Following her debut LP (KRAAK, 2018) and a string of tapes and 7-inches, Red Brut drops her second album, Cloaked Travels. It is a joint release by the Finnish labels Ikuisuus and Lal Lal Lal. In many aspects, Cloaked Travels is an amazing realisation of what Red Brut does best: molding the absurd, the amateurish, and the crude into beautiful and elegant sound pieces. These eight “songs”, organised in two suites, dwell between abstract avant-garde and pop sensibility. Working with cassette tapes, Red Brut enhances the ambiguous qualities of her sounds with the warm distortion and background hiss typical of the medium. The music leaves the listener to him- or herself, happily lost in small universes that contain many layers of beauty, discomfort, and intimacy. Susan Sontag once claimed that diaries, despite secretly kept by the author, are meant to be read by others. Red Brut’s intimate and highly personal take on musique concrète is characterised by a homely feeling: sounds of doors, kids outside her house, a synth that sounds like a house pet, muffled whispers of her voice. Her compositions sound like you are secretly reading her diary. You are in the uncomfortable position of watching someone chasing her own tail, unaware of the fact that she is being the object of our gaze. Unaware? Cloaked Travels displays on a certain point the sound of a squeaking door. Over and over until it starts sounding like a wild free jazz solo. Is Verbiesen playing tricks on our minds? Is she actually the Unconsciously Watched? Or is she cloaked as that character, and in fact very well aware that we are peeping into her inner emotional universe; maybe she is even projecting a fake version of what sounds like here day-to-day, intimate environment — making us conscious of our own gaze? Again Sontag comes to mind: she deliberately projected a well-constructed character in both her diaries as in public life. Cloaked Travels contains distinct and carefully composed pieces that play upon the tension between the concrete and the abstract. Every song acts like a Cave of Plato: we are unable to see what is actually happening, we only see the shadows of a door moving or the sounds of someone gurgling. The album suggests some fundamental questions: is what we conceive as reality nothing but a derivative of the Ideal? Is there really something behind the shadow, or is the shadow the actual reality? --- Released July 2020, Ikuisuus and Lal Lal Lal.

Jeugdbrand is the voice (Dennis Tyfus) and the beat (Jeroen Stevens) of Antwerp. They perform a sparkling drama, a theatrical tragedy, marinated in our classic Antwerp anarchic sense of humor. This is a true art record with cover art by famous German painter Albert Oehlen. Recorded at Joris Caluwaerts’ Finster Studios - a landmark in Belgian music. Inside the multiverse that is Dennis Tyfus’ oeuvre there exists this body of detailed pencil drawings of various sizes. In these drawings the artist puts himself in many tragic situations. Like vomiting on his way home after a long night at the bar. Boiling right wing idiots. Telling sweet little lies on your Tinder profile. Or, you know, taking out the garbage on a Sunday evening. The horror. These seemingly hermetic pencil drawings show a deceivingly simple world. But you’re often stuck with a bitter aftertaste when you understand a bit more what is actually happening behind the colorful masque. When it comes to his music - and in contrast to aforementioned drawings - Dennis pencils a more piecemeal picture. His recordings and performances often feel like spliced excerpts. Strange sentences and funny remarks waiver by and interconnect. Musical symbols are casually thrown on the table. Instead of a clear picture, we now have the feeling of looking at a bunch of different doodles. Like... sometimes I have the feeling compared to how focussed Dennis works on his drawings, how unfocussed and sketchy he treats his music. We are simply thrown from emotion to emotion. From laughter to tears. It’s a bumpy ride. I’d like to imagine that Dennis constantly notates all the shards of conversation he picks up during his regular walks in the centre of Antwerp - a wormhole congested with characters, the one more tragic than the other. In a kind of R. Murray Schafer way, Dennis takes in every sentence very un-arbitrary... and that’s the soundscape. Dramatic, normal, boasted, silly, urgent... Enter Jeroen Stevens. Antwerp’s number one percussionist. If I would have to list all the bands he performs in this text, well, we would be truly wasting data and printers. Jeroen is the grand gift of the well- schooled session musician. But thank the heavens of white improv, he is also sweet and creative. Jeugdbrand is his second entry in the Edições CN catalogue, after taking care of some of the percussive fragments on the “KAGIROI" LP with Sugai Ken (2021). Recently Jeroen has been performing very lengthy - thus correct - performances of Satie’s Vexations for midi instrumentation; Christmas music; and his famed De Stoeltjes project, where he covers Stooges songs on a camping chair. Apparently much to the confusion of Iggy himself. This might all feel like a big joke to you, but when you dare to listen, you will have to admit that Steven’s adventurous music is very rewarding. Special stuff. The music of Jeugdbrand reminds me a bit of the music of the late Ghédalia Tazartès - especially when it comes to reinterpreting and combining musical idioms - but trying to put a direct reference on this album does it a bit short. Most important, this is music how it could be: incomprehensible, hilarious, serious, ludicrous, well crafted, sloppy, non-genre. With a strong sense of personality. You know, a fragmented beam for your own overstimulated temple. To shake things up a little ... “They told us, they told her. I told everybody.”

