Compact Disc


Charles Gayle is a saxophonist, pianist, sometimes a clown and radical musical performer wrapped into the body of a humble person living in Downtown Manhattan since the 1960s. As this set attests to, It is sometimes hard to predict what he will do on stage... In all his musical (and personal) life Charles Gayle has remained outside of any form of mainstream, carving his own singular path. There is no player on the scene today with the emotional wallop of Charles Gayle. John Edwards is a true virtuoso whose staggering range of techniques and boundless musical imagination have redefined the possibility of the double bass and dramatically expanded its role, whether playing solo or with others. Perpetually in demand, he has played with  Sunny Murray, Derek Bailey, Joe McPhee, Peter Brötzmann, Mulatu Astatke and many others. Ubiquitous, diverse and constantly creative, drummer Mark Sanders has worked with a host of renowned musicians including Derek Bailey, Henry Grimes, Mathew Shipp, Roswell Rudd, in duo and quartets with Wadada Leo Smith and trios with Sirone and William Parker. Here we present a 2CD set documenting the two very special sets delivered on the 15th of November, 2017 at Cafe Oto, Dalston, London. In classic ecstatic fashion one would expect from these three stalwarts of blazing transcendence these 2 sets swerve from the sublime to the this is an exquisite document of one of the most exciting trios operating today, Limited to 500 copies packaged in mini gatefold sleeve.

Charles Gayle / John Edwards / Mark Sanders – Seasons Changing

Available as 320k MP3 or 24bit FLAC from the 16th June Tracklisting: 1. Potential - 22:50 2. Morning Star - 10:37     CD-R version comes in trigger case, with artwork printed on disc. No liners. Musician, writer and filmmaker, Sunik Kim follows up ‘The Bent Bow Must Wait to Be Released’ (Takuroku 2021) with their second LP - a deadly serious dismantling of the limits of contemporary computer music, delivered with playful dexterity and a touch of slapstick humour, a la Henry Cow.  Enlisting General MIDI to create frenetic, vital patterns of dis-organisation made up of gleeful synthetic trumpets, wry orchestral sweeps and brutal key clusters, Sunik Kim explodes a kind of simplistic sound into complex, beautifully uncertain structures. Rather than attempting to overwhelm or stun the listener into subjectivity, ‘Potential’ is ever shifting; regularly breaking form and unfolding, discreetly nibbling at the concept of the Spectacle and un-doing fatally closed systems of cyclic music.  On first listens we recalled Cecil Taylor’s Unit Structures, Stockhausen’s Gruppen, and even those weirdo attempts at making music from inside the world of Animal Crossing, Lil Jürg Frey. The overflowing ideas of Henry Cow (to which Kim dedicated a fantastically blended mix for the Wire in 2021) never drift too far from view, but contemporary counterparts lay few except for Yorkshire's most eminent polyceleratrix, Gretchen Aury, who we asked to write the liners. Gretchen’s words are unsurprisingly as extraordinary as the record itself, so we’ll close out the call to elicit a Media response to possibly the wildest OTOROKU yet with their words: “Potential reads as a rare honest response to the disaster capitalist era of the apparent nearing end of the anthropocene, a cyborg music which is not hopelessly psychotic like so much contemporary and especially computer-requiring music, but lucidly possessed with rapture, pain, madness, empathy, ecstasy, torment, fragility; all those vital feelings and incentives which our atrociously depressing times seem engineered to quash and bleed out of us. This sound is a blistering Electro Magnetic Pulse wave of revolutionary hope, exclaiming defiantly that History is not over, that the future is not ‘history,’ that there is still a vast multitude of ideas and identities burning brightly and resiliently, despite the fact that they are inconceivable to the tyrannical Hegemonic axis of global capitalist tech-culture. I ask of you, listener, if you truly wish to plunge beyond The Known, give yourself over in full to this record.” — Artwork by Sunik Kim Layout and design by Jeroen Wille  Liner notes by Vymethoxy Redspiders Mastered by Anotine Nouel at Sound Love Studios Track 1 edited by John Wall —

