★ReR Megacorp
Lost in Rooms
Although following The 5th Elephant in its musical organisation - around grids of pulses and highly crafted, rich sonorities - this work is more evolved, more focussed and more internally economic. Following a narrative thread this time, the whole is bound into a complex and ramifying exposition of repetition, transformation and evolution, where a return is no return and where perceiver and perceived are lost to time. Tightly bounded by speech-derived (but massively re-formed) sonic mate…
The 5th Elephant
Between electroacoustic procedural precision and more recent pulse driven electronica slips this placeless new work from composer Lutz Glandien, 2 years in the making, employing material collectively generated by Lutz himself, Chris Cutler and Tuba virtuoso Michael Vogt - heavily reorganised, processed, stretched and re-assembled to make extraordinary pieces that demand - and reward - concentrated listening.
Speak Puppet
Prepared guitars and dobro, for the most part composed and all very much in Janet's own unique style - somewhere between classical, experimental and folk-picking with attitude. Which doesn’t tell you much about how listenable and strange these pieces are, but then there's no one to refer to or to compare with since Janet is really in a class of one. On some tracks she is joined, variously, by Thinking Plague guitarist Mike Johnson, Margot Krimmel (prepared harp), Mark Weber (voice) and Mi…
Automat Highlife
Canada's most extreme noise-music exponents caught here in a project built around short, diverse sound experiments..31 bites - which you are encouraged to programme for random order select (shuffle).
Dead Tongues
Atmospheric, evolving, intricate and layered; a suite of fine compositions and carefully crafted sounds. Consistent creation of another place, another time.
Where is the Green Parrot?
Welcome release from this subtle but complex composer-performer-instrument designer. More than musical, these are dramatic constructions with environmental sound, birdsong, conversation, narrative... the guitar shop section of "two small boys go shopping" is a masterpiece.. A record hard to describe since it deftly side-steps all the usual categories.
Three Pieces Suite
Studio recordings seven years in the honing. Plus music for a film by Jacques Leduc, with guest Tom Cora.Plus part of a live performance at Sound Symposium, Newfoundland.
Shark!
From the much lauded Queen Elizabeth Hall concert and club Link in Bologna, two very different knife-edge tours through sound and structure landscapes; from rollercoaster to glider. 'Indescribeable but wonderful. Quite superb. I would have been happy listening for ten times as long' Gibralter.
There and Back Again
A companion to 'Twice around the Earth, 'There and Back Again' uses 44 environmental recordings to explore - amongst other things - the way memory works, and how the experience of passing time is constructed. Mainly it's just meant to be good to listen to: surprising, serendipitous, mundane - but alien, the commonplace transfigured - an agglomeration of inadvertent sounds made haphazardly by the world and some of its inhabitants that were never meant to survive, and certainly not to be l…
Live in Moscow, Prague & Washington
72 minutes consisting of the whole of a 1978 Prague concert, a cause celebre at the time, (audibly) dividing the 3500 public and provoking controversy for some years after; a snippet from Washington, and the whole of a Moscow concert 10 years later (May '89).This is improvised music that refuses to fit into the usual categories of improvisation, as well as being technically and formally provocative.
Live in Trondheim, Berlin & Limoges
Digital recordings from the Nordlydd Contemporary Music Festival and Berlin's Tacheles from 1991. Plus the historic prescient noise-music 1978 analogue recording from Limoges as a bonus. All singing, all dancing, all hell let loose. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee...
Two Gentlemen in Verona
An almost complete concert from Verona, 1999, slightly edited for listening logic with an impeccably clear and transparent sound. Very different from CCFFs 1 and 2, this documents a more upfront, intense performance, full of history, rock, post rock, tunes, rhythms, even melodies - all transformed into a contemporary and compressed musical language. With a surprising encore!
Rags/The Golddiggers
Consists of the whole of the LP previously issued as Re/arc and most of "The Golddiggers". Featuring Lindsay Cooper, Sally Potter, Phil Minton, Georgie Born, Fred Frith, Chris Cutler, Marilyn Mazur, Kate Westbrook, Collette Lafont, Eleanor Sloan, Lol Coxhill and Dave Holland. Explores the song form as so many of the early post Henry Cow records by ex alumni did. With a full book of texts and pictures (74+ minutes).
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…
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…
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…
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.
Downtime
The first release by the Blegvad Trio (Peter Blegvad, John Greaves, Chris Cutler). Compiled over two years without the pressure of Peter's major label releases, giving time for the songs and for Peter's singing to speak for themselves. Widely diverse in style, with many songs that have since become classics, this is a more personal and less marketable collection that Peter's Virgin releases, with the playing and production dedicated to the song, rather than its surface. Great songs, eccen…
Hangman's Hill
13 New songs from the master of witty, cynical but wistful songs, Peter Blegvad. With John Greaves and Chris Cutler.Follow up to the masterly Just Woke Up, sporting great new songs and guests including B.J.Cole, Geraint Watkins, Adam X, Chris Stamey, Bob Drake, Stoffer Blegvad.