"In the hands of John Butcher, the saxophone can sound like anything, from a piece of hollowed out brass baubled with pads and valves to an hermetically sealed feedback system, a miniature sound environment teeming with ever-evolving note-forms, or a huge echo chamber inflicting dub scale damage on every breath. The first half of the CD provides some particularly hallucinatory perspectives. The Oya Stone Museum was originally a working mine and it now consists of a series of enormous resonant chambers cut clean from the rock face. “From the first note I could almost physically feel the sound hanging in the air,” Butcher recalls. “lf solo improvising is to make any sense it has to respond to the particular acoustic of wherever you're playing. It's your partner, and it tests the flexibility, the usability, of your own language. The Oya concert makes for some very deep listening, with Butcher loosing darts of single notes and long oscillating currents deep into the bowels of the building only to hear them rebound as bat calls and foghorns. As the performance unravels, he starts to work real-time layers of overlapping call and response into a weave of ectoplasmic forms. The Tokyo club date, alongside no-input mixing board operative Toshimaru Nakamura, forms the 19 minute duet that caps the new CD. Butcher engages with the gulf of Nakamura's almost-sounds with shrill, sibilant hisses, squeaky balloon tones and luminous single notes that swell on the horizon like pregnant suns." WIRE - David Keenan.

JOHN BUTCHER - tenor/soprano saxophones, (feedback tenor on # 4) In the summer of 2022 Thomas Buhl-Wiggers, of the Cejero festival and label, kindly invited me to play inside the mammoth Brønshøj water tower. The very resonant spaces I’ve worked in before include a giant gasometer, a hollowed-out Japanese mountain, an underground reservoir, a Victorian mausoleum and a massive World War II oil tank. I’m still fascinated by how different these enormous environments all sounded and felt. They each inspired different approaches in trying to find the music for the actual space, and my recent experience within this extraordinary construction was no exception. The Brønshøj Vandtårn is a concrete water-tower, built almost a hundred years ago in the suburbs of Copenhagen. It’s 20m wide and 34m high - smaller than some similar shapes I’ve played in, but with a large, lingering reverberation. Some sounds seem to float away as if through liquid, others acquire a shifting haze, and some just prefer to sit around. John Butcher

Florian Stoffner - guitar John Butcher - tenor & soprano saxophones Chris Corsano - drums & half-clarinet Here, then, are three men who have, if you will, won the argument already. They don’t need excess volume or headline soloing to get their message across. Their message is inscribed in elegant lower-case and rarely used aural fonts. You will find yourself leaning forward because not a note or whisper should be missed ... (Brian Morton)

THERMAL (John Butcher / Andy Moor / Thomas Lehn) formed in 2001, three musicians from different musical backgrounds, evolving along their personal routes to meet in free improvisations. For twenty years they’ve been taking their subtle and explosive music throughout Europe. Unsounds released their first album Thermal in 2003. In 2023 the trio of quiet giants comes back with Ice in a Hot World, a new album recorded live in Avignon. The Thermal powerhouse has become highly confident but spontaneity and intuition are at the core of their performance at all times. Twenty years of working together, and in other formats, turned Thermal into a powerful and intrepid unit, always searching for uncompromising, mysterious and unchartered sonic frontiers. Eyal Hareuveni

Telyn Wrachïod Urquhart gan Ardival / Urquhart bray harp by Ardival. Recordiwyd gan Jethro Chaplin ar y 24ain o Awst 2023, yn Stiwdios Mwnci, Dolwilym. Recorded by Jethro Chaplin on the 24th of August 2023, at Mwnci Studios, Dolwilym. Ôl-gynhyrchwyd gan / Mastered by Sam Grant. Dylunio gan / Design by Anna Peaker. Darlun gan / Drawing by Jean-Luc Guionnet. Mae Cildraeth Sienco yn fyrfyfyriad sy’n seiliedig ar gyfuniad o nodiant a strwythur y darn Brandy Cove gan Angharad Jenkins â thiwnio tannau amgen ‘Cywair yn Nghywair y Wrach’ o lawysgrif Robert ap Huw. Cildraeth Sienco is an improvisation based on an amalgamation of the notation and structure of Angharad Jenkins’ Brandy Cove with the alternative string tuning of ‘Cywair yn Nghywair y Wrach’ from Robert ap Huw’s manuscript. Diolch i / Thank you to: Nia Daniel, Richard Dawson, Carl Ludwig Hübsch, Angharad Jenkins, Dafydd Roberts, Catrin Rowlands, Soundtrips NRW, Bill Taylor, Fern Thomas, Amy Treharne, Daniel G. Williams.

