Double LP version. Four long and vaporous unreleased tracks that document the Juri Camisasca's first mystical afflatus, bringing to light the moments of "collective meditation" of some events in 1978, including the recordings drawn from the exhibition "L'evoluzione interiore dell'Uomo", which took place at the Villa Reale in Monza. After his participation in the Telaio Magnetico project in 1975, and in parallel to his contribution in works like Franco Battiato's Juke Box (1978) and Lino Capra Vaccina's Antico Adagio (1978), and in Raul Lovisoni and Francesco Messina's Prati Bagnati Del Monte Analogo (1979), a more general syntony of Camisasca for different aspects of Eastern philosophies seemed to conceive his first personal form of music as a "celestial ocean" in which to break the eternal divine love. The mantra nature of deep drones of a natural reverberated harmonium literally introduce you to another level of consciousness; harmonic chants of dhrupad inspiration expanding the ethereal voice in the transcendental plot of all, while Roberto Mazza's oboe intervenes to paint this perfect osmotic sound echoing motifs of ancient medieval saltarello. For Camisasca, "the vibration of sound is something primordial which contains the mystery of creation"; and in this sense "the musician is a medium through which the Nature is expressed". This makes Evoluzione Interiore an intense minimalist work where singing generates a universal and archetypical spiral of purity and candor that suggests the Pandit Pran Nath's lesson as well as dialogues in concept with the mutability flux of seminal works as Terry Riley's Persian Surgery Dervishes (1972), Peter Michael Hamel's The Voice of Silence (1973) and Nada (1977), or with research on the overtones as that of Roberto Laneri's Prima Materia. Includes liner notes with archival photos.

Orpheus Variations is a new composition by Alvin Lucier for solo cello and seven wind instruments. It is based on a particular sonority from the first movement of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet score, Orpheus; a sonority that has haunted Lucier for decades.  Orpheus Variations is one of eight large-scale compositions made expressly for Charles Curtis by Alvin Lucier in the last 15 years. This performance was conducted by Petr Kotik, with Charles Curtis playing solo cello alongside members of the SEM Ensemble. “Lucier speaks first of a sonority, and only then of a chord. He discusses the chord, its notes and their disposition, but what haunts him is a “particular sonority.” A sonority is the product of physical action on physical materials: the instruments, the registers in which they are activated, the breath of the musicians, the waveforms thus produced, their merging and interfering, and finally the moment and place of these actions. An energy field, certain to vanish completely once the musicians put down their instruments. However concrete and real the actions and materials, the sonority they produce is a phantom.”

For her first album releases as a soloist, nomadic Australian cellist and composer Judith Hamann presents two collections of her sonic inquiries into shaking and humming. Her CD, "Music for Cello and Humming," features two pieces for cello and humming written specifically for Hamann by composers Sarah Hennies and Anthony Pateras alongside Hamann’s own “Humming Suite” and “Study for cello and humming.” Having arisen intuitively from Hamann’s investigations into shaking, just intonation, psychoacoustic phenomena, and the voice in relation to the femme presenting body in performance, humming here also references dislocation, or ventriloquism. Although teetering on the edge of audibility, the intimate and vulnerable closed-mouth sounding enters into subtle interference with her cello, drifting into acoustical beating and bringing instability to otherwise more formal grid structures. The capacity for rupture of this volatile fragility reaches its apotheosis on Hennies’ “Loss,” a piece that deliberately instructs Hamann to hum beyond the limits of her voice range. Going against the grain of chamber music orthodoxy, the guaranteed failure set in motion by this instruction yields a generative sound of effort reminiscent of Xenakis’ storied desire for an instrumentalist to play with the sorrow of knowing they can’t do everything. With an arc suggestive of sudden life change, “Loss” casts queer epistemology onto composition, positioning failure, undoing, unbecoming, and transforming as alternative ways of knowing or being. Hennies’ signature composite merging of individual components here brings oral sounds that include breathing and coughing together with humming, cello, and sine waves. Like Glenn Gould’s 1982 Goldberg Variations or Pauline Oliveros’ Accordion and Voice, this timbral meeting of bodily utterances with consummate musicianship imbues Hamann’s humming work with a breakable, human strand, here as humbling as it is uncomfortable. Accompanied by an essay on "Music for Cello and Humming," as well as its companion piece "Shaking Studies," by Nora Fulton. Judith Hamann undertook her doctoral studies with renowned cellist Charles Curtis, with whom she is currently engaged in a discourse based project, ‘Materialities of Realisation.’ She has additionally demonstrated a superlative capacity for improvisation and engagement with sonic arts through work with artists Dennis Cooper, Éliane Radigue, Áine O’Dwyer, Ilan Volkov, Toshimaru Nakamura, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, Golden Fur, Jessika Kenney, Anna Homler, Yvette Janine Jackson, and Lori Goldston, among others. Her recorded appearances include Tashi Wada’s Duets, Graham Lambkin’s Community, Alvin Lucier’s Illuminated By The Moon, and Gossamers, with Rosalind Hall.

