From the 1950s, Masaaki Takano (1927-2007) worked as a freelance "sound planner," mainly creating sound effects for stage productions. In the mid-1980s he began performances called "Sound Play" where he would perform on his own self-created sound instruments and his collection of ethnic instruments. Growing out of his work with sound effects, he became obsessed with the recording of natural sounds from the 1970s onwards, and this album "Shizukutachi" is a record of a high-quality recording of water droplets that he created in the studio using his own self-created suikinchiku system. This reissue recreates the original LP, using special paper to create beautiful packaging and duplicating the original, ultra-transparent vinyl. The reissue includes newly penned, detailed liner notes by Tomotaro Kaneko (owner of the Japanese Art Sound Archive).

Honest Jon's reissue of this classic Incus record.  "Multi-reedist Tony Coe was born in 1934, four years after guitarist Derek Bailey. He cut his teeth as a career jazzman with Humphrey Lyttleton, before an extended stint with the Kenny Clarke/Francy Boland Big Band. On this rare 1979 duo outing, he sticks to clarinet. And though that instrument has an illustrious jazz pedigree, Coe’s playing here is something else. It’s worth noting that the clarinettist has also played under the baton of arch-modernist Pierre Boulez, the kind of composer Derek Bailey enjoyed taking to task in his book Improvisation. You might think the Frenchman’s uncompromising serialism and the free playing Bailey defended with such passion all his life would have little in common, yet both men were hugely influenced by Anton Webern. It’s an influence you can hear right through Bailey’s career in his obsessive exploration of tight parcels of registrally-fixed pitches, notably those trademark ringing harmonics. Meanwhile, Coe’s meandering semitones and sinuous arabesques here recall both Boulez’s clarinet writing in Domaines, and the harmonic world of Boulez’s own teacher Olivier Messiaen. Still, no traditional classical musical notation could ever render the extraordinary rhythmic subtlety and timbral complexity of this music. It’s at one and the same time dazzlingly virtuosic — Coe and Bailey are on stellar form throughout, and have enough sense to, yes, accompany each other where needs be — and supremely lyrical and spacious.  An absolute delight." - Honest Jon's

"Since leaving Rio, Cyro has been accepted as one of the world's leading Brazillian percussionists, recording with Paquita de Rivera, Ruben Blades, Astrud Gilberto and lots of people like that. We met in New York while I was living there in the winter of 1982 and first played together at the Ear Inn on Spring St. In the following months we played all kinds of places, occasions which figured prominently among the many musical pleasures I enjoyed during that period. One such occasion, thanks to Bill Laswell, was this recording." - Derek Bailey.  --- Derek Bailey / guitar Cyro Baptista / percussion --- Tracklisting: 1. Toca Joga - 5:32 2. Quanto Tempo - 3:53 3. Polvo - 4:53 4. Rio Branco - 5:21 5. Joca Toca - 3:26 6. Que Horas - 5:02 7. Tondo - 7:04 8. Batida - 4:36 --- Recorded by Martin Bisi in October  1982, New York City. Produced by Adam Skeaping and John Haddon. Design by Karen Brookman. Photos by Eleonora Alberto and Karen Brookman.

