“Make Polish Jazz great again”: Piotr Damasiewicz & Power of the Horns return with “Polska” LP A musical visionary, some outstanding instrumentalists, the 10th anniversary of the collective’s founding, a reflection on Polishness, and finally – a 4,000 km-long walking pilgrimage of 100 solo concerts in 100 temples. These events, symbols, experiences and facts have somehow been combined into one coherent whole – the Polska LP, the first release by Piotr Damasiewicz & Power of the Horns Ensemble since 2013. “Power of the Horns have the ability to captivate audiences of any festival, from jazz gigs to the huge Open’er, from the Baltic Sea coast to the Tatra Mountains, and hopefully in every corner of the globe”, as Kajetan Prochyra wrote in Jazzarium a few years ago, shortly after the release of the phenomenal concert album Alaman which earned the band considerable fame in the jazz scene. Power of the Horns, however, turned out to be a scarce commodity. They only performed on special occasions, and it took 6 years for their second album to be released. Now they are back with the album titled Poland. This repertoire is a kind of synthesis of what influenced the image of jazz that accompanied Piotr Damasiewicz while building his musical identity. This is the essence of what was closest to Piotr’s heart in Polish jazz in the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, when he would mostly listen to Polish masters live, on the radio and on recordings. It was a period when he often listened to Wojtasik with Szukalski and Harper (it was the Quest album that was the main inspiration behind “Billy”), or some of the unearthly recordings of the Polish trumpet master Tomasz Stańko, such as Bosonossa, Litania, and From the Green Hill. Damas spent that period of his life in Katowice, which he still associates with the hard work of miners. It also remains a symbol of Polish industrial characterised by heavy groove... That’s why he has composed “Kleofas”, an homage to one of the Katowice coal mines. The recording session for Polska LP occurred at a very special time. The album was recorded the day before and on the anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising, as these were the only available dates for all of the musicians. The exceptional atmosphere and thus the dignity of this time were emphasized by the events preceding the recordings. “It was a very moving period, concluding a certain era, as several people close to us, both musically and personally, died. The great master, Tomasz Stańko, to whom we partly dedicated this session, passed away” – the leader explains. There is some kind of symbolism in the fact that when the sound of sirens froze Warsaw for a moment as it does yearly, the album session in Studio S2 (Polskie Radio) was coming to an end. Last year Piotr Damasiewicz and his orchestra celebrated the 10th anniversary of Power of the Horns. It is hard to believe that it took a decade for one of the most outstanding bands promoting Polish jazz in the world to record their first studio album. However, it is hardly surprising given that the leader of PotH – Piotr “Damas” Damasiewicz – is one of the busiest Polish artists around. It is not easy to lead such a big orchestra of gifted musicians, or, to be more precise, a bunch of contemporary Polish jazz stars – that's why the line-up that took all the jazz recaps of 2013 by storm with their debut concert album Alaman (For Tune) remained in phonographic slumber for another 6 years, at the same time putting on a few major concerts with guests such as James Carter, Lotte Anker, Anna Karwan and Zdzisław Piernik. Since the formation of Power of the Horns, the band leader has received a Fryderyk award for his jazz debut, while his colleagues, an alto saxophonist Maciej Obara and Dominik Wania, a pianist, have successfully released albums for the legendary German ECM label. For Piotr Damasiewicz, 2019 is a year full of round numbers. Damas set off on a 4,000 km pilgrimage along the Way of Saint James starting in May when he crossed the border with Ukraine in the village of Korczowa, continuing through the south of Poland, Germany, France, and finally completing the journey in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, northwestern Spain. The very idea of such journey seems to be impressive but if one adds that the trumpeter’s mission was to play 100 solo trumpet concerts in 100 temples of various denominations in order to prepare for his academic research, it’s beyond comprehension. Astigmatic Records is all the more proud to present Polska LP, the first, long-awaited studio album of Power of the Horns Ensemble led by Piotr Damasiewicz. The 42 minutes of this outstanding music was recorded in the summer of 2018 in Studio S2 in Warsaw under the supervision of Michał Kupicz who was also responsible for the mix. The album is due to be released on CD, vinyl, and all streaming platforms on November 29, 2019. It can be now pre-ordered in Asfalt Shop and Sounds of The Universe, as well as via the Bandcamp platform. The premiere concert showcasing the Polska programme will be held during the Wrocław Jazztopad Festival on November 23, 2019. The event will be preceded by a meeting with Piotr Damasiewicz taking place at 11 a.m. in Mleczarnia near Narodowe Forum Muzyki.