Originally compiled as a two cassette release by Archivio Diafònico in 2016, now reissued as a double CD for optimum playback at your next MRI scan. Samling documents the earlier, "noisier" years of Arv & Miljö, collecting all compilation appearances from the project's inception in 2010 up to 2015. The project has since moved to a more ambient sound, having recently completed a stunning tetralogy of seasonal themed LPs (Svensk Sommar I Stilla Frid, 2018; Himmelsvind, 2020; Ensam Är Nattens Rymd Över Vita Vägar, 2021; Vålnad Av Fornskog, 2022). While the release of the first instalment in this series, Svensk Sommar I Stilla Frid, in 2018 seemed to signal a radical departure from the gritty, claustrophobic sound documented here, the use of environmental recordings, primitive melodic synth tones, and fragile failing electronics all remain a defining characteristic of the project, from the early concrète industrial years to the broken new age music explored in more recent times (there were other clear signposts to the direction the project would later take too of course, notably the track 2415 Dagar from The Palermo Protocol 3CS compilation released by Posh Isolation in 2014 and also included in this collection).Arv & Miljö is the solo project of Gothenburg-based Matthias Andersson, member of the groups Enhet För Fri Musik and Heinz Hopf, and label operator extraordinaire (Discreet Music, Fördämning Arkiv, Förlag För Fri Musik, I Dischi Del Barone). Released: 2024, Krim Kram

These are recordings from the Berlin club Au Topsi Pohl where [ism] played 4-nights in a row, May 18-21 2022. For the concerts a Bösendorfer grand piano was brought in to the small club - the trio barely fit on stage, but the acoustic sound, all the more omnipresent and precise, was embraced by a highly crafted and risky playing evoking notions of dreams, form and human vibrations.  Maua means flowers in Swahili.

“Wonderful energy, constant motion, and roiling in noise. And immense amount of grit and power.” Corey Mwamba (Freeness, BBC Radio 3) Nautiloid capsule tumbles across field lines. An impracticably agile, graceful derailment. About this trio: www.busterandfriends.com/juno credits released September 1, 2023 Han-earl Park: guitar. Lara Jones: saxophone and electronics. Pat Thomas: electronics. Music by Han-earl Park, Lara Jones and Pat Thomas. Recorded live March 20, 2022, Cafe OTO, London. Recorded by Shaun Crook. Mixed by Han-earl Park. Mastered by Chris Sharkey.

