OTOROKU is proud to present the first vinyl reissue of Blue Notes for Mongezi, one of the most passionate celebrations of a life in music ever laid to tape. Recorded in late 1975 by Blue Notes, then reduced to a quartet - Dudu Pukwana on  alto sax, whistle, percussion, and vocals; Johnny Dyani on bass, bells, and vocals; Louis Moholo-Moholo on drums, percussion, and vocals; and Chris McGregor on piano, and percussion - and issued the following year by Ogun, the album is a kairos; the first commercial release by one of free jazz’s seminal ensembles, captured them 13 years after their founding - at the height of their powers - delivering an explosive dirge dedicated to Mongezi Feza, their former bandmate and friend.  Blue Notes were founded in Cape Town in 1962 and stand among the most important ensembles in the history of jazz. Artistically brilliant and groundbreaking - gathering, within a few short years, a devoted following that included Don Cherry, Steve Lacy, Abdullah Ibrahim, Dexter Gordon, Kenny Drew,Keith Tippett, Evan Parker, John Stevens, and numerous others - they were also the first widely visible multiracial band in South Africa. As a mixed race band under South African apartheid; this group of friends and like-minded artists - Chris McGregor, Mongezi Feza, Dudu Pukwana, Nikele Moyake, Johnny Dyani and Louis Moholo-Moholo -  existed within a context that viewed their mere existence as a dangerous and subversive act. In 1964, as the pressure mounted, they joined an exodus of musicians leaving for Europe, eventually settling in London during the following year. Sadly, not long after arriving and facing continued economic peril, the group buckled. Johnny Dyani left to join Don Cherry’s band. Moholo-Moholo and Dyani followed suit and joined Steve Lacy on tour, and the remaining members morphed into a number of ensembles that eventually grew to become Chris McGregor's Brotherhood Of Breath. In late 1975 however, Mongezi Feza - in the midst of a fruitful period collaborating with Dudu Pukwana, Johnny Dyani, and Okay Temiz - suddenly passed away at the age of thirty from pneumonia. Nine days later, on the 23rd December, following the memorial service to their friend, Pukwana, Dyani, McGregor, and Moholo-Moholo gathered in a rehearsal room in London and set out to play. Fittingly, no discussion took place before or during the session. The music was left to say it all.   The resulting double LP coalesced into four long-form movements that occupy a side each, collectively unleashing an onslaught of free jazz fire, fluidly covering a remarkable range of moods and tactical approaches across it’s length. For anyone encountering the Blue Notes for the first time, the album must have felt like being blindsided by a brick, adding a profound sense of credence to Moholo-Moholo’s belief that free improvisation was intrinsically linked to the Pan-African temperament. In the band’s hands, the idiom sounds like nothing else and exactly as it should.  A frenzied funeral dirge, a cry, and catharsis, the record rises and falls between playful and joyous movements of deconstructed song, rhythmic and vocal tribalism, and churning, instrumental free expression. It indicates not only a possible future for musical expression - as all truly avant-garde music does - but also the very roots of music itself, illuminating, through abstraction, the far-flung, ancient roots currently carried by the New Orleans “first line” march to the grave. It is a decidedly African vision of free jazz, coalescing as a collective expression of celebration and loss on a cold London day. It is a masterpiece unfolding in real time - out on a limb and laden with risk - created by four of the most talented voices the idiom has known.   --- DUDU PUKWANA / alto sax, whistle, percussion, vocals CHRIS McGREGOR / piano, percussion LOUIS MOHOLO / drums, percussion, vocals JOHNNY DYANI / bass, bell, vocals and most of the words --- This 2022 re-issue has been made with permission and in association with Ogun records. Transferred from the original masters and featuring an exact reproduction of the original artwork. Remastered by Giuseppe Ilelasi and packaged in a high gloss sleeve. All music by the Blue Notes. All music published by Ogun Publishing Co. Cover design by Ogun.  Front cover photograph and photograph of Mongezi Feza by Geroge Hallet. Blue Notes photograph by Jurg. Back cover photograph by George Hallet and Peter Sinclair. Xhosa translation by Z. Pallo Jordan. Produced by Keith Beal and Chris McGregor. Ogun Recording would like to thank John Martyn for his assistance in making this album possible. Reissue for OTOROKU produced by Abby Thomas. Transferred from the original masters by Shaun Crook at Lockdown Studios. Remastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Layout for reissue by Maja Larrson.