Stringing the Telyn Rawn from Culture Colony on Vimeo. --- "This album's 18 short improvisations on the instrument are brilliant. There is play and twang, a sense in which the instrument is being tested and sounded. Sometimes it sounds wobbly like a fawn on new legs, in other moments it has grit and shuffle. To make an instrument that hasn't been heard for 200 years, and then play brand new improvisations on it is bold and refreshing – a forward movement that brings the past along." - Jen Allan, The QuietusDating back to the 13th century in Wales, the Telyn Rawn is a nearly forgotten horsehair harp; UK improvising harpist Rhodri Davies researched the instrument and its unique sound, commissioning the construction of a harp on which he performs 18 improvisations of impressive technique and sonority, launching his new Amgen Records label with this album named for the instrument. Harp design by Rhodri Davies, body of harp by Alun Thomas, leather work by Gaynor Davies-Howell, pegs turned by Alan and Milissa Dewey, horse hide supplied by Barrhead Leather, plaited and wound horse hair strings supplied by Simon Chadwick. The building of the harp was made possible through a Creative Wales Award. Recorded, edited and mastered by Sam Grant.Recorded 22nd and 23rd of January 2020 at Blank Studios, Newcastle upon Tyne.Drawing by Jean-Luc Guionnet.Design by Anna Peaker. Diolch i / Thank you to: John Butcher, Richard Dawson, Audrey Evans, Delyth Evans, Robert Evans, Ann Griffiths, O’r Pedwar Gwynt, Robert Hadaway, Huw Ceiriog Jones, Michał Poręba, Llio Rhydderch, Gorwel Roberts, Sioned Puw Rowlands, Elan Closs Stephens, David Sylvian, Sesiwn Werin Tŷ Tawe, Bill Taylor.

Relics of the Horsehair harp This collection is a companion piece to my solo album ‘Telyn Rawn’ AMGEN 001 (2020). I have invited some of my favourite musicians to respond to the eighteen improvised pieces on ‘Telyn Rawn’. I asked each contributor to imagine that the musical material improvised in 2020 was an ancient musical form that had fully existed in the medieval period, and, that each of their responses were to have happened centuries after the imagined formation of the ‘Telyn Rawn’ pieces. This album therefore proposes a new imagined repertoire that emerges from an already speculatively built instrument and equally re-imagined repertoire. As guitarist C Joynes comments, these creative responses offer a kind of ‘speculative fiction’ approach to the source material. At the point where this music reaches you, it has been filtered through imagined passages of time, various musical languages and histories, and channelled through the fictional ecologies of musicians, locations and instrumentation. The title given to this album of imaginary musical histories, ‘Creiriau y Delyn Rawn’ or ‘Relics of the Horsehair harp’, is inspired by the title Edward Jones gave to his manuscript ‘Musical, Poetical, and Historical Relicks of the Welsh Bards and Druids’ (1802), a title I have always loved. Rhodri Davies, Abertawe

Syed Kamran Ali (Hunter Gracchus, Harappian Night Recordings) introduces ‘Dog Wearing Dracula Fangs’; the first album from his newly minted Fish el Fish project. As if to kick the existing ideas of his Harappian Night Recordings work into all new orbits of singularity, ‘Dog Wearing Dracula Fangs’ wrenches a dense throng of voices, electronics and busted instrumentation thrashing and wailing through filters of avant-psychedelic glimmer, mock exotica and atrophied, fusion-esque sheen. A dry, mysterious spoken prose underpins the sonics, appearing to speak in terms of daunting geopolitical allusions in one breath, then glib, tongue in cheek piss-taking sarcasm the next. These narratives pull you immediately into what feels like an entire universe of vivid though scarcely penetrable imagery, begging to be decoded and explored in detail.Yet even through repeat listens of this enticing work it is difficult to fathom exactly the type of thinking this music has sprung from. Far too crude and homespun to be the product of arch cultural strategy, ‘Dog Wearing Dracula Fangs’ is possessed of a blown out fidelity indicative of untarnished, DIY spontaneity and the willingness to let things emerge as they will. Clear as day from the moment of playback, however, is a confident, fully realised other worldliness to this music that is anything accidental. Comprised chiefly of shortish, song length pieces, each notably varied in shape and feel, there is a fully formed ‘proper album’ quality to ‘Dog Wearing Dracula Fangs’ which only reinforces curiosities about exactly where the fuck this has all come from. Whatever the answer, whatever its secrets, this is probably the most weird and wonderful release adhuman has had the pleasure to take on so far.

