n 1981, Joe McPhee culled together one of his greatest bands to record Topology, his classic outing for Hat Hut. Feturing an expanded version of Po Music, his ensemble with saxophonist André Jaume, guitarist Raymond Boni, and bassist François Mechali, the group included pianist Irene Schweizer, percussionist Pierre Favre, baritone saxophonist Daniel Bourquin, cellist Michael Overhage, and trombonist Radu Malfatti. One of the tracks left on the cutting room floor was a spectacular take on Ornette Coleman's composition "Lonely Woman," with McPhee on pocket cornet and haunting vocals by Tamia. Thirty one years later, Corbett vs. Dempsey is proud to present The Loneliest Woman, the full, uncut, 13 glorious minutes of music, available on this CD single for the first time ever. As McPhee says: "The Loneliest Woman is lonely no more!" Recorded in Boswil, Switzerland, March 25, 1981.

The first of two editions capturing Pat Thomas and XT's (Seymour Wright & Paul Abbot) enduring creative partnership, dedicated to renderings of Strata, Act (Joy Contemporary). This, the vinyl edition, encounters the trio in their second brilliant set at Cafe Oto on June 22, 2022 (while the second, X2 CD edition, listed separately, was recorded a Rote Fabrik in Zurich on June 10 + 11, 2022) Pianist Pat Thomas, saxophonist Seymour Wright (both of [ahmed]) and drummer Paul Abbott - the latter two working as XT - deliver a remarkable set of new music, each, re-imagining improvisation and synthetic ideas with acoustic and electronic tools. This monumental new suite Strata, Act (Joy Contemporary)* released by We Jazz Records on 30th January 2026 is spread across three release formats, the complete album includes more than 2 hours and 15 minutes of music recorded live in London and Zurich in summer 2022. Five tracks in total. complex, iterative whole that makes ideas live - back into tradition/s and out, on, into an infinite future. In 2018 the trio recorded a remarkable 80-minute tribute to the late Cecil Taylor "Akisakila" / Attitudes of Preparation (Mountains, Oceans, Trees) vigorously re-visiting his 1973 Tokyo trio Akisakila recording. Re-convening five years later to celebrate that release they imagined a-new, expanding that attitude to history through connected lenses of the traditions of British electro-acoustic-mystery: from the live electronics of Tony Oxley’s February Papers or Howard Riley’s Synopsis, to Leviticus’ Burial and Splash’s Babylon, plus of course Derek Bailey’s Domestic Jungle, and now up to their overlapping global-temporal experiments with, between them, Mark Fell, Anne Gills and RPBoo. The subtitles of each disc reveal something essential about the three musicians’ shared histories and ways of thinking-through-synthesizing ideas, time, space and sound. The LP, titled Strata, Act (Joy Contemporary)* London draws from UK improvising pioneer, guitarist Derek Bailey (on playing with Cecil) in its subtitle: “*(it's quite different to the other stuff, the earlier stuff. Without going into all kinds of detail which usually undersells the music, can't describe it. But it was a fine experience, and very memorable.)” Captured at London’s Cafe OTO, the LP hears Thomas & XT expand their acoustic trio each with liquid (dry and wet) electronics, as real and imagined instrumentation. We hear sounds of keys, sticks, reeds, pedals, (i)pads, plug-ins, body and breath and their potentials. We also hear the unique energy, space and feel of OTO a sui generis ecology in which all three musicians have worked and learned since its doors opened in 2008. And as you will hear, this night was a particularly wild, multi-species reception. Released as a double CD, Strata, Act (Joy Contemporary)* Zurich takes its sub-title from the great drummer, and live electrician, Tony Oxley (also on playing with Cecil): “*(is so much more immense if you prepare yourself to go where the music will take you, and not try and make the music go where you want it perhaps, or think it might go)”. Here we hear the music grow across two nights (one per disc), synthetic, bionic expanding, evaporating, electric, charging through time in ways that renders “genre” indistinguishable, irrelevant and even impossible. Two additional digital tracks added, “London FIRST SET” and “Zurich THREE” round up the release and connect back, in redux-miniature, to Attitudes[...]. This set is a multi-format document of some of the most adventurous, rare (and radical) creative musicians working today. Electronic-and-acoustic, real and imaginary, sounds, times, scales and proportions that extends out of and collapses into musical space in dialogue with past and future.

