Jazz /
Volume 1
Tip! *300 copies limited edition* We are about to release the debut LP from Secular Music Group, emerged from the home workshop of Christian Ruggiero, a renowned composer for film and television with a passion for classic recordings and legacy studio technology. He teamed up with long-time collaborator and multi-instrumentalist Yannis Panos to make a record in the old way; as a group of musicians in a room playing live to magnetic tape. This record would channel their shared interests in free-ja…
Novoa / Kamaguchi / Cleaver Trio - Vol. 2
Novoa/Kamaguchi/Cleaver Trio Delivers Electrifying Second Volume, A Bold, Experimental Fusion of Density and Dialogue
L'âme De L'Objet
1995 release ** “The music on L’âme de l’objet is strongly fed by Côté’s work for theater and dance performances, as it bears a remarkable plastic quality. One can feel the movement. All pieces (initially written by individual members and worked out by the whole band) are very atmospheric and often fitting a strange avant-gardist film noir mood, thanks mostly to the trumpet plus saxophone arrangements and Martin Tétreault’s remarkable performance (and highly original choice of LPs).”
Hémisphère / Hemisfär
"The music is never the same. It verifies its positions and conditions, its peculiar way of listening to the cavities, the motions started, the tensions between sound and silence, tone and memory. Nature is present not only as trees and clouds, light and shadows. It is a readiness for what is constantly changing, a heightened awareness on the minimal variations in the materials and processes at hand, what it means to slowly examine a rough surface, the transformation of a rhythm, a melodic phras…
List of Demands
List of Demands, Damon Locks’s first foray into creating an entire album from spoken and text-based work, finds the Chicago-based musician and educator collecting cultural abstractions and reorganizing them into a firm truth. The album lays out a vision of Black liberation and transmits it outward as a song cycle of bite-sized Nikki Giovanni-meets-MF DOOM-style rhythm experiments. The sample-based constructions are steeped in a lifetime of not only keen cultural observation, but direct communal …
Vagary Suite
*100 copies limited edition* The Pennsylvania improvising trio of Kevin Sims, James Searfoss, and Justin Dorsey continue to hone their fierce and potent relationship with texture, rhythm, and amorphous sound forms. This album is laced with musical paths travelled and skirted, conversant with drone, electroacoustics, and free jazz. “Glint” functions as a bit of an overture, and as “Once Threw” expands on the clatter and clamber, Dorsey’s bass becomes a focal point, taking a prominent position in …
Staged
To begin with, there was only me, and John Stevens. Not in person, of course - this was 2021, many years after he died. But I had this plugin that I liked, designed to spice up drum loops, and I wondered what would happen if I put free jazz drumming into it. I sourced a solo recording of Mr Stevens, and was very taken with the results. I put some layers on top, and contacted Richard Harding to add some Chapman Stick. A couple more layers, and I had a track I was very taken with. So taken, in fac…
The Lantern Tree
For the last couple of years Jazz In Britain’s output has largely consisted of CDs around the 75 minute mark, either single, 2 or even 3 disc releases. However, we have quite a lot of items in our archives which come up well short of the magic 75 minutes but, in our opinion, are well worthy of release. With this in mind, we have decided to launch a ‘budget’ series of releases which will come in gatefold digisleeves with simple artwork and no booklet. CDs and downloads will both be at the same p…
L’Album Vert
Tip! *300 copies limited edition* ‘L’album vert’ is a compilation of asynchronous steps for an imaginary dance foor. A strange but amusing place were eyes listen in and ears peek around. Glass breaks, someone stumbles, something always happens. The dancers inevitably hop to moments of tension of which they free themselves again and again. Almost always there is some kind of beat. Not the kind of beat that makes the hips wiggle, but rather the pulse of a crooked factory or a quirky steam engine …
Sing Me A Song Of Songmy, A Fantasy For Electromagnetic Tape
Big tip! Sing Me a Song of Songmy is an album-length composition by avant-garde Turkish composer İlhan Mimaroğlu, released in 1971. Principal performers include jazz trumpeter Freddie Hubbard and Mimaroğlu himself. The piece includes a chorus, strings, recitations of poems by Fazil Husnu Daglarca and other texts, organists and tape-based musique concrète, as well as Hubbard's jazz quintet. It is considered as one of Hubbard's most experimental albums.
