Available as a 320MP3 or 24bit FLAC Please note - the LP and 2CD contain different material. If you'd like to order both at once, please select LP/CD.  LP Tracklisting: A1. Donnie and Zouïna A2. Are You Ready / Sans-Papiers (Original poem by Vicky Scrivener)A3. Steady Eddie and the FireflyA4. Like the LotusB1. La Vie S’en Va (Life Is Fleeting)(Improvisation around original song by Zouïna Benhalla. “What’s the ugliest part of your body?” is a quote from Frank Zappa’s song of the same name.) CD1 Tracklisting: “Songs” 1. Slow Within The Urgency - 6:12(Inspired by mindfulness teacher Jeff Warren)2. Donnie and Zouïna - 5:423. Are You Ready / Sans Papiers - 5:49(Original poem ‘Sans Papiers’ by Vicky Scrivener)4. You Darkness - 8:26(Original poem by Rainer Maria Rilke)5. Steady Eddie and The Firefly - 6:096. Like The Lotus - 2:187. Music Is The Healing Force of The Universe - 5:10(Music and lyrics by Mary Maria Parks) CD2 Tracklisting: “Whatever Arises” Part 1 - 5:59Part 2 - 1:58Part 3 - 3:18Part 4 - 3:43Part 5 - 6:55Part 6 - 4:40Part 7 - 3:16Prelude - 9:36First physical solo release from legendary vocal improvisor, dancer, and performer Maggie Nicols, and the follow up to Creative Contradiction (Takuroku 2020). "This is music as social commentary, memoir, love letter, confessional. It’s Nicols doing what comes naturally, on a basis of practice and trust." Julian Cowley, The Wire While she might be best known as an improviser (most notably in Spontaneous Music Ensemble, the Feminist Improvising Group and more recently with the likes of Les Diaboliques), Maggie Nicols’ talents stretch into song, dance, poetry, performance and composition. When Cafe OTO was shut over lockdown we invited her to follow up the wonderful solo ‘Creative Contradiction’ with some time spent singing alone at the piano. ‘Are You Ready?’ comprises an LP of songs and a 2CD edition which includes a companion disk of freely improvised meditations entitled, ‘Whatever Arises’. Songs - seemingly contradictory to the practices of free improvisation - have been a vital part in Nicols’ relationship to music. It was singing bebop with pianist Dennis Rose which nurtured and challenged Nicols, allowing her to develop her own skills and sound amongst a repertoire of standards sung in clubs and pubs. Vocalising alongside Julie Tippetts in Centipede showed her how heady experimentation could be woven into composition, and more recently a gig with pianist Steve Lodder played out ‘The Maggie Nicols Songbook.’ 'Are You Ready?' recalls Nicols’ own compositions from memory, working out tunes and turning them over. New routes down old paths form in moments of improvisation and all wrong turns are played out with joyous discovery. What John Stevens dubbed Maggie's “ability to find the ‘rhythmelodic’” meets a willingness to be understood and to understand. Solo at the piano, Nicols is still firmly rooted in the collective however - “Sans Papiers” sets the words of poet Vicky Scrivener to tune; a story of migration and struggle which is as important to Nicols as the songs her mother wrote.  Such an intimate recording of her own compositions came with a certain amount of reflection and anxiety - best confronted with time spent freely improvising. ‘Whatever Arises’ - a companion disk to ‘Songs’ - is a meditation of sorts, a process of ‘following the energy’ which has its roots in John Stevens’ work. “Improvisation gives the confidence to compose,” Nicols told us in an interview about some of her archival tapes, and here the two are as important as each other. Beginning with breath and repetition, ‘Whatever Arises’ allows Nicols’ to find new voices, accompanied by the piano and over dubbings of her tap shoes on the concrete floor. Brilliantly she is able to share her moments of discovery with the listener, finding comfort in vulnerability. Whilst rooted in Stevens’ work, Nicols’ improvisational techniques also remind us of Pauline Oliveros’ Sonic Meditations. They are what has allowed Nicols to find her own sound, to ‘teach herself to fly.’ They have allowed Nicols to grow and share and to be able to keep close the songs that mean so much to her, now shared with us. — Please note - the LP and 2CD contain different material. If you'd like to order both at once, please select LP/CD.  Recorded at Cafe OTO on July 15th, 16th and 17th 2021 by Shaun Crook. Mixed by Shaun Crook. Mastered by Sean McCann. Artwork by Annalisa Colombara. Lettering by Rosella Garavaglia. Layout by Maja Larrson. ‘Slow Within The Urgency’ inspired by mindfulness teacher Jeff Warren. Original poem ‘Sans Papiers’ by Vicky Scrivener. Original poem ‘You Darkness’ by Rainer Maria Rilke. Music and lyrics to ‘Music Is The Healing Force of The Universe’ by Mary Maria Parks. LP printed on 100% recycled black vinyl.