Piotr Damasiewicz - TRUMPET Liba Villavecchia - ALTO SAX Grzegorz Lesiak - GUITAR Alex Reviriego - BASS Vasco Trilla - DRUMS, PERCUSSIONS The band Damasiewicz, Lesiak, Villavecchia, Reviriego, Trilla with SKAWA recording is the result of cooperation and friendship of five exceptional artists. The paths of these musicians have intertwined for many years. Each of them is characterized by a unique sound and the awareness of creating their own language, which is a bridge connecting artistic sensitivity, philosophy, mysticism and reality. Each of them blazes its own trail, often in difficult and untouched terrain. Constantly transcending themselves is the essence of their creativity and the true art of living. The initiator of the project is the guitarist Grzegorz Lesiak, who together with the Catalan drummer Vasco Trilla and the bassist Alex Reviriego created an adventure music band called "Essence". The combination of this line-up with the activity and philosophy of the multi-instrumentalist Piotr Damasiewicz is no coincidence, thanks to whom their art has acquired a deeper, spiritual dimension. This unique arrangement is characterized by coherence, openness and extremely subtle expression. Lesiak, Trilla, Reviriego, Damasiewicz recorded the album On The Way under this banner, then decided to invite another musician, Liba Villavecchia, with whom Trilla and Reviriego already co-create the Catalan trio. This is how the quintet was created. They recorded in Beskid Mały in Sucha Beskidzka in a location characteristic for Damasiewicz label, i.e. near Mioduszyna in Śpiwle. The material was recorded in October 2022. It contains interpretations of 5 impressions written by Damasiewicz. L.A.S. listening and sounding – a new concert-publishing initiative, the goal of which, in addition to recording and releasing sounds, is to promote art and music by experiencing it together on the listener-musician, artist-viewer line. The energy built during concerts and live recordings allows for creation of unique publications, with inserts including, as a tangible result of cooperation, the audience’s impressions about the music they listened to.L.A.S.is an artistic platform focusing on the co-creation and coexistence of unforced interpersonal relations. It is the realization of the mutual need to share knowledge and skills, of being in harmony and with nature, of mutual respect for space, building relationships with the world, looking at what is happening around you, focusing on your own needs, listening to yourself and others, of different perception of the world, being in peace with nature and yourself, of following your intuition. All of this guides Piotr Damasiewicz – such goals and principles, among others, are implemented in the L.A.S. In a way, L.A.S. constitutes a platform where you can stop and ponder or talk about what is meaningful to everyone. The basis of such meetings is sound and openness to listening.

We would like to introduce a new Polish- Austrian quartet led by the trumpeter and composer Piotr Damasiewicz and his Viennese connections- the meticulously passionate saxophonist Krzysztof Kasprzyk, Viennese-to-the-bone, versatile bassist Thomas Stempkowski , and the jazz and electronica drummer Alex Yannilos.The music of the quartet is best described as “(…) expressive, free though very rhythmic and melodic, manic at times, always lovingly passionate.” It goes back to dear to our hearts sounds of 60es and 70es jazz, in which composed and conjointly improvised had an equal place and the energy between musicians and listeners during a live performance was the crucial part of a creating process. The formation of the band is the result of a meeting of the musicians as part of the Melomaniac Corner concert series, organised by Anna Moser in cooperation with the Polish Institute in Vienna, which took place in Strenger Kammer, in the viennese jazz-club Porgy & Bess in February 2019. The repertoire was written especially for this occasion by Piotr Damasiewicz. The band members felt that the collective had something special, something worth continuing. The idea to release an album arose. In April musicians met again to prepare for the recordings. In May 2019, the Viennese Suite material was recorded in the renown Amann studio in Vienna, in a live recording session as part of the new initiative and label of the leader- L.A.S.