his music and its exponents defy categorization. The word 'band' doesn't cover it. Concept; project; workshop; experiment; energy; assembly; community; association. Black Top is all of the above and more, and although the music industry would call the British multi-instrumentalists Orphy Robinson and Pat Thomas a group that is augmented by different guests for their performances there is too much imagination and unpredictability in the results for the term to be really a propos. Black Top is its own thing, or something, or some kinda ting for our times, if one adapts the zeitgeist that the visionary dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson has referred to as 'tings an' times'. Since its genesis in 2011 Black Top has been through significant changes in sound and personnel so that any signature they present is most likely to be soon rewritten. Two previous recordings have seen two great British saxophonists, Steve Williamson and Evan Parker, respectively, each become the third point of the triangle, but on this session it is two stellar American improvisers, drummer Hamid Drake and double bassist William Parker, who join the fluid fraternity. They duly cement a pivotal transatlantic exchange in creative music, a kinship that builds on Robinson's work with such as Lester Bowie in the early part of his career and Thomas's with Butch Morris in his. As much as the four players in this latest incarnation of Black Top represent iconic spaces in the world of western music – London and New York, whence they emerged during the '70s and '80s – they also have non-western common denominators. Thomas and Robinson maintain a deeply rooted interest in Caribbean folk that chimes with Parker's avowed love of calypso – heard in his own bands and in collaborations with Trinidadian-American vocalist Faye Victor – while all three and Drake have immersed themselves in African, Middle Eastern and Asian music. This vast amount of information permeates and percolates in pieces that fearlessly uphold the principle of spontaneous composition. When the players convened at east London's Café Oto in August 2016 during Black Top's two-day residency there was great expectation over what the meeting would produce, but the extent to which they deeply personalized the myriad vocabularies housed by the word 'jazz' was gripping. A reprise of Moanin', the anthem forever linked to drum-star pioneer Art Blakey, drops rakish dissonance into the gospel-fired theme to present hard bop and avant-garde as cousins at play rather than brothers in arms, while the 42 minute opus For Joe Harriott investigates the kind of skilful mutation-elaborations synonymous with the Jamaican legend. Yet amid all the fiery disruption there is sensual dance. This is where the ensemble unveils its most boldfaced dynamic range, turning a two-beat tick-tock of marimba into a time-stretch suite whose vigorous rhythmic invention sees clavé, shekere and cabassa phrases swerve around hammer-headed keyboard syncopations. Stark shifts in tempo and attack push the music into both floating freeform and a groove broken free of a 12 bar shackle before Sun Ra's space organ skanks into view and the music fades to black over a tantalizing roots reggae surge. Histories rather than history are in effect. Traditions rather than tradition are in vivo. Black Top is a laboratory of sound, and in this third offering of its evolutionary trials four audio scientists play with notes and tones as if tomorrow's blues had come today. - Kevin Le Gendre, London, 2017.

In 1972, trumpeter Baikida Carroll and some of his colleagues from the Black Artists Group (more precisely saxophonist/flutist Oliver Lake, trombonist Joseph Bowie, drummer Charles "Bobo" Shaw and trumpeter Floyd LeFlore) took the advice of their friends in the Art Ensemble Of Chicago and left their native Missouri to come and discover the bright lights of Paris for themselves. The following year they would even get the chance to record their only album which would rapidly attain mythical status and a collector’s item: “In Paris, Aries 1973”. Therefore, it was not surprising that they crossed paths with Jef Gilson in the capital. He was always on the lookout for new artists for his recently formed Palm label and had been active on many fronts in jazz since the end of the 50s. The French bandleader/pianist/composer/sound engineer had already recorded, in the preceding months other American musicians who would go on to have great careers: Byard Lancaster, Keno Speller, Clint Jackson III, Khan Jamal… Gilson therefore offered Baikida Carroll the chance to record his first album under his own name, which would be the 13th release on the label. Carroll logically asked Oliver Lake to join him. He also recruited Manuel Villaroel, a young Franco-Chilien pianist from the group Matchi-Oul, who had already released an album on Futura in 1971 and would release another on Palm in 1976. The group was completed with the addition of Brazilian percussionist Naná Vasconcelos, who had just released a well-received album on the Saravah label. They were ready to enter the studio for the 3rd, 4th and 5th June 1974. The first side of the album is divided into two long tracks which send free jazz back to its long-lost African roots. The opener “Orange Fish Tears” indeed rolls out a jungle of percussion of all sorts and sizes -the whole group is involved- which weave and mix together reaching a point where all bearings are lost, lending a sense of wonder to the majestic entry of the brass and woodwinds, flying suddenly out from the undergrowth. “Forest Scorpion” (sic) is a real voodoo ceremony where a venomous percussive groove backs the fiery solos from keyboards and saxophone in a furious trance. A warning; after these two tracks listeners are physically and emotionally wiped out! The other side is more introspective. Deliberately using dissonance and repetition, “Rue Roger” -the only composition by Oliver Lake- in a long dialogue between trumpet and saxophone, could almost remind us of Terry Riley in his favourite ballpark. “Porte D'Orléans”, the fourth and final track on the album, has the group back to their old tricks in a long hallucinatory jam which owes as much to the contemporary music of György Ligeti as to the most angst-ridden Jerry Goldsmith soundtrack music (remember the heavy chords which beat through “Planet of the Apes»). With these two sides, and in under 45m, Baikida Carroll and his musicians show just what they can do, from cerebral to charnel without ever simplifying things. This is an indispensable album if you are a fan of free-wheeling avant-garde music from the Art Ensemble of Chicago to Sonic Youth and including Shabaka Hutchings and Rob Mazurek. For those with good taste, in other words.