First ever reissue of longstanding friend of Cafe Oto David Cunningham's incredible debut LP, Grey Scale, from 1976. David Cunningham was born in Ireland in 1954. His work ranges from pop music to gallery installations including several collaborations with visual artists. His first significant commercial success came with The Flying Lizards' single "Money," an international hit in 1979. Originally released in 1976, Cunningham's first solo album Grey Scale has become a landmark statement of DIY minimalist composition – continuing in the vein of the wild explosion of arthouse experimentation from the early '70s. Cunningham, then a student at the Maidstone College of Art in Kent, drafted fellow student non-musicians and (using whatever instruments available) crafted an endlessly shifting sonic palette with an improvisor's keen sensitivity to space, texture and tone. As Cunningham states in the liner notes, his approach was to "pursue something (which may appear trivial or meaningless) so rigorously or relentlessly to the point that it reveals something new." Cunningham was influenced by live performances he was attending at the time by English composers Cornelius Cardew, Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman as well as free improvisors Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, David Toop and Paul Burwell. The inaugural release on Cunningham's own Piano label, Grey Scale was indeed "something new" in 1976. The artist quickly integrated his experimental sensibilities to produce art-rock pioneers This Heat, whose debut appeared on Piano in 1979. His popular success performing as The Flying Lizards (with two electro-punk albums on Virgin during the New Wave era) was presaged by this seminal work of fascinating sound collage and tonal freedom. First-time reissue. Track Listing: Error System (BAGFGAB) Error System (C Pulse Solo Recording) Error System (C Pulse Group Recording) Error System (E Based Group Recording) Error System (EFGA) Ecuador Water Systemised Venezuela 1 Guitar Systemised Venezuela 2 Bolivia

Formosa is composer Adam Matschulat's first major work under his own full name, a deeply personal album of field recordings capturing sounds from kitchens, churches, forests and farmyards in a compositional net of musique concrète that speaks directly to his family's history in the south of Brazil, exploring safety and belonging.Formosa is in the South of Brazil, where his mother's family emigrated from Prussia in the 1880s. His great-great grandfather built a church there, which still stands and where the congregation still sing from 1850s German hymn books. The role of preacher passed down in the family to his grandfather, who played accordion and worked his farm as the patriarch of what remains a pious community surrounded by forest."It's where I call home," Matschulat says of Formosa. "It’s where we spent all our summer holidays. This was a place I felt safe, and was a refuge from life in the city, which I found hard. This album is a mixture of this beautiful sense of safety and also a sense of respect I have for the magic of the place."The two side-long compositions contain recordings made in Formosa, from intimate moments between his family members – his mother speaking German to his grandfather – to church singing and the sound of family BBQs. It also contains latent suggestions of mortality – clouds of flies suggestive of rotting and returning to the earth. "This album is about mortality, but also the woods – the cycles of the land and our tiny existence around it,” he says. "My grandad is the strongest man I’ve ever known – he's kind, gentle, supportive but worked like an elephant. Until he was 80 he did all the farmwork, then his heart went and he couldn't even hold his accordion. He'd lost his sense of purpose. I wanted to explore that feeling in the recordings."The album is made of two-side long distinct compositions. The first explores his connection between mortality and the land, structured around warp and weft of place and conversation. From a distance, the scene appears to be straightforward field recordings of a working farm; of conversations around a table; wobbling German songs with halting accordion on a bed of night-time insect sounds; of hymns once removed by tape static as if remembered, or as a sonic symbol of psychological detachment. Closer listening reveals astute collaging and electro-acoustic manipulations.Matschulat’s family’s farm is surrounded by virgin Atlantic wood, where the trees are protected, and many of the recordings are from under this canopy. Matschulat remembers as a child feeling as if he had crossed a threshold, and the magic and fear contained in this environment. "For Formosa I went and recorded in the forest," he says, "but I've never been there at night. There's stuff you don't want to step on there – snakes and all sorts. I got myself completely wrapped up so I didn't get bitten to shreds, and crossed over into the forest at about 3am, and stood there recording for a long time. In the pitch black – and it is completely dark in there – I began to hallucinate."The second piece on Formosa is about life, in the form of love for his grandmother’s potato salad, the recipe for which is included in the sleeve notes and which he has vivid memories of his grandmother making for family BBQs. The piece opens with a curious rattling sound: boiled eggs in a bowl of water, giving way to a phone ringing off the hook and the sounds of a farm household: of sinks, plates, cutlery, chickens in the distance, cows mooing and the close mic’d squelching of mayonnaise and potatoes. It is a peaceful domestic scene, where time passes quietly in the production of a meal.The two pieces on Formosa are meditations on everyday connections to home and family, and more broadly on notions of life, death and belonging. It is an album about the significance of our everyday sonic worlds that creates a teleology of place, and a psychological cartography of safety and home.