Heard in the Carpathians, „watra” is a word of Wallachian origin which refers to a large bonefire with a wooden construction set up. Burned and accompanied by singing and recalling the old times, it symbolizes the return to the roots and serves the purpose of glorifying the ancestors. Watra is also what we ourselves associate with inspiring meetings bustling with stories of tradition, travel and music from around the world, when, by the fire, different musical worlds of jazz and folklore have brought us together. Now we’re all in the state of journey back to our roots, friends creating music together that we are, inspiring one another during numerous gatherings by the fire in Śpiwle estate found in Sucha Beskidzka at the slope of Mioduszyna Mountain and in the Cofeina Jazz Cafe, where the recording of this album took place. credits released June 26, 2021 Piotr Damasiewicz trumpet, harmonium, percusssions, voice Zbigniew Kozera bass, guimbri, african harph Paweł Szpura drum, frame drum

HoP warmly welcomes Belgian chantress Annelies Monseré back to the fold. Annelies’s Mares LP (hop17) sold-out last year and was featured on end-of-year lists from The Wire, Boomkat, The Quietus, and Tone Glow to name a few. Recent live shows at Café OTO, Roadburn Festival and supporting HTRK in Brussels prove there’s no sign of her slowing down. Recorded at home in Gent between 2016 and 2023, I Sigh, I Resign retains the intimacy of Mares with it’s close-mic’d keyboards and vocals that capture every breath. Folk and early music are at the core of her sound but the palette of piano, organ, bass guitar, cello, synth and drum machine make it very much a document of the here and now. The cover features Annelies’s sketches referencing female artists from the Dutch Golden Age who, highly revered at the time, now serve as mere footnotes to Rembrandt, Vermeer et al. The cover sets the tone for the music within which deals with power structures, toxic environments, and questioning (his)tories. Standout tracks include the pounding rhythm and choir-like voices on Salt as well as the tense folk/post-rock of Simple Fractures (co-written with her Luster bandmates). The album’s most tender moment is a cover of Jean Ritchie’s Appalachian ballad One I Love played and sung by Annelies and her ten year old son. I Sigh, I Resign is an intimate piece of work that explores personal and general themes which, having played-out for centuries, are still depressingly relevant. Despite the suggestion of defeat in the title, I Sigh, I Resign is an affirming and defiant manifesto for growth and liberation.

stretchedwoundspeaks - 5:55 (text from ‘(i) Libation’, ‘(ii) The Making of the Drum’, ‘(v) The Gong-Gong’, Masks - Kamau Brathwaite) Tracklisting: A1 - the sleepening (0:33)A2 – invisible bodies (2:10) A3 – unknown tongue (5:53) A4 – black mantle (1:25) (text from ‘Interlude’, Towards the Stars - Una Marson) A5 – black mantle II (1:26) (text from ‘Interlude’, Towards the Stars - Una Marson) A6 - gyre's galax (2:56)(text from ‘Gyre’s Galax’, The Matrix - N. H. Pritchard) B1 – stretchedwoundspeaks (5:55)(text from ‘(i) Libation’, ‘(ii) The Making of the Drum’, ‘(v) The Gong-Gong’, Masks - Kamau Brathwaite)B2 – rush hush (4:16) (text from ‘The Voice’, The Matrix, N. H. Pritchard) B3 - their naked descent (2:42)(text from ‘When in the Heat of the Day’, Solar Throat Slashed - Aimé Césaire) B4 – spittle (1:08) (text from ‘When in the Heat of the Day’, Solar Throat Slashed - Aimé Césaire) B5 - tender as fly agaric (0:31) (text from ‘When in the Heat of the Day’, Solar Throat Slashed - Aimé Césaire) B6 - slli (1:54)(text from ‘VIA’, Eecchhooeess - N. H. Pritchard)First solo release from vocalist, movement artist and composer Elaine Mitchener, whose work encompasses improvisation, contemporary music theatre and performance art. Solo Throat draws on the work of African-American and African-Caribbean poets Kamau Brathwaite, Aimé Césaire, Una Marson and N. H. Pritchard as source material for twelve new vocal compositions Elaine Mitchener is a veteran of vocal expression in the global Black Avant Garde, traversing free improvisation, cross-disciplinary music theatre and contemporary composition with clarity and joy. Most recently, Mitchener has been improvising and composing with the written word as source material - challenging classical ensembles with her piece (“the/e so/ou/nd be/t/ween”), and commissioning composers Matana Roberts, Jason Yarde and George Lewis to respond to the work of Sylvia Wynter (“On Being Human as Praxis”, Donaueschinger Musiktage, 2020). Her performance of Umbra poet N.H Pritchard’s text FR/OG at OTO in 2021 was a revelation - a solo vocal recasting of the powerful visual-material form that Pritchard uses to disrupt semantic ‘sense’. Building on this performance, Solo Throat takes the work of Pritchard alongside poets Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Aimé Césaire and Una Marson as its source material. Its compositions are a loose translation - a carrying from text to voice which holds multiplicity and celebrates the transformative power of literary possibility. Surrendered to the spacing and repetition of consonants and vowels, Michener’s exceptional phonetic freedom gives rise to a sensuous experience which intensifies the roles of rhythm, timbre and breath in expressing meaning. Solo Throat comes together as much through difference as similarity. Mitchener’s own solo improvisations sit alongside the work of Brathwaite, Césaire, Marson and Pritchard, forming a constellation of unlikely alignments which make no aesthetic conclusion. Instead, Solo Throat is a site of encounter, a plural de-composition of words into an assemblage of sounds and impulses, emphasising what Anthony Reed calls, “the play on and the surplus of margins of lyrical translation to resituate other pathways of expression”. Just as the poets cited use white space to complicate our act of reading, so Mitchener utilises silence and multiphonics to complicate the act of voicing and the way we listen. — Elaine Mitchener is a British Afro-Caribbean vocalist, movement artist and composer working between contemporary/experimental new music, free improvisation and visual art. She is currently a Wigmore Hall Associate Artist; was a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Fellow (2022) and was an exhibiting artist in the British Art Show 9 (2021-22). In February 2022 Mitchener was awarded an MBE for Services to Music. Her regular collaborators include: composers George E Lewis, Jennifer Walshe, and Tansy Davies; visual artists Sonia Boyce, Christian Marclay and The Otolith Group; chamber ensembles Apartment House, London Sinfonietta, Ensemble MAM, Ensemble Klang, and Klangforum Wien; choreographer Dam van Huynh’s company; and experimental musicians such as Moor Mother, Loré Lixenberg, Pat Thomas, Jason Yarde, Neil Charles and David Toop. — Recorded and engineered by Sean Woodlock at Hackney Road StudiosMastered by Sean McCannLayout by Jeroen WilleAll music and artwork by Elaine Mitchener