“‘Rhea’ begins as an event and concludes as printed matter. Much like Cage’s ‘Water Walk’, the event of ‘Rhea’ consists of a series of fragmented performative gestures each with their own sonic characteristics. These movements will have auditory qualities that contradict their symbolic meaning; such as stepping on a bag of crisps or spreading butter on toast. Over time, these actions accumulate to reveal various rhythmic and melodic structures to be repeated or interrupted. This will be documented and then printed into an auditory and visual format. The conceptual essence of ‘Rhea’ is that the event oscillates between the symbolic and the auditory, whilst the printed matter amplifies this oscillation by projecting it into past and present.” Released by Calling Cards Publishing

This is the third release from The Slowest Lift who are a West Yorkshire based band comprising of Sophie Cooper (Tor Festival) and Julian Bradley (Vibracathedral Orchestra). This record is being self-released by The Slowest Lift on limited edition cassette and on digital download. There will be a vinyl version coming later released by Feeding Tube Records.

"The band seem to move together as one, crawling and then leaping like a lurching animal, with each musical event getting slightly more crazed as it progresses forward on stamping paws." – Ed Pinsent, The Sound Projector 2010 - 2020 compilation album: Tracks 1 and 5 are taken from "Inwards opened the floor." (2020) Tracks 2 and 3 are taken from "Kadita sessions" (2016) Track 4 is taken from "From inside the log" (2010) Track 6 is taken from "Still life with apples" (2020) Played by: Gosha Hniu, Ran Nahmias, Maya Pik, Grundik Kasyansky, Amos Ungar, Tom Wheatley, Lior Lerman, Andrea Serafino, Yoni Silver, Jonathan Shohet, Matthias Moos, Uri Eichelmann, George Priymenko, Ig Yu Kun, Timurti, Guillaume Viltard, Hans Grusel and Gretel Grusel. Lyrics are based on the poems by Arthur Molev and Avenir Snyatkov.

Chra is the artist moniker for Austrian Christina Nemec (Bray, Shampoo Boy). SEAMONS is the latest missive in her ongoing exploration of suffocating abstract audio. At once designed and falling apart SEAMONS is rough and crude, a stumbling and staggering electronic expedition where nothing presents itself explicit in intent. It’s a tense obscure record that teases you into it’s peculiar vortex from it’s suggestive nature of exploring the enigma beyond it’s haunted facade. VICIOUS WATER REGIMES stutters along as an ‘ugly’ mass of grey electronica. CAST(O)RO shines from light from the depths with it’s occasional foray into glistening tones. COLONIA MARINA SERENELLA is a dank squelching backdrop for a dark age. CAST twists tension with flickering electronics chaotic in their perpetual design of order confronting inevitable collapse. LET SHARKS SLEEP is not only a great title but a mind tickling adventure of descending/rising digital dance that builds in intensity with it's relentless repetition. WIDOW WALKS gallops and creaks along a path veiled in whispers. ENGE lunges through time with an air of deep uncertainty. SEAMONS hovers on the outskirts, crawling out of the speakers with endless surprising turns, few of them comfortable. SEAMONS is progressive ambient, not the kind that makes you escape, but rather one you can't escape from. SEAMONS crawls into the very guts of sound to uncover and unravel the uneasy and unsettling underbelly within.

Originally recorded in 1984, “Jumping and Standing” consists of a live performance at Musashino Art University by pioneering Japanese sound artist Akio Suzuki, accompanied by five toy rabbits. This long-awaited release epitomizes Suzuki’s approach to performance, imbued with a characteristic sense of humor and an organic interplay with his audiences, as evinced by uproarious laughter heard on the opening track. Now some three decades later, contemporary listeners are likewise drawn ever deeper into this novel noisescape featuring an ensemble of wind-up bunnies on broken boards, metallic fragments, and a reel-to-reel tape deck on the fritz. --- “Jumping and Standing” 1984"Akio SuzukiNovember 30, 1984 1-103 Hall, Musashino Art UniversityRecorded by Akio SuzukiMastered by Kiyoharu Kuwayama (Lethe).

