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"

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.

Percussionist extraordinaire Valentina Magaletti recorded live at 'A Colourful Storm: Valentina Magaletti, Mark, Princess Diana of Wales', Cafe Oto, October 1, 2021.

First vinyl edition of eco-acoustic psych ritual from Poland’s Magic Carpathians Project, conjuring a spectral symbiosis of birdcall, field recording, zither, and reed instrumentation. Lush and eerily meditative; a biophonic document of a vanishing soundscape.Infinite Expanse turns its ear to the Polish underground, plucking out Barycz – a mesmerising, immersive suite from Anna Nacher & Marek Styczyński (Magic Carpathians Project), captured in the wetlands and fishponds of Poland’s Barycz Valley – a biodiversity hotspot shaped by centuries of human-nature symbiosis. Originally released on CD in 2004, it now re-emerges in its most embodied form, shaped around the valley’s own rhythms and voices.Splicing raw field recordings of around 35 animal species with acoustic drones, reeds, and distant modular flickers, Barycz occupies a deeply uncategorisable zone between fourth world ritual, eco-acoustic composition, and post-human ambient. Birdsong, amphibian croak and insect chatter are left untouched, arranged with uncanny sensitivity into a sound world where non-human voices lead and human elements follow.Sitting somewhere between the ecological mysticism of Félicia Atkinson, the submerged intimacy of Grouper, and the acoustic ecology of Hildegard Westerkamp, Barycz also resonates with the Eastern European folk mysticism of acts like Księżyc and Osjan – where voice, landscape, and lore dissolve into dream.Quiet, glowing, and subtly haunted by recent ecological distress in the region, this is a sonic refuge as much as an album – and one that asks you to meet it on its own shimmering, feathered terms.

François J. Bonnet – Banshee Banshee is an ear directed towards the edges of the old world, where these infinite fines terrae cut and fractalize into coasts, harbours, fjords, peninsulas and archipelagos. Drawing its raw material from recordings made in the Inner Hebrides, Banshee tightly weaves a fabric where the sonic avatars of fauna, flora and climate merge with the human presence, its tools and its culture. Thus, a small boat cleaving through a loch becomes the voice of the mountains and wilderness, and the howling of the wind on the moors becomes the lament of a Banshee, harbinger of death, messenger of the Other World. Sarah Davachi – Basse Brevis Co-commissioned by Radio France and INA grm, Basse Brevis by Canadian composer Sarah Davachi was premiered at the Présences 2024 festival, which was dedicated to Steve Reich. Drawing on her own minimalist approach, Sarah Davachi explores, with extreme care, the weavings and complex relationships between the timbral, spatial and durational components of music. Using developments that can be appreciated over time, the composer manages to create music that is extremely precise, subtle and lively. But what is striking, and particularly evident in Basse Brevis, is that such an approach, both abstract and restrained, is nonetheless at times utterly poignant. The work combines moments of formal exploration with moments of pure emotion in a perfectly mastered fashion, creating a gentle tension as it swings between two modes of listening that navigate indecisively within both instrumental and concrete approaches, tracing, in parallel, a diagonal of sound that unfolds around perception, sensation and feeling.

Flora YIN WONG 'Trigram for Earth' Trigram for Earth, by Flora Yin Wong, is inspired by traditional eight-sided Pakua mirrors and the trigrams inscribed on each of their edges. The function of the mirrors is to show the nature of reality as being composed of mutually opposing forces and modulate them. Here, energies seem to be manipulated to guide and direct our listening, lost in a maze of sound, diffracted to the point of merging with the artist's own listening, through her memories, her obsessions, the fragments she carries within her. Flora Yin Wong invites us to embark on a multi-faceted investigation of sound, a journey through the meanders of liberated sonic forces, an auscultation of her own listening and a portal, at last, ajar to a fragmented and forever mysterious inner world. — Sébastien ROUX '50 frequency and amplitude modulated sine waves describing a landscape' In his work '50 frequency and amplitude modulated sine waves describing a landscape,' Sébastien Roux applies his approach to algorithmic composition to the observation of the natural world, bringing the sound of the sea and the song of birds into the electronic domain, transmuting them into each other through a slow process of gradual modulation. Exploring the abstract space of pure sounds between two naturalistic tableaux, Sébastien Roux offers us a fascinating meditation on the world of synthesis, revealing, with an economy of means and great formal elegance, the magic of sonic simulacrum and the strange beauty of the artificial, in a gesture that is ultimately as poetic as it is musical.

