Joyful rug-cutters and sweet soul-uplifters from the town of Morogoro, in early-1960s Tanzania: muziki wa dansi, inspired by Cuban 78s, and dance crazes like the twist and cha cha cha, but making them its own. Here is the cream of over a hundred recordings by Salum, mostly for Mzuri Records of Kenya; pretty much lost till now. In an old-school tip-on cover, with lyrics in Swahili and English on the inner sleeve. Lovely stuff.

Drawn from his six monumental singles for the Philips, Amha and Yared labels between 1970-73, revolutionising traditional Eritrean music via the innovations of amplified kirar, electric guitar and horns. Thick, deep declarations and considerations of love over a mixture of sombre and joyous tunes (with the hand-clapped beat often shifting into double-time near the end). Co-released with Mitmitta Musika in Addis Ababa; handsomely presented in a tip-on sleeve, with extensive liner notes, translations and exclusive photos. Fab.

One of the greatest that ever was, Noah Howard, captured in 1971 with  Han Bennink, Misha Mengelberg, Earl Freeman, Jaap Schoonhoven, and Steve Boston, reissed on Viny for the first time Released in 1971, this experimental jazz album stands as a defining moment in Noah Howard's career, capturing his vision of music as a "sound painting." A blend of free jazz and Dutch improvisation, the album features Howard's alto saxophone alongside an eclectic mix of musicians, including Misha Mengelberg (piano), Han Bennink (drums) and Earl Freeman (bass). The album opens with a disorienting space duet between conga and electric guitar, setting the stage for a primal and intense exploration of sound. As the musicians join in, the music evolves into a fierce clash of American free jazz and European avant-garde, where rhythmic energy and dissonant piano clusters intersect with Howard's lyrical yet passionate saxophone lines. The album's complex interplay of structure and improvisation reveals Howard's quest for originality, influenced by jazz legends but never imitative. It showcases his belief in the spiritual essence of jazz, channeling cosmic energy through his compositions. Despite challenges, such as guitarist Jaap Schoonhoven's discomfort, the session results in a high-energy fusion, full of vivid contrasts and sonic exploration. This work remains a powerful, enigmatic piece in Howard's catalogue, illustrating his distinct, boundary-pushing approach to jazz.