Tracklisting: 1. Carminative - 11:30 2. I Soon Learned To Know This Flower Better - 07:15 3. Ja Ja - 07:30 4. Dart Drug - 25:30Another essential Incus reissue by Honest Jon's.  "Percussionist Jamie Muir was a member of King Crimson during the recording of Larks’ Tongues In Aspic, in 1973. Staying less than a year with Robert Fripp, the Scot had already cut his teeth with another master guitarist, Derek Bailey, as part of the Music Improvisation Company, along with Evan Parker, Hugh Davies and Christine Jeffrey, whose eponymous 1970 album was one of the first releases on ECM. Muir and Bailey recorded Dart Drug eleven years later, in 1981. There’s no shortage of great percussionists in the brief history of free improvised music but on the strength of Dart Drug alone Jamie Muir deserves a place at High Table. Unlike for example Han Bennink and John Stevens, though, you can’t hear echoes of any particular jazz drummer in Muir’s playing, even if he has expressed appreciation for Milford Graves (who himself sounded like nobody else who’d come before him). What on earth did Muir’s kit consist of? Some instruments are clearly identifiable (bells, gongs, chimes, woodblocks); others could be… well, anything. Old suitcases thwacked with rolled up newspapers? Tin cans and hubcaps inside a washing machine? Who cares? It sounds terrific – but if you’re the kind of person who faints at the sound of nails scraping a blackboard, you might want to nip out and put the kettle on towards the end of the title track. Dart Drug is consistently thrilling, and often very amusing – but it’s certainly not easy listening. In music we talk about playing with other musicians, whereas in sport you play against another opponent (or with your team against another team). Why not play against in music, too? That’s precisely what happens very often in improvised music, and Bailey was particularly good at it. How can a humble acoustic guitar hope to compete with a Muir in full flight?  Sometimes Bailey’s content to sit on those open strings, teasing out yet another exquisite Webernian constellation of ringing harmonics and wait for the dust to settle in Muir’s junkyard, but elsewhere he sets off into uncharted territory himself. “The way to discover the undiscovered in performing terms is to immediately reject all situations as you identify them (the cloud of unknowing) – which is to give music a future.” Bailey evidently concurred with this spoken statement by Muir, including it in his book Improvisation.Derek Bailey is no longer with us, of course, and Muir gave up performing music back in 1989. All the more reason for seeking out this magnificent, wild album. Very hotly recommended." - Honest Jon's

The third release in a series of collaborations between Honest Jon's Records and Incus: a reissue of Derek Bailey & Han Bennink, originally released in 1972. The tussling vegetables in Mal Dean's cover-sketch somehow befit perfectly this extraordinary duo of Bailey and the great Dutch drummer Han Bennink. Recorded in London in 1972, Incus 9 was their second record (after an Instant Composers Pool in 1969), becoming a blueprint and inspiration for generations of free-improvisers. It is paired here with a brilliant session from the following year, with the same power and friendly combativeness, and oodles of creativity, technique, and humor. It's obvious how much they loved playing together. Newly transferred from tape at Abbey Road, and remastered by Rashad Becker. Available exclusively for download here. Derek Bailey / guitar, voice Han Bennink / percussion, saw, reeds, brass, strings, voice --- Engineered by Bob Woolford (tracks: A.1.-B.3.). Mastered by Rashad Becker. Cover by Mal Dean.

The second release in a series of collaborations between Honest Jon's Records and Incus: three double-LPs of the legendary free-improvising guitarist Derek Bailey, solo (HJR 200LP) and in duos with Anthony Braxton and Han Bennink(HJR 202LP), augmenting the original releases with marvelous, previously unissued music. Recorded in 1974, at the Royal Hotel in Luton, with Braxton playing soprano and alto saxophones, and Bb and contrabass clarinets. Two volumes were planned; only one was issued, till now. This was an early transatlantic meeting between the leading free improvisers. Many of Braxton's signature techniques and ideas were gestated in such sessions. It still brims with inquisitive musical creativity and knockabout jazzbo allusiveness. Newly transferred from tape at Abbey Road, and remastered by Rashad Becker. Available exclusively for download here.  --- Derek Bailey / electric guitar Anthony Braxton / saxophones, clarinets --- Recorded during a concert played at the Royal Hotel, Luton, England on July 2, 1974. Sides 1 and 2 were issued as Royal Volume 1 in 1984; 3 and 4 are released here for the first time by Honest Jons. Thanks to Karen Brookman-Bailey and Tim Fletcher.