“Dec. 2015: I received an invitation from Old Heaven to participate with FaUSt to the 3rd edition of “Tomorrow Festival” at B10 Live, Shenzhen, China! A few months later, May 2016, we were on our way to the most exciting concert experience. A loooong flight-haul and then, such a warm welcome, such a perfect organization… the most charming, dedicated, competent crew around us… the largest cement mixer I ever used on stage, and an audience so vibrant, so focused. I was and still am in memory, overwhelmed by the endless energy of all the people I met: technicians, promoters, music fans, the so-creative Knitting Ladies, my old-time friend Keiji Haino, and my comrade Maxime. The music we created together had been accurately recorded. As Old Heaven proposed to release this concert, I immediately was enthused by the idea. Even more so when I heard the perfect mix of Liu Ying. Two tracks were beautifully post-produced, edited and mixed by Amaury Cambuzat. I loved the B10 Live performance and place it in my top ten FaUSt concerts ever and I love this album, I do. ” —— JHP / art-Errorist --- Recorded at the 3rd Tomorrow Festival on May 14, 2016. B10 Live, Shenzhen, China. Published by Old Heaven Books & B10 Live, Shenzhen 2022. Tomorrow Festival Series OH 036 录音 Recording：曾君 Zeng Jun；罗绿野 Luo Lvye混音 Mixing & 母带处理 Mastering：刘英 Liu Ying编辑 Editing & 混音 Mixing：Amaury Cambuzat（track 06/C2 & 08/D1）制作人 Producer：涂飞 Tu Fei统筹 Coordinators：李书琴 P.G，尹思卜 Yin Sibo设计 Design：Nino摄影 Photography：艾飞 Effy，大米，惠子@DAFA，肖蔚鸿 Xiao Weihong，子弹，左氏文化特别鸣谢 Special Thanks：黄可 Huang Ke，李秭林 Li Zilin，邹佳伟 Zou Jiawei Jean-Hervé Péron - 人声 Vocals / 贝斯 Bass / 原声吉他 Acoustic Guitars / 小号 Trumpet / 水泥搅拌机 Cement MixerWerner “Zappi” Diermaier - 鼓 Drums 特邀嘉宾 Very Special Guests：Maxime Manac’h - 键盘 Keyboards / 吉他 Guitar/ 煤气罐 Gas Cylinder / 手摇风琴 Hurdy-Gurdy灰野敬二 Keiji Haino - 人声 Vocals / 电吉他 Electric Guitars / 电子设备 Electronics魏籽 Wei Zi, Tina, 郦亭亭 Li Tingting - 针织行为表演 Knitting PerformanceB10 Live, Shenzhen, China!

Langham Research Centre’s radiophonic experiments are twisted into new shapes on Tape Reworks Vol. 1, a split EP featuring remixes by renowned experimental musician Jim O’Rourke and Berlin-based industrial band Group A. On Side A, Jim O’Rourke uses ‘Quasar Melodics’ as his source material, transforming fizzing grains of sound into an oceanic swirl of noise. On the flip, Group A find metallic rhythms and eerie melancholy in ‘Perpetual Motion’.

Tape Reworks, Vol. 2 is the fourth project by Langham Research Centre released on Nonclassical. Following the success of their Tape Works, Vol. 1 and subsequent Tape Reworks, Vol. 1 (which featured remixes by Jim O’Rourke and Group A), this EP presents two remixes of tracks from Tape Works, Vol. 2: ‘Movable Fields’, remixed by Kara-Lis Coverdale, and ‘Nachholbedürfnis’, remixed by Beatriz Ferreyra. Kara-Lis Coverdale’s ‘Movable Fields’ is an icy soundscape, gently moving at a glacial pace, evoking the feel of a field recording from a strange planet. ‘Movable Fields’ draws from elements of two Tape Works Vol. 2 tracks, Accarezzo and Terminal Voltage Traces. Ferreyra’s remix of ‘Nachholbedürfnis’ is a dadaist cacophony of bleeps and lo-fi scratchy samples, darting chaotically throughout the track in true GRM fashion. The original album utilized recordings made in specific locations, particularly brutalist buildings, as an audio manifestation of modernism.