Since first developing Natural Information Society in 2010, Joshua Abrams has been gradually expanding the group’s conceptual underpinnings, its musical references & the sheer number of the group’s members. Its music is, in a sense, an expansive form of minimalism, based in repeated & overlaid rhythmic patterns, ostinatos & modality. Its roots, its scale & its meaning become clearer in time. If time is gravity, it also allows us to carry more. Having begun as fundamentally a rhythm section with Abrams’ guimbri at its core, the version here can stretch to a tentet, including six horns. Abrams has been expanding his minimalism gradually, but he has long understood a key to minimalism’s potential: the breadth of its roots in the late 1950s & early 1960s, ranging from the dissatisfaction of young European-stream composers with the limitations of serialism to the simultaneous dissatisfaction of jazz musicians with the dense harmonic vocabulary of bop & hard bop. The former began exploring rhythmic complexity & narrow tonal palates in place of harmonic abstraction (Steve Reich’s Drumming, Philip Glass’ Music with Changing Parts; perhaps above all Terry Riley’s In C & his late ‘60s all-night organ & loop concerts); the later reduced dense chord changes to scales (signally with Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, but rapidly expanding with John Coltrane’s vast project). In the 1950s the LP record opened the world with documentation of Asian & African musics, key influences on both minimalists & jazz musicians. If John Coltrane’s soprano saxophone suggested the keening shehnai of Bismillah Khan, the instrument was rapidly taken up by two key minimalists, LaMonte Young & Riley, similarly appreciative of its flexible intonation, the same thing that kept it out of big bands. If the guimbri, the North African hide-covered lute that Abrams plays with NIS, involves a rich tradition of hypnotic healing music associated with the Gnawa people, Abrams’ music also touches on other musics as well —other depths, memories & healings, different drones, rhythms & modes. As the group expands on Since Time Is Gravity, he has made certain jazz traditions in the same stream more explicit as well. If there is a mystical & elastic quality involved in the experience of time, both in direction & duration, you will catch it here. The parts for the choir of winds expand on the roles of Abrams’ guimbri, Mikel Patrick Avery & Hamid Drake’s percussion & Lisa Alvarado’s harmonium: at times, the winds are almost looping in the tentet version, each hitting a repeating note in turn, at once drone & distinct inflection on temporal sequence. The brilliance of the work resides in Abrams’ compositions, the NIS’ intuitive execution & in Ari Brown’s singular embodiment of the great tenor saxophone tradition, including the oracular genius of Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, & Yusef Lateef. The three pieces by the expanded NIS featuring Brown —the opening “Moontide Chorus” & “Is” & the ultimate “Gravity”— have an immediate impact, & togther might be considered a kind of concerto for tenor saxophone. Here Brown presses almost indistinguishably from composed melody to improvised speech, getting so close to language that he might have a text. Everything here is a sign. Note the tap of the Rhythm Ace that links “Moontide Chorus” to “Is”, the attentive heart always present, even when signed by a machine. There’s a link here to the methodologies & meanings of dub music & the linear & vertical collage of beats, textures & tongues: treated with reverence, a sample of a beat-box can be as soulful, as hypnotic, as a mbira or a tamboura. If those pieces with Brown are heard as a suspended concerto, the three embrace & enfold the other works, like the sepals of a flower. That placement will also touch on the mysteries of our perception of time. Particularly in “Is”, but elsewhere as well, a phenomenon of transcendence arises in which time appears to be tripartite, at once moving backwards & forwards & standing still. This is an act of technical brilliance certainly, but also an illumination of music’s ability to represent temporal consciousness through polymetrics. This particular listener has only heard it before in a few places, including the horn shouts & bowed basses of Coltrane’s Africa, in moments of Charles Mingus’ The Black Saint & the Sinner Lady, in certain pieces where tapes were literally running backwards, & earlier still in Dizzy Gillespie’s Cubana Be, Cubana Bop, in which the composer George Russell & conguero Chano Pozo found a music that spoke at once in the voices of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring & the vestigial rites, rhythms & songs of the Yoruba language & Santeria religion of inland Cuba. In Joshua Abrams’ compositions & the realization of them by the NIS, in the time of one’s close listening & memory thereof, distinctions between the “natural” & the “social”, the “quotidian” & the “transcendent” are erased, suspended or perhaps irrelevant. Consider two of the ensemble pieces, one named for nature, the other social science. In “Murmuration” the repeated wind figures of flute & alto saxophone combine with the interlocking patterns of harp, guimbri & frame drum (tar) to create a perfect moving stillness, not an imitation but a witness to the miracle of the starlings’ astonishing collective art, a surfeit of beauty that might be the ultimate defense tactic. “Stigmergy” takes its name & concept from the Occupy movement’s Heather Marsh, who proposes a social system based on a cooperative rather than competitive models, one in which ideas are freely contributed & developed as ideas rather than an individual’s property. In its form, Abrams’ “Stigmergy” is the closes thing to traditional jazz, a series of accompanied solos by each of the wind players. However, the composed accompaniment is a radically collectivist notion: a repeated rhythmic figure, call it ostinato or riff, in which the different winds each play only a note or two of the figure, a concept both more collectivist & individualistic in its conception than any typical unison figure. It suggests another of the underlying recognitions that propel the Natural Information Society, the group as social organism, the teleology of hypnotic anarchy, all parts in place, functioning systematically, evolving & expressing itself, its nature & society, as a transformative organism. George Lewis has described music as “a space for reflection on the human condition”. This suggests that, rather than a “distraction”, at least some music might serve as a distraction from distraction. It’s a focus, a clarity, an awareness, an external invitation to interiority, as if music itself is a model for form & contemplation, an organism contemplating for us or as us. If that is a possibility, & I am sure I have heard such musics, than this music is among them. How many of our rhythms, melodies & harmonies (cultural, historical, biological, psychic) might such music carry, translate & transform in the particulate ecstasy of our own murmuration? Stuart Broomer, April 2022  credits released April 14, 2023 Joshua Abrams: bass, guimbri Lisa Alvarado: harmonium Mikel Patrick Avery: drums Josh Berman: cornet Kara Bershad: harp Ari Brown: tenor saxophone Hamid Drake: conga, tabla, tar Ben Lamar Gay: cornet Nick Mazzarella: alto saxophone Jason Stein: bass clarinet Mai Sugimoto: alto saxophone, flute