Incredible recordings from 2017 by the late, great Finnish electronic pioneer, Pekka Airaksinen on keyboards, joined by Sami Pekkola (Saxophone / Percussion) and Samuli Tanner (electronics), for sessions that range from dreamy electroacoustic improvisations to blasting blowout sessions.   Pekka Airaksinen (1945–2019) was a pioneering composer of electronic and experimental music. Despite his undisputed position as one of the most significant factors in Finnish experimental music, he rarely performed live since the early days of Finnish underground in the 60’s and 70’s. He composed and developed his unique, gentle and enthusiastic approach to music at his private meditation center, far from the pulse and demands of life in the city. Luckily some exceptions did occur, like this live set with saxophonist Sami Pekkola and electronic musician Samuli Tanner. The trio was formed around 2015 for private sessions and occasional live performances. The music varied from dreamy electroacoustic improvisations to blasting blowout sessions where Tanner switched to drums. In February 2017, they performed in Tampere and Helsinki, opening for Rashad Becker. The latter concert can be heard almost entirely on this record. Pekka Airaksinen - keyboards Sami Pekkola - saxophones, bongos and small objects Samuli Tanner - electronics

The latest outing from Bromp Treb, aka Neil Young Cloaca (co-director of Milford Graves: Full Mantis), delving into the shifting realms of off-kilter ambiences, wonky electronics, and noise and free jazz adjacent acoustic explosions. Vinyl edition of 250 copies, comes with a riso insert. ald Eagle Over Food City is a blurry zoomed-in photograph of a national bird soaring over a grocery store parking lot. It is an album of thirteen failed portraits attempting to distill the impossible essence of a place that is repeatedly deformed by displacement and extraction, quietly made invisible by milltown charm. Bromp Treb is the solo project of noisemaker and filmmaker Neil ‘Cloaca’ Young, who has been performing and producing small-run releases under this moniker for some 20 years. For almost as long he’s been the percussionist for weirdo noise collective Fat Worm of Error, and collaborating in other units such as Carbus, Gloyd and Playbackers. Young co-directed Milford Graves Full Mantis with Jake Meginsky, as well as making many other obscure personal experimental films. He has lived in the village described in Bald Eagle Over Food City for the past 16 years and between the Connecticut and Hudson River Valleys his whole life.Bald Eagle Over Food City was composed, performed and produced by Bromp Treb aka Neil ‘cloaca’ Young, recorded with several tape machines in 2019-21 at the chromazone home studio in western massachusetts, along the Connecticut River at a small village currently called Turners Falls, aka Pocumtuck and Wabanaki lands.