Steve Swell: trombone Jemeel Moondoc: alto saxophone Dave Burrell: piano William Parker: double bass Gerald Cleaver: drums released April 25, 2016 All compositions by Steve Swell Recorded by Jim Clouse, Park West Studio, June 2015 Mixing and mastering: Jim Clouse Liner notes: Steven Loewy Photographs: Ziga Koritnik, Peter Gannushkin, Jacques Bisceglia, RogueArt Cover design: Max Schoendorff Cover realisation: David Bourguignon Executive producer: Michel Dorbon So, listen closely, and savor the sounds: treat them with delicate abandon, indulge in their intricately measured poignancy; but don’t forget to relax (a little) and enjoy: You are in the hands of a master soul traveler. Steven Loewy

Stemming from Speers’ background as a percussionist and technician testing large amounts of audio equipment, ‘xtr’ctn’ pairs nanoscopic recordings of electronic equipment’s internal behaviours with samples of the natural world and feedback from no-input mixers to yield a visceral and inventively personalised view on sound phenomena and resonant spaces that lay beyond the threshold of human perception. Arranging his unique palette of field recordings, SFX library, YouTube samples and original instrumentation by Olan Monk into non-linear, non-narrative structures, he invites the listener to immerse in a form of sonic fiction which highlights the fine line between referential, objective reality and pareidolic subjectivity. Distinguished by an otherworldy, meta sense of detachment shared with music by Giuseppe Ielasi, Mika Vainio, and :Zoviet*France:, the four pieces form a fascinating sonic weltanschauung that acknowledges and articulates the complex role of non-human and material sound generators upon the self. From the way seagulls resemble death metal screams in ‘obturo’ to the uncanny manner in which Olan Monk’s piano pulse and samples of Liam Byrne’s viola de gamba in ’tombeau’ recalls a scene of ravenous whistle and horn blowing at The Eclipse in Coventry c. 1992, each piece is densely packed with acousmatic data that will stimulate a broad range of reactions as listeners fill in the perceptive gaps according to their own sferic conditioning and grasp of worlds natural, and synthetic. Where the first two pieces steer clear of any blatant emotive cues, the fragmented shrapnel that opens ’sul. locus’ changes at the mid-way point with the suggestively gloomy strokes of a Kemençe, a stringed middle-eastern instrument held in subtle contrast with the sound of ice hacking taken from a 1984 BBC SFX library sample to sound like a location recording from an alchemist’s lab, or passages of When’s proto-BM classic ‘The Black Death’, while ‘ορμή’ follows with an eerie vent of percussive improv, the sound of filing metal, and a pressure washer that recall the lurching rhythm and gauntlet grasp of textures also found in the remarkable debut by Cairo’s 1127. It all points to a penetrative pair of ears and mind that sees the world differently, and should inspire listeners to pay closer attention to the world around them. --- C.A.N.V.A.S., 2019

Souffle Continu presents the seventh release in its series of reissues from the catalog of the cult French underground Futura label. Travelling was a keyboard-based trio that probably represents best what the Futura's RED series was about -- jazz, rock, and experimental inquisitiveness. Often described as the French answer to the Canterbury scene, Voici la Nuit Tombée contains echoes of Soft Machine, Caravan, and Supersister, especially on the sidelong opening track, "Voici la Nuit Tombée." It's the album's tour de force, with its fuzz bass, distorted organs, piano jazz, and complex meter. This is the first-ever vinyl reissue of this pioneering 1973 prog jewel, fully licensed by Futura founder Gérard Terronès. Presented in a 350-gram reverse-printed sleeve with obi strip. Limited edition of 500.

When the second Nu Creative Methods album was released, New And Rediscovered Musical Instruments by Max Eastley and David Toop had already been available for almost three years. Without being able to say that there was a direct, real-time influence, the direction taken by the British and French duos was however the same, combining research and tradition in a quest for a new imaginary folklore. The name chosen by the pair was anything but innocent, linking them to both the track 'Nu Creative Love' by Don Cherry (from Symphony For Improvisers) and the book My Creative Method by Francis Ponge. Because the first outlines the route of a free jazz the boundaries of which have constantly been demolished and through which Pierre Bastien and Bernard Pruvost traced their own path, while the second, an anarchist creating a bomb with the irrational as gunpowder, is close to providing an intellectual method. Close, because even this is undermined by other essential routes taken by Nu Creative Methods. The Oulipo, for example, encouraged all sorts of creativity; or perhaps pataphysics, according to which a banal saucepan is equivalent to the Mona Lisa! To get closer to the source of their imagination, the following names would have to be added to the list, Locus Solus by Raymond Roussel, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Harry Partch, New Phonic Art and 'Zwei Mann Orchester' by Maurizio Kagel. That shows, in broad strokes, the creative wheels in motion behind Nu Creative Methods and Nu Jungle Dances offers a taste of the pathways offered by chance, following improvisations using instruments from the five continents. By proceeding thus, that is to say entering an esthetic zone where popular and esoteric music come together at last, an infinite palette of sounds opens up, offering fantastic perspectives. Between free jazz and ancestral music, Nu Jungle Dances makes it happen without pretence but with a rare and luminous extravagance. But also with the willingness to take on board unexpected surprises, and with a natural charm combating for the craft of sound creation.