Aguirre Records present a reissue of Taj Mahal Travellers' August 1974, originally released in 1975. A monumental work by the Japanese experimental music ensemble. In April 1972 a group of Japanese musicians set off from Rotterdam in a Volkswagen van. As they crossed Europe and then made their way through Asia they made music in a wide range of locations. They also paid close attention to the changing scene and to differing ways of life. Midway through May they reached their destination, the iconic Taj Mahal on the bank of the Yamuna river in Agra, India. The Taj Mahal Travellers had fulfilled physically the promise of the name they adopted when they formed in 1969. The double album August 1974 was their second official release. The first July 15, 1972 is a live concert recording, but on August 19th, 1974 the Taj Mahal Travellers entered the Tokyo studios of Nippon Columbia and produced what is arguably their definitive statement. The electronic dimension of their collective improvising was coordinated, as usual, by Kinji Hayashi. Guest percussionist Hirokazu Sato joined long-term group members Ryo Koike, Seiji Nagai, Yukio Tsuchiya, Michihiro Kimura, Tokio Hasegawa, and Takehisa Kosugi. The enigmatic Takehisa Kosugi, whose soaring electric violin was such a vital element in their music, had been a pioneer of free improvisation and intermedia performance art with Group Ongaku at the start of the '60s. Later in that decade, before launching the Taj Mahal Travellers, he had become known internationally through his association with the fluxus art movement. During the mid-70s the Travellers disbanded and while his colleagues more or less stopped performing as musicians Kosugi continued to reach new audiences across the course of several decades as a composer, regular performer, and musical director for the acclaimed Merce Cunningham Dance Company. August 1974 captures vividly the characteristic sound of the Taj Mahal Travellers, haunting tones from an unusual combination of instruments, filtered through multiple layers of reverb and delay. Their music has strong stylistic affinities with the trippy ambience of cosmic and psychedelic rock, but the Taj Mahal Travellers were tuning in to other vibrations, drawing inspiration from the energies and rhythms of the world around them rather than projecting some alternative reality. Films of rolling ocean waves often provided a highly appropriate backdrop for their lengthy improvised concerts. Licensed from Columbia Japan. Remastered and lacquer cut by Rashad Becker.

At the beginning of the 1960s, at the Berklee College of Music, Byard Lancaster met some feisty friends: Sonny Sharrock, Dave Burrell and Ted Daniel. It is easy to see why he rapidly became involved in free jazz. Once he was settled in New York, he appeared on Sunny Murray Quintet, recorded under the leadership of the drum crazy colleague of Albert Ayler. In 1968, the saxophonist and flutist recorded his first album under his own name: It’s Not Up To Us. The following year he came to Paris in the wake of… Sunny Murray. He would come back to France in 1971 (again with Murray) and in 1973 (without Murray for a change). This is when he met Jef Gilson, the pianist and producer who encouraged him to record under his own name again. On Palm Records (Gilson’s label), he would release four albums: Us, Mother Africa, Exactement and Funny Funky Rib Crib. “Us”, the first of the four records was recorded on November 24th, 1973 with Sylvin Marc on electric bass (a Fender… Lancaster?) and the evergreen Steve McCall on drums. On the album, the trio works from the John Coltrane model; free jazz shook up by the timely contributions of the bassist, followed by a mesmerizing atmospheric music. Then, Lancaster delivers a sinuous solo path, which is a reminder of his unique tone. On the album’s companion single, the trio launches into great black music of a different genre which would lead the clairvoyant François Tusques to claim that Byard Lancaster is an “authentic representative of soul/free jazz”, to sum up this is Great Black Music!