The Intercommunal Free Dance Music Orchestra was created in 1971 by an “old hand” of French free jazz, François Tusques. Free Jazz, was also the name of the recording made by the pianist and other like-minded Frenchmen (Michel Portal, François Jeanneau, Bernard Vitet, Beb Guérin and Charles Saudrais) in 1965. But, six years later Tusques had had his fill of free jazz. After having wondered, together with Barney Wilen (Le Nouveau Jazz) or even solo (Piano Dazibao and Dazibao N°2), if free jazz wasn’t a bit of a dead end, Tusques formed the Inter Communal, an association under the banner of which the different communities of the country would come together and compose, quite simply. If at first the structure was made up of professional musicians from the jazz scene it would rapidly seek out talent in the lively world of the MPF (Musique Populaire Française).{French Popular Music, ndlt} Compiled of extracts from concerts given between 1976 and 1978, L’Inter Communal is not the first album from the Intercommunal Free Dance Music Orchestra. But it is the one which shows with the most exuberance the “social function” which inhabited free jazz and popular music at the time. All the more so as, to head up the project, the group (made up of wind instruments: Michel Marre, Jo Maka, Adolf Winkler and Jean Méreu) called upon Spanish singer Carlos Andreu. Andreu, claimed Tusques, was a griot “who created of new genre of popular song improvised with our music, based on events going on at the time”. L’Intercommunal can start the festivities: on “Blues pour Miguel Enriquez”, it is first Thelonious Monk who is invoked in an homage to one of the leading figures of the Chilean revolution, and a victim of Pinochet. The circumstances may be serious, the music, though, is not. The musicians light a bonfire to bring together on the same frequency France and Spain, the Americas and Africa: “L’heure est à la lutte” (the time to fight is here ndlt), is the new song offered by the l’Intercommunal Free Dance Orchestra… As if proof were needed that their music is still more than timely!

This recording of a 1983 Brussels concert, part of a concert series directed by Godried-Willem Raes, was previously released under the same name on the Incus label. The album presents Evan Parker in an early electro-acoustic quartet, where George Lewis modifies his trombone with various accessories, most of which were amplified; Paul Lytton amplifies a part of his percussion set, along with cymbals, woodblocks and gongs; and Barry Guy uses amplification and effects processors with his double bass. This was a fertile period for these performers, experienced with the London Jazz Composers' Orchestra, examining improvisation and applying many methods and searching for sonic possibilities Evan Parker - (tenor, soprano saxophones) George Lewis - (trombone) Barry Guy - (doublebass) Paul Lytton - (percussion)

Fred Van Hove's 52 minute solo piano performance at the Jazz à Mulhouse summer festival 2007 reveals one of the giants of improvised music at the height of his creative powers.

