John Butcher
John Butcher is an English saxophonist, improviser and composer. John Butcher's work ranges through improvisation, his own compositions, multitracked pieces and explorations with feedback and extreme acoustics. Originally a physicist, he left academia in '82, and has since collaborated with hundreds of musicians.
John Butcher is an English saxophonist, improviser and composer. John Butcher's work ranges through improvisation, his own compositions, multitracked pieces and explorations with feedback and extreme acoustics. Originally a physicist, he left academia in '82, and has since collaborated with hundreds of musicians.
Experiments with a Leaf
John Butcher and Andy Moor have shared a stage many times since their first collaboration in the trio Thermal with Thomas Lehn. Even though they hail from very different corners of improvised music, their musical horizons have meshed through the time into the distinctive duo that it is now.“Experiments with a Leaf” is a live recording from October 2013 in Berne, Switzerland, where the duo was playing in a cathedral. The large natural echo in the great space somehow glued the sounds togethe…
Bottle breaking heart leap
Limited dition of 250 on 180gm black vinyl. An essential document of this endlessly creative improvisational pairing...Californian Gino Robair and Londoner John Butcher first played together on a 1997 recording session in Oakland, California. Since then they have worked extensively as a duo, periodically expanding to form trios with Matthew Sperry (bass), Miya Masaoka (koto), Derek Bailey (guitar), Thomas Lehn (synth) and, most recently, The Apophonics with John Edwards (bass). Robair also …
Conceits (1987/1992)
A reissue of the first LP by the exceptionally fine improvising trio of John Russell (guitar), Phil Durrant (violin and trombone) and John Butcher (saxophones). This group came into being in 1984 after Russell and Durrant had spent the previous two years performing in private with another saxophonist. For this debut LP, made in 1987, they performed eleven short pieces. This CD has been expanded by the inclusion of a previously unissued extended concert performance made a few years later. The str…
Nigemizu
The brilliant sax player John Butcher continues to expand the boundaries of free improvisation. This is his latest solo release. An inexhaustible outpouring of ideas blends with phantasmagoric, wondrous technique to create a richly colored, dynamic world of sound. Not only is this John Butcher's greatest masterpiece, but as a solo saxophone album it is a valuable document that can even be said to rank alongside Evan Parker's 'Monoceros''. The 3 pieces were performed at Shimanouchi Church …
The Natural Order
Guitarist Fred Frith and saxophonist John Butcher are titans within the world of improvised music. Over the last four decades, each of these two men has permanently altered the way in which his instrument is heard: Frith with his (at times literal) deconstruction of the electric guitar, and Butcher with his exploration of the physical properties of sound and extended playing techniques.
Though they’ve played live together a few times, The Natural Order, recorded in 2009 and mixed in 2012, …
Exta
Finally restocked! "Butcher’s sax ranges from soft, whispery purrs to teeth-chatteringly spiteful blasts. Lehn’s analogue synth leaps in a moment from burbling tones to fiercely sizzling abstraction, and Tilbury slips from his familiar melodic interludes and fragmented arpeggios to crashing, seismic attacks on the inside of the piano. What sets this album head and shoulders above similar offerings is the understanding between the trio. It’s not just the way all three move together as one from su…
Winter gardens
180g LP in fine paper silkscreen printed cover. Recorded in London, December 2011 and in Milwaukee, October 2011. A solo album by saxophone virtuoso John Butcher featuring some of his most exceptional extended techniques which he has been developing during his career as a soloist as well as a member of some significant collaborative projects. Playing tenor & soprano saxophones, Butcher has developed a very unique style in free improvised music and composition, mostly by engaging with a se…
Bell Trove Spools
Northern Spy is proud to present two of John Butcher’s most recent experiments in moving sound waves through space. On Bell Trove Spools we hear Butcher in two distinct situations: Richmond Hall, a Houston art gallery housing a permanent Dan Flavin collection that has been compared to a bowling alley; and the high-ceilinged marble room in Brooklyn which is the new home to Issue Project Room. Butcher is heard on his two saxes of choice, the soprano and the tenor, and suspended in space, fluid, ch…
Meetings With Remarkable Saxophonists - Volume 2
The second volume of Eddie Prevost's 2011 series of concerts at Network Theatre, Waterloo, London meeting with remarkable saxophonists, here with John Butcher on tenor & soprano, with Guillaume Viltard on double bass. The concerts are also notable as Eddie Prevost returns to the drum kit to extend the function of the basic jazz element into AMM-style improvisation.