Souffle Continu Records present a reissue of Jean-Francois Pauvros and Gaby Bizien's No Man's Land, originally released on Un-Deux-Trois in 1976. Whether it is with the label Palm, or for Un-Deux-Trois, Jef Gilson has produced some of the best albums of French free jazz and improvisation. But that's not all: he also offered perfect recording conditions enabling some of the fresh young talent to emerge, including Daunik Lazro, André Jaume, and Jean-François Pauvros, all three of whom released their first recordings on one of those labels. Recorded by Jean-François Pauvros (guitar, but not only...) alongside Gaby Bizien (drums, percussion, aquatic trombone, marimba, bird calls), and, of course, produced by the audacious Jef Gilson, the appropriately named No Man's Land had virtually no equivalent in France (nor worldwide) when it came out in 1976. Radical, free, primitive, timeless: in the image of the musicians, it is not for nothing that it appears in the famous Nurse With Wound list of major influences concocted in 1979. No label can be placed on this vertiginous sensory adventure: an explosive flow of shrapnel and tearing intensity, full of mystery and life. To be clear, No Man's Land is the key recording of French improvisation. So much so that it is difficult to imagine it coming out of nowhere, the two musicians must surely have been listening to the latest forays of the British Music Improvisation Company and decided to reply in their own way. But not at all! If you believe what the protagonists have to say, these experiments were carried out in secret isolation, and with a total lack of awareness of everything that was going on in the avant-garde of improvised music. Indeed, it was only after the album was published that Jean-François Pauvros and Gaby Bizien learned that there was a movement going on with similar ideas. That tells us something about the level of invention of this album, which comfortably bears comparison to other similar duos such as Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley, Fred Frith and Chris Cutler, John Russell and Roger Turner, or Gary Smith and John Stevens... The Frenchmen were well served by their unbridled variety and poly-instrumentalism Edition of 500

Extracts from the Farewell performance at Kings College, London 1978. Jgjgjgjg formed at the  London Sound Poetry Festival in June 1976. Reissue of tape on Balsam Flex. 200 copiesIn those days a number of British poets were producing works influenced by radical international currents in sound art, conceptual art, visual poetry and performance art. Bob Cobbing (1920-2002) was a central figure in this continuation of the ‘British Poetry Revival’, a rather loose poetry movement of the 1960s and 1970s which can be seen as an internationally oriented modernist reaction to the English traditionalist and nationalist approach of poetry of ’The Movement’ (Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin et al.) Many of the Balsam Flex cassettes brought poets connected with ‘Writers Forum’, a small publisher, workshop and writers’ network founded in 1963 by Bob Cobbing, Jeff Nuttall and John Rowan. After Cobbing’s death in 2002 ‘Writers Forum’ has been directed by poet and artist Lawrence Upton (1949), who is one of the poets of the improvisational group JGJJGJG (‘as long as you can say it that’s the name of the band’). The other two members are Cris Cheek – originally from London but currently on the staff of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio – and Clive Fencott, who lectures at Teesside University. Slowscan #37 contains extracts from the Farewell performance of the group at King’s College, London 1978.Lawrence Upton(b. 1949) – poet, prose writer, essay writer, critic, publisher. Author of a great number of publications in literary magazines, collections, miscellanies both in Great Britain and abroad, and also of www-publications on various literary sites. Editor and publisher of a number of magazines and international anthologies, author of numerous books of poetry and prose. For many years he has been collaborating with different literary and artistic associations and perform-groups.

