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."

Slowscan’s MOCA/FM release is an anthology of audio art pieces by 26 performance artists from the late 1960s-early 1970s that was broadcast on KPFA-FM radio, Berkeley in 1971. The radio broadcast consisted of one-minute works presented by the Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA), San Francisco, which was initiated and realised as a ‘non profit corporation with paying memberships and a permanent collection’ by Tom Marioni in 1970. Marioni’s MOCA existed until 1984 and was a specialized museum for sculpture, performance and site-specific works. Shows included ‘Sound Sculpture As’, ‘Body Works’ and ‘Terry Fox’ in 1970, ‘Chris Burden’ and ‘Comedy Sonatas’ in 1971, All-Night Sculptures’ in 1973 and ‘Vito Acconci’ in 1975. From 1972 to 1975 there would be free beer at MOCA as part of the sculpture ‘The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art’ by Tom Marioni and Allan Fish. The steadily growing rows of empty beer bottles lined up on shelves along the wall recorded the progress in time of this sculpture. The entire 1971 broadcast MOCA/FM was released on vinyl by Slowscan in 2015 and contains works by Tom Marioni, Warner Jepson, Allan Fish, Paul Kos, John Woodall and many more. As such it is a unique document of the conceptual art and sound art of the period.

Edition of 250 copies Giuseppe Chiari (1926–2007) was a Fluxus artist from Florence, Italy. In cooperation with Archivo Silenzio and Chiari’s friend and assistant Paolo Coteni, Slowscan has now released an LP with two previously unreleased piano pieces by Chiari, both recorded in Rome, one in 1974, the other in 1980. ‘Chiari’ it says on the front the cover of the LP and ‘Down With Classic Music’ on the back. Chiari and Slowscan don’t beat around the bush. Already experimenting with new combinations of avantgarde music and visual arts in the 1950s, Chiari became affiliated with Fluxus in 1962. In that open-minded, subversive and experimental group he developed into one of the leading artists and theorists. Among his many Fluxus writings are: ‘Music without counterpoint’ (1969), ‘Mother Music’ (1973), and ‘Method For Playing’ (1976). In these writings Chiari embraces chance as a formative principle and promotes interdisciplinary works of art, combining music, performance, speech and visual arts. Chiari himself experimented with what he called ‘visual music’ and ‘action music’, the latter of which this Slowscan LP contains excellent examples. Started when he joined Fluxus in 1962, the ‘Gesti sul Piano’ developed into Chiari’s central works of deconstruction. They always mark a break with every structure. Demolition by piano hammers. Chiari – Down With Classic Music!

Edition of 200 copies, with printed inner sleeve. Great sound performance held at with an introduction by Charles Amirkhanian. Enzo Minarelli is one of the most significant sound poets of our time. First and foremost, he is a distinguished, important, even profound creative artist. His body of work, which he most appropriately terms "poly-poetry", includes not only conventional sound poetry, but also embraces inter-media sound poetry (his performances frequently include slide projections, musique concrete and the use of instruments and noise/sound emitting objects), concrete poetry or what Minarelli calls "phono-graphies", visual art works utilizing the written word and images associated with music and geometry, video poetry, and performance art

‘Exorcise’ is Yes Indeed’s bats debut: a death disco plate of syrupy bass, ratty violin and keys, stir-crazed vocals, and clobbered spinnet, magicked and minced by FX.   London burbs’ Laurie Tompkins (composes, performs); Otto Willberg (improvises on basses) are long-time friends, and this 12” - their first release as Yes Indeed - departs from a clump of raucous and intermittent shows, and a 2016 live tape on Willberg’s Heavy Petting.   The EP measures the pair’s clotted, foolish overdubs against a backbone of dubbed-out spinnet and pit percussion, played cosmic and blood-spattered by guest Aaron Parker. Laurie’s keys and violin are trapped and tart, Otto’s electric slinky and gruff, Laurie-Otto voice the fever dream of a train through Woking.   ---   ‘Exorcise’ is available from June 2021 on the pair’s newly-minted Why Eye label as a 12” vinyl and/or download. released June 17, 2021   ---Paintings by Mio Ebisu. Music by Laurie Tompkins & Otto Willberg, feat. Aaron Parker. Recorded by Andrea Rocca at Baby Microbe. Mastered and pressed at Curved Pressings.   ---

'Workaday Strangeness: Gyrating Death Throes From a Void Axiom' is the new LP from Glasgow-based music originator Wormhook. The music therein, we understand, emerged for highly personal therapeutic reasons; nevertheless to describe it as ‘idiosyncratic’ would do a disservice both to Wormhook and to the concept of idiosyncrasy. While the record is certainly a profoundly unique, irreplicable creation, its music is nevertheless based on a visceral, breathing human rhythm which is common to all living bodies. It represents a celebration of the act of creation as a means of processing psychic and spiritual conflict, unconscious thought leading to spontaneous musical discovery.   Through something approaching the musical equivalent of automatic writing, Wormhook gives birth to fluid, home-woven spectral incantations and an untutored, backward-masked concrète hymnody. Brittle-as-glass guitar and grainy, hand-processed electronics underpin cantorial, intuitively modal vocals delivering a kind of raw, revelatory yet anti-prophetic ur-poetry, bridging the centuries between Hildegard von Bingen and Lonnie Holley and fixing the solitary star of Wormhook within the hermetic constellation which these visionaries inhabit. - Alasdair Roberts