t the beginning of the 1960s, at the Berklee College of Music, Byard Lancaster met some feisty friends: Sonny Sharrock, Dave Burrell and Ted Daniel. It is easy to see why he rapidly became involved in free jazz. Once he was settled in New York, he appeared on Sunny Murray Quintet, recorded under the leadership of the drum crazy colleague of Albert Ayler. In 1968, the saxophonist and flutist recorded his first album under his own name: It’s Not Up To Us. The following year he came to Paris in the wake of… Sunny Murray. He would come back to France in 1971 (again with Murray) and in 1973 (without Murray for a change). This is when he met Jef Gilson, the pianist and producer who encouraged him to record under his own name again. On Palm Records (Gilson’s label), he would release four albums: Us, Mother Africa, Exactement and Funny Funky Rib Crib. A few months after recording “Us”, Lancaster recorded “Mother Africa” along with Clint Jackson III, a trumpeter, partner of Khan Jamal or Noah Howard on other recordings. On march 8th, 1974, Lancaster and Jackson headed up a group composed of Jean-François Catoire (electric and double bass), Keno Speller (percussion) and Jonathan Dickinson (drums). Together, they create an immediate impression. From the first seconds of “We The Blessed”, they develop a free jazz which rapidly abandons any virulence under the effect of blues and soul based interventions. When Gilson’s composition “Mother Africa” begins, listeners are transported into the studio, listening to the musicians setting up: chatting and joking… Then comes the melody: a dozen or so notes of a repeated theme which is accelerated and deformed according to their whims… The jazz played by the association Byard Lancaster / Clint Jackson III is rare: creative AND recreational. “We the blessed”, is apt listening to this again today! This CD edition contains a bonus track, the magnificent “Love Always” that was originally released on the fourth (and last) volume of the Jef Gilson Anthology series released in 1975. Recorded on 8th March 1974, it is a beautiful 15-minute-long modal jazz piece. Four notes from the bass (the relentless Jean-François Catoire, who makes up the rhythm section alongside drummer Jonathan Dickinson and percussionist Keno Speller), and the group is up and running! On piano, Gilson shows the subtle tact of a sideman, leaving the lions’ share of the place to the horns. This allows us to hear the trumpet of Clint Jackson III and the alto (which sometimes sounds almost flute-like) of Byard Lancaster each staking their claim in a long hallucinatory march which moves from moments of direct exaltation to profoundly sensitive collective playing.

Another absolute marvel from Stanley Schtinter's Purge: The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography is the original soundtrack to the film of the same name by WILLIAM E. JONES. Our first release in the seven-inch format, the record comes with original texts by WILLIAM E. JONES and JARETT KOBEK. 100 copies, numbered.

Originally issued as a very small run of tapes on Glasgow's GLARC, this is the first time vinyl release of Still House Plants’ self-titled debut. Recorded and mixed to tape in one day at Green Door Studios with Emily and Stu, ‘Still House Plants’ documented the then quartet’s output at the start of summer 2016. The tape was the first release on the GLARC label which turns 10 years old this year.glarc.bandcamp.comMastered by John Hannon at No Recording Studio and cut to lacquer for the vinyl reissue by Loop-O. All songs written by Jess Hickie-Kallenbach, Finlay Clark, David Kennedy and Calum O'Connor. Artwork by Still House Plants.

Music in Continuous Motion, Bill Orcutt’s latest entry in his 21st-century repertoire of quartet guitar music, pointedly steps away from the cut-and-paste constructivism of Music for Four Guitars into a sonic stratum that's yearningly melodic, resolutely human, and built for performance. Conceived for a 2026 NYC concert, Music in Continuous Motion shares the concision of its predecessor -- but rather than the discrete, mechanistic precision of Music for Four Guitars, the tracks on Music in Continuous Motion unify — each song weaving four gleaming threads into the warp and weft of an evolving, complex texture that employs simple, repeating motifs to build new melodies from counterpoint itself. It accomplishes this in the most efficient manner possible: most of these 12 tracks hover around two-and-a-half minutes, each iterating first the substrate, then the melody and its variations, then slamming shut like a clockwork music box.Based on previous recorded evidence, Orcutt is fond of boundary conditions for his studio guitar records. Much of the time, his launchpad is obvious (The Four Louies, How to Rescue Things); with others, it’s intentionally obscured. When recruiting me to write about each release, he might send me a clue (“This is a bridge pickup record more than a neck pickup record,” Orcutt helpfully offered for Music for Four Guitars). Although any given dispatch is a potential red herring, up until now, each has implied an Oulipian conceit (however obtuse) that at least somewhat determines the outcome. Thus, I was a bit surprised by his statement on Music in Continuous Motion -- “The mystery of how [the] same person, same process, same gear produces different results." When pressed, he elaborated that the record features “no triplets,” something I’ve yet to count out to determine for myself.Whatever overarching form the recording process may have mapped out, the path of the finished album is explicitly poetic. Echoing its predecessor, the song titles, read in sequence, paint fleetingly-glimpsed forms -- but in contrast to the distant shapes described in Music For Four Guitars, the present narrative spotlights the dance of polygons momentarily grasped (and then lost) as they spin through space: “Because sharp also smooth,” “And warm to the touch,” “Now nearly gone,” “Yet always moving,” “Impossible to reach.” Ultimately, the key difference between the albums (and what places Music in Continuous Motion in the realm of poetry) is its celebration of movement over immutability, of melody over form, of music as a hot wire to the heart rather than another upped ante in an arms race of inscrutability. — TOM CARTER