Euro TV is an ongoing instrumental collaboration begun in 2021 by artists Nicholas Cheveldave and Will Sheridan Jr.. Blending piano, trumpet, and other instruments with recordings of night buses, drifting voices, and the hum of empty streets, the album pieces together a rhythm of ‘interpersonal sound’—an echo of lives half-remembered yet undeniably present. Nicholas Cheveldave (b. Victoria, Canada) is an artist based in London. His practice brings together photography, painting, 3D rendering, and sculpture that culminate in densely layered collages and audio assemblages. His practice critically engages the ways in which Western consumer culture generates and controls the communication of contemporary identity.  Will Sheridan Jr. (b. Brussels, Belgium) is an artist based in London. Working across collage, drawing, sculpture, and sound, his practice is inspired by the imagery of modern advertising and consumer culture. Repetitive and meditative, his works reflect—and at times reproduce—the representational systems from which they are drawn.

Now watch this drive is an experimental six-part work of poetic prose written and performed by Angharad Williams. The narrative is fragmented and shifts between different modes—prison memoir, surreal romance, apocalyptic landscapes. Haunting and sensual, it follows a lone and desperate protagonist through escape, desire, and estrangement, drifting between incarceration and a dark, suffocating past toward flickers of personal freedom. The work deals with survival strategies, queer relationships, and environmental collapse. Set in a Bosch-like elsewhere, an imagined addressee lingers throughout. This is a story never fully told—part confession, part hallucination, and entirely debauched. Angharad Williams (b. Ynys Môn, Wales) is an artist and writer based in Berlin. Her multidisciplinary practice explores themes of incarceration, artistic provocation, and the destruction of the self. Central to her work is the idea of security—a state that exists between freedom and its confines. Williams is the co-founder of The Wig, an artist-run space in Berlin.

A sequence of piano and tenor saxophone free improvisations recorded in concert at the Appleby Jazz Festival in 2004.

"أحمد [Ahmed] are crucial listening for anyone intrigued by the fertile space between free jazz, Arabic music and West African modes." - Boomkat "Pianist Pat Thomas, bassist Joel Grip, drummer Antonin Gerbal and alto saxophonist Seymour Wright push the source material to new musical planes that are nonetheless framed by a limitlessly wide history of black music." - Jazzwise  سماع [Sam'aa] (Audition) arrives in a gatefold, reverse board sleeve with liners by Fred Moten and designed by Maja Larrson. Recorded and mixed by Benedic Lamdin on February 28th, 2025 Fish Factory Studios, London. Mastering and lacquers cut by Andreas LUPO Lubich. Cover photo ‘Arteries, New York, 1964’ courtesy of the Estate of Evelyn Hofer. Produced by Seymour Wright/OTOROKU with the support of PRS Foundation. Please note: This 2LP is currently sold out and awaiting a repress. Any orders now will be for the repress arriving in Feb. Known for their exhilarating live-to-record albums such as last year's critically acclaimed Wood Blues and Giant Beauty, سماع [Sama'a] (Audition) is the first of two releases that will surface after [Ahmed]’s first studio recording sessions at North London’s The Fish Factory in early 2025.  Since 2014, [Ahmed] أحمد have excavated and re-imagined the music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik, in an ever ongoing search for future music. Over a decade on, the group were given the opportunity to set up in the studio for the first time and, with the aid of meticulous engineer Benedic Lamdin,  سماع [Sama'a] (Audition) is the quartet's most detailed work to date.  Fastidious fans may recognise the album's tracklisting as that of Ahmed Abdul-Malik’s Jazz Sahara. After his success collaborating with the pianists Thelonious Monk and Randy Weston, Jazz Sahara was the first record Abdul-Malik made as a leader and was released in 1958. It used the flame of late Fifties jazz to light the wick of North African folk music and acted as a reminder of the Arabic origins of jazz, creating a distinct, unique sound that was far beyond its time. In Malik’s Jazz Sahara, there is no piano. The ongoing work of each member of [Ahmed] then is to think differently, to wonder how the music will work and to take a risk on trying it out - an extraordinarily compelling feat of imagination. Using group improvisation strategies and recording in single takes, سماع [Sama'a] (Audition) tackled the full suite of Jazz Sahara in just one session, with ‘Ya Annas [Oh, People’] and ‘Isma'a [Listen’] being previously unrecorded. 'Farah 'Alaiyna’, also released on 2019’s Super Majnoon, sounds unrecognisable - the slow, heady stomp and repeated phrasing of 2019’s embryonic [Ahmed] having been blast furnaced and sped up four-fold. The result is four kaleidoscopic, relative miniatures that move, unfold and re-imagine at a very different scale and proportion than [Ahmed]’s previous records. It’s a dizzying, euphoric music and an extraordinary record of a group moving through space-time like no other.

