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.

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.

Originally issued on cassette in limited runs between 1989 and 1990, At That Time is a long-overdue excavation of Nostalgie Éternelle – one of the most quietly crucial names in the European DIY underground. The compilation brings together tracks from three early self-released tapes – Damned Forever Those Who Listen To This Tape (split with Due), Art Is The Tool (split with From Nursery to Misery), and Virtual Reality (split with PN 4632402) – issued on the band’s own One Last Dream label and circulated through Europe’s mail-based cassette network. Formed in the small northern town of Leer in 1986, Stefan Heinze (aka Inox Kapell) and Dieter Mauson (later of Delta-Sleep-Inducing Peptide) worked with what was at hand – battered drum machines, cassette decks, synths, tape loops, found sounds – and pushed it into strange, low-lit zones between minimal synth, ambient-industrial, and new wave abstraction. Their sound was shaped as much by environment as influence: the clang of metal from a nearby workshop, Dutch radio static, local zines, field recordings in tunnels, and the distant pull of DAF, The Ex, Cluster and Palais Schaumburg. They didn’t chase scenes – they stayed locked in their own language, quietly radiating outward. These recordings land somewhere between NDW, DIY industrial, coldwave and post-punk decay – think early Portion Control, Legendary Pink Dots, Das Ding, P16.D4, or the more atmospheric zones of Nocturnal Emissions. Nostalgie Éternelle remain one of the great cult acts of the era, their output shaped by instinct and sustained by exchange. This LP captures them in full motion: abstract, skeletal, emotive, and locked into a sound entirely their own. Recently restored and remastered from the original tapes, this release marks the first time this material has appeared on vinyl, providing a vital compilation for those tracing the margins of the European tape underground.

Orchid Mantis, by Michelle Helene Mackenzie and Stefan Maier, is a work that draws its inspiration from the history of the Sanzhi Pod City, in northern Taiwan. Sanzhi Pod City was built from 1978 onwards, made up of buildings constructed from assemblages of ‘pods’ inspired by the futuro houses of Finnish architect Matti Suuronen. The project was abandoned in 1980, following a number of accidents during construction and persistent rumours that the site was haunted. However, this wasteland of a city has allowed insects to proliferate, in particular five species of orchid mantis. It is this strange environment, made up of utopian buildings, proliferating insects and vegetation reclaiming the site, that serves as the imaginary space for Michelle Helene Mackenzie and Stefan Maier’s music, a music of carefully designed pace and progression, drawing, through resonance and stridulation, subtle sonic materials that guide and accompany us into multiple worlds with admirable ease and grace.  — Breach, by American composer Olivia Block, engages in a dialogue between field recordings and synthesised sounds, creating a vibrant plea for wild spaces that face an ever-growing threat to their survival from human activities. The work is based on recordings collected in the San Ignacio lagoon in the Mexican part of Southern California. This lagoon is known as a breeding ground for eastern Pacific grey whales. With the help of precise electronics, the music unfolds like a drift, depicting the subjective soundscape of whales caught up in the noise of the Anthropocene. The composer uses otoacoustic emissions in particular, representing the sound saturation caused by humans in the habitat of these large marine mammals. Going beyond a merely descriptive dimension, Olivia Block manages to transcend her subject to offer a fascinating musical form that engages the listener in a constantly renewed way.