For his third new album release for Drag City, Tashi Dorji turns to the electric guitar. After the furious acoustic improvisations that drove the previous two—"Stateless" and "we will be wherever the fires are lit" — it’s easy to imagine an album of his electric guitar improvisations as an encompassingly incendiary essay. Especially when titled low clouds hang, this land is on fire. After all, this is a man capable of tearing up the place with the tactile musical violence of Bill Orcutt and Derek Bailey! And yet, this knowledge serves to set up a greater shock: the album’s disarmingly gentle musical drift.When asked why he turned the knob down from 11 for this album, Tashi says simply, “To find the silence.” As ever with Tashi, this is a political statement. Even the search for silence takes intention and happens for a reason. In this time of such institutional inhumanity, what is there to feel but exhaustion? When seeing the faces of the deprived, what is there to feel other than hopelessness? In the face of such grief, what words are there to say? So, Tashi got a couple amps, moved from the shed where he’d done his first two DC titles, set up in a room in the family home with high ceilings and dialed in the reverb. Once the sound was in the space, reflecting in a manner that he felt congenial with his mood, he taped it. It’s a striking signal, meditative and melancholy, with a delicacy comparable to the lineage of Loren Connors or Bill Frisell, the songs at times developed with the deliberate exposition of themes in raga’s alap form. It’s a sound that lives within silence.Once he’d laid down the sound, Tashi went back and listened to the composition of each piece. Then the words came easily. They’re the titles of these songs, they provide the narrative — or a prism, to allow us to gaze unblinking upon the awesome rot of empire. These are Tashi’s punk anthems for the year 2026… for all the years, really— to be thrown to the people outside the walls, to aid them in their quest to be allowed in.The cover art for low clouds hang, this land is on fire includes this found verse, sourced from an old anarchist ‘zine:"...here we are, the dead of all time, dying again,only now with the object of livingyou have to get out of yourself to save yourself"Dead time awakens us. We need to feel it all and then get up and get goingagain.

Geologist is the nom-de-théâtre of Brian Weitz, whose pursuits have been an active part of the music underground since since he was 15, playing and working in alignment with an organic ensemble of friends that would one day choose to call what they were doing Animal Collective. Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights? migrates from that tradition, containing a number of surprise affects of its own. #1 is that it is the first-ever proper Geologist solo album! For real. Surprise #2 is its pursuit of a musical answer to the not-oft-enuf-ast question:what if, back in the 80s, Ethan James had made a hurdy gurdy album for SST?Geologist’s affirmative answer to the question begins with another question — Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights?. It’s also the first step into a rippling songscape in which his hurdy gurdy gives and takes multiple forms, an epic electro-acoustic textile of many colors cut from the life and times of Brian Weitz. It’s an inspired ride through his phases and stages, with traditional sounds, ritual moods, avant, prog-jazz, kraut, post-punk and minimalist vibes merging in electronic infinity.Time changes everything. Brian said the title of the album once a day for probably four thousand days in a row, at least. Now it’s been over five thousand days since he stopped saying it. Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights?, lit like a constellation, threads impulses and happenings across space, cherry picking from his psychic archive: the vibe of an energizing drive from Tucson into the desert, taken repeatedly in the early aughts; an incendiary live witness one night in the clubs in 1998; the unending thrill of the mind-meld in eternal recurrence. Geologist uses the drone and chanter strings, whose possibilities blew open the walls for him back then, to highlight these moments in the kaleidoscopic flow of memory.It’s a process, right? These things take time! As he set the controls to account for a multitude of directions on this long-promised journey, Brian took inspiration from late-dawning solo eras of players like Bill Orcutt and Susan Alcorn. Then, hurdy gurdy in hand, Geologist realized structures, improvisations and rhythm tracks at home before seeking other energies at Asheville’s Drop of Sun Studio. At the session, Adam McDaniel helped a lot — he drafted drummers Emma Garau, Alianna Kalaba (FACS, Cat Power) and Ryan Oslance (The Dead Tongues, Indigo De Souza), Sham’s Shane McCord on clarinets and Mikey Powers on cello. Through vagaries of fate, Brian got Adam Lion to play vibraphone in a few places, Dave “Avey Tare” Portner for a couple bass tracks, and his son, Merrick Weitz, on acoustic guitar for “Government Job.” Izzy Barber painted the front cover and gatefold, capturing that Tucson magic, and Bob Nastanovich lettered the back cover, supplying additional pieces of time and space to the puzzle.Through the mystery and science of record making, Geologist refracts beatifically through his back pages throughout Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights? Realities and mirages flicker in and out of the aural parade route, and as we join the path of engagement, the puzzle transfers itself to our own experiences. That’s the beauty of records at work — and of this first record truly from the heart and soul of Geologist. Let your eras down, and let the mystery loose once more.