With But remember what you have had, Stephen O’Malley continues and expands his musical approach by transposing it to multiphonic electroacoustic writing and acousmatic listening. Drawing not only on his extensive experience as a composer and live instrumentalist, but also on the countless studio production and mixing sessions he has taken part in the course of his many projects (in solo, with SUNN O))) or KTL, to name but a few), Stephen O’Malley’s work on this new piece is ambitious, engaging in an inspired research that delves into the deep intricacies between polyphony, intonation and timbrality, enhanced by melodic motifs. To do this, O’Malley summons up his own very personal sound universe, constellated with amplified textures, instrumental sustained tones and raw energy, in order to diffract them into wavefronts, waves and blows that weave a complex, rich and fascinating matter. But remember what you have had stands out as an important work in Stephen O’Malley’s repertoire: it brings together the multiplicity of his musical approach in an exemplary way, while laying the foundations and promises for the future of an already extraordinary journey.

‘Is it difficult to reproduce the sounds of nature?’Environments 12 is a new, speculative addition to the once-popular Environments series: a sequence of 11 records released between 1969 and 1979 that anticipated a mass-market in mood-altering nature recordings. Now, in the era of planetary scale computation, it is the environment itself that’s being updated. The reproduction, synthesis and management of soundscapes has become ubiquitous and automated. Loudspeakers and microphones are laced through the biosphere, all in the name of a cybernetic ecology.Established in 2020 by artist-researchers Sean Dockray, James Parker, and Joel Stern, Machine Listening is a platform for collaborative research and artistic experimentation. The collective works across diverse media and modes of production, including writing, installation, curation, software, radio, pedagogy, and performance. And this is the first LP they’ve released. It is a mind-inverting libretto for the anthropocene: a post-historical field recording; aggressively brash and thoughtfully devious, one for the curling of your inner ear.Unfolding across a series of historical, contemporary, and speculative scenes, the work is narrated by an ensemble of vocal performers - Francis Plagne, Jenny Hickinbotham, David Chesworth, Catherine Ryan, Jasper Dockray, Roslyn Orlando - and their generative voice clones. Together, this more-than-human chorus tells and retells stories of ‘psychologically ultimate seashores’, reef lullabies, natural symphonies designed for zoo enclosures, and large language models for whales and crows. The record imagines a world in which the biosphere, human and technology are blurred almost entirely: a hypothetical space in which organic matter has to be exposed to synthetic renditions of itself in order to summon life, a reproduction of a replica.Environments 12 involves, or demands, a suspension of reality. Is this a chorus of real voices or a facsimile? Are animals hostile to microphones? What does it mean when field recordings are treated by as cultural artefacts, interpolated amongst ‘data’ gathered by acoustic biologists? There is no yardstick here with which to discern what is true and what is an abstraction thereof. And the effect is bafflingly addictive: sing-song lullabies slowly spinning into states of total dilation, miming ensembles mimicking ocean sounds in resplendent strains, dream chords built of broken voice humming within the wires.In the same way that Environments 12 feels narratively unmoored from any easily identifiable reality, it also refuses to pigeonhole itself sonically. The effect is something like Walter Maioli, Fred Gales and the Sound Reporters gang being set upon a digital gorilla enclosure, or perhaps Robert Ashley’s Don leaving Linda and instead going to the Osaka Aquarium to listen to dolphins. The palette here is definitely one for fans of the lovely music style (an approach more than an identifiable sound) of Paul DeMarinis’ ‘Songs Without Throats’ or Ron Kuivila and Nicolas Collins’ ‘Going Out With Slow Smoke’. But it’s also supremely off kilter in its dramatics. Not retrofuturist so much as off in its own continuum entirely, and all the more entrancing for it.In sum, Environments 12 is deeply perplexing, beautifully garish, and an unbridled pleasure for all its grotesqueries. Rarely do records strike so deft a balance between high-conceptualism and irreverent absurdity, much less while maintaining a distinct emotional core.