Polish composer and sound artist Robert Piotrowicz presents his first work for Penultimate Press, one which outlines an uncanny sound world with a series of fictional organ pieces.Whilst resembling a pipe organ alongside other acoustic sources all material is strictly synthetic. The impression of air being swept through the bellows… false. The spatial organisation suggesting it was recorded in large physical space, false! The long middle solo passage in Noumen must have been performed by some kind of wind instrument, no? False.All of these are elaborate tricks of the ear.The music of Afterlife is an artificial construct, one that is not able to be played on a traditional 12-tone organ, especially as one encounters a tuning based on 1/3-tone intervals. The result are three compositions which comprise a rather unique harmonic composition. One that comes across both familiar and foreign.Afterlife is an ambitious exploration of sound modelling and sound manipulation. Manipulation of both the tools deployed and to the listener with regards to the synthesis of acoustic deception. The result is a bold and dramatic shimmering mass of music. A fluid and visceral audio rendering with sheets of colourful sound pouring around the listener.Like much of Piotrowicz’s output this is more extraordinary exploration of the constituent relationship between harmonic and frequency components whilst investing a deep engagement with the synthetic as acoustic ruse.

Milo Thesiger-Meacham’s Audible Heat is an extended documentary, a fitful academic essay, a mass-media probe, an idiosyncratic piece of travel writing, a densely illustrated sound-art montage, and a deep dive into man’s complex relations with the seemingly eternal sound of the cicada as ‘audible heat’ in human consciousness.Featuring original music and field recordings, and spoken contributions by writer and translator Cristina Viti and filmmaker Ahmed Yassin Aldaradji, Audible Heat ranges across continents, embracing Greek tongue twisters, the poetry of Ibn Quzmān and Harry Crosby, African-American mathematician Benjamin Banneker’s lost wooden clock, Plato’s Phaedrus, cicadas on the film sets of Sergio Leone’s ‘Spaghetti Westerns,’ the body language of Clint Eastwood, the apocalyptic premonitions of the Wampanoag, Geronimo’s hatred of telegraphy, and botanist Donald C. Peattie’s terror of the inescapable buzz of mortality.Equal parts academic argument, travelogue, and critical collage, this synthesis of ideas pulls upon a wide-ranging bibliography of materials to examine the omnipresent sound of the cicada throughout human history and culture. Herein, this climatic sound acts as a conduit between ecology, identity and mortality, and the cicada’s sonic inference emerges as a codification of the unknown and unfamiliar—as a spiritual weathervane in desert settings—and as a means of teasing out the sensorial limits of human understanding.Audible Heat was written, read, recorded, produced & scored by Milo Thesiger-Meacham. It was first commissioned and broadcast as a work for radio by Radiophrenia, September 2023.

Frames that lean, pictures that roam’ is a collection of instrumental works by Ailie Ormston for tape, electric guitar, cello and double bass. This ensemble of instruments achieves a complex sound ranging from fully electronic (tape) to fully acoustic (strings), with the guitar occupying space in-between. The freeing of fixed material is the common thread throughout these six works – riffs and motifs are established before being reinvented and reimagined, bending and twisting within the bounds of their own frames then reemerging in new pastures. This is employed using different methods in each voice – through processing in the electronics, improvisation on guitar, and detailed notation for the strings.Ormston crafted the foundational electronics by processing fragments of improvised recordings using household objects and instruments, then assembling the results. These source materials are repurposed and brought back into real time as filters which the guitar is channelled through, subtly revoicing them and providing space for new melodic flares. The guitar is further abstracted through preparation with paper woven through the strings to disguise its well-known timbre and to afford new ways of playing. Ultimately, Ormston uses the guitar as a percussive device and sampling tool, bridging the gap between electronic and acoustic realms within the group. Ormston adds further dimension to the ensemble with cello and double bass parts that ground the abstract textures with nourishing melodic passages, informed by pitches, rhythms and gestures found in the other voices.Early interactions of these works were written as part of a commission for experimental music festival Tectonics in 2022. They were further developed whilst in residence at Church Walk, Aldeburgh and completed at home in Glasgow in March 2024. For this album, Ormston is joined by Joanna Stark on cello and Rhona MacDonald on double bass, for whom the string parts were written. Recording of the string instrumentation, as well as studio production on the album, was made possible through support by Help Musicians.  released March 19, 2025