Tape Works (Vol. 2) offers a new discovery of Langham Research Centre’s ever expanding analogue sound library, with its crystal clear recordings and effects. Humans and humour feature in each work, single voices or crowds milling and the spaces they occupy. This unique ‘sonotech’ is rooted in the cacophony of the real world. In fact each and every sound is so artfully articulated that the whole album makes you want to grab a microphone and recorder and get out there and start recording and transforming whatever sonic treats you can find.

“Exquisite musique concrète”, Seth Colter Walls in The New York Times www.nytimes.com/2022/04/28/arts/music/new-classical-music-albums.html “Natasha Barrett makes musique concrète feel like a thrilling adventure film”, Agata Kik in The Quietus thequietus.com/articles/31267-natasha-barrett-heterotopia-review “Natasha Barrett's intriguing compositions come across as mysterious sonic spaces that exist nowhere on earth” Richard Allen in A Closer Listen acloserlisten.com/2022/03/03/natasha-barrett-heterotopia/

Egypt’s “official” popular music throughout much of the 20th Century was a complex form of art song steeped in tradition, well-loved by the middle and upper classes, and even accommodating to certain non-Arabic influences. It was highly structured by professional musicians working an established industry centered in the capitol, Cairo.However, far from the bustling cosmopolitan center of Cairo, north and northwest, in towns like Tanta and Alexandria and extending across the Saharan Desert to the Libyan border, dozens of fully marginalized artists were developing a raw, hybrid shaabi/al-musiqa al-shabiya style of music, supported by smaller upstart, independent labels, including the short-lived but deeply resonant Bourini Records.Launched in the late 1960s in Benghazi, Libya, Astuanat al-Bourini اسطوانات البوريني (Bourini Records) published some 40 to 50 titles from 1968 to 1975. Bourini released 7-inch 45 RPM singles by 15 artists, all but one of them Egyptian, igniting brief careers for Alexandrian singer Sheikh Amin Abdel Qader and the blind Bedouin legend Abu Bakr Abdel Aziz (aka Abu Abab).The tracks compiled here comprise a full range of styles covered by the label, while highlighting some of its most gob smacking moments, from Basis Rahouma’s beastly transformation into a growling and barking man-lion by the end of “Yana Alla Nafsa Masouda,” to Reem Kamal’s hopeful-if-bitter handclapping party pivot “Baed Al Yas Yjini,” which descends into an almost Velvet Underground outro-groove of nihilistic dissonance. All the tracks on this compilation were laid down in stark divergence from the mainstream Egyptian popular music topography of heightened emotions buoyed by lush arrangements. The contrast is most evident in Mahmoud al-Sandidi’s “Ana Mish Hafwatak,” wherein his voice weaves heavily but deftly through a constant accordion drone, and Abu Abab’s “Al Bint al Libya,” a sparse, slow-burning lament with minimal percussion, violin, and Abab’s nephew Hamed Abdel Muna'im Mursi on lyre. Whereas the Egyptian mainstream was aspirational, attempting to reflect Egyptian culture at its most refined, the performances captured by Bourini were manifestations of everyday life lived by the mostly otherwise ignored masses.More than half century old, this music has lost none of its urgency, presence, or relevance. We hear these artists as if they’d just joined us in our living room, and not on a stage decades ago surrounded by tens of thousands of long-forgotten acolytes.