Dan Melchior has a wild history, brain and catalogue. Penultimate Press is honoured to add to it. The former and later that is. This is Melchior's first piano recording. “I used my girlfriend Jessica's piano and got a fairly cheap mic from the guitar centre that could just be plugged onto the end of a guitar cable.” The reverb is natural, as the piano sits in a large, mostly empty room. Hill Country Piano is the result of a human music box mind brimming with many a corner somehow aligning with chambers still being told. Melchior does not play the piano in any formal way, as you can probably tell. He played and recorded the piano, with simple repetitive parts, whilst listening to previous recordings on headphones. Then the magic happens. The gentle introduction of a banjo on Sparrow Song paints the reality of an America now lost. The percussion on the self-titled track unravels a psychedelic gamelan piano duo residing in the now. It didn't start out that way,it never does, but this slow burning trip around a mind/world happened to come into formulation just as an interest in Pascal Comelade was coming into play. All original piano was recorded in Austin. 4U.Dan Melchior is from London, England. He has lived in various cities in the USA for the last 24 years.Melchior’s resume is as unique as it is exciting and diverse. Having cut his teeth in the land of garage rock as a collaborator with Billy Childish and Holly Golightly his vision takes sharp twists landing on Graham Lambkin’s strange and beautiful experimental label Kye with two records which broke not only the mould of himself but that of the song itself.Melchoir is a musician with a voluminous discography which embraces many different forms of expression, from song based rock to pure textural explorations. His music has evolved significantly, to become a distant entity from some of his earlier blues-based work, showing a definite influence of more experimental bands such as The Homosexuals and The Fall, and some absurdist elements which have led to comparisons to compatriot exponents of that genre, Vivian Stanshall and Syd Barrett.Always experimenting with form in an original manner avoiding any inherent genre anchor. Blues is referenced and extended, musique concrete is found embedded in the song.Melchior has collaborated with artists as diverse as Billy Childish, Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, Letha Rodman Melchior and the LAFMS outfit Dinosaurs With Horns. Just as diverse are the record labels he has been associated with, including Sympathy for the record industry, Siltbreeze, Kye, Ultra Eczema, Chocolate Monk, Ever/Never, Feeding Tube and Penultimate Press, and more.Melchior supports himself in recent years as a portrait artist, while pursuing various divergent paths, both artistically and musically.

Koln, Germany around 1991. After a 40-minute train ride from Aachen, Christoph Heemann and Jim O'Rourke are sitting around with Jan St. Werner, C-Schulz, Frank Dommert and George Odjik. Heemann has brought with him a strange obscure disc (what else?) from Portugal by some group called "Plux Quba." Or is it the record? The label? Who knows, because no one here reads Portuguese, dummy! But what they do know when the needle hits the groove is that they've never heard anything like it. Attempts to cite reference points are soon given up, there are some similarities to Robert Ashley's later work, but even that is deceiving. It is simple, gentle, melodic, and yet completely alien. Originally released in 1988 on Ama Romanta, and reissued last in 1998 on Moikai.

OTOROKU is proud to reissue Evan Parker's first solo LP "Saxophone Solos". Recorded by Martin Davidson in 1975 at the Unity Theatre in London, at that time the preferred concert venue of the Musicians' Co-operative, Parker's densely woven and often cyclical style has yet to form; instead throaty murmurs appear under rough hewn whistles and calls - the wildly energetic beginnings of an extraordinary career.  Reissued with liner notes from Seymour Wright in an edition of 500.  --- "The four pieces across the two sides of Saxophone Solos – Aerobatics 1 to 4 – are testing, pressured, bronchial spectaculars of innovation and invention and determination. Evan tells four stories of exploration and imagination without much obvious precedent. Abstract Beckettian cliff-hanging detection/logic/magic/mystery. The conic vessel of the soprano saxophone here recorded contains the ur-protagonists: seeds, characters, settings, forces, conflicts, motions, for new ideas, to delve, to tap and to draw from it story after story as he has on solo record after record for 45 years. ‘Aerobatics 1-3’ were recorded on 17 June 1975, by Martin Davidson at Parker’s first solo performance. This took place at London’s Unity Theatre in Camden. ‘Aerobatics 4’ was recorded on 9 September the same year, by Jost Gebers in the then FMP studio in Charlottenburg, Berlin. Music of balance and gravity, fulcra, effort, poise and enquiry. Sounds thrown and shaken into and out of air, metal and wood. It is – as the titles suggest – spectacular." - Seymour Wright, 2020.

Butcher is interested in particular people and their personalities. He prefers not to work in a generic situation, where there's an agreement in advance to play a certain kind of thing, and the music cannot swerve in a sudden fresh direction. As he told me a few years back: "What got me so interested in the type of improvising I ended up really spending time on was, at least at a personal level, there was a feeling you could start from scratch. Now you might well be mistaken, and rediscovering endless wheels, but it felt like there was a chance… Whatever things you do pull together from various places into that, relate more to your own personal take on – I’m not just talking about music, but how you want to live as a musician in the world, what aspects of things outside of music you’re hoping will find their way into your activity." Clive Bell John Butcher soprano and tenor saxes Angharad Davies violin Mark Sanders percussion Pat Thomas electronics