Crossed & Recrossed presents two works composed by Peter Knight & inspired by mappings of imagined places by iconic Australian novelist, Gerald Murnane & Italian master, Italo Calvino. Simultaneously celebrating & deconstructing the tropes of minimalism, Crossed & Recrossed creates a series of musical mirages that form on an endless sonic horizon, reflecting & reimagining the wide open spaces described in Murnane’s iconic novel, The Plains & the labyrinthine streets of Calvino’s Invisible Cities. “Peter Knight’s work sets up a post-minimal logic that refracts & disintegrates as we listen. The instrumentation of the chamber jazz orchestra is expanded with the unexpected additions of turntables, a reel-to-reel tape machine & live laptop signal processing. The sounds of acoustic instruments & voices are interwoven with field recordings cut onto vinyl & are filtered & augmented as Knight plays with our perceptions of what we hear & what we imagine we have heard. Time folds into itself in a very Calvino-esque manner, leaving us with the trace residue of moments half remembered.” The Plains: Premiered National Forum of Music, Wroclaw Poland Jazztopad Festival 2018 Finalist ‘Performance of the Year’ APRA/AMC Art Music Awards 2020 for performance at Berlin Jazz Festival 2019 Diomira: Premiered at Metropolis New Music Festival 2016, Melbourne Recital Centre Winner Albert H Maggs Composition Prize 2017 Finalist ‘Work of the Year’ APRA/AMC Art Music Awards 2017 Peter Knight – composer Perpetually curious, composer/trumpeter/sound artist Peter Knight’s practice exists in the spaces between categories, between genres & between cultures. As Artistic Director of one of Australia’s leading contemporary music ensembles, the Australian Art Orchestra (AAO), Peter has emerged as a significant international force in contemporary music. Initiating commissions, collaborations & performances with a diverse range of artists including recently: Anthony Braxton (USA), Nicole Lizée (Canada), Amir ElSaffar (USA) & Alvin Lucier (USA). He has also performed his works with the Orchestra at major international festivals with recent highlights including: JazzFest Berlin, London Jazz Festival, MONA FOMA (Tasmania), Jazztopad (Poland), Barunga Festival (NT) & Melbourne Festival. In addition to his role with the AAO, Peter regularly presents his music as both performer & composer in a range of settings; he also composes for contemporary theatre, film, & creates sound installations.

In 1977 the US government sent two unmanned probes — Voyager I & Voyager II — on a one-way journey into interstellar space. On board each craft, a carefully etched golden record containing sonic artefacts of life on earth, including fragments of Bach & traditional musics, sounds of animals & nature, an audio realisation of the ‘music of the sphere’s’ & children’s laughter. As the 40th anniversary of the mission loomed, the three artists, working here together for the first time, locked themselves in a dark studio, armed with three things: a gleaming desktop computer & microphone running custom software (pulled from a previous gallery installation by Tim Bruniges), a pair of keyboards from the era, & a laboriously hunted-down playlist of fragments from the original golden record (this was before the Ozma boxset existed…). The setup was such that Bruniges & Day could each hear McGuigan’s collaged Voyager excerpts but not each other’s responses, like a sonic exquisite corpse. Each artist brings insights from their diverse extra-musical practices, sound art, film making & writing, which lends a keenly sculptural approach to the material. The results are mysterious & evocative, like a submerged fever dream. The release includes a poignant lyric essay ‘Termination Shock’ that ruminates on the Voyager program, comparing the implicit melancholy of its steady recession with a long-distance relationship coming apart.

Words on Prayer for Nil by Jessica Aszodi: Writing these words feels painfully final, like I’m filling the last page of a notebook I’ve carried around for the last six years. This record wears the efforts of a group of artists entangled in their human and artistic journeys. Most of us have known each other since the beginnings of our musical lives. Prayer for Nil, encapsulates quite a bit of that history. In Anthony Pateras’ Prayer for Nil the electronics are a swell of voices so dense they seem inhuman, amassed like a threatening cloud. As the piece unfolds the masses thin to a taper. By its conclusion the solitary singer is left brutally alone, though it’s hard to tell if she wasn’t alone the whole time – every voice in the throng was her own - my own. The ‘live vocal’ part is a highly structured improvisation. Anthony gave me a set of rules, pitches, and rhythms. Within the electronic field, and those restrictions, I had to find an improvisatory freedom. This approach could be seen as a metaphor for the whole process of making the album – the composers and I trying to find ways to understand one another, building a shared understanding of the musical objectives, negotiating varying degrees of control and freedom – and inside this discourse, me trying to find a way to be present in realising the sounds as myself. In [ja] maser Alexander Garsden deals with very specific relationships between groups of pitches and non-traditional vocal utterances to create cresting swarms of noisy vocality that grow, splinter and re-germinate. In the second half of the piece a more vulnerable voice emerges, broken and crumpled in the low depths of my range. The composer bids me gradually to ascend to the highest extremes of my instrument’s capacity until that too fractures and breaks. [ja] maser, was for me, a physically extreme experience of my own limits and subjection. The musical notation was the most specific and traditional of the four pieces; perhaps surprisingly, the experience of making the sounds was the most embodied and phenomenally intense. The fabric of wind is the piece in the group that is most overtly inspired by the composer-performer relationship. James’ composed material was conveyed to me though an audio-score, piped point-blank into my ear, rather than via notation. The sounds you hear are a combination of James’ and my voices, and his and my performances on various auxiliary instruments and objects. In the piece, James “attempt(s) to speak a written text whilst being constantly disrupted by various wind instruments and objects that are inserted into my mouth. Some of these recordings are heard within the piece in playback form... Out of this process emerges two inter-connected characters - my own desperate and confused, and Jessica's more calming yet somewhat stuttered. A deeply intimate conversation of mangled speech and murmured singing results, unclear in meaning but rich in expression.” (Rushford) In Mechanical Bride, my singing voice represents anima in an automated world. The text comes from Enrico Cavacchioli’s 1914 poem, 'Let the moon be damned', in which he describes a decaying environment where humans entwine with machines. The dystopic picture painted in this poem, now 100 years old, still convinces. As I perform this piece, I stage inside myself a battle between flaw-filled human expressivity and savage, ancient machines. Jeanette’s sound world pays homage to an analogue era, referencing mid-century modernist instrumental and electronic techniques in a milieu that is something like a space-western. Each piece on the record is its own microcosm of unfolding connections, decisions and influences; it feels silly to try to characterise them as a group. If there is a common thread amongst them, it’s that they all push my vocalic body towards its limits. The voice on this record is not the voice of a unified and cogent human person, it’s the mutable voice of someone wailing unrestrained in passionate argument - as people who know each other well are sometimes wont to do.