Recorded on Hayman Island off the coast of Queensland, Australia, the paths of stranded friends Ryko Kalinko (guitar & sampler) and Aemon Webb (vocals, guzheng & percussion) meet, creating an astonishing 3-part journey of deeply spiritual improvisations reflecting the beauty, isolation and nature of their vivid environment. “There Are Many Moods Of Tropical Exultation” carefully spends its 20+ minute track length conjuring a spell, bringing all dust in the room to settle. Smoke trails rise. Shade cloth quietly billows. Ryko and Aemon let their guitar and guzheng flow across and between one another, dissolving clock hands and carrying the listener into the twilight hours. “Stand For The Rush” introduces the B-side and shifts the sense of stillness towards something more rhythmic where the nocturnal world begins to open its eyes. Rattling drum machine percussion, slinking guzheng and chirping birds weave in and out of focus whilst booming kicks drive forward. A distant siren wails whilst life in surrounding undergrowth moves in shadows. Finally “These Waves…” drops the world into droning negative space where crushing black sky comes down. Crooning out into vast nothing. Murmuring; lost at sea. “Never coming home”.

LP ltd to 400, black vinyl, 2 color silkscreened jacket with obi (grey, tan), inserts and a postcard. An’archives are pleased to announce the release of a self-titled album by Tori Kudo & 3C123. A reissue of a cassette that was originally released on Uramado in 2020, this is the first time this live session has appeared on vinyl. The performance, featuring Kudo on piano and 3C123 on clarinet, was recorded on October 18, 2009, at the Uramado venue in Shinjuku. A beautiful and quixotic forty-minute set, it reconnects both Kudo and 3C123 with various musical histories, including those of classical composition and free improvisation.