Flung is proud to present a major new work by cellist and composer Okkyung Lee with London’s Explore Ensemble: Signals dissolves boundaries between live performance, studio construction, and electroacoustic illusion.Following her 2025 minimalist/ambient album ‘just like any other day (어느날): background music for your mundane activities’ on Shelter Press, Okkyung Lee moves in another direction with London’s Explore Ensemble. Flung is proud to present Signals, a release that eludes categorisation while shifting between electronics, acoustic composition, and improvisation. It places Lee’s improvisational language in dialogue with the instrumentalists of Explore Ensemble’s sextet, whom together become enveloped by kaleidoscopic electronic sound, at times fiercely intense, at others weightless yet immense.As a meta-document of the ensemble’s commission for Lee, Signals takes recordings from live performances in Leuven, Huddersfield, and Luxembourg, restructuring them with additional layers created and edited in the studio. Lee’s hybrid approach blurs the line between real and imagined acoustics, where the listener’s sense of small and huge, near and far, dark and bright, all combine in seemingly impossible ways, restlessly morphing between materialisation and dissolution.The album unfolds in seven sections, one for each of Explore Ensemble’s musicians plus Lee’s own section ‘Wings / First Love’, which ends both sides of the LP (the second instance also called ‘Farewell’). Every section creates a distinct environment that tests the boundaries between instrument and performer — including Lee herself on cello sitting among the ensemble — from ultra close-mic string crackles, to woodwind multiphonic canyonscapes, melodies heard both near and far, and the piano turned inside out. Where Lee renews Signals for every performance by altering the sequence of these sections, on record she commits to a fixed constellation that reinforces both the particularities of the individual musicians and the work itself in a striking of live and studio composite version.A release that feels both self-interrogating and outward- looking, Signals folds Lee’s personal language together with collective form. Each performer’s presence — their sound and intuition — emerges clearly, while Lee’s voice remains central. As she writes:The main focus of making music has been to understand myself through the music. For me the audience is there to immerse themselves in that journey, and maybe discover something on their own. For the last seven years, the world seems to have split into two extreme ends, with no possibility of bridging the gap. Once I felt this sense of hopelessness, I also started to ponder upon the reason for this music's existence when it didn't seem to have any actual relevance to what was happening in the world. Not that the music should have "meaningful reasons for its existence" but how can I express my political stances and beliefs without lyrics or long explanatory texts? With this aspiration, I wanted to create a piece with signals that can generate multiple facets for the performers and the audience. — Okkyung LeeSignals is released by Flung as its first vinyl released in an edition of 300,

Sotto le Nuvole arrives as a limited edition one sided LP with artwork by Gianfranco Rosi. Designed by Maja Larrson. Produced, recorded and mixed by Daniel Blumberg. Recorded at Daniel’s flat, London and underwater in Baia, Italy. Additional recording by Alberto Landolfi. Mixed at Timeline Studio, Rome. Additional mixing by Stefano Grosso. Mixing Assistant: Giancarlo Rutigliano. Mastered and cut by Loop-O.In Gianfranco Rosi’s portrait of Naples, Sotto le Nuvole (Pompei: Below The Clouds), the ground shakes periodically. Between Mount Vesuvius and theTyrrhenian Sea, the fumaroles of the Phlegraean Fields hiss volcanic gas and steam. Below the sleeping volcano, modern day Naples emerges in black and white and fills with voices, with lives. From the traces of history and the concerns of the present, Rosi documents a city immersed in its continuous past, with Daniel Blumberg’s minimal soundscape hovering in a sonic space between liquid and air. Tasked with creating a soundscape that would suspend space within Rosi’s film, Blumberg called upon the extended technique of saxophonists Seymour Wright and John Butcher to create a gossamer fabric of traces and sounds abstracted from their instruments. Having transitioned from theoretical physics to the saxophone, John Butcher has always deeply considered space in the context of his playing. His concerns are with flow, density and how the saxophone is situated in the living world. Zeroing in on the core sonic properties of the mechanical and acoustic components of the saxophone, Seymour Wright has integrated its every breath, reed vibration, keypad clatter and hissed microtone of his alto into his own, unique improvisational language. In his work with these two seminal players, Blumberg makes his most concentrated soundtrack to date - reinforcing the film's sense of overlapping time and space, and pushing at the limits of experimentation. Initially recorded in Daniel’s flat in London, Butcher and Wright centre themselves around long, consistent tones, so soft that it seems breath is being gently pulled from the saxophone's bell by an invisible hand. Blumberg himself adds haunting bass harmonica, and recordings of Wright’s launeddas - a traditional and ancient triple pipe polyphonic reed instrument from Sardinia, Italy. Blumberg then travelled to the volcanic region of Baia, next to Pompeii. Once a flourishing classical Roman city loved by Nero, Baia slowly sank under hydrothermal pressure, leaving the city in a kind of geological purgatory. Using specialised geophones and hydrophones, Blumberg took those initial recordings and amplified them underwater, sending them calling out across the ruins of Baia’s mosaics, Nymphaeum statues and villas.  “It was important to me that the music was whispered in the same landscape that Gianfranco has worked for the past three years, so that you can hear the volcanic air gulping, the lapping of the waves, the steam and bubbles popping against John and Seymour’s saxophone breaths – an echo from a suspended time.”   What emerges is deeply melancholic, tender, subtle and right at the edges of audio technology. Submerged in an aquarian mausoleum, the mysterious vibrations of the saxophone and its bell become an echo of an echo, wading from the future into the past.  --- Seymour Wright / alto saxophone, launeddasJohn Butcher / soprano & tenor saxophoneDaniel Blumberg / bass harmonica