1. Luna Turca - 01:44 2. Om Shanti Om - 06:55 3. Chenrezig - 11:49 4. Nana's Solo - 03:56 5. A Chi Chi Ou - 01:39 6. Koye - 06:32 7. Flute Song - 05:16 8. Dissolution - 09:29An amazing document of the life experiment that was the Organic Music Society. This super quality audio, recorded by RAI (the italian public broadcasting company) in 1976 for television, documents a quartet concert focused on vocals compositions and improvisations. Here, Don Cherry and his family-community’s musical belief emerges in its simplicity, with the desire to merge the knowledge and stimuli gained during numerous travels across the World in a single sound experience. Don's pocket-trumpet is melted with the beats of the great Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, the Italian guitar of Gian Piero Pramaggiore, and the tanpura drone of Moki. A pure hippie aesthetic, like in an intimate ceremony, filters a magical encounter between Eastern and Western civiliziations, offering different suggestions of sound mysticism: natural acoustics in which individual instruments and voices are part of a wider pan-tribal consciousness. A desert Western landscape marries Asian and Latin atmospheres. Indigenous contributions with berimbau explorations find fossil sounds of rattles and clap-hands invocations. Influences of Indian mantra singing are combined with eternal African voices or with folkish-Latin guitar rhythms , while flute and drums evoke distant dances. In the Organic Music everything becomes an act of devotion and love, an ecstatic dwell in the dimension of a sacred free-rejoice.

Very pleased and grateful to announce this ‘Home Comfort’ reissue by Mark Glynne and Bart Zwier, originally self-released in 1980. Maybe a bit of an unexpected title to appear in the LSD catalog but my love for this album goes back to my late teenage years and has had an addictive effect since, like a spleen infused magnet.  With this album Glynne and Zwier (†), based in the Netherlands and connected to the Ultra scene, drew an insular blend of intimate post-punk and chamber (bedroom) songs with surreal scenic reflections. Probably its naked singularity defying categorization has left it so unnoticed, even 43 years after the making. It also features a reciting Marlène Dumas still quite unknown at the time. With biggest gratitude to Mark Glynne who instantly felt confident with my proposal to reissue this silent witness of lasting beauty.   My long-time Japanese friend You Ishihara (White Heaven, The Stars) who bought the LP when it came out in 1980 still considers it as one of his all-time favourites. This is what he writes about ‘Home Comfort’:   “Resignation and fear in a desolate mental landscape. This album, which exists like a shelter for those who have quietly escaped through the backdoor of the world, vividly reflects the inner depths of the devastated Amsterdam of the early 80's. A beautiful and sad, unmistakable masterpiece.”

11 track album of previously unreleased music for a ballet choreographed by Philippe Talard. Composed, performed and recorded by Michael Ranta in 1988/1989.

Even though only being fully terminated 50 years after its conception, ‘Azabu’ can be regarded as the starting point of Michael Ranta’s creative self-discovery. The recordings that form the base of ‘Azabu’ were mostly made in the Tokyo district with the same name (Azabu-Juban). Next to abstracted field recordings ‘Azabu’ is also pervaded by a rich variety of percussion, string and wind instruments, all played by Ranta himself. Subsequently Ranta edited, layered and processed the recordings at the NHK electronic music studio in Tokyo. Both pieces display a vast array of acoustic, electronic and concrete sound events meticulously sequenced to a complex fusion symbolizing the entire spectrum of earthly and heavenly sounds. Dynamic extremes evoke a restless flight through space, or through the depths of human subconsciousness, between dream and reality. Ultimately the music disappears, like a dot in the sky gradually fading into nothingness – an “ascension” that closes the loop in a ritual of life that can begin anew again at any time.

