all music by Brötzmann (Gema) and Nilssen-Love (Tono) published by Cien Fuegos Note: tracklist is different for LP and CD / digital format credits released January 26, 2024 Peter Brötzmann - tarogato, bb clarinet, contra-alto clarinet, bass saxophone, bass clarinet Paal Nilssen-Love - drums, gongs, percussion recorded by Michael Huon at Zuiderpershuis, Antwerp 25-26th of August 2015 mixed and mastered by Martin Siewert produced by Paal Nilssen-Love and Peter Brötzmann woodcut by Brötzmann, used for duo tour 2013 cover design by Lasse Marhaug

Recorded a month after Outspan No 1, this album offers up four more sonic delights from the core trio of Brötzmann, Van Hove, and Bennink. Rarely has free jazz/Euro improv/circus music/[your identifier here] sounded so unfettered and delightful -- adventurous without seeming self-serious, silly yet not without gravity. A must for any fan of these three maestros.

Renowned for her percussion genius, Limpe Fuchs surprises with a rare venture into her classical roots – the piano. Despite her extensive musical career, documented piano performances have been scarce until now. In this album she transcends time and expectation, diving into the instrument's essence. Her rhythmic finesse as a percussionist leaves an indelible mark on each keystroke. Join Fuchs on this intriguing late venture into the world of piano and savour every note on this unique and raw artistic encounter.

Among its many qualities, music relies on a special force: transcendence. When we listen, we are placed in a different reality, where sound is a vehicle for a much higher meaning. Naturally, not all music is capable of such a thing. But a few musicians clearly stand above as special – as soon as we hear them, we know that their music flows, floats and transcends. Dialogues and shadows, the second recording by the duo of Gonçalo Almeida and Pierre Bastien emanates a distinct and intriguing sound from the beginning, inducing our listening toward a world that goes way beyond a succession of notes and timbres. We hear it and it's there, this mysterious matter that touches us. We hear a dialogue, a connection, and a shadow of luminescent presence. Both musicians are based in Rotterdam, and they share an ethical common ground, with an endless list of collaborations, recordings and the same passion for a music that should always point in new directions. Throughout this recording, we are taken into a conversation where the listener plays a significant and active part. With constant changes in the mechanical instruments and a rich harmonic content of polyrhythmic counterpoint, the duo sets a base for subtle melodic phrases, that appear surprisingly from different sources – Bastien’s pocket trumpet, Almeida’s double bass, or their custom-made instruments and devices. As we listen, we move towards a personal fictional narrative, accompanied by these abstract sonic entities that guide us through the record. Their presence is highly visual too, as our imagination is immediately filled by Bastien’s instruments coming to life along with a multitude of strings played by erratic movements of the bows, almost like a tribal dance from a culture that never existed. In this strange and beautiful world, we are constantly surprised by the next element that will face us and transcend its physical projection, in an elegant invitation to the unknown. The unknown we seek constantly throughout all our lives. So, let the sound be the light that guides us in our shadows.

The artist record Call and Response brings together pieces created in connection with performances and exhibitions by Jimmy Robert, including a booklet wrapped around the record. These pieces provide insights into his collaborative practice in conjunction with his performances. The record is released following the exhibition la musique dans la chambre which took place in 2022 at Künstlerhaus Bremen. It addressed the question of how his performance works can continue to be shown apart from being performed again in exhibitions: How can one approach a performance work anew without re-staging it? The exhibition focused partcularly on sound and brought together videos, works on paper, as well as sculptural elements and sound created in the framework of his performances. Call and Response expands the exhibition and gathers sound pieces produced by Robert as well as by other artists—often in connection with Robert's works.Featuring Ain Bailey, Emma Hedditch, Jane Ellison, Rosa Barba, Jimmy Robert, Nadja Quante, Mason Leaver-Yap. Jimmy Robert (born 1975 in Guadeloupe, France) produces works on paper, photographs, collages, sculptures, videos and artist books. His artistic practice explores the points of contact between body and material, as well as the representations and material conditions of bodies.