**Regular edition of 350 copies, gatefold sleeve** John Driscoll is a composer who is a founding member of Composers Inside Electronics (CIE) and collaborated on David Tudor’s Rainforest V starting in 1973. He has toured extensively in the U.S. and Europe with CIE, David Tudor, Phil Edelstein, Douglas Dunn & Dancers, Maida Withers & the Dance Construction Co. and as a solo performer. His work has focused on robotic instruments, music for dance and compositions and sound installations for unique architectural spaces. He’s exhibited his sound installations at the Fridman Gallery (NY), the Museum of Modern Art (NY), Museum of Modern Art (Warsaw), Museum der Moderne (Salzburg), Lyon Biennale, Subtropics (Miami), Univ. of Maryland (College Park). Driscoll has collaborated with Phil Edelstein on numerous works including their recent sound installation Cluster Fields.His collaboration with Edelstein on Rainforest V (variations 1-4) has resulted in acquisitions in the collections of Museum of Modern Art (NY), Museum der Moderne (Salzburg), Arter Museum (Istanbul) and Musée d’art Contemporain (Lyon). For the first time on vinyl, this essential publication includes 4 key audio works spanning an era from 1979 to 2018.

Slowscan vol. 38 is a expanded re-issue on vinyl of the Dances Interdites tape originally released on Balsam Flex, a London-based label run by artist Erik Vonna-Michell in the late 1970s-early 1980s. Peter Finch is a poet and short story writer living in Cardiff, Wales. He works in both traditional and experimental forms and is a performer on the reading circuit. In the sixties and seventies he edited the ground-breaking literary magazine, second aeon, exhibited visual poetry internationally and toured with sound poet Bob Cobbing.  Bob Cobbing (1920-2002) was a central figure in this continuation of the ‘British Poetry Revival’, a rather loose poetry movement of the 1960s and 1970s which can be seen as an internationally oriented modernist reaction to the English traditionalist and nationalist approach of poetry of ’The Movement’ (Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin et al.)

Another crucial excavatio from the elusive The Balsam Flex legendary catalog is now available again thanks to Jan Van Toorn Slowscan imprint. Balsam Flex was a cassette label run by the artist Erik Vonna-Michell in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and evidence of a relatively overlooked moment when a number of London-based British poets were producing work that was influenced by performance art, conceptual art, sound art, text-sound composition, Fluxus, and situationism.

Published and sold on an audiocassette by Ulises Carrìon (recently rediscovered thanks to an important Alga Marghen retrospective LP) , who in 1975 "created" the legendary Amsterdam bookshop-gallery "Other Books & So," the first space dedicated exclusively to artists' publications such as artists' records, books, magazines, postcards, etc.. only 12 cassettes were actually sold. Reissue of a cassette from 1978, a collection of sound poems and concrete poetry by G.J. de Rook, Michael Gibbs, Greta Monach and Ulises Carrión himself. The initiative for the release at the time originated from Ulises Carrión, who wanted sound poetry to be better known in The Netherlands. His plan was to release a series of sound poetry cassettes through his bookstore Other Books & So in Amsterdam and to distribute them among Dutch conservatories and libraries. The plan was to publish sound poets from all over the world. The series, called ‘Sound-Proof’, was introduced with a zero issue dedicated to sound poets living in The Netherlands. The recordings for Sound-Proof no. 0 were done by Greta Monach (assisted by technician Herman Kooy) at the Institute of Sonology of Utrecht University in 1978. With Sound-Proof no. 0 as an example Ulises Carrión and Greta Monach applied for a grant from the Dutch Ministry of Culture to realise the series they had in mind, but their request was denied and consequently no other cassettes appeared in the series. To make matters worse, only a handful of copies of Sound-Proof no. 0 were sold and the rest of the edition was destroyed by mistake. All that makes Sound-Proof no. 0 a rare set of recordings, which Slowscan released on vinyl in 2014 after they had been digitised by Greta Monach. The LP comes with English and Dutch inserts that contain background information on the recordings and biographical information on the artists.

An incredible compilation featuring unreleased before pices by sound related artists such as Charles Dreyfus, Ferdinand Kriwet, Julien Blaine, Richard Maxfield, Bob George, Henri Chopin, Rolf Julius, , Diana Spodorek, Milan Knízak. Editon of 250 copies, non-gatefold cover. Recorded live at "Artists Talking Back To The Media " November 1985 at Time Based Arts, Amsterdam curated by Ulises Carrion and Max Bruinsma in a live radio broadcast by VPRO radio. Ferdinand Kriwet's piece recorded by KPFK-FM in 1972"Talking Back to the Media was a manifestation that took place in Amsterdam during november 1985. It focussed on the media and its influence and how artist reacted to this influence. Talking Back to the Media was a concept by David Garcia and Raul Marroquin and took place in Amsterdam in november 1985. The aim of Talking Back tot the Media was to show work by artists who were making use of one of the mass media and who attempted to deconstruct the 'reality' evoked by the mass media or commented on that media in some other way in their work. It consisted out of numerous events as a photography-exposition, artist-conservations, a theater-play, a film festival, a publication, and local television broadcasts."