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Phonography
The first time I heard R. Stevie Moore was when The Residents played me goodbye piano - which would have been sometime in early 1978. Soon after that, I got in touch with him to import some copies for Recommended - followed over the years by many of his other releases. Phonography was Stevie's first, and a masterpiece. Terminally idiosyncratic but with all the compositional qualities of great pop. R Stevie Moore is a gifted songwriter and marches to his own drum - as this strange and compelling …
Middle of the Moment
Continuing the definitive Fred Frith edition, this is the CD based on Fred’s music for the second film he made with Humbert and Penzel – following nomads – that features, along with Fred’s compositions and re-workings, a restless and gripping unfolding of atmospheric locations, tuareg and other musics, ethongraphic material and times captured. A collage or a soundwork rather than a straightforwardly musical composition, this is a serious and unfairly marginalised piece (because it falls between …
Gyromancy
Mnemonists eventually evolved into the incredible Biota band. Before they did they released a series of LPs, including the art work that surrounds and informs their approach to improvisation. As Mnemonists their work is darker and more ominous than that of Biota, but the process was still the same: post-processing live improvisation to construct larger works that stood on their own two feet as compositional pieces. Think AMM, Organum, Faust; Mnemonists embraced their strategies but created somet…
Rarities (Volumes 1 & 2)
Lindsay Cooper was a rare and extraordinary woman; at home in rock bands (Henry Cow, National Health), Jazz ensembles (Mike Westbrook Orchestra, Maarten Altena Octet) Concert Halls (Concerto for Sopranino Saxophone and Orchestra, Songs for bassoon and Orchestra); she also founded the Feminist Improvising Group, scored feature films and wrote for television, dance, radio, theatre, contemporary ensembles and orchestras - as well as being highly respected as a virtuoso performer on several instrume…
Ordinary Objects and Other Distractions
In this episode, a number of short recordings of household objects and curious instruments become the core thematic material for a range of exquisitely conceived and realised pieces in which the recordings are shaped, stretched, tuned, combined and otherwise manipulated before being folded into a variety of musical structures with additional elements or parts added. Much use is made of rhythms derived from gravity – that is, dropping and bouncing - embedded into microtonal, poly-rhythmic and dee…
Propaganda
Written for theatre in 1987 using a host of avian and mammalian voices, snippets of unidentified musical material and electroacoustic noise- sculpting, as well as invented and real instruments played by Fred Frith. This was a hard time and the mood is intense, lean and not cheerful, though there are some gruesomely cheery inserts. There's no fat but a lot of meat here.
Sale Quanto Basta
Paolo Angeli’s latest is an extraordinary collection of pieces that explore the full range of his highly modified, extended and prepared Sardinian guitar; and although it’s just him and electricity, it seldom sounds like fewer than 3 people. Great compositions, each like a short novel, beautifully recorded. Paolo’s unique music defies genre or category - at once accessible, experimental, tuneful, tactile, ambient, with a folk root and a rock inflection and a contemporary outlook. And his instrum…
Funnel to a Thread
Since the late 1970s Biota has ploughed its own furrow, producing a body of work that resembles nothing anyone else has done or is yet doing. Their compositions evolve in long, constantly shifting timbral blocks filled with fragments and echoes of quasi-familiar musical languages and sounds – or none - and use instrumental resources that span half a millennium and two thirds of the planet to create unique combinations of timbral colour in constant motion; this is a music in which everything is i…
Gaps, Absences
A beautifully recorded and produced cycle of pieces that combine complexity and precision with rich and unfamiliar timbres. The ensemble pieces amplify and enrich a core piano with various combinations of harmonium, double bass, violin, percussion, Hungarian zither, citara bassa, bowed cymbals, alto clarinet, melodica, sampler and field recordings, all sparsely but powerfully deployed. This is a deep and powerful music with both crystalline clarity and cinematic low frequency power. And no fat o…
The Previous Evening