It’s been ten years since Bill Orcutt released A History of Every One, a compendium of hacksaw renditions of American standards on acoustic guitar — and since ten years is a blink of an eye, you are forgiven for not immediately realizing that we've gone an entire decade waiting for Jump On It, the next Orcutt solo acoustic record. As those of us of “a certain age” will tell you (ad nauseam), a decade is a blink of an eye containing an infinity of experiential moments, and if this record is any gauge, the weight of those experiences have squashed Orcutt’s rough edges, feathered his stop-motion timing into a languid lyrical flow, and snapped the shackles tethering his instant compositional skills to the imperative to deconstruct guitar history. In short, Jump On It is a collection of canonical, mature acoustic guitar soli to contrast against the fractured downtown conceits of previous acoustic releases. For those paying attention to the arc of Orcutt’s electric records, which chart a course from Quine’s choppiness to Thompsonian / Verlaine-ian flow, it should be no surprise that the ten year gap between acoustic records should expose a similar underlying journey.But what’s maybe more surprising is that Jump On It, with its living-room aesthetics and big reverb, packs a disarming intimacy absent from the formal starkness of Orcutt’s earlier acoustic outings. Although you might sense the looming human in the audible breath whispering intermittently between chords (a physical flourish reminiscent of the late Jack Rose), such documentarian signposts are the exception rather than the rule. Not quite refuting (yet not quite embracing) the polish of revered watershed records by Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, or Bola Sete, Jump On It treads a path between the raw and the refined, exemplified in tracks such as “The Life of Jesus” and “In a Column of Air” that alternate swaying chords with Orcutt’s trademark angular quicksilver runs (cut brick-wall short). While you won’t mistake Jump On It for incidental music, at least not iftaken at full strength, stray passages radiate a conversational beauty that would please the most dissonance-adverse listener.Strangely, some of the melted lockstep grooves found in Jump On It evoke nothing other than Music for Four Guitars. While many of the linear runs are clearly improvised, and the phrasing distinctly slurred, intuitive and non-mechanical, the strummed chords hint at a cellular construction similar to Jump On It’s electric predecessor. (Orcutt states that he prefers to keep his strategies obscure — but that implies there is in fact a strategy).Whatever the case, I also hear Satie in Music for Four Guitars, and I hear him here too, hidden within Jump On It’s lilting repetition, which I easily imagine stretching to an infinitely-distant horizon. Like each of Satie's three Gymnopedies, each facet of Jump On It is a tiny miniature bound in a slim volume, an earworm you might savor again and again upon awakening or before drifting off. Each track is a key to a memory, a building block in a shining anamnesis leading to the recollection that hey, we’re all humans in a shared cosmos, and music is one way we might make that universe go down easy. And who wouldn't jump on that? — Tom Carter

