding principle of his solo project, L'ocelle mare, initiated in 2005, and continues to form the core of his instrumentation. The release of Serpentement in 2012 marked the end of a cycle of four progressive stages, homogeneous but distinct from one another, released with successive regularity, proceeding with the elaboration of his singular set up, implicating the human body into a simultaneity of associated gestures and sonic tools and forming a commonality of timbres and tremors. This structure remained fluid and adaptable, finding a balance which lent itself quite naturally to collaborations, entering into the fields of improvisation, folk, rock and contemporary music. In recent years Bonvalet has collaborated, most notably, with Powerdove, Arlt, Radikal Satan, Jean Luc Guionnet, Arnaud Rivière, Will Guthrie, Gaspar Claus, Daunik Lazro, Fred Jouanlong and Sylvain Lemètre. Without renouncing his solo work, his interruption from it has allowed a slower and more elastic evolution, permitting ancient shapes to gradually metamorphose. In this way new compositions successively articulated themselves in an almost self-determining manner. Temps En Terre is the fifth album release from L'ocelle Mare, and the first to have been recorded in a studio. The preceding releases were characterised by a marked acoustic: the echoey reverberations inherent to Serpentement were thanks to the protestant temple it was recorded in; Engourdissement was entirely recorded in forest expanses, upon ponds and enclosed within remote wood cabins; Porte d'Octobre was recorded entirely in urban spaces; and his first, unnamed album was entirely recorded in caves and churches. The pieces forming Temps en Terre however, are recorded under a harsher gaze, presented in far cruder light, comparable to that of a live recording. The instrumentation is composite, rustic, yet paradoxically sophisticated: piano, 6 string bass banjo, mechanical metronome, tuning forks, claves, hand and foot clapping and tapping, mini amps, amps, subwoofer, microphones, small mix desk, bells, mouth organ fragments, concertina, componiums, "stringin it", audio ducker, drum skins, clockwork motors...  --- Kythibong, 2018 Kythibong - 2018

Konstrukt made contact with both Alexander Hawkins and Alan Wilkinson during their presence at Konfrontationen Festival in Nickelsdorf in 2013 where the band performed for the second time in Austria after Saalfelden Jazz Festival with Marshall Allen in 2011. All three parts were excited and have agreed to get together sometime in the future. The result was a night of music with high energy and a wide musical perspective. From drum & bass to ethnic funk vibes, from straight free jazz bursts to spiritual chantings, the whole performance here shows a wide range of outer wordly aspects of all musicians present. --- Korhan Futaci / alto & tenor saxophones, flutes, sipsi, kaba zurna, voiceUmut Çaglar / electric guitar, gralla, bamboo flutes, pocket drum machine, xylophones, percussion, tape echoBarlas Tan Özemek / electric bassEdiz Hafizoglu / drums, cymbals, bells, turkish hang drum+Alexander Hawkins / acoustic pianoAlan Wilkinson / baritone saxophone, bass clarinet, voiceDaniel Spicer / pocket trumpet, bugle, bamboo saxophone, shenai, recorder, pan pipe, whistle, cow bell, kalimba, voice --- Omlott Records, 2018

Seditionary art music and hypnobeat from (The) Mudguards, the (very) English duo of Nelson Bloodrocket and Reg Out, a properly f****d bricolage of end-of-the-pier agit-pop, nauseated industrial cut-ups and the kind of demolished-man techno that transports you to an alternative universe where E was never invented.Active in East London and Essex between ’81 and ’93, and inspired by quintessential English working class entertainment – music hall, skiffle, drinking songs and broadsides – (The) Mudguards’ theme, or rather career-long obsession, was the “commodification of dissent”. In fact what makes their work special, and more resonant today than that of your typical sloganeering anarcho bleater, is their awareness of their own complicity in the things they despise, and all the self-loathing that comes with it. VERY relatable. But though in some ways it transcends history, this stuff was born of a very specific time and place. As Johnny Cash-Converter writes in his brilliant sleevenotes, the backdrop was one of genuine civil unrest, with Mrs T gleefully overseeing “the dismantling of welfare and the deliberate creation of poverty as a social control mechanism.”Intense corporatisation, and the attendant feeding frenzy of land-grabs, sell-offs and privatisations left large swathes of industrial Britain looking like Tarkovsky’s Zona, empty spaces that would, for a time, be repurposed by the resistance: squats, warehouse parties, experiments in communal living and/or communal oblivion. It’s in this milieu that (The) Mudguards established their hunt-under-the-wreckage praxis, “maximum content with minimum hardware”, creating improvised installations/performances with noise-makers and visual props built from re-appropriated scrap, vintage sound equipment and circuit-bent electronics.This was the era when post-punk, industrial and noise scenes and sensibilities were overlapping with the arrival of electronic dance music: and I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a band or project who capture that brief confluence of disparate things quite so brilliantly as (The) Mudguards. One minute they’re plainly and openly addressing Harold Wilson and the state of the National ‘Elf, the next they’re unspooling narcotic/neurotic minimal synth raga like a dole-queue Monoton. And somehow, despite their preoccupation with class war and the treacheries of the state, they retain a sense of humour – well, if you find Ceramic Hobs funny…Sterling maiden release from London-based label Horn of Plenty