On April 15th SA Recordings present a new LP and sample library from the acclaimed New York composer, performer and sound designer Lea Bertucci. A work of three interlinked incarnations, ‘Acoustic Shadows’ began as an event, which then became an album and has inspired a sample library for other musicians. The Event (recalled by Lea Bertucci) “Acoustic Shadows I-III was a series of site-specific musical performances and a sound installation that took place in the enclosed hollow body of the Deutzer bridge in Koln, Germany, 2018. Spanning approximately 440 meters across the Rhine river, the extraordinary acoustics and rich existing aural architecture of this site became crucial components of the installation and musical compositions. An 8-channel speaker system distributed throughout the bridge became activated by three instrumental performances that happened throughout the course of a week. Fragments of each performance were captured by microphones installed in the space and then played back through the 8-channels after the performance was over in a loop of overlapping moments, creating a sonic accumulation that takes place over long stretches of time - a musical performance with no clear ending. The first performance, for solo alto saxophone, served as the basis for the rest of the piece, as the sounds generated during this performance were played back as an installation throughout the following days. The second performance built upon the first, this time with an 8-piece brass ensemble. Again, the sounds produced here were captured in a similar fashion from the first performance and continued as an installation for the next few days. On the last day, a performance for three percussionists closed out the event and completed the project. I wanted to create elements within this project that directly responded to the auditory richness of the site. In each composition, I looked for particular instruments that would excite the acoustic characteristics of the space. With approximately 14 seconds of reverb, distinctive delay effects and a room tone of approximately 65 hz, the hollow body of the bridge provided a lush sonic backdrop to stage these pieces."

Solo Guitar 2 was recorded by Bill Nace in 2008, in a good-sounding room in Bennington, Vermont. This year the record, originally released as a now (nearly) extinct cassette, is reissued without it's mysterious and (maybe?) long-lost sibling Solo Guitar 1 (Like any good punk demo -- which, both aesthetically and energetically, Solo Guitar 2 is -- the thrill of discovery is made only sweeter by the potential of future discovery). The vinyl release comes a little less than a year after Bill's first 'official' solo record, Both, which was released by Drag City in May, 2020. The two records don't necessarily stand in opposition, but they are at different points on the spectrum of production, tone, mood, time, place, age, career. Where Both is softened by the warmth and precision of a studio, there's a wildness to Solo Guitar 2 which approaches the experience of witnessing Bill perform live. Made up of mostly brief pieces - songs, practically - Solo Guitar 2 winds tight, then unwinds, or sometimes snaps apart. Crackling, itchy static morphs into heavy, watery vibration, layered on metallic rattle. There are moments where that Bennington room sounds as sterile and lonely as a deserted art gallery. And then it becomes spacious and warm, like a cathedral filling with the hum of the universe. The bulk of Bill's releases are collaborations with other artists, who are drawn to him (at least in part) because he's an innovative player and a deep listener. Those qualities hold, and in certain ways intensify when he's on his own. As he takes a series of unlikely tools across his prone guitar with the grace and urgency of someone at a loom or an aircraft control panel, there's a sense of reaching inward. But where some might meander or navel-gaze, Bill's playing is a process of constant dynamic construction. What unfurls can feel intensely personal, and often - for reasons I don't always understand - very moving. Bill isn't interested in micromanaging his listeners' experiences, but he does make room for us. Composer Pauline Oliveros observed that when we listen deeply to the world around us, we sometimes notice very subtle and quiet differences in sounds that we thought were familiar. As a result, she writes, 'the slightest difference may lead you to a new creative relationship.' Bill is, I think, tuned in to these subtle and quiet differences. But, in a truly punk fashion, he flips this for the listener, making unfamiliar and not-very-subtle noise into something akin to (but also distinct from) familiar sounds: traffic outside your window, the soft roar of a conch shell to your ear, static between radio stations. Solo Guitar 2, full as it is of shades and moods and life, offers a fresh way of hearing. -Margaret Welsh Philadelphia, PA 2021

1,000 copies in yellow vinyl. Singing songs while playing ding dongs, Charlemagne Palestine’s solo voice over the bells of his studio carillon is a premiere in his recorded works, and possibly the first voice/carillon record in musical history. All the little shamanic stuffed deities inhabiting the carillon added their souls to the spirit of the reverberating songs, including a song in memory of Mika Vainio.