■NB the content of the LP and CD versions is not identical.■The LP includes four pieces: three selected from the original exhibition pieces by Art into Life, and one new piece (“Dialogue”) by Hirose that was not included in the exhibition. “Dialogue” only appears on this LP version.The CD includes all of the original pieces from the exhibition. The vinyl comes with DL code that has all CD tracks. The Kiyosato Museum of Contemporary Art was located in Kiyosato, Yamanashi prefecture from 1990 to 2014. It was a private art museum with a permanent exhibit based on a collection of unrivalled scale. The museum also collected and mounted exhibitions on the work of radical contemporary composers, including John Cage. The museum’s primary informant on music was sound designer Yutaka Hirose, one of the pioneers of Japan’s environmental music (kankyō ongaku) movement in the 1980s. In 1992, the museum mounted a John Cage Memorial exhibition, and this release showcases Hirose’s work on the overall exhibition design and the creation of the sounds that were played in the museum during the exhibition, through a re-edit and reissue of the sound materials.The sound materials that Hirose created for the exhibition environment were only ever distributed on CDr to members of the curatorial team so this is their first formal release. Hirose’s work for the exhibition was radical in its use of musique concrète and collages of noise and everyday sounds, and in his homage to Cage’s methods, these pieces represent a distinct departure from his normal approach at the time.The A4 booklet includes texts about the exhibition by members of the team, Hirose’s own description of the pieces, and photographs of the exhibition. (Text in Japanese and English).

Manon Anne Gillis has been creating music using primitive systems since the 1980s. Her ninth solo album weaves together her voice, breathing, words and sounds using ingenuous methodologies. She has remarked that her sound is not something conceptual and that feeling and immersion matter far more to her than understanding. Her latest collection consists of ten pieces that approach sound as a tactile, sensory experience. She transforms spoken word and singing into blurred noise and irregular repetitions, plunging them into rhythm tracks to create new inner worlds.

@xcrswx is the duo of Crystabel Efemena Riley (human/drum-skin) and Seymour Wright (saxophone) both also working with digital, analogue and ANDROID technologies – live and in the studio. Together they create sound works, and ideas that they explain, are to do with: “(REFERENCES) a span of human traditions, technologies and applications from the menstrual-bloody origins of cosmetics through evolution of reeds/drumskin ritual/musics, to Samsung and Audacity tools and attachments, Crunchyrolls and sub-woofer succulence. It’s committed, collaborative work that draws on decades of other association (past and present: X-Ray Hex Tet, Maria & The Mirrors, GUO, أحمد [Ahmed], XT trios with Anne Gillis and RPBoo) and (MORE REFERENCES) glamour/talent, clean-beauty, smart-boards, teaching-teams, stages, studios and solos, but in terms of what comes out is a sui generis, exciting, radical, extreme, tender, physical and fresh synthesis, of beats, layers, and patterns of raw and polished sound”.*MOODBOARD is @xcrswx’s first 12” LP, following on from FIXES a 10” split (with Lolina) from 2023 and CALLTIME/HARD OUT, a 7” single from 2020 it completes a trilogy of releases on Feedback Moves. It extends the previous releases in exciting, new ways – presenting things on a scale where everything is greater, with extremes wider, rawer and deeper than on previous recordings. MOODBOARD is one long-form piece played across two sides, and, a suite of discrete, overlapping songs – OKIE EFE, NPC, P2W, REFERENCES, MORE REFERENCES, UFFIZI, THE CREATIVE DECK, OKIE EFE IVẸ – pulsing with the intensity of one of @xcrswx’s extraordinarily intense, physical, caring and socially-situated live shows, but employing hi- and lo-tech studio assembly, intervention, and re-invention to keep these two sides very much, and meticulously, produced – a record made. Released 2025 - Feedback moves