2023 repress of the OTOROKU re-issue of the legendary English free improvisation LP 'The Topography of The Lungs' by Evan Parker, Derek Bailey and Han Bennink. This was Evan Parker’s first recording as a "leader" and was the first release on Incus, the label Parker founded with guitarist Derek Bailey and drummer Tony Oxley. This re-issue has been produced from an original vinyl pressing from Evan's archives - carefully transcribed and restored by Andreas [LUPO] Lubich at Calyx in Berlin and features the original liner notes from Parker along with updated notes penned in 2014. "To talk further of the music we play is difficult. It’s criteria for success exist, but are elusive and indefinable beyond the intuitive level. We operate without rules (pre-composed material) or well-defined code of behaviour (fixed tempi, tonalities, serial structures etc.), and yet are able to distinguish success from failure." - From Evan Parker’s original liner notes (1970) This pressing of The Topography of The Lungs comes in a limited edition of 500 copies.

vintage recordings from the EMI Archive in Hayes, this album uncovers the dizzy beginnings of the golden age of African music — zinging with the social and political ferment of the independence movement and anti-colonianalism, after the Second World War — and the daredevil origins of Congolese rumba, the entire continent’s most popular music in the sixties and seventies. The new music grew in concert with a burgeoning night life — especially in the twin capitals of Leopoldville (today’s Kinshasa) on the Belgian side,  and Brazzaville on the French, where humming factories lured increasing numbers of rural Congolese with the offer of a steady, relatively well-paying job. Brazzaville had its celebrated nightclub, Chez Faignond, but most of the action took place across the river in much larger Leopoldville. There, Avenue Prince Baudouin, a ribbon of pavement connecting the white ville and black cite sections of the segregated capital, afforded easy access to a giddying number of bars. Labourers and clerks, fresh from work, jostled with thieves and dandies and a few adventuresome whites in the thicket of the Avenue’s cross streets. Music wafting from hangouts like the Kongo Bar and Congo-Moderne, the pungent scent of cooking fires, hawkers’ cries — Chewing gum! Cigarettes! Roast meat! — bombarded the senses and enfeebled self-control. Inside, beer flowed, and dancers glided in European-style embrace. (Adikwa Depala’s song here about the C.C.T., the Congolese Tobacco Company, is encoded with verbal play about cannabis.) The ‘coastmen’ or popo, West African immigrants who came to Congo for work, headed for the Siluvangi. Henri Bowane’s Quist occasionally hosted Brazzaville’s Negro Jazz. Nearby, the Air France usually strained to capacity, and beyond it the O.K. Bar would offer its stage and its name to the great band of Franco and Vicky. More numerous open-air bars crowded back yards and side lots, arrayed in lights and fenced to discourage freeloaders. Children hung like bats from neighbouring trees, hoping to glimpse their favourite stars and check out the grownups at play. The astonishing inventions of Europe and America also played an important role in the music’s development. Echoes of music exported in the slave trade came home on radios and records. Congolese musicians who strayed from the traditional realm with its plethora of lutes and likembes (thumb pianos) — all the various indigenous instruments — began to master imported guitars and horns by mimicking what they heard. The jazz of Louis Armstrong and the ballads of European torch singers like Tino Rossi captured the imagination of the rapidly expanding working class — and then the familiar-sounding music of Latin America, in the form of the shiny shellac of HMV’s GV series of 78s (G for the English Gramophone Company; V for Victor in the US). Local musicians swapped the Spanish of the originals for Congolese languages like Lingala or Kikongo. In his version of Peanut Vendor, included here,  on top of his musical changes Depala replaces the seller’s cry of ‘mani’, or peanut, with a lovelorn lament for a woman named Moni — a neat encapsulation of one step in the evolution of Congolese music. The guitarist Depala went on to land a spot in the house-band of the prestigious Loningisa studio. Others failed to gain equivalent recognition, but their music was no less impressive. Listen to likembe player Boniface Koufidilia as he makes the transition from traditional to modern in the first few seconds of Bino, which then hits you with a vamping violin whilst he muses about death (including that of the popular Brazzaville musician Paul Kamba). Andre Denis and Albert Bongu both echo the the sounds of palm-wine brought to the Belgian Congo by the coastmen. The sweet vocal harmonies of Vincent Kuli’s track were learned perhaps in a mission church. Rene Mbu’s nimble, likembe-like guitar plucking shines on Boma Limbala. Is Laurent Lomande using a banjo as a backdrop to Elisa? Aren’t those kazoos, buzzing along on Jean Mpia’s Tika? It’s as if the musicians, fired up by the times in their zeal for experimental self-expression, tossed into a bottle some new elements and some old, some from near and some far, and then shook it hard, to see what would happen. With notes by Gary Stewart, author of Rumba On The River; translations and rare photographs; sound restoration at Abbey Road.