Via Blank Forms Comes the long overdue, first ever vinyl reissue of The Shadow Ring's seminal 1996 full-length (originally issued by Bruce Russell’s Corpus Hermeticum on CD) Wax-Work Echoes Originally conceived as a compilation of outtakes and live recordings from The Shadow Ring’s 1995 stateside tour, Wax-Work Echoes takes its name from the first line of “Put the Music in Its Coffin,” the title track of the group’s breakthrough release. Lambkin abandons the bits-and-bobs approach, advancing the Shadow Ring concept with entirely original material that builds on the unit’s self-mythologizing lyrics, celebrates the clicking of horse hooves, ponders on the sociability of rats and mice, and warns of the dangers of poultry. The first Shadow Ring album to officially include Tim Goss in the main lineup, Wax-Work Echoes reveals the group in its final and lasting form, awash in the outer bounds of atmospheric exploration, with Lambkin’s familiar wry and morbid lyricism and the stripped-down angularity of amateurishly detuned guitars fully intact. While Klaus Canterbury and Tony Clark seem all but forgotten, and the shrugged off S. Fritz is listed on the liner notes as performing only “when required,” Lambkin did solicit contributions from outside the inner circle. A bit of “Mambo Twist,” lifted from a tape of unreleased Vitamin B12 material sent to Lambkin by Alasdair Willis, found its way into “V.E.R.M.I.N.,” while an extended epistle contribution from Richard Youngs (and, technically, Brian Lavelle) would be employed in the second half of “Catching Sight/Of Passing Things.” Released on CD in 1996 for Bruce Russell’s newly minted Corpus Hermeticum, Wax-Work Echoes was recorded concurrently with intense rehearsal periods, in anticipation of the forthcoming “Rose Watson Tour,” and was supported by a celebratory fanzine media blitz. The album seemingly absorbs the frenetic excess of the band’s transatlantic travels; Wax-Work Echoes channels the trio’s wilder instincts into an unresolved catharsis, not yet free of frustration or restlessness. Out of print for almost three decades and available here for the first time ever on long-playing disc, Wax-Work Echoes is a classic from the outer eddies of The Shadow Ring’s sound, a must-have for any aficionado’s collection: “A window slides, glass slips from frame / And canvas carcass breathes again.” Throughout their legendary, decade-long run, The Shadow Ring were an enigmatic force on the international musical sub-underground. Before their disbandment in 2002, this shambolic rock outfit, formed by a group of rowdy teenagers in southeast England, left behind a mighty run of eight LPs, a handful of 7"s, and a spate of raucous live shows and cryptic zine appearances on both sides of the Atlantic, all which have bolstered their enduring word-of-mouth mystique. Beginning in 2023 with the first-ever vinyl pressing of the self-released pre–Shadow Ring tape The Cat & Bells Club (1992), Blank Forms Editions has been conducting a systematic retrospective of the storied group. Wax-Work Echoes and Hold Onto I.D. are the latest releases in a multiyear reissue effort that includes several LPs, a comprehensive CD box set, and a nearly five-hundred-page book.

Via Blank Forms Comes the long overdue, first ever vinyl reissue of The Shadow Ring's seminal 1997 full-length (originally issued by Siltbreeze on CD) Hold Onto I.D. Recorded from late 1996 through early 1997, Hold Onto I.D., The Shadow Ring’s fourth album, marks the apogee of the trio’s experimental rock epoch—their last record clinging to their factitious bandness before they let all song and structure go awash in sonic malaise for their final run of releases on Swill Radio. The surrealist dreams of City Lights and Put the Music in Its Coffin give way to pseudo-expressionistic lyrics mired in the banality and bleakness of the everyday, set against the backdrop of the Coombe House (as pictured on the album’s cover). While Hold Onto I.D. is the group’s most overtly autobiographical release to date, Graham Lambkin’s lyrics obfuscate his expressionist tendencies filtering them through the codes and languages of officialdom, linking the “inner self” with documents of the state—identification cards, National Insurance numbers, and British passport numbers. Having moved out of their parents’ homes and into the top floor of the famed Coombe House, Lambkin and Darren Harris set out to rework material drafted over the previous year, aided by Tim Goss, still safely in residence at the “Valebrook Inn.” While the familiar sounds of Harris’s deadpan recitation and Lambkin’s electric guitar, amateurishly strummed, dominate the album, the emotive interludes of Goss’s keyboards populate the record along with of home-cooked tape experiments and dime-store concrète. Originally released on CD and supported by a US tour with friends Scott Foust and Karla Borecky’s Idea Fire Company, Hold Onto I.D. is perhaps the band’s best-known and most accessible album. (The Shadow Ring’s sole representative on a streaming platform, it was once acknowledged by the Guardian as one of “the 101 strangest records on Spotify.”) Offered here for the first time on vinyl, Hold Onto I.D. is an essential album for both completists and the uninitiated alike. Throughout their legendary, decade-long run, The Shadow Ring were an enigmatic force on the international musical sub-underground. Before their disbandment in 2002, this shambolic rock outfit, formed by a group of rowdy teenagers in southeast England, left behind a mighty run of eight LPs, a handful of 7"s, and a spate of raucous live shows and cryptic zine appearances on both sides of the Atlantic, all which have bolstered their enduring word-of-mouth mystique. Beginning in 2023 with the first-ever vinyl pressing of the self-released pre–Shadow Ring tape The Cat & Bells Club (1992), Blank Forms Editions has been conducting a systematic retrospective of the storied group. Wax-Work Echoes and Hold Onto I.D. are the latest releases in a multiyear reissue effort that includes several LPs, a comprehensive CD box set, and a nearly five-hundred-page book.