Scrutables
John Butcher and Derek Bailey first played in duo around 1989, at London's Red Rose Club. Butcher then took part in the 1990 & 1992 (London) and 1996 (Vancouver) Company weeks. Various other playing situations materialised in the 90s, ranging from Saturday afternoons at the Oasis Wine Bar in Hackney, to a quartet with Robyn Schulkowsky in France, and a trio with Joelle Leandre at Tonic in New York in 2000.A comparatively long lived grouping was with tuba player Oren Marshall - which relea…
Trace
Cassette-only release. Edition of 250 copies. John Butcher's work ranges through improvisation, his own compositions, multi-tracked saxophone pieces and explorations with feedback and extreme acoustics. Originally a physicist, he left academia in 1982, and has since collaborated with hundreds of musicians. He is well known as a soloist, recently exploring unusual site-specific acoustics, and has released seven albums of solo saxophone music. His tape for The Tapeworm features two contrasting per…
Invisible ear
Two decades ago, saxophonist John Butcher abandoned his doctoral pursuits in theoretical physics to pursue a life in improvised music and has since become one of the genre’s leading instrumental and structural innovators. Butcher’s pursuit of extended techniques has yielded and continues to yield, as indicated by this most recent solo outing, a treasure trove of unfathomable timbral and dynamic possibilities for an instrument whose role in experimental music seems to consistently teeter o…
Treader Duos
Recorded February 2008, this album captures a specially organised Treader concert at St Giles-in-the-Fields church in London's West End. A series of duos played at the event, each improvising over the course of a twenty-five minute set. First up, the excellent John Butcher (on tenor and soprano saxophones) pairs with drummer Mark Sanders for 'Tooth Pivot', an incredible opener that stumbles into life through the reverberant performance space, with Butcher at first sounding measured and contempla…
the geometry of sentiment
John Butcher is up there with the Parkers, the Rothenbergs, the Zorns and the Harths, yet his style is inimitable; he has arrived at the top at last, and dominates in a world of bent overtones and multiple subdivisions of a single note. THE GEOMETRY OF SENTIMENT - which I perceive as his masterpiece - presents seven tracks recorded at various places between 2004 and 2006, each one with a different kind of resonant space forced by our man to respond in a unique way, at the same time exploring tha…
Optic
Two of the most adventurous musicians around today, John Butcher and John Edwards have been working as a very compatible duo for some years now. This CD contains concert performances from Brussels and Barcelona. 59 minutes -- previously unissued.
The contest of pleasures - Tempestuous
Having used extensive editing and some remixing for the second of their two excellent Potlatch CDs, Albi Days, Contest of Pleasures – the trio of John Butcher (tenor and soprano saxophones), Xavier Charles (clarinet) and Axel Dorner (trumpet) – returns to its initial acoustic position with Tempestuous, which launches the new British label, Another Timbre. Recorded late on a stormy November night in an old church during the 2006 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival,Tempestuous moves between t…
Requests and antisongs
Saxophonist John Butcher and violinist Phil Durrant had been playing together on the English improv scene in various formations for 14 years when they decided to start a live electroacoustic project in 1997, a project not unlike Evan Parker's own unit at the same time. The Butcher/Durrant duo released a first CD, Secret Measures, on Wobbly Rail, recorded live at the beginning of the experiment. Requests and Antisongs is a studio performance taped in January and February 2000, over two years late…
13 friendly numbers
John Butcher appeared on six records, beginning with the 1984 LP 'Fonetiks, before he first released 'Thirteen Friendly Numbers' on his own Acta label in 1992. But the disc is still something of a debut; it is the first document of his peculiar language for solo saxophone, which he had fashioned by purging his vocabulary of the instrument's familiar sounds and jazz-associated gestures, and filling the space with carefully selected sounds located at the periphery of instrumental control. Butcher'…