"Far View is a collection of 15 tracks drawn exclusively from across Vandroogenbroeck’s years with Coloursound, in remastered analogue form. If the titles necessarily leave little to the imagination, styles and moods range far and wide, though as you’d expect, many reflect the trends of their time'

For this collaborative release, Eiko & Jim edited and remixed material captured at shows they played during a lovely two week tour through France, Switzerland, Italy and Ireland in April 2023. Pareidolia shapes an ideal collage from the best resonances and relationships from those nights. A dynamic medley of color and shape to pulse through earbuds, speaker cones and the air around you, appealing to your suggestibility, wherever you find it.

Maple's third full-lenth outing and the first offering on Drag City. Produced by Michael Gira of The Swans. This is their unique take on Rock n' Roll High School.

More Free Jazz fire from Superior Vaiduct: One of the greatest artiifacts from St Louis' Black Artists Group, Julius Hemphill's seminal debut,  Featuring the all-star line up of Hemphill, Baikida Carroll, Abdul Wadud, Phillip Wilson, and Hamiet Bluiett.  "Julius Hemphill's debut record, 1972's Dogon A.D., was self-produced for his Mbari imprint, and it was issued with a beautiful black-and-white cover. Very DIY. The label's name writ large along the bottom edge, like it was the band's name. It's a quartet record featuring Hemphill on alto and flute, with Baikida Carroll on trumpet, Abdul Wadud on cello, and Phillip Wilson on drums – a classic jazz front line/rhythm section format, but nothing conventional about the way the music sounds. "The long track – from where the LP takes its title – is one of the key epic statements of new jazz in the era. Among its remarkable distinctions, it manages to draw on Wilson's schizoid experience having been a member of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and the first drummer for the Art Ensemble of Chicago, in making an 11/8 rhythm into a staggeringly funky thing of joy. Over the course of fourteen and a half minutes, Hemphillbuilds a nearly continuous solo, his spiritual blood brother Wadud sawing the cello with a deep blues soulfulness that is raw and mantra-like in its repetitive incantation. It feels right and wrong in equal measure, the theme carrying its own piquancy with honked barnyard dissonances and some contrary motion between the horns and string. Most of all, it takes its own sweet time, in no hurry to get anywhere in particular, but out for a righteous stroll." – John Corbett (excerpt from the liner notes)

Music in Continuous Motion, Bill Orcutt’s latest entry in his 21st-century repertoire of quartet guitar music, pointedly steps away from the cut-and-paste constructivism of Music for Four Guitars into a sonic stratum that's yearningly melodic, resolutely human, and built for performance. Conceived for a 2026 NYC concert, Music in Continuous Motion shares the concision of its predecessor -- but rather than the discrete, mechanistic precision of Music for Four Guitars, the tracks on Music in Continuous Motion unify — each song weaving four gleaming threads into the warp and weft of an evolving, complex texture that employs simple, repeating motifs to build new melodies from counterpoint itself. It accomplishes this in the most efficient manner possible: most of these 12 tracks hover around two-and-a-half minutes, each iterating first the substrate, then the melody and its variations, then slamming shut like a clockwork music box.Based on previous recorded evidence, Orcutt is fond of boundary conditions for his studio guitar records. Much of the time, his launchpad is obvious (The Four Louies, How to Rescue Things); with others, it’s intentionally obscured. When recruiting me to write about each release, he might send me a clue (“This is a bridge pickup record more than a neck pickup record,” Orcutt helpfully offered for Music for Four Guitars). Although any given dispatch is a potential red herring, up until now, each has implied an Oulipian conceit (however obtuse) that at least somewhat determines the outcome. Thus, I was a bit surprised by his statement on Music in Continuous Motion -- “The mystery of how [the] same person, same process, same gear produces different results." When pressed, he elaborated that the record features “no triplets,” something I’ve yet to count out to determine for myself.Whatever overarching form the recording process may have mapped out, the path of the finished album is explicitly poetic. Echoing its predecessor, the song titles, read in sequence, paint fleetingly-glimpsed forms -- but in contrast to the distant shapes described in Music For Four Guitars, the present narrative spotlights the dance of polygons momentarily grasped (and then lost) as they spin through space: “Because sharp also smooth,” “And warm to the touch,” “Now nearly gone,” “Yet always moving,” “Impossible to reach.” Ultimately, the key difference between the albums (and what places Music in Continuous Motion in the realm of poetry) is its celebration of movement over immutability, of melody over form, of music as a hot wire to the heart rather than another upped ante in an arms race of inscrutability. — TOM CARTER