stunning new solo Orcutt recorded live at Oto  Another Perfect Day is Bill Orcutt's first solo electric guitar record since 2017’s eponymous Bill Orcutt. While that eight-year gap might not seem like a ton of time on the cosmic scale, it nonetheless represents a busy half-decade plus for Orcutt projects: a raft of improv collaborations, an acclaimed run of chopped and looped albums on Fake Estates, and the collision of Orcutt's computer and guitar music on Music For Four Guitars and last year's How to Rescue Things, both on Palilalia. The undeniable alchemy of those latter mashups inspired not only a wider appreciation of Orcutt-as-composer, but also the resurrection of Orcutt-as-bandleader, as the Bill Orcutt Quartet hit the road in support of Four Guitars, Orcutt's first work with a proper score (courtesy of Shane Parish). All of the above makes 2025 the perfect year to reacquaint ourselves with Orcutt-as-solo-performer, wielding his trademark four-string rather than a mouse, running the neck rather than shuffling waveforms, blasting through Cafe Oto's tattered Fender Twin (the cover model for the aforementioned How to Rescue Things) rather than a pair of ancient NS-10s. Indeed, this 2023 performance at Oto, East London's finest music establishment, boomerangs back into the slashing chords and frenzied double-picking of the Harry Pussy years, tossing the gentler melodic glow of the last few solo records into the dustbin. In other words, this may be Orcutt's most overtly punk-rockist record since Gerty Loves Pussy, his first solo electric LP from a decade ago. It's an affirmation that Orcutt is above all a lead player -- angular runs scaling the heavens, ricocheting back to ground zero before climbing again. Orcutt builds tension with short phrases, repeated with slight variability until it seems like they’ll never stop, finally slamming into a fresh line like the dawning valley at the crest of the mountain pass. Another Perfect Day is, ultimately, something of a solo guitar Nouveau Roman, an exhilarating run through melodic reiteration, impossible crescendos (check out those ecstatic crowd hoots on "For the Drainers") breaking into — a moment rarely found on an Orcutt record — soft, whisper-quiet tracer notes at the end of "A Natural Death." Another Perfect Day returns Orcutt to the immediacy of his earliest records while maintaining the melodic complexity, phrasing, and flow of a player, who's been going, what — four-plus decades now? And when he taps his roots, it's a reminder of exactly what was so exciting about Orcutt's playing in the first place. — TOM CARTER

Another seminal reissue from Superior Viaduct: an absolute storming free jazz grail  In the pantheon of classic free jazz, Noah Howard's The Black Ark looms large. Recorded at Bell Sound Studios in New York City in 1969 – just prior to the alto saxophonist's relocation to Europe – the album was eventually released in 1972. The Black Ark exhibits not only the power and imagination of Howard's playing, but also his breadth as a composer and bandleader. Listeners expecting unrelenting blasts of "energy music" might be surprised to find a cohesion atypical of free jazz; amidst the wild, impassioned solos, Howard weaves in Latin rhythms and fat-bottomed grooves. The first side, consisting of "Domiabra" and "Ole Negro," sets the album's tone. Both tracks sound as if they could have appeared on some of Blue Note's proto-spiritual jazz, groove-heavy releases – evoking the likes of Horace Silver or Bobby Hutcherson – before ceding the floor to the horn players' anarchic firepower. As John Corbett writes in the liner notes, "Two players stand out. Bassist Norris Jones – who would soon consolidate his name into a one-word reversed amalgamation/permutation of the two, Sirone – is given ample room, largely unaccompanied; his corporal approach foreshadows later work with the Revolutionary Ensemble. But the secret weapon on The Black Ark is Arthur Doyle. Straight from basement rehearsal sessions with Milford Graves, whose ensemble he had joined and who remained a favorite of the drummer for decades, Doyle is a human flamethrower." Trumpeter Earl Cross' guttural, vocal effects complement Doyle's take-no-prisoners approach, while the estimable combination of Muhammad Ali (Rashied's brother) on drums and Juma Sultan on congas adds an ever-shifting propulsion. The septet is rounded out by the enigmatic pianist Leslie Waldron, who anchors the group with imaginative accompaniment and occasional boppish flourishes. Every bit worthy of its reputation as an "out-jazz" holy grail, The Black Ark only sounds better with age. It remains the ideal record to convert the remaining free-jazz skeptics.

The music of these Louisville-NYC art-punk-rockers continues to exist bafflingly outside of time – so when better than 42 years after initial release to reissue their album debut on vinyl? New listeners will find, in addition to the roiling compulsion of its odd, dance-damaged clockwork and synthesis of feral and aestheticized values, a refined understanding of the width and breadth of “post-punk” music, from any era, known or unknown.