After a run of extremely under the radar cassette releases, Penultimate Press is proud to present the first vinyl collection of works by the Winnipeg outfit Korea Undok Group. With more hiss than a valley of snakes the various monikers here cover the gamut of contemporary practice traversing  industrial decay, rhythmic pulse onwards to piano etudes and fractured possession. All these forms come debossed with the signature destroyed tape aesthetic which makes these sharks so lonely.  180 gram vinyl on beautiful reverse board sleeve with passport style booklet all designed by KUG. This is a package that befits this unique scene of one, or many.  Side A Sargasso Sea – Richardson Centre  Sargasso Sea – Patria  Sargasso Sea – Winnipeg Downtown Skywalk Purple Circles – Under the Canopy by the Red River Sargasso Sea – Richardson Reading Terrace Side B Sargasso Sea – Canada Trust Korea Undok Group – This Fantasy Is Unhealthy Korea Undok Group – Quarto Korea Undok Group – There Is Always Somewhere Else

Building on nearly a decade of friendship, with an evolving creative partnership spanning roughly half that time, Swedish/Australian synthesist, John Chantler, and Danish saxophonist, Johannes Lund, return with Andersabo, their second outing as a duo.An intricate, thrillingly unbridled blast of carefully controlled sonic anarchy, pushing at the perceptual boundaries of conversant sound, Andersabo captures the collision of two sympathetic, but often radically different, creative pursuits - Chantler’s subtle complexity, composing for electronics, modular synthesis, and acoustic instruments, and Lund’s full tilt constructions for various saxophones, pointedly defying long standing expectations and syntaxes applied to his chosen instrument — in open dialog with landscape beyond.Recorded during the summer of 2019, while the duo were on a residency in rural Sweden, the LP’s three works present a radical rethinking of aural collectivism. Each is a space within which the environment and its many actors — the floorboards of a barn, a grassy field, distant hills, insects, the pulse of an electric fence, or a passing tractor, threaded with the tones and responses of Lund’s saxophone and Chantler’s pump organ and synth — are given equal presence and voice. A clear, conceptual extension of both artists’ long standing pursuits of collaboration and the building of context, whether creatively or as facilitators, notably via Chantler’s Edition Festival in Stockholm, and Lund’s work within the Danish community as a founder of the legendary space, Mayhem. Andersabo represents a rigorously forward thinking rendering of utopian sound, inextricable from the joy, playfulness, and humour with which it was made. Two artist bound by friendship, dramatically opening the sense of creative possibility for the next.A poignant reminder that art and its making, as serious as it is, can be thrilling, adventurous, and fun, the album’s opener, Back of the House, weaves an immersive and emotive tapestry of dancing texture and tone where the identity of generative sources flutter in and out of view, stripped of hierarchy. Shifting gears with the final minutes of the first side of the LP, Open Field & Forest packs a remarkable density into its length. Long, harmonic tones of a pump organ fall within a cavernous landscape, captured from beyond the farmhouse walls, its breadth riddled with unplaceable rumbles, clatters, and chirps, giving way as the animalistic howl of saxophone takes hold. With Under Barn Floor, stretching across the entirety of the LP’s second side, Chantler and Lund depart into a gripping, abstract portrait of time and place. Playfully pushing at the conceptual boundaries of drone, the hand of the artists rise and fall as the low frequencies of the bass saxophone and Chantler’s synthesized organ tones are challenged with interventions of insect sounds and countless, happenstance incidents, dancing with electronically generated images of themselves. A journey toward the future, locked within a discrete moment in time, which culminates as a collective intervention between voice, geography, ideas, and chance. An unpredictable bridge between acoustic and electronic composition and field recording, Andersabo offers a remarkable image of the rewards found through friendship, community, and uninhibited experimentation.     ---   Johannes Lund / bass saxophoneJohn Chantler / synthesizer, pump organ   --- Recorded by John Chantler and Johannes Lund, August 2019 on location at ANDERSABO, Sweden. Residency graciously hosted by Jason Dungan.Open Field & Forest and Under Barn Floor were mixed by John Chantler at The Royal College of Music (KMH) and Silence is Golden in Stockholm. Back of The House was mixed by Stephan Mathieu at Schwebung Mastering who also mastered the record. Vinyl was cut by Andreas 'LUPO' Lubich and pressed at Pallas.With support from Koda's Cultural Funds.