stunning new solo Orcutt recorded live at Oto  Another Perfect Day is Bill Orcutt's first solo electric guitar record since 2017’s eponymous Bill Orcutt. While that eight-year gap might not seem like a ton of time on the cosmic scale, it nonetheless represents a busy half-decade plus for Orcutt projects: a raft of improv collaborations, an acclaimed run of chopped and looped albums on Fake Estates, and the collision of Orcutt's computer and guitar music on Music For Four Guitars and last year's How to Rescue Things, both on Palilalia. The undeniable alchemy of those latter mashups inspired not only a wider appreciation of Orcutt-as-composer, but also the resurrection of Orcutt-as-bandleader, as the Bill Orcutt Quartet hit the road in support of Four Guitars, Orcutt's first work with a proper score (courtesy of Shane Parish). All of the above makes 2025 the perfect year to reacquaint ourselves with Orcutt-as-solo-performer, wielding his trademark four-string rather than a mouse, running the neck rather than shuffling waveforms, blasting through Cafe Oto's tattered Fender Twin (the cover model for the aforementioned How to Rescue Things) rather than a pair of ancient NS-10s. Indeed, this 2023 performance at Oto, East London's finest music establishment, boomerangs back into the slashing chords and frenzied double-picking of the Harry Pussy years, tossing the gentler melodic glow of the last few solo records into the dustbin. In other words, this may be Orcutt's most overtly punk-rockist record since Gerty Loves Pussy, his first solo electric LP from a decade ago. It's an affirmation that Orcutt is above all a lead player -- angular runs scaling the heavens, ricocheting back to ground zero before climbing again. Orcutt builds tension with short phrases, repeated with slight variability until it seems like they’ll never stop, finally slamming into a fresh line like the dawning valley at the crest of the mountain pass. Another Perfect Day is, ultimately, something of a solo guitar Nouveau Roman, an exhilarating run through melodic reiteration, impossible crescendos (check out those ecstatic crowd hoots on "For the Drainers") breaking into — a moment rarely found on an Orcutt record — soft, whisper-quiet tracer notes at the end of "A Natural Death." Another Perfect Day returns Orcutt to the immediacy of his earliest records while maintaining the melodic complexity, phrasing, and flow of a player, who's been going, what — four-plus decades now? And when he taps his roots, it's a reminder of exactly what was so exciting about Orcutt's playing in the first place. — TOM CARTER

A feverish essay of transcendent drumming: Chris’ solo approach, rooted in the exploration of elements of extended technique, sought another level, via possibilities facilitated by a self-made string drum! The Key (Became The Important Thing [& Then Just Faded Away]) brings his encompassing focus on free improvisation and noise into a granular fusion with acoustic experiments and hot-wired ideations of hard rock riffing and the post-punk sound.

Minimalist avant-rock from experimentalist Dreyblatt: ultra-rhythmic overtones created from striking piano strings strung to a bass. LP originally released in 1982 by India Navigation Records