Preorder: Released September 5, 2025 Black vinyl • First pressing of 500 copies • Heavyweight printed inner and outer sleeves • Artwork by eun chun • Mastered by Stephan Mathieu and cut at Schnittstelle Unlike anything we’ve heard from her before, Okkyung Lee returns to Shelter Press with Just Like Any Other Day (어느날): Background Music For Your Mundane Activities, a deeply intimate body of recordings at the juncture of ambient music, minimalism, and the baroque, that stands as radical intervention with what experimental music can be, and the place that organisations of sound occupy in our lives. For more than two decades, Okkyung Lee has stood at the forefront of the most radical trajectories of experimental music: a virtuosic cellist and improviser, renowned for her creative rigour and emotive depth. Particularly noteworthy for her range, dexterity, and adaptability, over the last five years Lee’s output has revealed unexpected shifts and developments that move far afield from the realms of free improvisation for which she is most well know. 2020’s Yeo​-​Neun, a heart-wrenching, ambient chamber work - drawing inspiration from the Korean popular music of her youth - was issued by Shelter Press to great critical response, followed closely by Teum (The Silvery Slit) - one of a series engrossing electroacoustic works created at Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris - on Portraits GRM, and then 나를 (Na-Reul) in 2021, regarded by Lee as a closing statement of more than two decades living in New York, which set the precedent of her allowing her emotions to fully occupy the forefront of the music for the first time. Marking her return to Shelter press, Just Like Any Other Day (어느날): Background Music For Your Mundane Activities, encounters Lee upturning the apple cart once again, weaving a profoundly intimate artistic statement on completely unexpected terms. Like its three aforementioned predecessors, Just Like Any Other Day (어느날) belongs to broadening shift in Lee’s approach to composing that roughly aligns with her return to her native South Korea, having lived in the United States since her late teens. Infused with a deep reengagement with her own culture and relationship to memory, it is equally a response to those critical challenges and questions provoked by significant life change. Worked on in isolation, and continuously returned to, over the course of four years, the album’s nine pieces began with a simple recognition that experimental music is not always what we imagine it to be. It is a practice and a pursuit - a music for which, at its inception, the outcome is unknown - rather than an idiom defined by certain syntaxes, approaches, and qualities of structure and sound. From this departure point, Lee began to inquire after the utility of music itself: what is it for, what does it do, and what place does it (or can it) occupy in our lives? This solitary and durational journey, each composition gradually moving through different phases and evolutions over years, led Lee toward uncharted ground: a music that is not only playful, introspective, and seductive, but also intended to provoke a relationship to experimental music beyond its normative expectations. Rather active or deep listening, it pursues passive listening. Rather than a grand statement, it is discreet. Rather than virtuosity, it embraces the elegant and direct. Even more strikingly, for the first time, the music of Just Like Any Other Day (어느날) encounters Lee leaving the cello entirely behind. Created at home on keyboard, computer, and an inexpensive cassette recorder, Just Like Any Other Day (어느날) presents a remarkable form of ambient music - organisations of sound that become their own environment, to be occupied - intended, as the album’s subheading infers, as Background Music For Your Mundane Activities. An expansion of the creative pathways opened by the Korean pop imbued compositions of Yeo​-​Neun, aspects of electronic process explored by Teum (The Silvery Slit), and the emotive foregrounding of 나를 (Na-Reul), each of the pieces presented across the two sides of Just Like Any Other Day (어느날) implies something far greater than the limits of its own temporarily: a mood, provocations of memory and place, mirrors for the solitude within which it was made, and palpable emotion lingering just out of grasp. For Lee, each of the album’s compositions could be continued or looped for an indeterminate duration: straddling a ground between the minimal and the baroque, enveloping the listener in endless cycles of appreciating, repetitive and rhythmical notes, flirting with the melodic and implying a disembodied imagism that borders on the profound. Remarkably beautiful and direct, Okkyung Lee’s Just Like Any Other Day (어느날): Background Music For Your Mundane Activities represents a radical reconfiguration of experiential music, stripped to its bare essence in defiance of the widely presumed aesthetic signifiers. Unlike anything we’ve heard from her before, this immersive body of intimate recordings not only reveals new dimensions of Lee’s striking range as an artist, but also of how we might regard and occupy music itself: an ambience to lived and felt like a second skin.

“In a concert, I show something with a beginning, a middle and an end. But, there is no end. Of course, there is no end. Because I am the music, and I am still here.” - Sophie Agnel  ‘Learning’ - Sophie Agnel’s first solo LP, feels like the dark, physical inversion of her excellent ‘Song’ which came out on Relative Pitch earlier this year. Sinking her unique sound into vinyl for the first time, the LP arrives as Agnel recovers from a brain tumour - a shocking discovery that will require Agnel to start again with the piano. It’s a terrifying prospect, but Agnel has been here before, having reorientated herself almost entirely away from her early classical training over the last 4 decades of her work.  ‘When I was young I had very good ears, oriole absolute. Then later I began to make strange sounds with my piano, to do different kinds of music. I was more interested in the sounds than the melody, for example. I remember once I sat down in a shop to try to read the scores of Schubert and there was a light [emitting] a very strong bzzzzzzz. And I couldn't listen to my oriole internal - I couldn't read the score. I was entirely subjugated by the sound of the light. And I understood that something had changed. Ten years before I could read and not hear the light. Now I understood that my ears were completely different. I was more open to the sounds of life.”  Born in Paris in the 60’s and playing her parents piano as soon as she could stand up, Agnel quickly grew tired of the classical world. What frustrated her was the strange disconnect between the frame of the piano and its keyboard - a weird boundary that seemed to form some hushed code of etiquette. “The first thing I put inside the piano was a plastic goblet. I’d seen a few pianists do it: Fred Van Hove, for example, put rubber balls inside his. But what didn’t appeal to me was that there seemed to be no link between the pianos outside and inside.”If you see Agnel play now, the body of her piano is littered with fish tins, ping pong balls, wooden blocks - not that you’d recognize their sounds. Having absorbed the language of the European avant-garde, Agnel is known for pulling the piano’s interior outside of itself by tipping her handbag into it. But these ‘strange sounds’ don’t just come from Cage - they also share the poetic force of Cecil Taylor and ‘Learning’ demonstrates that Agnel’s work on the piano's keyboard is just as important as what she’s littered on its strings. The record lets loose her ability to unleash a formidable sound mass and then rope it back to one single, clarifying note. With one hand, Agnel plays 88 tuned drums and on the other an enormous guitar - with the LP rotating through oncoming trains, and blues harmonica and feedback. It’s single minded stuff, borne out of a dedication to a wholly personal language of gesture, accumulation and deft reduction. “Maybe when I’m 80 I will not need anything,” Agnel says in a recent film made at her home. “I will do the same but with one note, and one finger. Maybe it's enough.” — ‘Learning’ arrives in a reverse board sleeve designed by Jereon Wille. Recorded live at Cafe OTO by Billy Steiger on 6th June 2023 and 4th June 2024. Mixed by James Dunn and Benjamin Pagier. Side B edited by Benjamin Pagier. Mastered and cut by Loop-O. Front photograph by Aimé Agnel. Typography and layout by Jeroen Wille.