‘Three well crafted gems of abstract electronic gestures... If Joan Miró’s biomorphs could sing, this is what they’d sound like’ - Todd Barton Ben Carey is a Sydney-based saxophonist, composer and technologist. His practice is profoundly informed and extended by technology, through the creation of audio-visual works, the development of his interactive performance software: _derivations and more recently, his fixation on modular synthesis. Ben's work is driven by a fascination with the symbiotic relationships that develop between human and machine in composition and performance.   ‘The three pieces on this record are the result of live interactions with complex and unwieldy networks of electricity, realised on a small eurorack modular synthesiser system in the studio sometime between late 2017 - mid 2018. Over the past few years this instrument has become a core part of my musical practice. For me, working with a modular synthesiser is about experiencing musical composition as an interactive process, where the lines between sound design, composition and improvisation are enticingly hazy. The first two pieces are edited from longer improvised sessions on the instrument. ‘Peaks’ evolves from a single, restless microtonal line into a sea of metallic resonances and unstable bass snarls. Named after the Danish physicist Søren Absalon Larsen, the second work explores a gestural language based around audio-feedback, the acoustic phenomenon he discovered. Feeding the outputs of filters, oscillators and amplifier circuits back into their inputs, ‘Larsen’ exploits the resultant textural, timbral and rhythmic instability of these chaotic vibrations. Finally, the long-form improvisation ‘Networks Articulated’ drives relentlessly forward through active surface textures to arrive at a monolithic, suspended noise-scape woven from un-synced oscillators, swirling filters and crackling analog noise.’ - Ben Carey

The debut release from the trio of Chris Abrahams (piano), Clayton Thomas (bass & preparations), & Miles Thomas (drums & percussion), Words Fail is an intergenerational meeting of the minds. Despite the quintessential trio format, the sound world subverts the instrumentation across four expansive improvisations. Beginning with a lone piano note, repeating like droplets of water on a glassy lake, the interwoven textures of Clayton Thomas’ prepared double-bass & Miles Thomas’ foley-like percussion - sounding on occasion like something out of Xenakis’ Pithoprakta - soon attempt to pull things into deeper, darker waters.

