★ReR Megacorp
The People's Music
With string orchestras, percussion, a motivating red guard and the severed embalmed arm of the great helmsman himself (maybe), Jon Pits the ethos of Mao's China - and in particular the mass production of the violin and it's use in life against the 'reductive cultural practice of our globalised world'. Well, that's what it says here and by golly I agree. Apart from that, this a large scale work that features fine and extensive writing for string orchestras, juxtaposed with (more or less) controll…
Silo
Sound artist Lauren Weinger documents and reworks one of her large scale installation events in giant grain silos in America. The massive sounds of gargantuan hoppers pouring grain, documentary moments of dialogue, local, archive and composed musics, mysterious traces of a country, a culture, an event where 2 Americas meet. Beautiful packing. Plus extra Video track (& software, if required, to play it). A unique document and powerful listening.
Spoors
Some changes from Volume One. These are Instrumental pieces, and the band is now a quartet. Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer, Bob Drake and Chris Cutler are joined by guitarist Mike Johnson of Thinking Plague. The music remains somewhere between intense contemporary complexity and rock - passing most points between. Tickmayer's compositional language is....unique and complex and extremely broad - no influence is seemingly outlawed, and this makes for a genuinely unclassifiable form that resembles nothing…
Vampyr And Other Stories
In the late 1980s two globetrotting Milanese composers joined forces to produce an acclaimed and prescient record made in equal parts from their own performances and ethnic field recordings, a little in the manner of Eno/Byrne's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts - but rather more evolved. This 30th anniversary release includes some early pieces, not already available on CD made this way but, mainly, features the entirety of their score for Theodore Carl Dreyer's legendary silent film, Vampyr - perfo…
Waiting For The Bomb
2024 stock. LP version. Eccentricity in music is tricky in that it's difficult to embrace it in moderation. There's risk of having it come off as either overly (and gratingly) deliberate, or teetering over the precipice into full-blown novelty. Pere Ubu co-founder Allen Ravenstine's Waiting For The Bomb is one of these rare exceptions where peculiarity, nuance and genuine warmth align in such a way that it's perched right on that edge and all the more evocative because of it. One of the album's …
Historia
This box collects and restores two legendary Música Urbana mid-70s releases, both met at the time with extravagant critical acclaim but with few sales outside of Spain, and presents for the first time a set of previously unknown studio recordings by the otherwise undocumented Trio Altisent – which features members of both other projects - alongside a substantial and comprehensive book of background materials, newly conducted interviews, rare unpublished photographs and a general overview of the …
The Henry Cow Box Redux: The Complete Henry Cow
**17 CDs, 1 DVD and 250 pages of histories, chronology, testimony and commentaries by the band, sundry contemporary documents, and rare photographs – in a sturdy box.** This collection brings together in an inexpensive and definitive edition the full contents of all earlier releases, with the addition of a further 60pp booklet of newly unearthed, or commissioned, band commentaries, pictures and other documents prepared specifically for this box - as well as re-mastered versions of all the studio…
Out of Cold Storage
** 2024 Repress. The complete official lifetime releases of This Heat: This Heat, Deceit, Health and Efficiency, Made Available and Repeat, re-mastered and re-packaged, with a substantial (48pp) book of interviews, recollections, information, documents and photographs in a sturdy box, PLUS a new CD of concert recordings ** This Heat were born in the years immediately preceding punk rock. Severe young men Charles Bullen and Charles Hayward were making things go pish-ding-whoosh on London’s free-…
Níjar
Less than a year after the release of the album Rade, Paolo Angeli surprises with the sounds of his orchestral guitar, putting them at the service of a classic of Spanish literature: Bodas de Sangre, by Federico García Lorca. Níjar - recorded for the most part in the same studio session as the previous album and completed in February 2023 - goes back to the roots, that is, to the chronicle event that inspired the poet to write the work and that, in fact, took place in Níjar, in Andalusia. The Sa…
Fragment For Balance
After 4 years of work on their 11th release for ReR, Biota, this extraordinary, reclusive, and highly individual audio-visual collective continues to evolve through the painstaking accumulation and disposition of a seemingly incompatible range of both exotic and familiar musical languages, instruments, techniques and studio manipulations – into one of the few genuinely original bands at work today. It took a long time to refine their unique process of composition to this level of ambiguity and d…
