Jazz /
Inframince / Immensity
Michael Thieke (clarinet) and Olivier Toulemonde (acoustic objects) : 'Inframince'. Lucio Capece (bass clarinet & preparations) & Jamie Drouin (analogue synthesizer & radio) : 'Immensity'. The Inframince / Immensity split CD is the first in a series of discs exploring the work of musicians based in Berlin, a city which has been one of the most vibrant centres for improvised and contemporary music since the 1960's. The alternative music scene there is now huge, and musicians from all aroun…
Public private
Atolón : Ruth Barberán, Alfredo Costa Monteiro, Ferran Fages. Chip shop music : Erik Carlsson, Martin Küchen, David Lacey, Paul Vogel. Recorded by Simon Reynell, February 2012. Mixed and mastered by Ferran Fages. A collaboration between two established and highly-regarded improvising ensembles, Atolon from Barcelona and the Irish-Swedish group Chip Shop Music. The disc consists of the whole of a wonderful concert performance from February 2012 in which the two groups attempted to play tog…
Spoo
Released 10 March 2013. The album combines the inspired play of Eric Vagnon (saxophone) with a solid rhythm layer driven by the double bassist Eric Brochard and legendary drummer Nicolas Lelièvre. So good...
Boneshaker
"Boneshaker are Mars Williams (reeds, toy instruments), Paal Nilssen-Love (drums & percussion) and Kent Kessler (bass), three prolific powerhouse musicians, carrying among them a Grammy nomination and decades of experience with the top ensembles in the world.Norwegian phenomenon Paal Nilssen-Love has established himself over the last decade as one of the most important voices in improvised music from his generation. A powerful drummer of unbounded energy, he shows an ongoing ability to br…
Concert For Fukushima
Concert film by Pavel Borodin featuring the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet benefit concert at the Music Unlimited festival in Wels. Guests: Toshinori Kondo, Michiyo Yagi, Yoshihide Otomo and Akira Sakata It was a special wish of the curator of the 2011 Music Unlimited Festival (Wels, Austria), Peter Brötzmann, to organize a charity concert in aid of the Fukushima nuclear disaster recovery effort. For that purpose, the Chicago Tentet, one of Brötzmann's main bands since 15 years, invited f…
Live at the Montreux/Detroit Jazz Festival 1986/1989
World Premiere!! Available for the 1st time, this legendary live set by the near-mythical Roy Brooks' Sensational Aboriginal Choir. which used to be one of the highlight of the Montreux/Detroit Jazz Festival. unique & special ?! kind of.After the Improvisational Sphere & the Artistic Truth Roy Brooks recast his Artistic Truth band with a formidable, all-Detroit lineup and quickly established it as one of the region’s top groups. He teamed with established local jazz godfathers such as Kenny Co…
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…
Zurich
Live in Zurich 1984. Reissue of a double vinyl publish on the same label. Donald Miller, guitar, alto saxophone (on one track). Jim Sauter, tenor, alto, baritone saxophones. Don Dietrich, tenor, alto saxophone, guitar (on one track). 'First off, there is this huge saxophone sound, the bells of the two saxes often jammed against each other with a microphone dropped inside, and then there is the guitarist as a generator of sounds more crazed than anything that has ever come out of the instr…
Cafe Oto/London
CD edition. Great work from this heavy heavy trio – a group that features the talents of probably the three greatest living avant saxophonists in the world – Peter Brotzmann on tenor, alto, clarinet, and tarogato, Ken Vandermark on tenor and clarinet, and Mats Gustafsson on baritone sax! The trio have worked together countless times over the past two decades – and together have an affinity that not only results in some of the most amazingly adventurous improvisation you'll ever hear from …
The Living Music
180 gram vinyl reissue of German free improvisation pianist and composer Alexander von Schlippenbach's The Living Music, originally released on his own Quasar label in 1969. Recorded by Conny Plank, it features Peter Brötzmann (tenor & baritone saxophone), Manfred Schoof (cornet, flugelhorn), Michael Pilz (bass clarinet, baritone saxophone), Paul Rutherford (trombone), Buschi Niebergall (double bass, bass trombone) and Han Bennink (drums, percussion). The Living Music remains one of the paramoun…
A Space Odyssey: From Birmingham To The Big Apple - The Quest Be
**Tri-fold digicase with 20-page booklet of liner-notes and photos** Kris Needs repositions the roots of Sonny Blount aka Sun Ra on three discs (60 tracks) spanning his earliest 1933 recordings of big band jazz and be-bop, thru the birth of Sun Ra and the "future shock" of his later visions. "CD1 (Pre-flight) features Sun Ra’s earliest recordings from the 1940s, playing piano for Wynonie Harris and Lil Green, jamming with Stuff Smith, and coaching or arranging for artists such as Andrew T…
Cuts