"They had never played together before. They had never even met each other before this springtime 2024 concert at London’s Café Oto.  Evan Parker, circular breathing maestro of the saxophone, a legend in the universe that is Free Improvisation since the late 1960s and Bill Nace, one of the most intriguing experimental “noise” guitarists of the 1990s/2000s underground scene.  For those of us who have been enamored by the live and documented work of both these gents, this Café Oto duo was a must-hear event. It could have gone anywhere musically and that would have been totally fine. Particularly with Evan having a history of being thrown into a variety of challenging collaborations throughout his career, employing the learned elegance of trust in his own sensitivity to listening, responding, leading, following, sparring, intertwining, dialoguing, creating in the instant and, essentially, dignifying the non-hierarchical grace of chance.  The aesthetics of socialist consideration in Evan Parker’s playing, in his community of expanded and personal technique, for a younger player such as Bill Nace, strikes an exemplary model. This notion of respect would be entirely the reason Nace, when offered a residency at the most critical “new music” room in England, would request to play in duo with Parker.  Bill Nace came to prominence mostly during the apex of experimental music activity in and around Western Massachusetts in the early days of the aughts, with a focus on visual art and free improvisation guitar action. He could be found in the daytime hours, his head hanging down over a notepad, penning fine-tuned illustrations and abstract line drawings, while in the evenings he’d be attending any number of basement noise gigs, many of which he’d be participating in. His guitar style came across as being informed as much as by the physicality of his writing utensils in friction to the page as it was to his hearing and redefining of radical recordings ranging anywhere from the Black Unity Group to Black Flag. Utilizing various metal files and other small cylindrical objects Bill would allow his guitar and amplifier to be in tandem with the improvisatory movements of his body as the instrument balanced, intentionally and, at times, precariously, upon his lap. The performances came across thrilling and daring and they would be mostly in the context of venues nothing more than a low-ceilinged damp and dank New England basement, a clutch of people hanging onto rusty pipes or sitting up on dilapidated washer/dryer machines, the shards of Bill’s “file guitar” sounds ringing out like the most alive music on Earth. By the time Bill reached Café Oto in early 2024 he had relocated to Philadelphia all the while releasing a succession of collaborative LPs on his Open Mouth label to present his developing progression of solo and collaborative work. He also would find himself considerably engaged with playing the electric taishōgoto, a keyboard-activated string instrument from Japan which can exist as a one, two, four, five, or six string oblong sound object. Bill’s approach to the taishōgoto would not be too unlike his approach to the traditional electric guitar, though no outboard implements such as files, sticks, and rocks are utilized. The similarity would lie wholly with Bill’s full immersion of high velocity action-playing where, with the taishōgoto, an electric drone beauty occurs. The flurry of sonics and resultant harmonics emanating from the amplifier (which Bill opts to dial into with borderline loud-as fuck volume settings) furthers the meta-mantra properties of the instrument in an astounding display of drone dynamism. This sound world of Bill’s two-stringed taishōgoto on this Café Oto night worked beautifully with Evan Parker’s improvisatory saxophone conceptions. The duology achieved instant lift off at ground zero only to find it’s eventual finale as if it were organically ordained. Time seemingly morphed from its ancient human construct of control, rendered inconsequential to the torrential transcendence of the room wildly activated by the magic resonance of the multi-directional pan-spatial sonance of the music as if it were some beatific blessing. It was one of those nights where art as a liberating force of spirit gifted the listeners with an offering of exaltation and joy. It was entirely mystical and mind blowing. A night of Total Music." - Thurston Moore, London, 2025  For his last solo record ‘Through a Room’, Bill Nace shifted his usual saturated guitar sound and added tapes, hurdy gurdy, doughnut pipe, bird calls and the mysterious Japanese taishōgoto. Setting up for the final night of his three day residency at OTO with only the taishōgoto soundchecked, Nace hoped that Parker would arrive with his small soprano as its opposite. “I’ve been interested in state change, you know, playing until there’s a shift in time.” Known for his development of multiphonics to produce a constantly shifting pattern, Evan Parker has evolved an instantly recognizable sound - his work the soprano most distinct. Happily, it was the soprano Evan brought with him and as soon as the two start to play they entwine - taking off in a double helix of keys and reed primed for endless reconfiguration. Space warps under the velocity of playing, the pitch rising unrelentingly. It felt like unending lift off in the room, sheer energy until the last note makes remember your feet have been on the floor the whole time. Total time bending shredding.  --- Bill Nace / electric two string taishōgotoEvan Parker / soprano saxophone --- Arrives in a tip on sleeve with artwork by Bill Nace. Edition of 500 released as a split with Bill Nace's Open Mouth Records. If you're in the USA we advise you buy locally.  Recorded live at Cafe OTO on Friday 25th May, 2024 by Billy Steiger. Mixed and mastered by Brian Haran. Cover art by Bill Nace. Photo by Dawid Laskowski. Layout by Neil Burker & Bill Nace.  --- "The piece possesses exceptional cathartic beauty, with a power that seems to emerge from the mists of time, yet it feels more essential and compelling than any modernity. The 40-minute performance, built on loops and repetitions, forms a seamless whole that is impossible to pause, let alone stop. It is an experience that hypnotizes the mind into a marvelous trance, where the intensity of the performance fades behind the beauty of the perfect complementarity of sounds and the music shared by these two musicians. Branches is an exceptional release." - Best of Jazz