What is in the Museum Of No Art? Not paintings, but visions. Not sculptures, but empty spaces full of potential. It is within this inverted gallery that Mona Steinwidder traces fabulous forms with synthesizer, clarinet and effects. Under the moniker Museum Of No Art, she has created an album that floats in a hazy lacuna between realities, rooted in propulsive and deep bass resonance, but also footloose, playfully deconstructing language and mixing in layers of echoing synthetic and organic tones. The fascinating result of these unfettered experiments resonate as an imaginary cadavre-exquis played by DJ Screw, Arthur Russell, Hiroshi Yoshimura, MJ Lallo, Poppy Nogood, and Laurie Anderson. With a background in fine art and music, over the years Steinwidder has created and released music under the pseudonym Mohna, as part of the experimental pop band Me Succeeds, and collaborates with composer Alexander Schubert and electronic dance music producer Christian Löffler. Recently, shifting her focus more on improvisation and experimental music, she moved to Vienna for six months to concentrate on experimenting with synthesizers, samplers and voice. Her intention was to build a “playground” that would leave space for improvisation and allow for a meditative and intuitive process. This solo exploration allowed her to return home with a new way to play. “I like this idea of an open and light structure that can grow and transform and leaves space in all directions. Something without a clear beginning and ending. A rough, short note. Today I’m in the mood to sing, but tomorrow I might be in the mood to just float on an ocean of synths or to play a solo on my clarinet. I am a never-ending process and I am many. The Museum Of No Art album is a collection of days and moods, images and circumstances I experienced and immediately recorded in the last year.”

Peter Broetzmann / alto and tenor sax, Bflat clarinet, Taragato Jason Adasiewicz / vibraphone John Edwards / double bass Steve Noble / drums Recorded live at Cafe OTO on 12 August 2013 by James Dunn. Mixed by Rupert Clervaux at Grays Inn Road. Mastered by Andreas [LUPO] Lubich at Calyx. Design by Brö/Untiet. Drawing by Brö. Photocollage (on sleeve reverse) by Dawid Laskowski ROKU010 Format Information 180g LP -- Outersleeve: Full colour offset print on Hansaboard / Innersleeve: Generic OTOroku innersleeve (two pantone offset print on reverse double whiteboard / Single Colour black labels.  CD -- Card sleeve, full colour offset print on greyboard. DL -- Available as 320k MP3 or 24bit FLAC. Our tenth OTOROKU release sees a return to the group that kick-started the label - the veteran German reedsman and free jazz pioneer Peter Broetzmann with the long-running London bass/drums partnership of John Edwards and Steve Noble. After the release of '…The Worse The Better' that group went on to play a series of devastating shows in Europe and to emerge as one of Broetzmann's finest working groups. Over the same period Peter was developing a deep rapport with Jason Adasiewicz, the upstart vibraphone player from Chicago. What seems on paper like an awkward pairing reveals itself on stage and on record as a symbiotic revelation. Adasiewicz's physical attack matching Broetzmann for impact whilst the extended sustain of the vibes opens up an eerie space for some of Broetzmann's most fertile lyricism. The recording is from the last set of a two-day residency at Cafe OTO that brought these two groups together for an astonishing quartet. Adasiewicz and Noble struck up an immense partnership in rhythm. Edwards wrestled with a broken house bass and failing amplifier and still managed new levels of invention - stoking the others onwards. Broetzmann was clearly energised - I swear I saw him dancing at the side of the stage whilst exchanging a shattered reed. And for all the usual rhetoric of Free Jazz bluster and machismo, this is a meeting characterised by the joy of communal creation that makes you want to dance - even if only in your head.

Transversales Disques presents « KSHATRYA, The Eye Of The Bird », a recording never released before by french avant-garde electronic composer Igor Wakhevitch, who released a bunch of major experimental albums in the 70’s such as « Logos », « Docteur Faust » , « Hathor » "Les Fous d'Or", "Nagual" and "Let's Start".Unpublished recordings / Remastered high-resolution / Exclusive liner notes and pictures.

Electrucs’ is a previously unpublished LP of works by former INA-GRM chief François Bayle, recorded 1974-1995, and now finally issued on the 60th anniversary of the world-renowned facility he managed between 1966-1997. Comprising four distinct sections of acousmatic study ranging from playful AKS Synthi “hand games” to the blooming ‘Rosaces’, a test-piece for the Acousmonium, and a dedication to his peer, Bernard Parmegiani; ‘Electrucs’ follows Recollection GRM’s series of Bayle reissues to offer a diverse and spellbinding survey of his pioneering work spanning the past half century. The A-side is taken by 10 oozing, viscously shapeshifting ‘Electrucs’ that give the LP its title, rendering a series of highly dynamic pieces made on the Synthi AKS between 1974-2018, and veering from chaotic polymetrics to pulsating, almost melodic vignettes, and many moments of tense, atonal abstraction that wouldn’t sound out of place on a good hour or thriller soundtrack. The other side breaks down to three distinct sections. ‘Cinq dessins en rosace’ [1973] is a five part study of increasingly complex geometries, transiting from sharp, simple oscillations to filigree, spatialized arrangements of electronics and keys. ‘Foliphonie’ [1974-2011] follows with a beautifully alien scene of chirruping voices and whirled woodwind originally hatched for use on the GRM’s Acousmonium speaker/diffusion system, and ’Marpège’ [1995-2007] finds him dissolving a trace of Bernard Parmegiani’s ‘Sonare’ into sonic delirium.