Former Henry Cow guitarist Fred Frith pays homage to three giants of contemporary classical music: John Cage, Morton Feldman and Earle Brown. In his own inimitable fashion, Frith has tried to incorporate the chosen composer's own working methods into each of the three pieces that make up The Previous Evening. As he explains in the enclosed booklet regarding his John Cage homage: 'Fragments of text heard in Part 1 were taken at random from Cage's book Silence. Tape editing, the structure of the e…
GPS
Steve MacLeans 5-piece ensemble perform complex, composed polyrhythmic pieces interspersed with atmospheric improvisations for guitar, bass, keyboard, percussion and various objects: a journey through complex, composed polyrhythmic pieces interspersed with careful, atmospheric improvisations for guitar, bass, keyboard, percussion and various objects. There is a quiet rigour, almost a formality, about this CD that is rather unusual for the new century - the compositions are not over-elaborated an…
Field Days (The Amanda Loops)
14 pieces originally written for dance and other practical situations, here reassigned and reconstructed for choreographer Amanda Miller and the Nederland Dans Theater. These are loop-based, textural, mood pieces, and invocations of spaces and landscapes, with some fine steel guitar playing. Mostly this is Fred multi-instrumenting, with pianist Daan Vanderwalle, percussionist Willie Wynant, the Arte Sax quartet and Lotte Anker, the Arditti Quartet, Kiku Day, occasional shakuhachi, and vio…
Esperanto (LP)
LP version. Wewantsounds continues their Ryuichi Sakamoto reissue series with the release of the 1985 album Esperanto, composed for a performance by New York avant-garde choreographer Molissa Fenley. Produced and performed by Sakamoto with contribution by Arto Lindsay and Japanese percussionist Yas-Kaz, Esperanto is a fascinating instrumental work mixing electronica, ambient and synth pop. Released in Japan in 1985 on Midi Inc.s' School label, the album has never been released outside of Japan u…
Electronics
Presenting a third volume of collaborative works between European avant garde ensemble Zeitkratzer and modern electronic composers. On this release, Zeitkratzer cooperates with legendary Japanese noise artist, Keiji Haino. The Berliner Zeitung had the following to say about this mind-melting collaboration: "They had only rehearsed for three days, but the result was mind-blowing. Haino made music on the guitar and on the drums, on electronic devices, on two Theremins and with his wonderfully chan…
Amlux
** Limited edition of 300 ** Certainly Amlux is a very cohesive and well-constructed piece; starting more softly than usual, the record slowly builds into the chaotic harsh sound that Merzbow is well known for, but this time adding some actual recognizable music elements (like rhythms), and constructing various surprisingly well-texture soundscapes, that made of this album a more focused and immersive piece that effectively keeps engaged during 40+ music of primal noise. Records like this are t…
Water Messages On Desert Sand
The extraordinary 1987 debut album from the Italian legendary duo. Water Messages on Desert Sand was the very first sound creation from the Italian avantgarde duo of Roberto Musci and Giovanni Venosta. A classic work in the genre, released by Chris Cutler's Recommended Records in 1987. Back in the mid Eighties, Musci & Venosta, both on sampler, synthesizer, guitar, piano, effects and tapes were masters in overlaying and constructing rhythmic and harmonic pictures of transparent sound from electr…
Bread Love And Dreams
"The debut album by this two-woman, one-man trio presented contemporary British folk with the slightest of pop and folk-rock edges. The most prominent pop embroidery was found in the occasional sweeping, haunting string arrangements; there were also dabs of organ, harp, and percussion here and there. It was pretty but somewhat bland music on the border of late-'60s British folk-rock, the songs faintly echoing those of U.K. peers such as Donovan and Bert Jansch.
Bread, Love and Dreams had a sligh…
Os Mutantes
2023 repress. Lilith present a reissue of Os Mutantes' self-titled debut, originally released in 1968. With the release of their debut LP in 1968, Os Mutantes cracked the already red hot Tropicalia scene wide open. Fusing traditional Brazilian music, psychedelia, rock, and a good dose of pure experimentation, they quickly became giants both in Brazil and in the outer fringes of pop music, where they have managed to reign supreme for the past four decades. Not an easy task in such a crowded arena…
Riddled with Absence
** Edition of 250 ** Dalibor Cruz's debut LP traces his families bloodline to the mountain town of Siguatepeque and the native people of Honduras, teaming these ancient rhythms inside the framework of the midwest's noise scene. The artwork is an original piece by Gabrielle K. Brown.