Saxophonist Evan Parker leads this variegated ensemble sojourn into exploratory improvisation, largely within the archetypal framework of Brit-improv. The nine performers feed off one another's ideas, leading to spurious shifts in strategy and combining minimalism, avant chamber motifs, micro-themes and more. Passages containing creaky strings and whimsical flute patterns are interlaced with contrapuntal call and response passages. Energies are spent wisely here! The music incorporates a multitude of tonal shades to complement moments of wit and happenstance. On the quintet piece aptly titled "Quintet, pianist Agusti Fernandez shoots rapid flurries across a fluctuating musical plane, offset by violinist Philipp Wachsmann's pointed staccato lines. Here and elsewhere the artists touch upon the new style of classical avant-garde overtures. The musicians inject innumerable contrasts into the flow, where circular motifs often evolve into transient statements and bellowing soundscapes.n sum, this recent outing typifies the perceptive and often ingenious platforms of Parker's previous ventures. Crossing the River prods and stimulates one's sense of reason. Recommended. (all about jazz)

Evan Parker's followup to The Snake Decides is this live recording of saxophone solos from 1989 recorded in the Holywell Music Room by Michael Gerzon."Of the many solo soprano recordings by British improviser Evan Parker, few offer as intimate a portrait as this one in terms of his development as an artist. In 1993, Parker had hit a new stride in his playing. He worked -- as he does now -- long hours to find a way through the improvisation barrier imposed by the restrictions of circular and conventional breathing, toward a series of microtonal possibilities that were adaptable in virtually any situation, solo or group. His practice had led him to a place of opening the breathing techniques toward new microphonics and multiple sonances. His wish to document them, however, led to his nearly abandoning his findings. He discovered that in the music rooms of Holywell in England, that the harmonic atmospherics of the room, of the architecture itself, provided an entirely new set of tonal and spatial possibilities he hadn't counted upon and proceeded to make a record to document those instead. There are five "Conic Sections" ranging in length from just over seven-and-a-half minutes to over 25. Duration is dependent on how an idea is expressed by the soloist (Parker) and looped back to him by the room itself. Certain tones and phrasings offer far more in the way of complex reverberation -- naturally occurring -- than others, inspiring different angles, shapes and colors from Parker. It's as if he is playing off the room, even though he has instigated the proceedings. The room never quits, and it is obvious that it will have the last sound, play the last note, no matter how hard Parker struggles against that dictum -- and he does for much of the recording. He uses every trick, technique, and grift to try to put off the inevitable, and in the process it takes him to some very interesting places musically. This is an exhausting yet exhilarating set to take in at one setting; it changes the listener's reality, turns it inside out for over 70 minutes, and allows one to hear, as music, some rather confounding sounds and breathing techniques. Amazing stuff.

Recorded at Gateway Studios, London, 16 March 2000

At the Unity Theatre is a live album by saxophonist Evan Parker and drummer Paul Lytton. It was recorded in January 1975 at the Unity Theatre in London, and was released later that year by Incus Records. The album was reissued on CD (this edition), with three extra tracks, by Psi Records in 2003

A sequence of six duo improvisations from Evan Parker on tenor saxophone & Sten Sandell on church organ recorded at Evan Parker's recording studio of choice, St Peter's in Whitstable, UK, 2009.

FOUICKFOUICK: a duo born of coagulation between a sound distiller and a film maker. Jean-Marc Foussat - Blick Together, in the studios of Fou Records, they survey the continents of musical and narrative improvisation. A kind of renovation like a "musical story". While one frames a musical invention, the other unfolds a velum of imprecation. Jean-Marc Foussat extracted from his synthesizer, toys, appeaux and his voice, some musical possibilities. Note tutoring, voice scanning, incongruous interference, everything participates in the invention of an unlikely but audible aggregate. In parallel, Blick impregnates. From his breath to the microphone, he lets go all words spoken live from his visions. Profiting, chewing, observation allow the twists and turnouts of elucidy but audible stories Mastic Boréal brings together 4 of these musical tales. Their textures are obscure. Their torment is alive. Their wanderings remain without cards. Their thorns are catching. Their confessions deal with ear infections. Interference between music and voice is intertwined. The borders are blurring. It doesn't matter the loss of reference. Let us continue to move forward in this suffocating fog. Let's shrew and cough a glimpse of black shores. The contours of the horizons are caulked with mastic. Only a few reflections awaken us borealis.