!!! --- Lucrecia Dalt channels innate sensory echoes of growing up in Colombia on her new album ¡Ay!, where traditional instrumentation encounters adventurous impulse and sci-fi meditations on atemporality in an exclamation of liminal delight. Dalt’s introspective approach to composition, last surfaced on her entrancing 2020 album No era sólida, refracts across ¡Ay! in a subconscious spectrum of the music genres she absorbed as a child. Treasured sounds and syncopations of bolero, mambo, salsa, and merengue rooted in Dalt’s early surroundings awaken on ¡Ay! and give glow to the album’s contours. The intuitive melodic structures of this music, processed by memory and modular synths, led Dalt to a mirage of her creative origins and the album she has always wanted to make. ¡Ay! is a tincture of rich acoustic textures filtered through the warmth of Dalt’s signature machinic distortion, diffused of easily-defined edges as previously explored on No era sólida and her 2018 album Anticlines. Here, vivid incantations of upright bass, wind ensembles and brass form shimmers of harmonic motif, distilled across radiant rhythms. Dalt worked closely with friend and collaborator Alex Lázaro to cultivate new shapes and colors for slowed down tumbaos and bolero percussion patterns. Together they deconstructed the traditional drum kit into serpentine expansions of congas, bongos, temple blocks and timbales, all of which they tuned to dance among Lucrecia’s lucid vocal processions. Into this hallucinatory crossing of time and space, Dalt projects a sci-fi mythology rendered through theoretical exchanges with philosopher Miguel Prado. Their mutual interest in consciousness and atemporality summoned the tale of a metaphysical odyssey, cast by Dalt through silken lyrics in her native Spanish tongue. The lush musical world of ¡Ay! offers a soft but obscure landing for an alien entity called Preta, who has gathered a body in the hydrosphere from evaporated dead skin. We follow her first experiences of containment and composure as she navigates our geology and earthly markers of love and time, in contrast with her state as a timeless entity. Through Dalt’s soaring vocals, the intimate monologues of this ethereal being oscillate with the album’s vibrant instrumental arrangements. ¡Ay! stages a rare encounter between tropical rhythms and sci-fi storytelling, where Dalt devises her amorphous character to explore love without the expected cliches of romantic genres. Dalt brings lightness and humor to the arc of this melodramatic tale, once again shedding the restraints of convention to break boundaries into abstract, fragmentary relics. ¡Ay! is an interjection through which Dalt enters a new dimension in her work – one which connects her legacy of electronic revelations with the moment she reaches a panoramic view of her musical source. In sound and spirit, ¡Ay! is a heliacal exploration of native place and environmental tuning, where Dalt reverses the spell of temporal containment. Through the spiraling tendencies of time and topography, Dalt has arrived where she began. --- Composed and arranged by Lucrecia Dalt in Berlin in 2021Percussion by Alex LázaroTrumpet by Lina AllemanoClarinet and flute by Edith SteyerDouble bass by Nick DunstonDouble bass on “El Galatzó” by Isabel RößlerBacking vocals by Camille Mandoki and Alex LázaroLyrics by Miguel Prado and Lucrecia DaltWind instruments and bass (Nick Dunston) recorded by Alberto Lucendo at Lucrecia’s home studioPercussion recorded by Eric Bauer at Bauer Studios (Berlin, Germany)Premixed by Lucrecia DaltMixed by Marta Salogni (London, UK)Mastered by Sarah Register (New York, NY)Vinyl cut by Anne Taegert, Dubplates & Mastering (Berlin, Germany)Standard edition artwork details:Album concept written by Miguel Prado and Lucrecia DaltCover photo by Aina ClimentOriginal artwork and design by Will Work For GoodAlbum cover concept derived from the project Pedis Possessio, created with Aina Climent, Judit J. Ferrer, and Miguel Prado. With movement realized by Judit J. Ferrer.Limited edition artwork details:Cover artwork courtesy of Regina de Miguel. Nerve bushes as coral forests, 2021Design by Will Work For GoodSupported by Initiative Musik gGmbH with project funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media.

