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Catalogue
2005 reissue. Released in 1979 in a limited edition on his own d'Avantage label, Catalogue, with its overt theatricality is every bit as wild as the previous Paralleles. Not really jazz, not rock, having nothing to do with contemporary music either, Catalogue is a kind of sonic postcard which features not the group of the same name but instead numerous Jacques Berrocal associates including Potage (co-founder of the d'Avantage label in 1976), Parle, Ferlet, Pauvros and recording engineer Daniel D…
Voooxing Poooetre
* Housed in a 6-panel wallet, including a 24-page booklet reproducing the photos, scores, and writings from the original LP, along with a new foreword written by Enzo Minarelli in 2015 * A CD issue of the long unavailable international sound poetry compilation LP, Voooxing Poooêtre. Originally released in 1982, this collection was assembled by Italian sound poet Enzo Minarelli (who has also curated releases on Slowscan and Baobab, in addition to operating the 3Vitre imprint).
Comprised of voice…
Accidental
Fred Frith has been heard in all possible contexts, from solo improviser to composer of orchestral music, but he remains at his best when trapped in a studio, alone or with a few musicians, building layered pieces. This process previously yielded stunning albums such as the delicate Middle of the Moment or the avant rocking Speechless. Accidental features Frith performing all instruments and voices, mostly guitars, violin, junk percussion, and random radio tuning. This music was commissioned by …
That House We Lived In
It was a long wait, but, 12 years after the fact, Fred Frith put together a live album of his group Keep the Dog, which had previously gone undocumented. Comprised of sax/flute player Jean Derome, guitarist René Lussier, keyboardist/harpist Zeena Parkins, sampling artist Bob Ostertag, and drummer Charles Hayward, Keep the Dog was formed by Frith in 1989 to perform a best-of repertoire of his career and remained his last rock group. By the time of this 1991 European tour, the unit had grown beyon…
Dentro
Somewhere between Musique Concrete and a kind of abstract improvisational work, using extended techniques and electrification that disconnects sound from any recognisable source. A fascinating first record that sits between studio improvisation and extensive post production processing composition.
Bijou
A subtle, moody, rich and wide-ranging work, in which atmosphere, emotion and dramaturgy lead the ear far beyond music into a world of hints, evocations, anticipation and association and, in passing, reveal a complex metonymic language that, at a deep level, invokes that mostly unconscious lexicon of sound we have all absorbed collectively and subliminally in the course of a century of movie-going, television viewing, documentary recording and electroacoustic experimentation. Once sounds have be…
Kew. Rhone.
The classic restored. No extra tracks, just this legendary release as it was originally conceived. Kew Rhone was made soon after Peter and John left Henry Cow, at Carla Bley and Mike Mantler’s Grog Kill studio in New York (they both appear on the CD). Fellow conspirators included singer Lisa Herman and drummer Andrew Cyrille. It’s one of those records which sums up a moment; a creative moment in which ideas have come into clear focus, and just need to be got down; an historical moment at which a…
A Face We All Know
'A Face We All Know' breaks new ground altogether. This is a single work with texts by Chris Cutler, Rainald Geotz and Thomas Pynchon and documents the last days of a political nightmare. Start here with Cassiber.
Crashing Icons
Based in Miami, this is a very interesting American band, ploughing its own furrow - whose accent is what they call 'prog' over there, but whose language is more complex by far. Pip Pyle adds a seasoned sophistication - in fact I think this is a great environment for him, he shines - but the whole ensemble is way past the foothills and keeping the oxygen packs handy. An excellent first CD, in a style that, features densely composed, layered, slightly post 5UU-school music - with some sung…
S'Û
An amazing record. It’s beautifully recorded and almost impossible to believe that such a layered and polyphonic music, with chords, percussion, lead lines, bass lines, harmonies, string sections and sometimes voice could all be produced by one person in real time, without overdubs or loops. But it is. The instrument, a specially designed and augmented Sardinian guitar (almost the size of a cello) is equipped with motors, pedals, individual string mic’ing, and extra appendages; and of course the…
Itsunomanika
Paolo Angeli and ex-After Dinner/Volapuk violinist/singer Takumi Fukushima present an integrated, complex and largely composed programme of deft, focused pieces that make the most of their not inconsiderable individual talents and instruments; mostly sounding like a much larger ensemble. The sonorities of Paolo’s extended, customised, prepared giant Sardinian guitar doing extraordinary, and sometimes chameleonic, work as bass, chord accompaniment, melody instrument, viola/cello, and even percuss…
Little Black Train
Thinking Plague, Hail, EC Nudes, 5UU's bassist and mixmaster with his second solo CD. Fast and furious country picking meets weird fragmentation and fast cut compositions. Guitars, Bass, Drums, Violin and odd unidentifiable noises all flawlessly performed, recorded and mixed into a single organism of musical strangeness. One of a kind.