Between 1978 and 1984, Fluxus artist Willem de Ridder did a weekly radio show called De Radiola Improvisatie Salon. Listeners were invited to send in cassettes recorded at home and would get guaranteed air­time. Willem never listened to any of the tapes in advance. No censorship or personal taste were involved, just total artistic freedom. Long before social media existed, he understood that just providing a platform could ignite boundless creativity. Willem was a visionary, always pushing the boundaries of art and mainstream culture, while his interactive radio shows were breaking down the barriers between listeners and producers. Unknown home tapers and independent artists would share their freshly recorded bedroom experiments with the world and Radiola became a catalyst for the rising Dutch tape scene. When the show gained popularity, broadcasts became open to the public and people would visit the salon to submit their latest cassettes in person. From these live events a network of independent labels emerged, releasing and exchanging cassettes. Punk was fading away but a new alternative to the mainstream was born. Nobody seems to know what happened to the Radiola master cassettes, but somehow a few boxes survived and were archived by Marco van Dalfsen in 2022. We went through hours and hours of material and eventually compiled this album. A few names might sound slightly familiar, but our goal was to unearth the most obscure hidden gems of Dutch home taping culture. The result is an eclectic mix of ambient, industrial, lo-fi weirdness and experimental music and offers a unique glimpse into a very specific, but still relevant piece of the past.

Following a creative burst in 2024 that resulted in several releases on iDEAL, New Forces and No Rent, label favorites Organ of Corti are returning to DMR for their first LP. Slowly moving into new territory, they deliver 6 bare boned surreal soundscapes. Minimal, repetitive tape loops, haunting synths and vaguely familiar vocal samples are carefully mixed for a sonic exercise reminiscent of those classic Nurse with Wound and Organum releases. The Swedish trio of scene veterans Joachim Nordwall, Mattias Gustafsson and Dan Johansson have been exploring the possibilities of sound manipulation for years, together or by themselves under various aliases. Stoically moving forward in pursuit of obscure, atmospheric textures that will get right under your skin. While the world is falling apart, they have been fine-tuning their hallucinatory concrète ambiances. The sort of stuff that fits a bleak, enervated mood by chewing on nerve ends, transporting heads to other places.

Turman first came onto the industrial scene in the late 70’s as the ominous ‘other half’ of legendary noise outfit NON. Shortly after recording the classic 1977 single Mode of Infection, Turman went on to pursue his own unique vision as a solo artist. Fusing every possible influence at his disposal while laying his ideas down on self-released cassettes like Flux (1981), Spirals of Everlasting Change (1987), Way Down (1987) and the massive Chapter Eleven cassette box set (1988). After a hiatus Turman resurfaced in 2005 to team up with seminal noise musician Aaron Dilloway. Since then, he has been gradually adding new titled to his already impressive discography. For this archival release Turman selected 7 tracks that were recorded between 1980 and 1984. A welcome supplement to his library of avantgarde music that was released in the 80s. This album fits in nicely between the early industrial noise, the long-form minimalism of Flux and the rhythmic industrial of Way Down. Focusing on slowly shifting hypnotic loop-based layers of sound, it covers a specific side of Turman. It feels like there’s a direct link to his earliest works but it’s also a precursor to some pieces that were recorded much later. A missing link that finally gives us the opportunity of a complete overview of his early audio work.

LP - Edition of 300 copies, handmade textile artwork w/ printed inner / CD Edition of 150 copies, handmade textile artwork Sylvain Chauveau has been releasing quiet and minimal compositions on various labels for more than two decades. ultra-minimal marks his debut for Sonic Pieces and takes the minimal approach even further, centring on reduction and limitation. The album was recorded live at Café Oto, London in March 2022 - one of Sylvain’s rare solo concerts and the first time he performed publicly with only acoustic instruments; no machines, no recorded sounds have been used, only piano, guitar, harmonium and melodica, played one at the time. While some of the compositions are completely new, others are live versions of previously released pieces which have either been performed close to their original or stripped-down, reduced to a single instrument and partly rearranged. This reveals a predilection for repetitions and variations that Sylvain shares with Jim Jarmusch, and at the same time it is a personal attempt to avoid electronic devices as a tool for live music. The artwork and track titles follow this reductionist idea and an aesthetic of miniaturization that Sylvain has developed for many years. They refer to the minimalist, concrete poetry that he writes regularly. In this context rewriting some of the original titles was a consistent implication to achieve a complete work, an album that perfectly represents Sonic Pieces’ aesthetics, both musically and visually.

Available as a 320kbps MP3 or 24bit FLAC or WAV. Edition of 300 standard LPs, 100 LPs with screenprinted artwork inserts and 200 CDs Totally beautiful and rare piano performance from Loren Connors, joined on guitar by long time collaborator Alan Licht.  Celebrating thirty years of collaboration, Loren Connors and Alan Licht performed for two nights at OTO on May 5 and 6th, 2023. On the second night, with the stage lit in blue, Connors took up a seat on the piano stool whilst Licht picked up the guitar. What followed was the duo’s first ever set with Connors on piano - one of only a few times Connors has played piano live at all - here captured and issued as The Blue Hour. Its spacious warmth came as a total surprise live, but makes complete sense for a duo whose dedicated expressionism takes inspiration from a vast spectrum of emotion. Both opening with single notes to start, it doesn't take long before a surface rises and begins to shimmer. A run up the keys, the drop of a feedback layer on a sustained and bent note. The two begin to exchange notes in tandem and brief touches of melody and chord hover. After a while, Connors picks up the guitar, stands it in his lap and sweeps a wash of colour across Licht’s guitar. Sharp, glassy edges begin to form, open strings and barred frets darkening the space. When his two pedals begin to merge, Licht finds a dramatic organ-like feedback and it’s hard not to imagine Rothko’s Chapel, its varying shades of blue black ascending and descending in the room. When Connors goes back to the piano for the second side, the pair quickly lock into a refrain and light pours in. It’s a kind of sound that Licht says reminds him of what he and Connors would do when the duo first started playing together 30 years ago. It’s certainly more melodic than some of their more recent shows, and the atonal shards of At The Top of the Stairs seem to totally dissolve. What is always remarkable about Licht is that his enormous frame of reference doesn't seem to weigh him down, and instead here he is able to delicately place fractures of a Jackson C Frank song (“Just Like Anything”,) amongst the vast sea of Connors’ blues. Perhaps it's the pleasure of playing two nights in a row together, or the nature of Connor’s piano playing combined with Licht’s careful listening, but the improvisation on The Blue Hour feels remarkably calm and unafraid. There’s nothing to prove and no agenda except the joy of sounding colour together. Totally beautiful.  --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO on Saturday 6th May 2023 by Billy SteigerMixed by Oli BarrettMastered by Sean McCannArtwork by Loren Connors Layout by Oli BarrettScreenprint by Tartaruga Manufactured in the UK by Vinyl Press.  Edition of 300 standard LPs, 100 LPs with screenprinted artwork by Loren Connors printed as inserts. Also available on a limted run of 200 CDs.

The 4LP boxset version holds nearly all the music performed over the two nights, minus 5 minutes we were forced to cut to fit the music onto 4 discs. It will arrive in a handcovered and screenprint boxset, limited to 250 copies and will include a full booklet of photographs from the residency by Dawid Laskowski. Please note the artwork may differ slightly from the mock up.  Your order will be packed with care and delivered via a tracked service.  The 2LP version is an edit of the music played on both nights. It will arrive as a gatefold 12" printed in reverse board outersleeves and will include a pull out with photographs from the residency by Dawid Laskowski. The 2CD version contains both sets from both nights. The discs will be housed in a digipak on reverse board and will include photographs from the residency by Dawid Laskowski. It is a huge honour to publish Peter Brotzmann’s final concerts on OTOROKU. When we invited Peter to do a residency at Cafe OTO back in February 2023 we had no idea these would be his last ever shows and he played with such power it would have been hard for anyone present to believe he would never play publicly again. Recorded over two nights this grouping of Jason Adasiewicz on vibraphone, John Edwards on bass and Steve Noble on drums feels especially resonant and personal to Cafe OTO. The first time Peter performed at the venue back in 2010 it was in a trio with John and Steve, (released as The Worse The Better kick starting our in-house record label) so it feels fitting that the last shows he ever played here should also have that trio at its core. The quartet last played together at OTO back in 2013, (released as Mental Shake on OTOROKU), and Brotzmann humbly opened the return of the group saying, "it's a pleasure to be back” before launching straight into a long blast on the alto sax, swiftly met by the relentless energy and engagement of Adasiewicz, Edwards and Noble. There are moments of tenderness to Brotzmann’s playing that feels specific to this small group - one that cuts across three generations - and in a space that’s come to feel like home. Of course, there is dizzying, forceful, singleminded playing, but even amongst a relentless chorus of cymbal splashes and busy vibraphone clusters the lyrical, spacious moments are savoured and held onto. As he remarked after at the end of the group's first visit to OTO, “the Quartet is, for us, a great adventure.” Peter clearly wanted to play to the end. Did he know these might be his last shows? We will never know. What is clear is he wanted to go out in style and on his terms. For anyone in the room at the time or listening to these recordings it’s clear he achieved that. It was Peter’s wish that these recordings should be made public and he was due to finalise the cover design on the week he passed away. We would like to thank Peter’s family for working with us to fulfil Peter’s wishes to release this material but more than anything we would like to thank Peter for all the extraordinary memories, his generosity and all he has given the music. On a personal level for us, like so many, he meant a huge amount and we miss him deeply. --- Peter Brotzmann / reeds John Edwards / double bass Steve Noble / drums Jason Adasiewicz / vibraphone  --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO by Billy Steiger on 10th and 11th February 2023. Mixed by James Dunn. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielesi. Photos by Dawid Laskowski. Pressed in the UK by Vinyl Press. Artwork by Peter Brötzmann. Design by Untiet.