Astounding 50th anniversary restoration / vinyl remaster of Pearls Before Swine's brilliant debut LP, originally issued by ESP in 1967 50 years later — still One Nation Underground — in the original mono mix that hasn't been heard since the days of the original vinyl pressing! All the better to cut through the sustained smell of BS, idiocy and outright apocalypse in the wind.

Astounding 50th anniversary restoration / vinyl remaster of Pearls Before Swine's brilliant second LP, originally issued by ESP in 1968 From 1968: the second album - and second masterpiece from Tom Rapp's merry band. A host of NYC session players augments the old Floridian Pearls gang, progressing the sound into greater depth, with Rapp's gimlet eye cocked at the world of contradictions that allows so much love and beauty, and so much to destroy it. Newly restored to highlight the gorgeous design of the album, inside and out. Make war no more.

a sky cold as clay is a record of traces, where sounds exist as palimpsests rather than clearly delineated entities. The album’s root is a collage of recordings Rory Salter collected over the last few years. Piano captured on an iPhone, friends throwing sticks at trees in Finland, a hurdy-gurdy laying around a studio – threaded together with tender melodiousness from trickling acoustic guitar, wobbly drones and electrical tones. Each track sounds like a superimposition, as though traces from their original contexts and the processes of their creation and documentation are leaking through.Salter’s day job is as a sound engineer. And across a sky cold as clay we’re offered a glimpse into that work. The way sound acts before it’s captured in a perfect recording or performance, and the possibilities it has before being varnished to a pristine external standard.Opener “during a slack half hour” arrives with the noise floor of a mic-preamp cranked high, dousing us in a blanket of static through which chirring electricity, struck metal and languid acoustic guitar emerge. “In corners, after clocks, on tiled floors” sees unsettling thuds, coughs and voices creep through hissy ether, as though the mic is turned so high it’s picking up the neighbours. On “Where the gains are set” Salter reads a poem which teeters back and forth between the sense of gain as both an audio term and one imbricated in the fabric of a zero-sum, competitive way of seeing the world. Infant Tree - 2025

Now we have The Red Krayola's state-of-the-states address 1999, presented to one and all in grand Red Krayola style, going all the way back to the days when they spelled it with a C instead of a K (c. 1967). Back then, the world was hearing it's first of this now legendary outfit. Having never tried to do anything the same twice, The Red Krayola, manage in a way not to again on Fingerpainting, although this time, in a way, they tried. Fingerpainting features unreleased songs from the distant days of 1966. The 90s Red Krayola shuffles these ancient pre-Arable Red Crayola songs with the sounds of neo-freakouts, live on the world's stage -- free, familiar, ugly, for a whole bunch of new generations. Fingerpainting features both the latter day Krayola and the original Red Crayola, from thirty years back, bringing it all full circle. And thus allowing another circle to be formed as soon as possible." All-star line-up of Albert Oehlen, Bobby Henschen, Christopher Williams, David Grubbs, Elisa Randazzo, Frederick Barthelme, George Hurley, Mayo Thompson, Sandy Yang, Stephen Prina, Steve Cunningham, Tom Watson

another killer drop from the enduring collaborative ferment of The Red Krayola and Art & Language, recorded in 1983