Royaume / Aimant + Aimant – is second in the three part re-issue series focussing on the works of Etant Donnes based around field recording and voice. Royaume (originally a CD on Touch, 1991) is made up of 4 tracks and is a kind of purifying travel through the four elements which symbolically refers to the light evoked by the colour green, an allegory of the grail and of the light- carrier angel. As to the poems, they tend to amount to their essentials, as is the case in Matin which is both Taoist and surrealistic. Aimant + Aimant – (originally as a split 10”/CD on Danceteria,1992) presents itself as a magical alchemical mantra based upon the force of love, the force of life. Two pole like two bodies like two hearts like two magnets. Like true buffoons from ultra – world , Eric and Marc Hurtado succeed in achieving what many sages consider to be the very purpose of magical art : to create one’s own ritual and , being one’s own referent, to become a vibrating point in the cosmos and be a receptacle for natural energy, like those bright patches or that black point recurring in their magical music, real poems-paintings and irremediably aiming , like an insect caught between the circle and the cross, in the heat of the sun in an attempt to merge with the Whole. – Stephane Duval

Heather Leigh takes her Throne as queen of pedal steel with a suite of heartbleed ballads cauterised with burning riffs. After the rawness of its precursor I Abused Animal, Throne is a record of late night Americana and heavy femininity; intimate love songs smoked in sensuality. The songs on Throne are woozy, gorgeous and uncomfortable, smothered in thick layers of bass but lifted by multitracked vocals. These are rich song forms that stand in contrast to the stripped down steel in her duo with Peter Brotzmann. Prelude To Goddess sashays in wearing leopard print jeans under the twinkling fluorescent illuminations of the British seaside, like Brighton Rock with extra bass. It is followed in by Lena – arguably Leigh's Jolene – a perverse love song soaked in a subversive sexuality, weighed down with a heavy pulse. Soft Seasons is anchored with sunken beats shrouded in wailing, growling steel and an earwormy melody. Gold Teeth, the longest track on the record, crests and breaks in waves; ecstatic peaks balanced and echoed by melancholic troughs. It soars on an updraft, and from cosmic heights dives seaward into a gnarly and riotous pedal steel breakdown, before catching the breeze again. Days Without You and Scorpio & Androzani are shorter, intimate songs, in the latter the synths seethe and the steel bows and bends as Leigh's voice falters above a Greek chorus of shadows and reflections. But this isn't autobiography, and Throne departs on Days Without You, a confrontationally unfinished romantic song, anxious with half-thoughts and missed connections. It glides into the night on stilettos leaving unanswered questions, in a fug of psychic disturbance and lovesick sensuality. Leigh's artwork (which she photographed and designed) is a visual mirror of the songs on Throne. It is an album of cosmic echoes, abstractions and introspection, of characters and stories that make up Leigh's first best pop record, its melodies and hooks set alight with the fiery core of her unique and distinctive pedal steel.

Before coming to Europe, in 1970, pianist Manuel Villarroel was a vet in his native Chilli. A few years later, as leader of the Machi Oul Big Band, he returned to the animal kingdom. A very specific kind of animal, for sure, the Quetzalcoatl, also known as the Feathered Serpent. What is behind this title (also the name of one of the three original compositions on this album released on the Palm label in 1976), is first and foremost a sort of homecoming… After discovering the jazz of Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Villarroel was taken by the free jazz which was all the rage at the time in America and Europe, and this would inspire the first version of his Machi-Oul, project. This was a septet, with which the pianist would record, in 1971, the tremendous Terremoto (re-released by Souffle Continu FFL085). After this masterstroke Villarroel was invited to record with Perception (Perception & Friends) and with Baikida Carroll (Orange Fish Tears). While these were notable contributions, Villarroel was already looking into other combinations. “I had to deal personally with my situation as an expatriate, without disavowing it. I tried not to betray my roots, I tried to translate into my music what was essential to me, to reflect my origins – Latin America, its musical and above all human feelings – while remaining faithful to jazz, which is the mode of expression of the musicians in the group”. This then is the ‘homecoming’ we mentioned, which would incite Manuel Villarroel to compose what he would call “structured free music”. In January 1972 the pianist enlarged his formation to reach the size of a real big band: the Septet became the Machi-Oul Big Band. Three years later in January 1975, with producer Jef Gilson at the helm, fifteen musicians including those from the old Septet (Jef Sicard, François and Jean-Louis Méchali, Gérard Coppéré) worked on a rare form of jazz. From togetherness to dissonance, we danse to it “Bolerito” then shake it up on “Leyendas De Nahuelbuta”. As for the concluding serpent, it is a piece which is impossible to pin down: “Quetzalcoat” is as impressive as it is difficult to grasp. To remind ourselves of this, lets listen to it again.