Sunik Kim – Potential

Tracklisting: 1. I - 6:30 2. II - 6:49 3. III - 17:43 4. IV - 6:18 5. V - 16:56Keiji Haino, one of the foremost exponents of the Japanese avant-garde, always provides a masterclass in constantly shifting improvisation. John Butcher is a saxophonist of rare grace and power, who has expanded the vocabulary of the saxophone far beyond the conventions of jazz and other musics, to encompass a staggering range of multiphonics, overtones, percussive sounds, and electronic feedback. Haino and Butcher met when Butcher opened for Fushitsusha at the show Cafe OTO arranged at St. John, Hackney - 5 years ago. In 2016 they were invited to play two duo concerts – at The Empty Gallery in Hong Kong and at Cafe OTO in London. Otoroku is proud to present the audio documentation of their first UK meeting. Recorded live at Cafe OTO in July 2016 the results are an uncompromising milieu of swirling sound played out as a total union of these two legendary performers.  Haino’s blues drenched guitar entices skittering notes from Butcher’s sax playing as numerous sonic clues unravel over the course of of this unique and compelling journey. Light Never Bright Enough comes in a limited edition of 500 LPs and 500 CDs with matt sleeves and japanese removable obi-strip. --- Keiji Haino / vocal, guitar, flutes   John Butcher / saxophones and feedback --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO on the 9th July 2016 by Luca Consonni. Mixed by John Butcher. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Photography and design by ORGAN.

HAINO KEIJI / JOHN BUTCHER – LIGHT NEVER BRIGHT ENOUGH

Switchback - Plywie Kacza 201 Paradiso Infernal - Live 2022 Schlippenbach / Johansson - The Fox Let's Go 2017 Full Blast - Moods 2007 Uruk - Live 2019 Last Dream Of The Morning - Shaken Light 2021 Snekkestad / Guy / Fernandez - Ripples 2018 The End - Translated Slaughter 2019 Schnee - No Time 2018 Jim O'Rourke - Live 2010 InAWhirl - Nido IV 2021 Joelle Leandre - Live 2013 Also - Twelve 2021 Amado / Corsano - Seeking 2019 Caspar Brötzmann Bass Totem - When Black Days Never End Part 1 2021 Bruch - Sugary 2017 Vandermark / Kurzmann / Kern - Swan Song 2021 The Thing - Live 2017 Part 4 They Shall Not Pass  /  No Pasaran!Live on planet earth - in the spirit of freedom, peace and solidarityAs we saw the horrible events going on in the Ukraine, we wanted to do something as a label as well beside donating on a personal level. many (trost related) artists answered right away and were enthusiastic to participate. the material-collecting and mastering took some time, but sadly it is still an issue and no-one knows how long this despicable war will last. the title of the compilation is "No Pasaran" (they shall not pass) translated into Ukrainian. it was a shout in the 30s to defend democracy in spain, to fight against the fascists.big thanks to all artists, bookers, venues and helpers involved.the great work of Martin Siewert and Lasse Marhaug was happening in support of this project, longtime cd pressing company Gusstaff Records made a special price and the austrian SKE fonds gave financial support.all proceeds of this compilation are donated to an artist-run Ukrainian aid organisation helping victims of the war, recommended by Ken Vandermark

VARIOUS – Вони не пройдуть - No Pasaran

Joe McPhee’s response to the challenge of making a new CD of solo music during COVID was to go at it head on, to address the present in its starkest aspects, to reach for comfort in the music of great composers, and to speak directly to the virus in no uncertain terms.  The result is unlike any other of McPhee’s many records, a variety show of improvisations, favorite compositions, field recording, multi-tracking, incantation and recitation.  After searching for the right studio-like setting with an ideal sound, but hampered by the restrictions of quarantine, he abandoned such hope and dug out a clothes closet in his Poughkeepsie house, where he could approach the task with an unconventional intimacy.  In the dead of night, McPhee played luscious versions of compositions by Carla Bley and Charles Mingus, extrapolating on their melodies, even singing a Joni Mitchell lyric to Mingus’s “Goodbye Porkpie Hat.”  Elsewhere he plays harrowing tenor saxophone improvisations, a plaintive tone entering his melancholic melodic sensibility.  On the title track, McPhee layers a dozen aching blues lines atop a field recording of the namesake highway, and in another piece he discovers an entire drum choir in the noise of dripping water on a tin plate in his sink, something he dedicates to Ruth Bader Ginzburg, whose death was announced moments before he noticed the environmental sound.  On one of several very short, intense tracks, McPhee literally attempts to reverse the virus by intoning a spell-like chant: “Out, damned bug/Out, damned bug!”  The package includes extensive track-by-track liner notes and a poem by McPhee, with artwork and design by Christopher Wool. A Reflection On Ida Lupino [06:28] A Self Portrait in Three Colors [13:14] Route 84 Quarantine Blues [06:53] Cuernavaca ’79 [02:23] Goodbye Porky Pig Hat [06:59] Be Gone Damn Bug [01:24] Forget Paris [01:25] Do You Still Love Me? [01:22] Improvision For The End Of COVID [01:01] Im-Pro-Vi-Sation [3:01] Tzedek, Tzedek (For RBG) [05:49] Joe McPhee, saxophone Cover design and artwork by Christopher Wool. CD design by David Khan-Giordano. Produced by John Corbett and Christopher Wool.   CvsDCD081