Icelandic artist and musician Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson is known for his work with Stilluppsteypa, numerous solo albums and collaborations with other artists, such as Swedish composer BJ Nilsen. Into The Second Half takes the listener into a mysterious, yet calming sound world, where carefully composed textures weave hypnotically in and out of each other, as subtle as the changes of light in the forbidden zone in Andrej Tarkovsky’s Stalker.

Brunhild Ferrari returns to the scene with this new solo album. Extérieur Jour is comprised of two previously unreleased electroacoustic compositions – the first, a piece of cinéma pour l’oreille, a movie for the ears, and the second, a meditation on the loss and reappearance of memory and silence, recorded in various places across the globe over a period of 15 years.

nehan is a Japanese free improvisation/avant-garde rock quintet formed in 2022. Their performance is initiated by a 9HZ brain wave emitted from a testee who has been brought into a deep meditative state. nehan respond with gongs, typani, tabla and other percussion, crumhorn, bagpipes, oscillator and mellotron, passing tranformatively through a musical prism, from east to west, from traditional folk and classical to rock, jazz, and electronic.

The future is a flash-back! Having dynamited the end of the 70s, in the next decade, Philippe Doray was still alive and kicking. With Laurence Garcette, he juggled with keyboards and all their simulations to begin the “second period” of the Asociaux Associés (the Antisocial Associates). Labyrinthine programming lead to songs which go crazy: electro, pop, krautrock, no wave…? In a word, French chanson as it was never heard before or since. “Nobody Move!”, so says Philippe Doray and his Asociaux Associés (the Antisocial Associates)! Having dynamited the end of the 70s with two radical albums – Ramasse-Miettes Nucléaires in 1976 & Nouveaux Modes Industriels in 1978, both reissued by Souffle Continu – Doray still hadn’t finished singing. Throughout the next decade he began his Composant compositeur which would document the “second period”, as he calls it, of his Asociaux Associés. The record includes new schizo-electro songs which make the most of his association with Laurence Garcette, who also plays any and all sorts of keyboards. A prolongation of the first period of the Asociaux Associés, the duo updates Doray’s poetry: in reaction to the current overcast atmosphere, here are some hallucinatory fantasies to the rhythm of an infernal circle dance (« Le petit géant ») or an ecstatic waltz (“Bombés fluo”) or even coded messages stuffed into bottles and thrown into space (“Secoue le flipeur”, “Choc d’amour”). On the bonus CD there are further iconoclastic examples: rare recordings (unpublished or even “inaudible”) of the Asociaux Associés but also by Crash, a duo that Doray formed with Thierry Müller (Ilitch, Ruth). At the controls of their experiment-bending machine the musicians multiply the possibilities: peripheral rock, arias in orbit, broken swing, industrial mantras and other joyful falsities. Enough to make you lose your mind ? No… as Philippe Doray promised: it is the “jackpot qui frissonne” (the shivering jackpot) which is there to excite.

After years of exchanging ideas, Translation from Unspecified marks David Grubbs and Jan St. Werner's studio debut locking horns as a duo. Evolving from a microscopically disordered set of sounds and words into a reconstituted monolith of sound, it’s clear this deck-clearing collaboration was long overdue.

Arthur Petronio – LP Metaphon 016 – 2023 With fold-out poster and original sleeve design by Alain Geronnez Arthur Petronio: Born Switzerland 1897. French-Italian musician, poet and painter. Lived in Belgium and The Netherlands between 1910 and 1924 and since then in France. Young violin virtuoso studying with Belgian master violinist Eugène Ysaÿe. Played solo violin for Belgian King Leopold II, at the age of 9. Attracted to the avant-garde and visionary ideas of Gesamtkunstwerk. Develops and presents his “Verbophonie” in 1919, integrating sound poetry into regular music scores. Friend with Kandinsky, Mondrian, Cocteau and Picasso. Published several avant-garde journals and poetry books with participation of like minded artists. Wrote many scores for solo instruments, small ensembles, orchestral works, opera,… Met Henri Chopin in 1950 and extended his musical ideas with new possibilities of tape composition. His one and only LP, now reissued by Metaphon, was originally published by the Belgian Igloo label in 1979. An extravagant DIY montage of musique concrète and sound poetry. In addition to Petronio’s voice several female readers/performers contribute to this theatre of voices as guest vocalists. An album as unusual as his lifecycle.

Thrilled to announce the reissue of Nikolaus Utermöhlen’s ‘Karlsbad’ album, originally released in 1989. Utermöhlen was a founding member of Die Tödliche Doris and this is his sole solo release. A collection of 23 witty oddball compositions for clarinet, accordion, percussion, recorder, violin, guitar, organ. It definitely has a Doris dose but even more so it shines for its totally singular mélange of tribal dada chamber folk, dilettante dissonant poetry, hard to compare with anything else. A slice of flamboyant wellness. The recordings of this album were made for the ‘Georgette Meunier’ film by Tania Stöcklin and Cyrille Rey-Coquais. Issued from the original master tapes and includes the 8 page booklet with engravings from the Karlsbad spa era.

As well as being a return to public programming, this live event is also a record launch for The Mystery J, CvsD's new vinyl LP which features improvised music by Joe McPhee, violist Jen Clare Paulson, and Brian Labycz on electronics. Recorded in 2014 at Okka Fest 6 in Milwaukee, it contains some of the most bristling trumpet work ever heard from McPhee's lips, in a super-responsive, sometimes uncommonly quiet musical context. Another side of the master improviser – subtle dialogue with two younger maestros. Taking its title from the rum-running yacht on which McPhee's father sailed from Nassau to Miami, The Mystery J is CvsD's inaugural long-playing vinyl, lovingly pressed in Chicago at Smashed Plastic and featuring a design with artwork by one of the original Chicago Imagists, Richard Wetzel. It is available in a limited edition of 500 copies. --- Released: Corbett Vs Dempsey

Reading Group is very happy to announce the release of Blue Monday, a new LP from Zara Joan Miller and Ute Kanngießer. The LP is the result of the first live collaboration between the poet/artist Miller and the cellist/improvisor Kanngießer, recorded at London’s Cafe Oto in January of 2023. Kanngießer’s searching, intensive cello lays an amorphous terrain beneath passing fragments of Miller’s poetry (from her 2022 book of the same name from JOAN Publishing), billboards dotting the interior freeway of liminal perception. The micro-world of spectral and textural details within the cello sound seems to dramatize or mirror the micro-world of unspoken implications left unsaid in the gaps between threads of language. At times, these worlds produce a dull anxiety or a quiet fervor, only to be scattered by the occasional swerve to a poetic delivery reminiscent of slow-motion jokes (“I once saw a sign on the side of a road it said SLOW DUST”), a fortuitous error (“a seagull shitting on my face is home”), a mysterious interruption of domestic boredom (“someone’s girlfriend called to say don’t answer”). Occasional dates progressing through time give the sense that we are being driven through a year of blue Mondays, the cello wandering as if seasonally. The live set having been accompanied by a literal slideshow of some cumulative, fictive vacation adds to this sense of the year in review. But the imperceptibility of (tonal and narrative) space between these entry/fragments bring us beyond the stark view of the calendrical and into something less measurable: the space of a syncope: “to witness your life unfolding she said / is the key getting stuck.” "Yesterday I watched Blue Monday performed as a dialogue between voice and cello by Zara Joan Miller and Ute Kanngießer. A series of images shown on a 35mm slide projector triangulated this conversation, and the darkness of the room protected us all from the terrible blueness of a January afternoon. Images of scarecrows in smiling fields flash by slowly as the solidity of the projector’s mechanism creates a soft thunk against which the sound of the cello is a knife’s edge, the bow moving across a cluster of nerve endings, somehow this unpeeling feels good." (Bella Marin for Map Magazine, January 2023)