The first-ever release of Alain Pierre's original soundtrack for the 1974 cult film Vase de Noces, directed by Thierry Zeno, is now available. This Belgian film, despite its unique production, was never officially released in Belgium. Like works by Bergman or Polanski, it found limited distribution through "Swedish distribution" channels, typically associated with adult cinema. Alain Pierre's approach to sound for Vase de Noces was unconventional. He salvaged magnetic tape from his workplace and created an atmospheric score using rudimentary techniques. The film's soundtrack is entirely dubbed, with no direct sound - a creative choice that blended seamlessly with the dark, avant-garde nature of Zeno's project. Pierre's inventive manipulation of sounds, including bottles and slowed-down Monteverdi music, gave the film an eerie, haunting feel. The collaboration between Pierre and Zeno was marked by deep trust and shared artistic vision, leading to a soundtrack that feels as raw and unsettling as the film itself. This release pays tribute to Pierre's legacy, beautifully packaged in a screen-printed sleeve.

Actual Earth Music - Volume 1 & 2’ presents two caustic, yet alluringly unreal live sets from Canadian noise-rock entropy hunters Earth Ball. Following on from the group’s critically appraised ‘It’s Yours’ LP (released 2024 on Upset The Rhythm) this release captures the band at the peak of their powers, playing live, composing spontaneously.Side A features Earth Ball live at The Fox Cabaret in Vancouver, supporting Wolf Eyes on August 4, 2023. Jeremy Van Wyck from the band considers this “the gig that sent us into orbit, really. Causing Olson & Young to wax poetic about our interstellar jams to a fine bloke across the big sea. Upsetting our casual rhythm and forcing our hand. All that talk led to an LP, ‘It’s Yours’, and a full UK tour the following spring”. Now, with the birth of this live series ‘Actual Earth Music’, it seems only fitting that Volume 1 should be this gig. It’s a doozy. Listening back is a pure revelation. Earth Ball whip up a vortex of thrashing wild energy, the ecstatic release is off the charts. “You don’t always catch every nuance of the jams as they come down. I mean, this one felt good, but upon listening back to the tapes, it sounded very good” confides Jeremy. “It reminded me of Von Trier’s Melancholia: the sound of a large sphere coming toward you to bring doom. However, this one reverses course, heading away to some other shore, bathing you in reflective bliss before saying goodbye—instead of ending humanity as we know it”.Volume 2 occupies Side B of this LP, showcasing a collaborative summit from the second night of their recent Café OTO residency on May 21, 2024. This event featured Earth Ball laying down three separate sets—all collaborations. This second recording presents their opening performance and features pivotal UK improv luminary Steve Beresford on piano and free-jazz phenomenon Chris Corsano on drums. “To say I felt nervous would be an understatement.” Jeremy admits. “Here I was with my best friends, in a venue I had dreamt of experiencing gigs in—let alone performing in. Add to that my mind was reeling from the legendary status of our two guests and a sold-out crowd. It was, for sure, a recipe for freezing up and barely playing, with your amp turned right down. Not to be. Between the attitude of our guests and the vibe of the crowd, all nervous energy was dispelled and alchemically transformed into the sonic stew you hear here. An unforgettable night. The image of Steve looming over the grand piano, scraping children’s toys along the strings, creating a horrifically transcendent sound that brought tears to my eyes, will be with me forever.” These two life-affirming sets make a fine addition to the Earth Ball discography and really demonstrate how intuitive and inventive the group are when they keep cresting the moment. This is so much more than a live album, this is ‘Actual Earth Music’, sharing Earth Ball in their element as they conjure sound from the daunting ether. ‘Actual Earth Music - Volume 1 & 2’ is exhilarating and essential, the stuff of which dreams are made, the thunderous gathering and the thrilling undertow. ‘Actual Earth Music - Volume 1 & 2’ will be released on Upset The Rhythm on March 7th digitally and as a limited 180g black vinyl pressing of 500 copies only.

Fred Moten: texts, voice Brandon López: bass The work of each of these powerfully creative & exceptionally perceptive artists concerns itself with navigating the ascending reign of long-institutionalized madness while simultaneously keeping humanity and sanity intact. Their synergistic mesh in Duo is here presented on record for the first time (following two acclaimed works on the Reading Group label in trio with Gerald Cleaver). The Quietus, Album of the Week: thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/album-of-the-week/revision-fred-moten-brandon-lopez-review/ They will be at Cafe OTO April 26-27, RG residency: www.cafeoto.co.uk/events/reading-group-two-day-residency/ at Oxford University: www.keble.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/Fred-Moten-poster.pdf in Ghent, Belgum: schoolofartsgent.be/en/agenda/echoes-of-dissent-vol-7 and elsewhere this year. Inimitable poet, cultural theorist, author, 2020 MacArthur Fellow, Fred Moten creates new conceptual spaces that accommodate emergent forms of Black cultural production, aesthetics, and social life. Moten is a professor of performance studies and comparative literature at New York University concerned with social movement, aesthetic experiment, and Black study. He is also a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Puerto Rican-American bassist Brandon López is the son of a gravedigger who himself put time in doing the same, developing muscles that serve him well in his thorough command of the upright bass. On moving to NYC, López made himself indispensable within numerous realms of creative music. As the Cleveland Review of Books noted, “This is virtuosity as vocabulary, a total command of texture, subtlety, and a depth that can be reached into.” On their previous work in trio with Gerald Cleaver: New York Times: “Best Jazz Albums of 2022: Moten is after nothing less than a full interrogation of the ways Black systems of knowledge have been strip-mined and cast aside, and yet have regrown.” Pitchfork: "8.0 – A conceptually rich, politically weighty album that asks timeless questions without over-explaining...breathlessly complex"

At the end of my armA finger, a thread, a vanishing pointWhere nothing can be seen and the air is movingAnnie A, the one-off collaborative project between Félicia Atkinson, Time is Away’s Jack Rollo and Elaine Tierney, Christina Petrie and Maxine Funke, arrives on A Colourful Storm with a profoundly inquisitive, exploratory composition evoking questions of inconstancy and reconciliation, vastness and finitude, and the sometimes cruel deception of human perception. Who will conduct our dreams if we never wake?Annie A quietly observes and attempts to compartmentalise the answers. A geographically diverse yet determinedly like-minded ensemble, its seeds were sown during a spring night in London, where time on stage was shared and cherished by Atkinson, Time is Away and Petrie after years of mutual appreciation. Atkinson had found solace in Time is Away’s Ballads, Funke’s Seance and particularly the voice of poet and performer Petrie, whose remarkable delivery, first heard on Ballads, here drifts effortlessly from a wide-eyed stream of consciousness to crystalline sensory expression: “The wind is full of creases / It is shaking the weak threads in the cliff / Thecoast is releasing teeth and nails into the air”. It is the perfect accompaniment to Atkinson’s hushed tones - a sometimes textural, if not spectral, presence - spoken sensitively like a mother to a resting child, reflecting upon the forces of nature, the fragility of ecology and the surrendering of self to air, rain, and earth.Devotees of Atkinson’s practice will recognise the significance of the natural world in her work, her evocative sonic landscapes formed from a toolbox of keyboard, voice and materials collected from everyday life on the dramatic rocky coast of Normandy, as well as field recordings from places far and wide. She breathes life into liminal spaces, the sound of wind, whispers and the distant clatter of rocks conjuring visions of places both beautiful and eerily familiar. Petrie wanders curiously in these places. “First the Crocus” introduces her desirous cries above a wistful electronic signal, the alternation with Atkinson’s whispers suggestive of each other’s distant presence. “The wind that had not touched land, moving with the warm gyre of the sea / Is now touching land / And is beginning to draw the dust”. What is her fate when this wind touches land? The meeting of the other, the crossing of paths. Their voices, layered and dreamlike, drift and entrance each other with gossamer intensity.Interpreting and arranging the field of sonic accoutrements is Time is Away, whose weaving, layering and sensitivity to detail is likened to the meticulous assembly of an Anni Albers textile. The spirit of Albers guides the piece’s entirety, Petrie’s recounting of her loom and thread a symbol of endurance, vitality and seeking wonder in intricacies: “Every thread needs to pass through the eye of a needle before you begin / I keep wondering, I just keep wondering what will happen”. The piece concludes with a timely appearance by Funke, whose meditation on vulnerability confronts and surrenders herself to the enchanting natural world.TonightI don't wanna readI wanna be read by the rainI wanna wake up from a dream My mind standing on my heart

Where to begin with a figure like Simon Fisher Turner? From teenage stage and screen star to illustrious recording artist for Creation and Mute and score composer of Caravaggio, Blue and The Epic of Everest - via a stint with The The and collaborations with Derek Jarman, David Lynch and Tilda Swinton, to name but a few - Turner embodies a distinctly modernist sensibility and boundless curiosity for sound. For us, discovering Deux Filles, his devilishly intriguing, perfectly camp project with Colin Lloyd-Tucker, was a significant moment in shaping our label’s identity. In August 2023, A Colourful Storm presented Turner and Time is Away live at Spanners, London. Performed at the tail end of Blue Now, a series of events celebrating Jarman’s last feature film, Blue, the recording reveals a lifetime of significant events and influences: a private recording of Jarman reading White Lies; a live reworking of Terre Thaemlitz’s remix of Turner’s Shishapangma; a sample of Bertrand Russell; a room recording of his brother practising the organ for their father’s funeral. We asked Turner to reflect on these moments. “Some of my earliest musical memories are hearing The Small Faces’ ‘Itchykoo Park’ on mum’s portable transistor radio in Whitsand Bay, Cornwall. I adored Puccini’s ‘La Bohème’. I went to The Marquee Club in Wardour Street all the time and saw everything from King Crimson, Focus, The Faces, Uriah Heep and Patto to The Spiders from Mars. I was a guitar freak but also appreciated minimal American composers, such as Terry Riley, Philip Glass and Steve Reich. The White Noise album was important for me, as was the first Faust LP and Tubular Bells. “I love musicals but also new sounds. I love working with The Elysian Collective. Flamenco music was important as I grew up, as was ballet and modern dance. I went to a ballet school at 144 Piccadilly. Moving to London was life-changing. I was dumped in London so I explored and rode my bike everywhere after that. I lived with an odd family on Grape Street. Soho and The West End was my playground. The big smoke. “The idea behind this performance was to strip down my recent Blue Live set and use sound textures that were location-driven and not too musical. I found a recording of my brother James playing the organ in my dad's local church in Great Rissington, in preparation for dad's funeral. I was sitting quietly by the alter at the other end of the church, recording away. I also used Derek Jarman tapes and a Terre Thaemlitz remix of a track of mine from The Epic of Everest. I loved the idea of a live remix of a remix. It was a very special evening under the arches for me - I don't often get the chance to make a racket like this and was astonished by the level of concentration in the room. It was a complete surprise. “20 years ago, my wife and I lived in Brixton, near the venue, on Coldharbour Lane. We were above a takeaway shop. The air extractor was a nightmare and the flat smelled of grease. The market was a great place to buy fish. We adopted a giant snail, who we called Ayrton. I used to take him all over town and he loved lettuce and tomatoes. There was a wonderful small pizza shop too, which was so delicious. But back to the music. Brixton is music and I’m a lucky man.”