Volume 1
*2024 stock* Brooklyn-based pianist Eva Novoa delivers a masterfully executed trio album of melodic themes replete with touches of swing, grooves and exquisite electronic landscapes. Novoa’s articulated playing flows with plenty of room gifting the band full freedom of improvisation.
On the track ‘Rocket Man’ you can hear the possibilities of the traditional jazz trio format as it projects into the future, combining the acoustic beauty of the piano with the electronic tapestry of modular synthes…
A Lifeboat, Part II
*2024 stock* Matthew Putman and Michael Sarian found a home in a makeshift studio, using a borrowed 20-year-old keyboard, a good microphone, and in cramped apartment acoustics, to improvise throughout the pandemic. What they called their “weekly pilgrimages” gave them a sense of much-needed sanity, grounding their friendship and keeping them afloat, as Sarian describes, “much like a lifeboat.” The resultant project was an exploration of cadences, rhythms, and full of searching and synchronicity.…
A Lifeboat Part I
*2024 stock* In the first lockdown, Matthew Putman (on keyboard) and Michael Sarian (on trumpet and flugelhorn) began to meet up (with precautions) for semi-regular sessions in Sarian’s makeshift home studio. The conditions were less-than-ideal—a borrowed 20-year-old keyboard, an inadequate microphone, and cramped NYC apartment acoustics—but they continued their “weekly pilgrimages, searching for [their] cadences, rhythms and melodies through the Fall.” The sessions gave them much-needed sanity,…
Godtet
7 years since its release; the iconic debut from Godtet gets a repress. The self-titled LP marked the inception of La Sape Records along with the genesis of Godtet. Stitched together more like a beat tape. 12 movements recorded live with no overdubs; "This record came about with no preconceived ideas of what we were making or what it would sound like". A crystallisation of Godtet which aided to form the sound of La Sape.
Traversing across spiritual jazz, dub and experimental gestures. It caught …
Mizu, Tagiru
Released at the occasion of their 2024 Japan tour, it follows their debut LP Troubled Water (TT005 – LP). The album’s title aptly captures the essence of their music. In Japanese, “Tagiru” describes the act of boiling or seething, whether it pertains to water or other liquids reacting to heat or agitation. Metaphorically, it illustrates heightened emotions or situations of intense fervor. This theme of boiling intensity runs through the six tracks, each piece brimming with emotional depth and en…
Berkeley Lecture, 1971
One for the ages here. Unearthed from the ESS archives and officially released for the first time ever, a previously unknown half-hour from cosmic mythologist and sound scientist Sun Ra's 1971 U.C. Berkeley course "The Black Man in the Cosmos." Ra's soft-spoken intensity is underscored by the sound of chalk on the board as he ambles effortlessly through his potent and prescient ideas. The class session closes with two musical tracks, a piano version of "Love In Outer Space" and a blistering Moo…
Tri Dela
Šalter Ensemble operates on the border between free improvisation and composition, focusing on collective processes as a central part of its practice. The project is an international electro-acoustic ensemble initiated in 2017 by Jonas Kocher in collaboration with Zavod Sploh Ljubljana and Izlog Festival Zagreb, and has since performed at numerous venues and festivals in Slovenia, Croatia, Italy, Switzerland and Serbia.The ensemble consists of outstanding personalities from the Swiss music scen…
Practical Dreamers
This fifth AXIS recording once again brings in a different approach to the music. With the exception of the group’s first album, Les Oiseaux De Matisse, which was largely recorded live in the studio, subsequent albums (Dream Feathers, Port Of Saints, Blutopia) have been built from Ron upwards – Ron recording with a small core of players and then arranged for larger groups via subsequent overdubs. This time round, Ron requested that he respond to completed tracks as the last player to record – to…
Romaria
*2024 stock* Andy Sheppard’s quartet extends the musical explorations begun on the 2015 release Surrounded By Sea, an album praised by Télérama for its “poignant serenity.” In this new programme of compositions by Sheppard (plus the title track by Brazilian singer-songwriter Renato Teixeira), the drones and washes of Eivind Aarset’s guitar and electronics – aided by the generous acoustics of Lugano’s Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI – help to establish a climate in which improvisation can take place. T…