Jazz /
Tapestry Koto & The Occident Hillside
*Original masters licensed by Nippon Columbia for the first ever reissue. Includes OBI and insert.* 'Tapestry: Koto' is a 3-album series produced by Nippon Columbia in the mid-1970s dedicated to one of the main instruments of Japanese traditional music: Koto. The beauty of the trilogy curated by composer Kiyoshi Yamaya, whose chapters are respectively dedicated to Sea, Hillside and Country, lies in the fact that they are a modern translation of tradition using newer and more avant-garde sound id…
Seven pieces / about an hour / saxophone, piano, drums
There are some jazz musicians long known by cognoscenti for a mere handful of recordings: Dupree Bolton, Earl Anderza, Hasaan Ibn-Ali, Alan Shorter, Dewey Johnson. Add saxophonist Mark Reboul to that list. Before the release of this album, his discography consisted of four tracks on three albums on which he was a sideman. On Higher Primates’ Environmental Impressions (GM, 1987), he plays sax on two of the percussion-heavy album’s five tracks: a fragmentary track, and a sixteen-and-a-half-minute …
The Separatist Party
Long before the pandemic, Reed had been thinking about isolation, haunted by a 2015 story in The New York Times about the death of a resident named George Bell, a hoarder who passed away at home, his body undiscovered for nearly a week. In January 2022, Reed gathered a group of some of the most creative figures in Chicago’s experimental and improvised music community to put sound to those thoughts of forced seclusion: cornetist Ben LaMar Gay, poet and spoken word artist Marvin Tate, and members …
Vertical Motion
"In 2018, I had the good fortune to organize a session with two absolute heroes of music: Anthony Davis, and Kjell Nordeson. I'd been playing with Kjell in various groups for a few years, and had been studying with Anthony at UC San Diego; the three of us had played as a trio a handful of times. For the session, we played some of Anthony's older works, including some which referenced The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. With that idea of literature and music in mind, I brought some mi…
Texas Edition
Tip! *200 coipes limited edition* This release is an orchestral expansion of the vocabulary of The Hatch. The duo work of Desprez and Rasmussen extrapolating into two local scenes in Texas in 2019. This album also features Sonic Transmissions artistic director Ingebrigt Håker Flaten who was living in Austin Texas from 2009 – 2020.
Implicatures
*300 copies limited edition* Sam Weinberg is a saxophonist and improviser living in New York City. Recent focus has been material for solo tenor saxophone, and trio music represented on Implicatures (Astral Spirits, 2023) which features Tom Rainey and Chris Lightcap.
Fly Or Die Fly Or Die Fly Or Die ((World War))
In July of 2022, just one month before Jaimie Branch’s death sent shockwaves around the world, the trumpet player and composer was in Chicago at International Anthem studios putting finishing touches on an album. It was a suite of music she had composed and then recorded with her flagship ensemble, Fly or Die, over the course of a residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska. In her wake, the album was near complete, with only mixing tweaks, final titles, and artwork to…
Afro Futuristic Dreams
Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids are back with their first major new studio album in over 3 years, an epic, sprawling new work exploring the future, the past and the urgent reality of the present, ‘Afro Futuristic Dreams’.
+Strings
Recorded live in concert with an acoustic string quartet in a colonial-era gaol during Vivid Festival in Sydney 2022.