Block Gifts is a collection of three works for organs composed by James Rushford between 2015 and 2018. Using harmonium, portative organ and electric organ, each piece is linked by Rushford’s idiosyncratic combination of strict intervallic systems in different tunings (Werckmeister, quarter-tone, equal temperament), and haptically-informed rhythmic and expressive freedom. Creaks, stutters and sweeping fingers on keys become instrumental sounds in their own right, creating a further logical layer in Rushford’s compositional world. An intimate, nocturnal, and slightly suffered dialogue between the instrument and the body building a shining and fragile monument to the ephemeral nature of the organ, one of the most intriguing and ancient families of musical instruments in history. Mixed by Joe Talia, mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi, cut by Daniel Krieger at SST, Frankfurt am Main. Composed and recorded 2015-2018 at Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart), California Institute of the Arts (by Sam Dunscombe) and Chinatown Studios, Melbourne (by Joe Talia). Cover artwork and fold out poster by Graham Lambkin.

**Second edition of 250 copies, 20 page photographic book** Henning Christiansen was an incongruous mirror for the paradoxes of 20th century creative practice. He gave his context what it demanded - visionary and singular work, but was so radical that almost no one knew what to do with him, forcing him into the position of an outsider. Of all the composers working within the cradle of Fluxus, his work falls among the closest to its primary intent, destroying hierarchy, orthodoxy, and categorization - dissembling long cemented ideas about what music was understood to be - a truth, crystallized through the purity of ideas, which threads its way across the two releases in our hands. Schafe statt Geigen (Sheep instead of Violins) and “Verena” Vogelzymphon (Bird Symphony) were composed in 1988 and 1990, first appearing as a tiny CD gallery edition issued by Bernd Klüser. Both works, each occupying a single of this LP edition, extend from one of Christiansen’s long standing conceptual strategies - deploying recordings of animals as stand-ins for musical instruments, cows (with dogs) and birds respectively. While each work allows these source to take the natural lead, at times masquerading as field recordings, both feature subtle tonal and electronic interventions by the composer, creating strange and brilliant compositions which shift the terms and subjects of music as they were long understood. Brilliant and beautiful challenges to the ear and mind, laying out of reach for decades, this stunning LP, issued in a limited edition of 500 copies, comes with a 20-page photographic booklet. Essential for any fan of avant-garde practice, artist music, and experimental sound. Accompanied by a twenty page booklet featuring drawings and texts by Henning Christiansen, as well as pictures by René Block. Translation from German by Michael Muennich. The sound installation Schafe statt Geigen is owned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde, Denmark. "Verena" Vogelzymphon op. 194 (1990) is dedicated to Verena and Bernd Klüser on the occasion of their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Text by Robert Musil: Nachlass zu Lebzeiten (Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, 1936).  Lacquer cut at SST, Frankfurt am Main. Cover artwork by Henning Christiansen, 1985.