Half A True Day
Six years in the making, the visual/sonic art group Biota have finally completed their Sixth CD for ReR. Unique in their history and method, Biota painstakingly construct complex, organic structures that mix extensive studio processing and musique concréte techniques with a highly eclectic orchestra of acoustic and electronic resources – from kit drums, through mediaeval winds, strings and barrel organs to early experimental electronic instruments. Their works are always performance driven and i…
Talea
Recorded in Australia, Brasil, Italy, Japan, Turkey and America on his 2015/16 world tour, these excellent recordings offer an astonishing range of styles and sounds – all somehow emanating from Angeli’s fingers and feet – and his highly modified, prepared, extended and amplified giant Sardinian guitar which – like Angeli himself – is routinely able do several very different things at once. You have to keep reminding yourself as you listen that this is just one person with one instrument, workin…
After Dinner - Live Editions
Repressed and available again for the first time in years. After Dinner was the Japanese group from the late 80s, let by vocalist Haco. This reissues their original ReR studio album from 1984, plus tracks from the live cassette release that followed, etc.. "...bizarre experimental 3D surround-sound, backwards/sped up/slowed down tape technique (before the days of sampling), complex but charming arrangements featuring a huge cast of Japanese instrumentalists. The influences are many: John Cage, n…
Killing Time
Temporary super offer! Spittle Records present an expanded reissue of Massacre's Killing Time, originally released in 1981. Following the breakup of Cambridge's avant-rock legends, Henry Cow, guitarist Fred Frith moved to NYC in 1979, and soon found himself deep in the heart of the city's robust post-punk and free-jazz scenes. He performed with Bill Laswell and Fred Maher, from the group Material, as a power trio of sorts under the moniker of Massacre. The group quickly garnered a reputation aro…
File Under Popular: Theoretical and Critical Writings on Music (Book)
This substantial book was written in 1984/85, soon after the band broke up and while memories were still fresh. It was written very much from the perspective of the time – that’s more important than it may sound in such a project: hindsight has its own value, but it loses the essence of the moment, the context, the freshness; the feel of unfamiliarity. Originally written as a master’s degree thesis, it was updated and published in book form in 2000 by the Norwegian University of Science and Tech…
Henry Cow : an Analysis of Avant Garde Rock (Book)
Theoretical and critical writings on Music. 200pp. Illustrated with woodcuts and Photographs. Chapters on Sun Ra, The Residents, Phil Ochs and Elvis Presley, What Is Popular Music?, Progressive Music in the UK, Necessity and Choice in Musical Forms, Henry Cow, Rock in Opposition etc.L
Glastonbury And Elsewhere
A further collection of missing pieces uncovered since the release of the 18 CD Henry Cow Box that fills in parts of the story still undocumented - even on the bootleg circuit. Contents: 1: The earliest and only known stage recording of the band as it was in June 1972 (Martin Ditcham, Fred Frith, John Greaves and Tim Hodgkinson) at the first Glastonbury Fayre. The recording is quite clean, though the mix heavily favours bass and guitar but, in a way, this makes it of special interest, both music…
Chris Cutler in a Box
These 10 CDs (and DVD) collect together solo work, compositions and collaborations made between 1972 and 2022 by percussionist and lyricist Chris Cutler and include as well as three previously released solo CDs ('solo', 'twice around the earth' and 'there and back again'), more than five hours of unreleased materials, as well as a double CD collection of tracks culled from official recordings featuring Henry Cow, Art Bears, Cassiber, News From Babel, Aqsak Mabou, Duck and Cover, Peter Blegvad, R…
Sounds From Dangerous Places
Two CDs and a 90 page hardback book with photos, info and interviews from audio documenter and experimenter Peter Cusak, recording in Chernobyl, The Caspian Oilfields, and various dangerous locations in the UK. The Chernobyl disaster of 26th April 1986, was the realization of all our fears of the nuclear industry, leading many countries to suspend their nuclear power programmes. Two and a half decades later, nuclear power is again reasserting itself, presented by governments and the industry as …
The Necks Box
8CD Box. A career-spanning box set dedicated to the Australian music icon..." One of the greatest bands in the world, said the New York Times; A post-jazz, post-rock, post-everything sonic experience that has few parallels or rivals, according to The Guardian; Fifty years after Kind of Blue, the new music I would find it hardest to do without is that produced by The Necks, circumlocutes Richard Williams. No one has so far even attempted to copy them since, what they do is so unique, anyone ventu…