Godtet is: Godriguez: guitar. Andrew Bruce: keys. Dominic Kirk: percussion. Jan Bangma: bass. Tully Ryan: drums. Strings: Novak Manojlovic: Composer, conductor, additional synthesiser. Jack Ward: Cello. Phoebe Gilbert: Viola. Lydia Sawires: Violin. James Armstrong: Violin. Auxiliary live effects and soundscape: Jack Prest
Remedy II
"Voted “Best of 2021” by the critics of “The New York City Jazz Record,” the reaction to Remedy’s debut on the FSR label was not only a welcome boost to our morale but also confirmed the musical strategies we have been developing as a band: three equal partners, sharing an artistic vision where structure, collective interplay and individual free expression are evenly matched. While the ingredients will and have to change with each new piece, an instantly identifiable ensemble sound holds it all …
What Else Is There
In late winter of 2021, four improvisers convened in a Chicago studio. This rare event united UK pianist Alexander Hawkins, midwestern bassist Tatsu Aoki, stalwart drummer Michael Zerang, and me, sleepless Oakland guitarist Karl Evangelista (who had arrived in O'Hare mere hours before downbeat). During breaks, the conversation turned to music and family, two threads that seemed to dominate the waking lives of the musicians involved. Pondering this notion, Aoki asked, "What else is there?". "What…
All This This Here
The title of this new work for the Blue Shroud Band comes from Samuel Beckett’s “what is the word“, his last poem and an elegiac meditation on language. Additionally to “what is the word”, I have also used one of Beckett’s late poems “Brief Dream” which refers to the theme of transiting life and the acceptance of ending - “go end there / one fine day” and Barra Ó Seaghdha’s (Irish writer and poet) evocative poem “Waiting”. Two 18th century Edo Haiku complete the texts featured in this piece that…
Kairos
Do you remember the first musical meeting between Japanese-born, Irish-based pianist Izumi Kimura and legendary drum master Gerry Hemingway? It was the album Illuminated Silence recorded with Barry Guy. Today it's the two of them, Kimura and Hemingway, in the second installment of their artistic collaboration. In front of you is the album Kairos, containing five signature compositions by the two artists, one track each of their own, and the traditional song Over The Tide. And for poetry lovers, …
Stone Stone Stone
*2023 stock* "This album, the first under the band's name in six and a half years, is a jazz alternative album with a multilingual and hardcore taste that differs greatly from previous albums.
The recording for this album started in June 2020, during a period when many of our activities were being cancelled due to Covid-19. It had been a while since I last met or played with the members of this band, with whom prior to the pandemic I would regularly get together for gigs at various venues or tr…
Moonshine
One of the most gifted, prolific and adventurous figures on Egypt's thriving experimental arts scene, Louca has in recent years garnered a global reputation through three previous solo albums and an expanding, evolving lineup of genre-defying collaborations. The Wire called his 2014 sophomore solo effort, Salute the Parrot, "remarkable music-dense, driven and splashed with colour. For Louca, Elephantine serves as both the pinnacle of his wide-ranging experience and a bold next step in his develo…
We Could Be Flying
"Un must per tutti i DJ! Un raro capolavoro della Polydor, che include la famosa Raindrops, Raindrops. Un must per chi ascolta Karin Krog per la prima volta. Un must per tutti gli amanti dell'ambient e del crossover." - Makoto Saito
Meta Zero
Temporary Super Offer! The music on this CD is an impressive document of such a search for meaning and artistic legitimacy. It doesn’t want to add something even louder to the supposedly spectacular. On the contrary: Here, it is about the subtle intimacy and emotionality of human relationships, about breathing as one. It is about being interested in each other beyond ever new superlatives. This is where the unobtrusive authenticity of this music comes from, what makes it special and thoughtful. …
Ink Folly, Orchid Gleam
"Ink Folly, Orchid Gleam is a piece in two movements for alto saxophone, upright bass, and drum set. Each movement was transmuted from a two-part poem of the same name, which was first drafted on a bus to my home of Northeastern Pennsylvania. The pang to return to where nature is abundant wasn't something I expected would be so strong when I moved to New York, but Ink Folly, Orchid Gleam is a product of those emotions. Written with my dear friends Mathias Jensen and Eliza Salem in mind, I knew I…
In Focus
Listen to Misha Panfilov's latest release and witness the mastery of beat, mood, and melody as he teams up with jazzaggression. None can do it better than Misha Panfilov!
Flowers In Space
"This is the first LP (following a cassette) released under Drew Gardner’s name and it’s a doozy. Drew is a guitarist, probably best known as a founding member of Elkhorn (although his musical partnerships with Jesse Shepard go back way further than that), and his recent work with Jeffrey Alexander’s Heavy Lidders has also been noteworthy as hell. The band here is a trio with Andy Cush (Garcia Peoples) on bass, and the extremely well documented Ryan Jewell on drums. Drew’s guitar playing is jazz…