180g black vinyl, card sleeve, printed insert Historically Fucked is a four way entanglement made to create short, eruptive songs and then set about obliterating them from the inside, like improvising a barrel to encase themselves in and then proceeding to lick their way out of it. It is about playing and laughing at playing, and it is about not doing either of those things sometimes. Sometimes it is to do with talking, howling or grunting, and sometimes it is to do with hitting and rubbing.Historically Fucked contains four people, who each share the same duties, and whose names in sequence are Otto Willberg, David Birchall, Greta Buitkuté and Alecs Pierce. They are from Manchester and often other places. Guitar, bass, drums and voices keenly jostle amid the group’s frenzy of spontaneous rock throttles. Some of these rampant exercises in avant are collected on ‘The Mule Peasants’ Revolt of 12,067’, the band’s new album, released by Upset The Rhythm on February 3rd. This is the group’s first release since 2018’s mantlepiece staple ‘Aliven Wool’ (Heavy Petting). This is Rock and/or Roll as fertilizer, uncivilised and free, as if one were to imagine what the Plastic Ono Band would’ve hit upon if they had read ‘Riddley Walker’, the sound of an entire timeline of expression put back together back-to-front, misshapen and irradiated.‘The Mule Peasants’ Revolt of 12,067’ is not mere Sedentary Rock but Blasted Basalt, Frog worshipping cave-funk, harmolodic hullabaloo-wop, a musical game of “badger in the bag”. It is the sound of sacks crammed full of aggregate, a chimerical mind-meld, a seductive din that is to a hound dog in blue suede shoes what a raking of the dorsal fin with a fat marrow pinecone is to a pelican in the midst of being fired from the academy.‘The Mule Peasants’ Revolt of 12,067’ by Historically Fucked was recorded by Rory Salter, mixed by Otto Willberg and mastered by Mikey Young. The liminally worrisome artwork was painted by John Cobweaver.“They say these days that History is Fucked. Nothing ever dies but continues to rule the earth as an undead tyrant that cannot accept it’s own decomposition, look earwardly upon the dance of the proudly dead and decrepit!” Vymethoxy RedspidersLeeds 2022

"Hermann Nitsch playing the church organ in the Jesuit church of Vienna, November 20th, 2013. Four heavy drone pieces, mastered by Martin Siewert. These four tracks of Nitsch performing solo on organ are made of sustained drones that are soothing and intense. Music is beautiful and meditative, as it slowly evolves and transforms, full trills that shimmer with celestial light and glide slowly into one another in a harmony that's at the opposite of Nitsch's jarring and disturbing Aktion pieces, though with a similar droning minimalism aesthetic." --- Tracklisting: 1. Satz 1 - 16:04 2. Satz 2 - 13:16 3. Satz 3 - 11:54 4. Satz 4 - 13:00

Available as 320k MP3 or 24bit FLAC  Tracklisting:1. Sniffin' Samgh - 6:262. Peejayargh - 2:313. RP Beal - 3:284. Lime Rugis - 2:505. Charterhouse, Vinci - 7:32 'Ample Profanity' is composer Laurie Tompkins and cellist Oliver Coates' collaborative debut: coagulated gristle surfacing from a Beal, Brooklyn-brown, Ray V, Bangs, GAN, Rugs and Works acid bath. The EP collects 5 pieces composed by Laurie and then co-edited and performed with Olly. The former plays keys, tape player, and samples, the latter cello with effects. Both sing.  Here is grazed, contorted classicism, here post-binge hallucinations, here gunky funk.  "I met [Laurie] when I was 16, at school. I don’t know where along the way he’s found that he can make a piece out of flower pots and shouting, and it can be genuinely moving. With Laurie, there’s this thing with Netflix culture and tropes in the promotion of electronic dance music. Like, “you must all listen to footwork now” because they market that at you. Ample Profanity is all about awkward juxtapositions: bits of music from House Of Cards coupled with RP Boo. That’s the headspace he’s in and he’s trying to articulate these as cello rhythms. I find that really satisfying. It looks really spidery and architectural on the page. You’ve got to repeat it 17 times and then shout the next thing, so it’s absurdly difficult to play. To play it physically, the energy of playing it, that’s why I do it." - Oliver Coates, The Wire, September 2018. --- Laurie Tompkins / vocals, keys, tape player, samples Oliver Coates / vocals, cello, effects --- Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Artwork by Laurie Tompkins and Suze Whaites.