To abandon animals for music – and avant-garde jazz at that –, could seeming shocking to some people. However, it is exactly what Manuel Villarroel did, as he was a vet for three years before leaving his native Chili for Europe and a career in music. And though the animals may have suffered, the world of music can be grateful. Born in 1944, Manuel Villarroel lent an ear to the best pianists from North America: Oscar Peterson and Erroll Garner then Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner and Cecil Taylor. Manuel left Santiago in September 1970 to participate in the Contemporary Music Workshop in Berlin. To pursue his musical career, he rapidly decided to remain in Europe. The following year in Paris, Manuel began a quartet with saxophonist Jef Sicard (who would also play with his brother Patricio, in the Dharma Quintet). But the group would rapidly expand: Villarroel and Sicard added Gérard Coppéré (saxophone), William Treve (trombone), François Méchali (bass) and Jean-Louis Méchali (drums). And with the arrival of Sonny Grey, a Jamaican trumpeter heard ten years earlier with Daniel Humair, the Matchi-Oul Septet was complete. Complete and ready: on May 8th, 1971, Matchi-Oul was in the studio for Gérard Terronès’ Futura label. The septet recorded seven of the pianist’s compositions. A succession of tracks which flow magically from one to the next: from the first drum strokes to the last deep notes of the bass, the successive waves roll over the piano and whistle through the wind instruments. And when they all come together it gives even greater force to Villarroel’s beautiful songs. Terremoto is a masterpiece of collective expression: but what else could we expect from a “supergroup’’ of this stature?

L’Escalier des Aveugles, or The Stairway of the Blind, was commissioned in November 1990 by Spanish National Radio (Radio Nacional de España). Asked for a piece to premiere as part of the European Day of Music, Luc Ferrari returned with a radiophonic concept that organised his anecdotal music into montage form, sequencing short, elusive narratives in a successive way.The completed composition is formed of thirteen chapters containing a mixture of environmental and synthesised sound, commentary, chatter, and encounters with people and places. Each focuses on a small event within this playbook, and Ferrari notes that each “in addition to being a realistic photograph, will be the subject of a ‘setting to music’: fragments of voice and atmosphere will be sampled and will produce musical matter or a ‘song’.”The sonic language of Madrid forms the setting to which Ferrari lays out the persistent theme of the piece, that of the composer being guided throughout the city by a young woman. Using a game-like structure (liners for this edition include Ferrari’s “Regles de Jeu”, or “Rules of the Game” which act as a script or score to the piece) the motivation is posed: imagine that one day you are told “I know a place in Madrid that sounds amazing (or bizarre)”, to which you reply “Let’s go to it together.” The recordings toy with the relationships between guide and tourist, translator, director and actress, and masculine and feminine that emerge as Ferrari and the actresses follow this action, documenting the shared experience and connections they make as they visit these places.Six actresses guide Ferrari (and the listener) through locations simultaneously ordinary and sonically rich: the metro; the El Corte Inglés department store where we hear the gossip from changing rooms set against music emanating from the PA; vagabonds declaiming their political stance in the Conde de Barajas plaza; interactions buying apples in a market; the reverberant and spacious halls of the Prado Museum where one actress gives a moving description of her favourite painting - Goya’s The 3rd of May 1808.Ferrari replies in French to their comments in Spanish, and there are several self-referential plots, devices, and word games that flirt with the poetics and rhythm of language and sound. A recital of Lorca’s poem "La Casada Infiel" in “Hommage À Lorca” in amongst the location recordings feels striking, and the call and response of “La Nouvelle de L’Escalier”, where one of the actresses descends the staircase of the blind - a long stone stairway in Madrid proposed to Ferrari as an interesting location to visit during the trip by producer José Iges. She replies to Ferrari’s vocal enunciation of the place (and title) in French - L’Escalier des Aveugles - with the place-name in Spanish: La Escalera de los Ciegos.Using this repeated title and image of the staircase of the blind as a symbolic place, a line is drawn to a situational landscape experienced and diffused through snapshots and allusion rather than holistically overviewed, sound conjuring pictures within the imagination. In the sensorial qualities of Ferrari’s treatment of emotion and language—fortified with electro-acoustic motifs and musical properties—the piece accelerates towards a render that is truthful, beautiful, yet also surreal; somewhere between theatre and reality, a gonzo cinema of the ear.