Having each followed their own distinct trajectory of exploration for decades - interweaving rigorous experimentalism with transcultural conversations - and building upon roughly 20 years working as a duo, Jessika Kenney and Eyvind Kang return with Azure, their third full-length with Ideologic Organ. Among their most riveting outings to date, comprising five new compositions recorded in Seattle during the spring of 2022, this remarkable body of sonority culminates in a singular gesture of contemporary minimalism that slowly unfolds across the album’s length. Emerging from the Pacific Northwest, Jessika Kenney and Eyvind Kang have retained a strong presence within the context of North American experimental music since the mid 1990s, each producing some of the most grippingly original music to have appeared over the subsequent years. Kenney is a vocalist and composer internationally regarded for her spellbinding timbres and her in-depth study of oral traditions. Her work takes the form of sound installations, talismanic scores, music for film, electronics, and choir. She released the groundbreaking experimental gamelan album Atria (Sige) in 2015, and has collaborated with Lori Goldston, Holland Andrews, Niloufar Shiri, Tashi Wada, Alvin Lucier, Sarah Davachi, Melati Suryodarmo, Ensemble Nist-Nah, Sunn O))), and numerous others. Kang, a multi-instrumentalist, composer and arranger, works across genre and discipline, bringing subtlety, fluidity, and emotional intensity to each of his varied projects. In addition to creating a striking body of solo works that has traced its way across the last two and half decades - most recently including Sonic Gnostic (Aspen Edities, 2021) and Ajaeng Ajaeng (Ideologic Organ, 2020) - he has played on albums by Bill Frisell, Joe McPhee, Sun City Girls, Ikue Mori, Laurie Anderson, Blonde Redhead, William Hooker, Animal Collective, and numerous others. Since beginning to work together as a duo in the early 2000s, Kang and Kenney have collaborated on sound installations, music for orchestra, choir, and mixed ensembles in addition to releasing numerous widely acclaimed full-lengths: Aestuarium (2005), The Face Of The Earth (2012), Live In Iceland (2013), At Temple Gate (2014), Reverse Tree (2016), Seva (2017), The Cypress Dance (2020). A hypnotic return to the duo’s unique expression of “unison music", Azure is among Kenney and Kang’s most pared-down efforts in more than a decade. Its five compositions are underscored by allusions to the natural world and drifting temporalities, producing a profound calm that rises in arcs of tonal color. The album’s opener, Eclipse, is a composition built around the phrase “eclipse…inside the eclipse”, drawn from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s book, Dictee. Leaving aching silences between each utterance - Kenney’s sparse vocal interventions enmeshed with Kang’s delicate viola d’amore tones - the piece’s collective elements produce a remarkable tension bubbling within its spacious calm. The title track, Azure, takes its name from a pun on the Persian "az u" or "from her/him/them”, and is a meditation on the closing rhymes of ghazal 413 from the Divan of Hafez, such as mâh az u, râh az u, and âh az u, “the moon from them, the path from them, the sighs from them”. Imbued with sorrow and release, across the piece Kenney’s vocals and Kang’s viola d’amore weave and dance against a shruti drone, calling forth echoes of lost moments in far off worlds. This is followed by three pieces that incorporate traces of wide-ranging techniques into their forms. Ocean is an experiment with different intensities of pulsation, with inspiration from ring modulation’s use of two simultaneous frequencies, which assemble an enveloping expanse of intoxicating harmonics and vibrato. For Forest Floor, Kenney’s long-tone vocalizations play on the meanings of ‘tan’ or body, and ‘nur’ or light, and the town names of ‘Chegel’ and ‘Khotan’ from ghazal 327 from the Divan of Hafez. Dancing at the boundaries of sorrow and joy, her voice, paced in perfect harmony to Kang’s viola, seems to propose alternate realities of what ecstatic music might be. The album’s final piece draws upon Glenna Cole Allee’s book, Hanford Reach, incorporating photographs and words spoken within by interviewees living or working in the tribal territories of Wanapum, Yakama, Cayuse, Umatilla, Nez Perce, and many others on or near the Hanford Nuclear Site in the state of Washington. Among the album’s most dynamic and powerful efforts - drones and pizzicato tones playing counterpoint to Kenney’s soaring vocals - the duo, inexplicably, imbues strong impressions of that landscape. As Suzanne Kite states in the album’s liner notes, with each of Azure’s discrete expressions Jessika Kenney and Eyvind Kang “ask our ears to hold/stop/wait/listen closely to the edges of knowability, while the world continues around our sounding bodies… [they] draw our ears so closely that if we are not careful, the listener’s breathing could interfere, our blinking could interface with each tone, and we would blindly intercede into what is a landscape being formed before our ears. Azure pushes us to find a deeper rhythm, to move, grow, and form our listening bodies towards each composition.” Azure is available via Ideologic Organ as a vinyl LP, mastered by their original sound collaborator Mell Dettmer, cut by Andreas Kauffelt at Schnittstelle and pressed at Optimal, CD, and digital download, with sleeve photos by Glenna Cole Allee / Text by Suzanne Kite, and a live photo by Kali Malone.