Deadstock copies of this rare 7" by Birdyak (Bob Cobbing & Hugh Metcalfe) from 1988, issued by Klinker Zoundz. As wild and wonderful as experimental, free improvised vocal music gets!

Available as a 320 MP3 or 24bit FLAC Tracklisting: Side A  ⁗ - 20:20  Side B ◠ - 19:09  Loud Object is the second solo release from artist Billy Steiger, following his self released 'Recordings, drawings and photographs from in and around Fr​î​dd Newydd' in 2016. Both a visual artist and a musician, Steiger’s Loud Object plays as a two sided experiment in markmarking and sound, as a kind of writing by ear - metallic, brushed, wooden - lines imprinted and pressed circular.  The record takes its name from the discarded title of the several-hundred-page draft of Clarice Lispector’s eventual 96-page novel Água Viva. Devoid of characters or plot, Água Viva appears always in suspension between the interior and exterior and impression and expression. Weird and formless (like the jellyfish ‘agua viva’ translates to in Portuguese) Lispector’s text deals less in the cerebral or the knowable realms of words, but more in the unknowable moment of experience. Its joy is found in its looseness, its meaning found in its lack of definition. Loud Object began as six sides of violin improvisations, four of them abandoned and the last of them added to or processed usings samplers in moments Steiger calls ‘wells’ - gaps or dips in the recording which could be filled or poured into. The process of filling up and taking away, of repeating and multiplying, of building tension between the finite and the lost -  all wrestle with actualisation. Which line will be drawn? In the liner notes for the LP, Evie Scarlett Ward writes, “The record holds loss.”Though the lines are fixed, its contents are fluid - forty minutes filled in and manipulated, before time moves on. Steiger’s relentless rearranging of convention means no two of his live shows are the same, and his decade-plus involvement in London’s free improvisation scene constantly surprises. Loud Object is no exception.

Avaliable as 320MP3 or 24bit FLAC from 7th October Tracklisting: Side A 1. la charnière I - 6:112. woe are we - 2:503. a unit has no unity - 3.004. indigos - 3:205. study of a flame - 4:32 Side B 6. la charnière II - 1:117. promise & illusion - 4:358. hush now you say - 2:569. tempera - 6:3610. mistakes & continue - 5:54 Promise & Illusion is the first LP from Ecka Mordecai, following the release of her solo Critique + Prosper on Takuroku in 2020. Cello, voice, horsehair harp, violin and field recordings combine to spin narrative melody, rich intimacy and melancholic landscapes. Composed around an exploration of la charnière (from the French ‘hinge’), Promise & Illusion begins with the sound of footsteps and a door opening and closing repeatedly, unsure whether to let us into the mysterious interior beyond. We are reminded of the house of Penny Slinger in An Exorcism, an abandoned mansion of gothic hallways and inky corridors. “woe are we” twists violin and voice together into the sort of tension and high drama heard in “The Executioner” - Henning Christiansen’s soundtracks made for the films of his partner Ursula Reuter Christiansen in the 1970’s. Then things begin to soften, almost despite themselves. Distortion on ‘a unit has no unity’ can’t quite smother a rising tune on warped harp. The cello on ‘indigos’ - its voice pizzicato with a velvety sustain - brings comfort and clarity. Mordecai hums a line, feeling out the edges of a song in an intimate release of tension. We are across the threshold - into a romantic sort of nocturnal gloom that feels somewhat out of place in London’s experimental music scene.  Trained on viola da gamba as part of a renaissance youth group in the historic midland town of Stafford, Mordecai went on to study performance art in Brighton, later graduating in sound art in London. She performed with David Toop and Rie Nakajima as part of Allan Kaprow’s Yard at the Hepworth Gallery, as well as performing scores by Yoko Ono and George Brecht solo at White Cube Gallery as part of Christian Marclay’s Liquids exhibition. Later, various moves across the north of England found her working with Andrew Chalk and Tom James Scott (forming the trio CIRCÆA), Miles Whittaker (of Demdike Stare) and performing alongside free improvisers. A myriad of influences have crossed her path, her work slowly taking shape across music concrète, improvisation and performance art.  A more recent recording with Valerio Tricoli as ‘Mordecoli’ made during the development of Promise & Illusion found its final form as a cassette - a collage of sustained tones, ominous atmospheres and brief 4th wall dissolving vocal interaction. With both CIRCÆA and Mordecoli, Mordecai deals with landscapes - playing with the imaginary over the real and using improvisation as a useful way to dream.  On Promise & Illusion, Mordecai sharpens her focus and pivots toward the interior over the exterior - the landscape becoming a personal, psychological one - both comforting and strange.  --- Tracks 4, 5, 7 & 10 recorded and mixed by Adam Matschulat in December 2020. All others recorded and mixed by Ecka Mordecai. Mastered by Shaun Crook at Lockdown Studios, London. Artwork by Ecka Mordecai. Layout by Zofia Sobota.