Marcelle Van Hoof is a DJ first and foremost. As DJ Marcelle, she brings as much verve and self-expression to the art of playing records as one could realistically expect (for proof, check out one of the many mixes on her website, her radio show, Another Nice Mess, or last week's RA podcast). And yet, dance music has never really been her thing—"more underground left-field music of the past 40-50 years," she told us, in particular dub, post-punk and avant-garde. In her DJ sets this may be balanced out by the basic needs of the party. In her productions, though, it comes through in a wild, unadulterated form. Though she's been active since the '80s, Van Hoof's own music only started coming out in the last few years, all of it on the Munich label Jahmoni Music. One Place For The First Time is her first album. More than the EPs that came before it, it shows Van Hoof really letting it rip, whipping together 30-odd minutes of demented samples that could have come from the archives of Throbbing Gristle or William Burroughs, layered over sideways rhythms of wildly varying tempos. The vibe is best embodied by the second track, "Respect My Snack Foods." Near the beginning, a woman says: "We can walk you through that difficult, awkward, sweaty moment when you come to take a deep breath and say... I'm sorry." The track goes on to do precisely that, breaking down the process of apology into numbered steps while an 88-BPM groove slithers underneath. "Respect Caged Animals" could be club fodder for the adventurous DJ, with an almost Villalobos-style minimal beat (albeit at 140 BPM) framing a feverish collage of samples, from ambiguous gurgles to women chanting and ululating. Thanks mostly to their length—they're the only ones over four-and-a-half minutes—those two tracks feel like the album's centrepieces. In a way, though, you sense Marcelle is more at home in the album's shorter tracks, which tend to be more unhinged. Take "There!," a two-and-a-half-minute sketch in which a man snores while children sing "Frère Jacques" over a 260-BPM beat, with the occasional chime of a front-desk bell thrown in for good measure. That's the second in a run of four short ones that finish the album, arriving just after "Dub (Dub)," a track that lives up to its name, basically giving us a dub remix of dub itself, or dub to the power of dub. It's all a bit bonkers, and not for the faint of heart, but there's an ecstasy and humor in this chaos that's hard not to like. "Well… it's another nice mess you've gotten me into," a man intones in the album's final moment. Another nice mess indeed.

Domestic Exile returns with the debut LP by Portuguese artist Luar Domatrix. LD has previously operated as 1/2 of Lisbon duo Yong Yong on Akashic Records and Night School, reworked traditional Portuguese workers songs for Discrepant Records, and released other solo material on Sucata Tapes, 12th Isle and Offshore Drilling Limited. Recorded between Lisbon and Glasgow, track 08 from the record 'I'll Fly With You' has featured on The Wire magazine’s Below The Radar 33 compilation as well as being supported by the likes of Jon K, Debonair, SIREN, Latete Atoto, SUE ZUKI and Body Motion on their respected NTS Radio shows. Bokeh Versions on Noods Radio and Vaj Power on Subcity Radio. ‘Nova Vida Passada’, which translated from Portugese means ‘New Past Life’, surveys the progressive expressions, technological innovations and futuristic aesthetics of late 90's & early 00's R&B;, Hip Hop and Pop culture. NVP explores the way in which visionary songs of that nature can demonstrate being intimate and lavish but at the same time anonymous, intangible, enigmatic & metaphysical. Luminescent, glacial synthesisers merge with syncopated, multi-layered accelerated metallic percussion. Ebullient rhythms conjure up flourishing, intricate fractal patterns whilst euphoric, fragmented vocal edits gaze into a dazzling, psychedelic, precious crystal opal gemstone. How the moral sensibility of music is ever changing with the passage of time and propositions the listener to reflect upon the dynamics, ethics and desires of a generation. What does the ‘90s’ spirit epitomise? Music videos with abstract ice particle brick walls, gravitational fields, silver pagers, holographic iridescent spaceships, moral dilemmas and aluminium cyborg feelings. Pop music reverberating loud in a sci-fi celestial club in the distant future. Channels the same energies as Equiknoxx, NAAFI, Hakuna Kulala, BFDM and fellow Lisboners Principe.