The Skull Mailbox (and other Horrors)
The strangest so far. Mostly songs; a lot of acoustic instruments, a lot of unidentifiable sounds, a lot of fragments borne on a wind from somewhere else; bizarre picking interludes, humour (maybe) and snatches of incandescent playing. You can't pin this one down; it's full of twists and turns and a geometry that doesn't quite add up. Seemingly casual, there's not an ounce of fat on it, and the production - or anti-production - is, on repeated listening, quite extraordinary. Impressive.
13 Songs and a Thing
The latest collection of twisting, turning instrumentals and songs, and another instant classic. If you didn't venture down this way yet, now is a good time to start. In a category of one, Bob Drake undermines musical, technical and production norms with a breathtaking amalgam of broken rules and unimaginable musical logic.
Unaccompanied Barre
Recorded in St. James Norlands church in London in November 1968 and first released in the following year, this work stands as the first solo bass album in the history of Jazz and improvised music. Born in 1934 in San Francisco, Barre Phillips is one the most influential bassists of his generation. In his long career Phillips has played and recorded with almost everyone in the world of Jazz and beyond, a long list of forward thinking music icons including Don Ellis, Bobby Hutcherson, Dave Hollan…
Bob's Drive-In
A set of twisty, forty-ideas-a-minute, niftily arranged, irredeemably eccentric, but strangely brilliant songs that skip blithely across genre borders - from Nashville through the Miskatonic by way of the Beach Boys… even the production values range across the history of recording, sometimes switching inside a single song; so it’s a high-information ride - but still engagingly listenable. So far so good: another crafted, dense, idiosyncratic studio album. Now comes the twist. Finished with his …
Lawn Ornaments
After Bob Drake's Drive-In, which, in terms of production was quite restrained and minimal, Ornaments sets off in the opposite direction, piling up great car-crashes of overlapping fragments in a production that makes rococo look like shaker minimalism. Playing only drums, guitars, bass, banjo, fiddle, organ, trumpet and piano Bob herds tamed cataclysms of musical debris into the shapes of coherent - if episodic – songs, en route skipping through half a century of recording history. As to method…
The Shunned Country
A collection of 52 very short songs on uncanny themes, illustrated in the exquisite 24p full-colour booklet with a set of 20 commissioned paintings by Ray O'Bannon. Perhaps the scariest thing is that each of these miniatures is a fully formed, fully orchestrated and complete structure - no lazy snippets here - and Bob Drake plays all the parts with his famously Paganini-esque virtuosity in spooky variable tempo synchrony, packing more ideas and material into 50 seconds than many manage on an ent…
CMCD (Six Classic Concrete, Electroacoustic And Electronic Works 1970-1990)
This essential piece of history at last reissued, redesigned and repackaged. Keystone works from the various streams of musique concrete, electronic music, soundscape, electroacoustics and plunderphonics - including two masterworks from Eastern Europe, a territory traditionally overlooked in collections of this medium. It comprises: John Oswald's 'Parade', a complex work drawn and extended from Satie's celebrated ballet composition of 1917; Georg Katzer's monumental 'Aide Memoire' ('7 nig…
Explosion Of A Memory (A Literary Canvas For Orchestra)
An extended iterative, cycling, dissipating cloud of fragments, constantly shifting focus, which throws up detail, evolves, returns, settles and re-dissolves; it's a four-dimensional explosion in which stretches of baroque, folk themes and Byzantine liturgy exist contemporaneously alongside modern and (arguably) post-modern materials and techniques, all shaken loose out of the same experiential block, much as strata emerge as tectonic plates fold one time over another. Long, beautiful, to…