If jazz, as the eminent critic Whitney Balliet once wrote, is the “sound of surprise,†Cuts, an intensely cathartic, fiercely turbulent collaboration between Japanese noise purveyor Masami Akita (aka Merzbow), Hungarian drummer Balazs Pandi and Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustasfsson, is the “sound of shock and awe.†A sonic assault of epic proportions, it blends the bombast of Merzbow’s grinding white noise barrages with Pandi’s thunderous pulse on the kit and Gust…
For Adolphe Sax
At last, the reissue of German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann's long out-of-print first record, one of the most auspicious debuts of free music, and a trenchant tribute to the inventor of the saxophone. For Adolphe Sax is a roundhouse punch of European free jazz, delivered in1967 by the saxophonist's first classic trio featuring drummer Sven-Ake Johansson and bassist Peter Kowald. Initially issued in a tiny private run on Brötzmann's own BRO label -- silkscreened cover designed by Brötzmann, with h…
Musiki
Reissue of a very obscure free music document, recorded in Cambridge, MA, sometime in 1970. Notable for it's Saturn-esque paste-on cover artwork (eloquently reconstructed here), and general cosmic vibe, this record harkens back to days when "out" was merely a place people went to buy a sandwich. A trio, led by drummer Ertunc, with Michael Cosmic (as, cl, fl, bcl, sop, piccolo, organ, perc.) & Phill Musra (ts, ss, fl, zurna, cl, perc.). The albums features long tracks: "The Creator Spaces"…
At WKCR Studios NY 12-8-74
Massively unlikely unearthing of a previously unreleased live radio broadcast from legendary free jazz saxophonist Charles Tyler in a hand-numbered edition of only 99 copies: Tyler is a comparatively unsung player compared to the better known free music titans but his was a fascinating career, playing alongside Albert Ayler on Bells and Spirits Rejoice, cutting a hands-down classic run of private LPs – Eastern Man Alone on ESP Disk, Voyage From Jericho and Live In Europe, 1978’s Saga Of Th…
Quintet
Things get dislocated, gather themselves, spread across areas of varying intensities. More intimate or more complex song. closer to the sacred, left untouched by mediation, even slightly incomprehensible, though mostlyambivalent and reality-piercing. At times, the music seems to lead us to a meaning that is deeper than the textual level. or is it the depth of another possible song? That's when the music takes us to areas that seem perpetually urging, more than their simple addition of voi…
By the Stream
A study of free-form improvisation, rhythm and language using vocalizations, cello and analog electronics. These recordings in two movements can be taken as, on the one hand, pieces for two voices and improvisation chamber orchestra (which is what the musicians felt throughout the recording session) and, on the other hand, pure free improvisation. Both voices in interaction, perpetually urging the other on, producing more than their simple addition, producing a third voice -- like a semi-au…
A winter's night at the crooked forest
Kari Rønnekleiv, violin. Ole-Henrik Moe, viola. In 2011 Rønnekleiv/Moe released the album “A summer’s night at the crooked forest” on SOFA. The London based music magazine WIRE wrote that the album is a technical tour de force. And a musical one, too, each track structured with composerly precision. On this sequel we meet an extraordinary duo with an almost telepatic interplay. Recorded in the middle of the forest in a cabin with no electricity (the recording equipment was run on solar en…
Live at Knot Gallery, Athens, November 2011
Edition of 300 (coproduced with phase records & mafia). 'it was in dhalgren that i had read about a father getting fired, and who trying not to depress his family about it, wakes up every day, shaves, dresses himself up, has breakfast and leaves for his work. where does he spent his almost 8 to 10 hours? a mystery. perhaps crying on a park's bench or drinking or whatever. however, there are times when reality creates even more dystopian images than those in sam delaney's aforementioned o…
Cosmo Earth Fantasy: Sub Underground Series Vol. 1 and 2
A Saturn release from the 1960's featuring a wide-range of pieces from studio recordings, rehearsals, and live concerts that are all heart-felt and made in the traditional Sun Ra style, starting with eight delirious minutes of kora and piano frame -- almost certainly the Strange Strings instruments, whatever they were. And then Ra's signature clavinet of the period and an unidentifiable double-reed instrument, probably played by Marshall Allen. Enter the xylophone. I sense you're getting the …