Wisdom from the child’s mouth always tells us the truth. It’s hard to overstate the influence of Ditterich von Euler-Donnersperg on A Colourful Storm; indeed, it’s almost impossible to imagine the label’s existence without it. A figure whose movements within Germany’s industrial avant-garde span almost forty years, it would be in 2010 that he unknowingly entered our orbit through two important releases. At the time, SPK’s Auto-Da-Fé and Throbbing Gristle’s Journey Through A Body left some impression on us, their discovery propelling an interest in the possibilities opened up by industrial music that we still explore today. Responsible for publishing these releases was Walter Ulbricht Schallfolien - who, or what, were they? Founded in 1980 by Hamburg-based Uli Rehberg, Walter Ulbricht Schallfolien was a base for Laibach, Asmus Tietchens and Werkbund as well as Rehberg’s own artistic endeavours: the most devilishly humorous his adopting of the name Dr. Kurt Euler, spokesperson of a satirical political party comprised of musicians Felix Kubin and Gregor Hartz. The project would foreshadow the life of Ditterich von Euler-Donnersperg, an alias unveiled in 1998 with the first in a series of spoken word 7” picture discs that have since become highly collectable. Attracting an enviable list of collaborators throughout his career (John Duncan, Thomas Köner and Column One have all lent their expertise), it is perhaps the enigmatic Werkbund project that remains most coveted within the world of von Euler-Donnersperg. Cloistered and clandestine since their inception in 1987, their brooding, synthetik atmospheres have long been speculated to be the work of von Euler-Donnersperg himself. Listen to Werkbund’s Skagerrak or Stahlhof and tell us we’re wrong... The culmination of decades of sound research and electroacoustic investigation, Weisheit aus des Kindes Mund tut uns stets die Wahrheit kund is significantly also a tribute to von Euler-Donnersperg’s children, their voices and spoken word hocus-pocus conjuring clairvoyant visions amongst soaring metallic sheen and spectralist digital debris. Cybernetic ooze spilling into servers and causing subdued bleep signals and static. A slasher film soundtrack starring the German avant-garde dressed in laboratory coats. The latest piece of von Euler-Donnersperg’s peerless, endlessly imaginative puzzle.

A Colourful Storm presents Enteha, the latest piece by Elodie, the longstanding duo of Andrew Chalk and Timo van Luijk. Chalk and van Luijk embody a bold, free-spirited approach to music making whose improvisational methods can be traced to a distinct period of Europe's post-industrial landscape: the former’s Ferial Confine project finding a home on Broken Flag (Ramleh, Kleistwahr) while the latter co-founded Noise-Maker’s Fifes, a Belgian audiovisual project employing unusual homemade instruments.  More than two decades of ambitious solo and collaborative work would solidify both Chalk and van Luijk as masterful craftsmen exploring (and exposing) the tension between composition and free play. Their individual lists of collaborators boasts a certain fin-de-siècle faction of the avant-garde: Christoph Heemann, Giancarlo Toniutti, David Jackman and Colin Potter, to name but a few, have recorded with Chalk while van Luijk has also welcomed Heemann as well as a guard of other artists including Raymond Dijkstra, Kris Vanderstraeten and Frederik Croene. Elodie’s first documented recording, 2011’s Echos Pastoraux, betrayed a musical interplay of extremely accomplished standards, Chalk and van Luijk’s pastoral mise-en-scène daubed with Daisuke Suzuki’s Asiatic elements creating a sound world at once mystical and eerie. A figment of two imaginations, Elodie materialised almost fully formed with each subsequent recording patiently revealing glimpses into a world concerned with time dilation, the phantasmagoric and spirits of the everyday. Enteha is one of the duo’s more subdued and melancholic pieces and can be seen as a human response to seasonal transition, foretold by the concluding passages of 2020’s Le Nid d'Ivoire. It’s one of their uniquely longform explorations of mood and atmosphere as an air of romance drifts deftly into mystery and despair. The delicate hues of autumnal haze. The deceptive optimism of morning light. A work of supremely understated beauty, Enteha develops at an hypnagogic, if not unconscious, level and will appeal to anyone who finds solace in Harmonia, Gas, Joanna Brouk, Roberto Musci, Zoviet France and other investigators of pastoral arcana.