Post-metal sludge avantgarde powerhouse SUMAC around Aaron Turner (Isis, Old Man Gloom) follow up their collaboration with legendary Japanese guitarist and singer/performer Keiji Haino on Thrill Jockey (American Dollar Bill – Keep Facing Sideways, You are too Hideous to Look at Face on) with another monolith - heavy and experimental at the same time --- Keiji Haino / guitar, voice, flute, taepyeongsoAaron Turner / guitarNick Yacyshyn / drumsBrian Cook / bass

lll人 (pronounced /el/) is Daichi Yoshikawa, Paul Abbott and Seymour Wright. This recording includes two bare twenty minute excerpts from separate performances at Cafe OTO. 1. lll人 = Daichi Yoshikawa + Paul Abbott + Seymour Wright2. Still finding, twisting and hammering out an expanding musical universe balanced only by its own logics – lll人 have few obvious comparisons. Their performances are consistent radical negotiations of the emotional, physical and social energies of the environments they sound out. 3. Fold out/roll up drumfeedbackreed sausage/pleat, holed and sliced. 4. [cropse after gannen begat gjerhan (ovo) ROKU11] 5. The tools are familiar, the listening is not; 6. The tools are familiar, the spaces are not. 7. Here are recordings of public longform negotiations of: a. the vast of V&A; cast rooms (walkthru); b. the theatron of Spanish Fighters (sitdown). 8. June 28, 2013 VandA cast-coated Huge room full cast of plaster. BORC Ljubljan Friday Spanski - spanski 2013 the 11th year 15 months dark room Escapade Winton, we're playing in front of the emergency; 9. More lll人: absorbing protoplasm dances of doppelnut learnings.   gjērhan, (!) From subterranea, sweat, haze and dedication emerging out of intimate and intense weekly meetings begun in 2009 – their first, 2012 public performance, squeezed into a London basement was a sheer, vexed and exhilarating smack of organic, heterodyning ideas, and taut, lowbeating lumps. Reemerge/revanish. With the economy of familiar/traditional raw tools feedback, drumkit, altosaxophone, time, space and emotion lll人 move from molten musical pasts to grow future pleasures in sound. The ingredients are familiar, but the listening is not. At its heart is a still, undecorated concentration fuelling an extreme testing of limbs, language and order. This has no concern with collapsing difference into a vogueish flattened mass froth, but searches – forensically, ceaselessly – for something to chew, in the challenge of discretion and integrity or asylum in the body of its instruments. Akilsakilan learning, Doughnut. Finding, twisting and hammering out an expanding musical universe balanced only by its own logics – lll人 have few obvious comparisons. Their performances are consistent radical negotiations of the emotional, physical and social energies of the environments they sound out. Perfectly Reasonable. [The second side was recorded at a summer fundraiser concert for Project Fukushima (This followed a solo performance by Evan Parker who later joined the group for a quartet) and the first as part of the inaugural INTERSECT festival four months later.] Recorded at Cafe OTO on 28 August 2013 (Fukshima) by Stuart Bannister and 7 December 2013 (Intersect) by Kate Arnold. Mixed by Paul Abbott. Mastered by Andreas [LUPO] Lubich at Calyx, Berlin. Design by Paul Abbott. Inner sleeve by Paul Abbott, Cara Tolmie and Conal Mcstravick