Two brand new pieces from one of the most exciting, active & relevant members of the first generation sound artists. Magnetic Flights is a perfect follow up to Five Electrical Walks (IMPREC167) and it is being released at the same time as a collection of two of Kubisch's unreleased archival pieces, also on Important. Magnetic Flights is entirely made of electromagnetic field recordings of international airports and inside airplanes. The recordings of this piece were made by Christina Kubisch on her travels in 2007 from and to the airports of Bukarest, Manchester, Chicago, Seoul, Munich, Amsterdam, Zurich, Frankfort, Paris, Lisbon, Berlin, Pisa, Milan and London. The sounds were neither altered electronically nor changed in any other way. The only tool which was used, and only for a part of it, was a filtering program (DINR). All recordings were made with the help of special sensitive wireless headphones, by which the aboveground and underground electromagnetic fields are detected, amplified and made audible. The headphones are custom made, developed by Kubisch, and constructed by the engineer Manfred Fox, Berlin. The sounds are much more musical than one could expect. There are complex layers of high and low frequencies, loops of rhythmic sequences, groups of tiny signals, long drones and many things which change constantly and are hard to describe. Magnetic flights consists of three parts with a short special sound at the beginning, and another one at the end. The piece starts with an electromagnetic sound recorded just before departure, and continues with the material of flight radiations recorded inside different airplanes. These electromagnetic fields slightly change pitch during departure and arrival, but remain quite constant during the flight itself. The relatively high and compact sounds gradually build up a dense layer of vibrations with continuous minimal variations. In the second part, some of the previous flight radiations gradually become filtered. The single signals mingle into a mix of small, short, nervous and very rhythmic signals. Their origin might be radio waves, communication signals with the tower, internet and atmospheric disturbances, but these are only guesses. The third part, the situation of arrival or transition, is a mix of typical electromagnetic sounds in the waiting areas of airports such as the deep vibrations of the screens of monitors which slowly fade in and out. The piece ends with the electrical flickering of an electromagnetic field of unknown origin.

VINYL IS DELAYED TIL NOVEMBER. CDS READY TO SHIP.  ---- In 1968, Don Cherry had already established himself as one of the leading voices of the avant-garde. Having pioneered free jazz as a member of Ornette Coleman’s classic quartet, and with a high profile collaboration with John Coltrane under his belt, the globetrotting jazz trumpeter settled in Sweden with his partner Moki and her daughter Neneh. There, he assembled a group of Swedish musicians and led a series of weekly workshops at the ABF, or Workers’ Educational Association, from February to April of 1968, with lessons on extended forms of improvisation including breathing, drones, Turkish rhythms, overtones, silence, natural voices, and Indian scales. That summer, saxophonist and recording engineer Göran Freese—who later recorded Don’s classic Organic Music Society and Eternal Now LPs—invited Don, members of his two working bands, and a Turkish drummer to his summer house in Kummelnäs, just outside of Stockholm, for a series of rehearsals and jam sessions that put the prior months’ workshops into practice. Long relegated to the status of a mysterious footnote in Don’s sessionography, tapes from this session, as well as one professionally mixed tape intended for release, were recently found in the vaults of the Swedish Jazz Archive, and the lost Summer House Sessionsare finally available over fifty years after they were recorded. On July 20, the musicians gathered at Freese’s summer house included Bernt Rosengren (tenor saxophone, flutes, clarinet), Tommy Koverhult (tenor saxophone, flutes), Leif Wennerström (drums), and Torbjörn Hultcrantz (bass) from Don’s Swedish group; Jacques Thollot (drums) and Kent Carter (bass) from his newly formed international band New York Total Music Company; Bülent Ateş (hand drum, drums), who was visiting from Turkey; and Don (pocket trumpet, flutes, percussion) himself. Lacking a common language, the players used music as their common means of communication. In this way, these frenetic and freewheeling sessions anticipate Don’s turn to more explicitly panethnic expression, preceding his epochal Eternal Rhythm dates by four months. The octet, comprising musicians from America, France, Sweden, and Turkey, was a perfect vehicle for Don’s budding pursuit of “collage music,” a concept inspired by the shortwave radio on which Don listened to sounds from around the world. Using the collage metaphor, Don eliminated solos and the introduction of tunes, transforming a wealth of melodies, sounds, and rhythms into poetic suites of different moods and changing forms. The Summer House Sessions ensemble joyously layers manifold cultural idioms, traversing the airy peaks and serene valleys of Cherry’s earthly vision. In the Swedish Jazz Archive quite a few other recordings from the same day were to be found. Some of the highlights are heard as bonus material on the CD edition of this album. The octet is augmented by producer and saxophone player Gunnar Lindqvist, who led the Swedish free jazz orchestra G.L. Unit on the album Orangutang, and drummer Sune Spångberg, who recorded with Albert Ayler in 1962. The bonus CD also includes a track without Cherry featuring Jacques Thollot joined by five Swedes including Lindqvist, Tommy Koverhult, Sune Spångberg, and others. --- With liner notes by Magnus Nygren and album art featuring a cover painting by Moki Cherry: Untitled, ca. 1967–68 --- Blank Forms, 2021