Joe McPhee – Route 84 Quarantine Blues

A fantastic new release by Rory Salter aka Malvern Brume on Index Clean The two main ideas behind the music are to make use of domestic and work situations. Most of it was recorded in a new flat I moved into last year. The place had a really interesting acoustic and after so many years of making music in whatever flat I was living in I wanted to do something where you could really hear the place it was recorded/the surrounding area. So a lot of the recordings are done in different locations in the flat, and often re-played back into the flat and recorded using different speakers and microphones. A lot of material was recorded whilst performing usual domestic activities and would spend quite a lot of time running between rooms doing other tasks at the same time as recording. The name of the 'On the Floor, by the Door' track is because that's where I recorded a fair bit of it, by the front door. It's in a similar way that I used and included my job in the pieces. I work as a sound technician at a university in the day and as a sound engineer in the evenings a couple times a week. I've been thinking (and talking a lot of shit) about work and art making recently and I’m really into stuff where the persons found some way to include their day job in their art in a way that sort of re-purposes the skills, materials, time etc of work. So anyway I did a lot of this, really thinking about skills I've picked up and making the effort to borrow some really otherwise unattainable equipment. I thought a lot about space and acoustic-ness during the process so a lot of it again is about me wanting sound to exist within a space; reamping sounds into spaces, or recording synthesised sounds through different speakers positioned in ways to filter and alter the sound. A lot of these practices are things I've developed and talked about a lot at work. Friends also feature quite a bit in relatively candid ways and crop up in recordings here and there. I guess there's a desire to get to a point of a 'life' music, where it feels a bit everyday and blurs the line a bit, that's when things are most interesting to me.- Rory Salter

Rory Salter – On the Floor, by the Door

The original soundtrack performed by Tomeka Reid & co. for the critically-acclaimed, feature-length 2014 documentary, "Hairy Who and The Chicago Imagists," directed by Leslie Buchbinder of Pentimenti Productions. "Hairy Who and the Chicago Imagists" is a lavishly-illustrated romp through Chicago's art history, and the first film to tell the Imagists’ whole story. The narrative begins with the artists' explosion onto the scene in the 1960s, follows their precipitous fade from prominence in the 1980s and '90s, and concludes with their 21st century resurgence in popularity. Over the last 50 years, the Imagists have influenced generations of artists, including contemporary figures like Jeff Koons, Chris Ware, Kerry James Marshall, Peter Doig, and Gary Panter. The Imagists' roller-coaster ride through art history is re-created in this film with a wealth of archival footage and photographs, and over forty interviews with the Imagists themselves, critics, curators, collectors, and contemporary artists. Chicago-based cellist and composer Tomeka Reid, a mainstay on the Windy City scene and an important contemporary member of the A.A.C.M., was commissioned to create original music for the first documentary to chronicle the Imagists, Chicago’s hometown post-surrealists who exhibited together starting in the mid-1960s. Reid composed theme music for the film and made a wide range of multi-track improvisations based on moods, creating a tableau from which the film drew as it unwound the artists’ circuitous tale. For the CD, Reid returned to the studio to make new versions of some of the tracks and to transform the extant material into a fully realized suite of music. It retains a sense of light-heartedness and depth, whimsy and melancholy, adding voice and percussion to her indelible cello.

Tomeka Reid – Soundtrack to Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists