1. Coming Together - 19:11 2. Attica - 06:31 3. Les Moutons De Panurge - 16:08This milestone of the avant-garde music, published in 1974 by the historic Opus One, was a very significant political awareness. With Coming Together and Attica, Rzewski celebrates in music the famous revolt of the American prison in 1971. The texts of Sam Melville and Richard X. Clark make pulsating and alive the invocations of the prisoners; full of pathos, these fragments of life oscillate between a confessional tone and the hymn to freedom, in a touching emblem of compassion. The fixity of the sound images is incisive, unnerving and melancholic, embroidering a solid minimalist repetition. The different combination of the verses produce a psychosis or obsession of a cathartic experience, at the same time emotional, physical and mental. Together with great guests such as Alvin Curran, Jon Gibson, Garrett List and Karl Beger, Rzewski seems to merge his radical vocation with the most meditative and suffered plots of the spiritual jazz; sealing all with Les Moutons Des Panurge, an amazing suite for percussion, a timeless masterpiece of polyrhythmic expertise.

The third release on the Henning Christiansen Archive features a previously unreleased work from 1991. The Wandering Human Being – The Wandering Voice, as the title suggest is a piece for voice and featurues Carlo Quartucci, Carla Tatò, Ursula Reuter Christiansen and Henning Christiansen. Ursula and Henning met the couple Carlo Quartucci and Carla Tatò through the curator Johannes Gachnang on a visit to Genazzano in Italy 1983 and became close friends, collaborating on a variety of projects, most notably on Carlo and Carla’s epic adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist’s play Penthesilea (forthcoming on The Henning Christiansen archive). The Wandering Human Being – The Wandering Voice came about from a conversation between the four of them whilst on a beach on the island of Møn in the eastern sea in Denmark, looking south. Here they all laughed at the realisation that on the other ide of Europe in this direction was Sicily where Carlo and Carla lived. The island Sicily, The island Møn. As Henning says “The human-being was wandering from sea to sea”. Henning saw no difference in their way over life ‘over there’ and mused on the means of which we cross over oceans and move around facilitating awareness of the same family of human being. People from islands meet people from islands and they can all look across vast waters and laugh together. Human-basic-technology This conversation and collective realisation of the simplicity of it all lead to this work which is one of the finest in Henning’s vast catalogue. L´essere Umano Errabando La Voce Errabando is a mantra for four voices, the sound of the ocean, a pvc tube, effects and wind instument. The piece moves in an organic hypnotic fashion lulling and rolling, ebbing and flowing over the two sides of the record. Rudimentary phrases in various languages interlope and weave a mystical music, as primitive as it is ‘contemporary’. The Wind, The Stars, etc are repeated over in random untrained fashion. The two couples from different countries weave voices, words and language into a common sonic fabric which eradicates identity, the idea of ‘national’, the idea of country, the idea of difference. Unlike anything else in Henning’s output L´essere Umano Errabando La Voce Errabando is a calm and meditative work which rolls along two sides wrapping the listener in a random melancholic meditative mantra. Only Henning Christiansen could summon such haunting, beautiful, gothic music carved from political hope. Limited LP in an edition of 500 copies with:  Large bespoke fold out sleeve on grey board with white reverse Printed inner sleeve 195 x 280 booklet Front Cover drawing by Ursula Reuter Christiansen Design and Concept by Maja Larsson Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi

First ever vinyl reissue of highly sought after French experimental jazz from the legendary Jef Gilson Remastered from the master tapes. * In 1971, the day after the death of Igor Stravinsky, Jef Gilson and his Unit (Pierre Moret and Jean-Claude Pourtier) made this curious homage to classical music. It is jazz, contemporary and electroacoustic music that the trio interrogate through a wild ‘noise’ session evoking as much John Cage as Pierre Henry, John Coltrane as the Percussions de Strasbourg, the Art Ensemble of Chicago as the Tacet by Jean Guérin. Le Massacre du Printemps, (the Massacre of Spring) is a strange kind of homage to Igor Stravinsky, who had just died when, in 1971, Jef Gilson recorded this not-to-be-missed album of French experimental jazz. “Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end” the Russian composer was quoted as saying and here is Gilson offering us... six! A funny bird (of fire) was Jef Gilson. Clarinetist who came up playing in the basement clubs with Claude Luter and Boris Vian, he turned to piano and multiplied his experiences in jazz: bebop, choral, modal, free, fusion... As a free spirit, Gilson welcomed many ‘up and coming’ French musicians in his bands (Jean-Luc Ponty, Bernard Lubat, Michel Portal, Henri Texier...) as well as being associated with Woody Shaw, Nathan Davis or Byard Lancaster. Later he would go on to create, Europamerica, a transatlantic formation in which Butch Morris, Frank Lowe, and Joe McPhee would play... But for the time being it’s a massacre! With Pierre Moret on organ and Jean-Claude Pourtier on drums, Gilson improvises with style and gusto. On the eponymous title track of the album, he also plays tuba and invites Claude Jeanmaire to get involved on prepared piano. Spring, for the four musicians here, is windswept: billowing, rumbling, frantic, it sounds like Stravinsky played by the ‘Percussions de Strasbourg’ without a scoresheet! After which, behind his electric piano, Gilson with Moret and Pourtier offers us five more “unpremeditated spontaneous expressions”, as he wrote on the back of the album sleeve. Five wily and electric expressions which are like the soundtrack to a film which could also have been played by the Art Ensemble or Jean Guérin. So, when, in the same text, Gilson expresses the hope that we will get “from this album the same pleasure that we had making it”, we can but reply: how could it be otherwise? --- Released December 2020, Souffle Continu

"Derek Bailey’s guests for Company Week at London’s ICA in July 1982 were contemporary classical pianist Ursula Oppens, folk/jazz singer-turned-improviser Julie Tippetts and her partner pianist Keith Tippett, violinist/electronics wizard Philipp Wachsmann, guitarist Fred Frith, trombonist George Lewis, harpist Anne LeBaron, and from Japan free jazz bassist Motoharu Yoshizawa and sound artist Akio Suzuki. Altogether they performed the stunning extended improvisation Epiphany.In different, more intimate lineups they detonated numerous Epiphanies. Here, to start, Yoshizawa and Oppens (both on the keyboard and inside her piano) bounce ideas off each other like ping-pong balls. Then Tippetts, Wachsmann and Bailey do extraterrestrial cubist flamenco; and Lewis and Frith rumble at everyone magnificently.Tippett and Oppens kaleidoscope the entire history of the piano into just over fifteen minutes (Fourth and Fifth) with added seasoning from LeBaron and Wachsmann. To close, Akio Suzuki — despite once describing himself as “pursuing listening as a practice” — makes one hell of a racket with his self-made instruments: a flute, a spring gong and his analapos (two single-lidded cylinders attached by a long steel coil, which he can manipulate and strike, besides vocalising into the tube). Yoshizawa and Bailey give him a real run for his money, and it all builds to an ecstatic, swirling, grinding climax, with Suzuki whooping and hollering wildly."

Maxed out and burning hot nasty, Electric Rag brings together the electric organs, electronics and alto sax of Jean-Luc Guionnet, with the closely amplified drums and percussion of Will Guthrie. After years of playing together in the minimalist pointillist free jazz noise core trio ‘The Ames Room’ (with Clayton Thomas on bass) Electric Rag offers up  another point of view on a musical history of nearly 15 years of playing together.The 8 titles of Electric Rag draw on their various experience in electronic music, free improvisation and experimental sound research, however the music is deeply rooted in their love of jazz, in its most potent, aggressive and antisocial form. --- Kythibong, 2021

Absolutely astounding, first ever reissue from Art Into Life, of little known artist, Colette Roper's lone LP of solo piano pieces, originally issued by Dieter Roth's Verlag in 1979. A stunningly beautiful left-field minimalist marvel that's high among the  great holy grails in the canon of "Artist Records". Considered one of the most influential contemporary artists, Dieter Roth was consistent in his artistic search for inner self through and produced artworks in the various media, from graphics, drawings, and sculptures, to assemblages / ready-made, sound and music recordings. Dieter Roth's Verlag was founded in 1974 under the name Dieter Roth's Familienverlag and renamed in 1978. The label gradually acquired something of a cult status the 1970s, and Colette Roper’s “Piano Pieces”, which was released in 1979, was one of the hardest to find album among Dieter Roth's Verlag catalogues. Much is unknown about Colette Roper and “Piano Pieces” was her only album. The front sleeve features a hand-drawn butterfly on yellow background, the rear sleeve features a photograph of women with a bunch of flowers in their hands and poems. And the work engraved on the vinyl is rough-hewn piano minimalism with a lot of hiss and fragile innocence. As with Dieter Roth's artworks, there is underlying feel of decay and metamorphosis. Primitive innocence and enigmatic elements featured in this obscure album will provoke various speculations about many other elements hidden inside.

Deluxe gatefold LP, edition of 300 copies, includes a 12 page inset booklet with photographs, plus liner notes by Arnold Dreyblatt, and a download of the album dropped to your account. Cover artwork by Dan Solbach, mastered by Rashad BeckerPhillip Sollmann (Efdemin) and PAN alumnus Konrad Sprenger’s ‘Modular Organ System’ stands at the crest of a years-long re-evaluation of the Pipe Organ in new music, from Japanese artist FUJI||||||||||TA’s attempt to personalise and adapt its vast machinations into a hand-operated, portable device, to famed organ tuner and composer Kali Malone’s focus on alternate tuning systems, or Kara-Lis Coverdale’s reading of the pipe Organ as a form of early speech synthesis, in which the organ literally transmutes the voice of God. The duo investigate and enact potential new methods to democratise and future-proof the instrument, with engrossing results that come highly recommended if you’re into any of the aforementioned artists, or indeed work by Ellen Fullman, Ellen Arkbro, Éliane Radigue, Sarah Davachi or La Monte Young.     Sollmann and Sprenger here tackle some of the most controversial and interesting aspects of the organ - an instrument that since ancient Greek and Roman times was devised to allow a single performer to produce a larger ensemble sound. ‘Modular Organ System’ started life in 2017 as an installation piece devised by the duo as a new model for a modular system that could be used for composition, performance and tool development in acoustic space. This album is the first proper documentation of that work, offering two long-form drone compositions that consider space, tonality and acoustics. Sprenger built his first organ as far back as 2002, but for this iteration the duo built the system out of tubes, air pumps and vibrating reeds, which they could place around a space as if the instrument were a sculpture. Visitors were encouraged to wander around the installation and wonder as the sound shifted; sometimes hearing just electrical buzzing from its motors, and sometimes just its engrossing low end frequencies. “The visitor has the impression of being inside an organ itself," composer Arnold Dreyblatt writes in the liner notes, "rather than listening to it externally." On 'Modular Organ System', we don't have the benefit of being able to physically move around the space, but we do get to interface with the root of Sollmann and Sprenger's process: its peculiar tonality, commanding sound, and hypnotic interplay of airy, ancient drone. They use pure power to lull us into the opening side, with non-tempered harmonics that boom from the speakers. Even without seeing the instrument itself, it's easy to hear its unusual properties - at times sounding like archaic, phased woodwind playing alongside a church organ, or atonal bagpipes in the distance, over a hill or a mountain. The slow-moving wails connect us wholly to history, but the recording and texture feel decidedly modern. On the dense, overpowering second side, the duo layer their drones into a wall of humming vibrations. These elements crack and distort naturally, sounding as powerful as Tim Hecker's signature granulations but blessed with spiritual magic. Midway into the piece, the drones descend into near silence before building again into a slowly chugging rhythm that seems to directly reference Sollmann and Sprenger’s motorik collaborations with Oren Ambarchi, and which leave us re-evaluating the instrument’s technological and historical boundaries. It makes for a stunningly meditative, disorienting listen.

Sept duos pour guitar acoustique et piano préparé is the second duo recording from Stephen O’Malley and Anthony Pateras. Their first together, Rêve Noir (2018), took an electro-acoustic scalpel to a 2011 duo concert for electric guitar and piano, using Revox and digital treatments to twist and smear gig documentation into ghostly echoes and fractured drones. Here, in contrast, the music is entirely acoustic and presented as it was performed, without overdubs. Both players’ choices of instruments are notable: this is O’Malley’s most extensive recording on steel string acoustic guitar (playing an instrument whose previous owners include Marissa Nadler and Glenn Jones) and Pateras return to the prepared piano, which he has rarely employed in recent years, after spending much of the first decade of the 21st century exploring its possibilities. Recorded during O’Malley’s residency at La Becque on Lake Geneva in the summer of 2021, from the first moments of the opening ‘déjà revé’ the music immediately establishes the distinctive landscape of chiming tones and hovering clouds of resonance explored throughout its one-hour running time. Pateras’ preparations create tolling bell-like tones alive with complex overtones, alongside which O’Malley’s open strings and natural harmonics add a sparkling clarity. While Pateras’ music often uses a densely chromatic harmonic language, these duos are remarkable for their modal simplicity. However, the interaction between the pure intervals of O’Malley’s just-intoned strings and the unstable harmonies created by the piano preparations suspends the music in an oneiric state of hazy ambiguity. Without obvious reference to tempo or meter, the music floats in what the composer Ernstalbrecht Stiebler has called a ‘bottomless sound space’, the temporal placement of events determined by bodily rhythms and the performers’ own listening to (and enjoyment of) the sounds being made. Heard one way, this music can seem striking in its consistency, almost environmental. Attending more carefully, the listener hears the pitch sets and tunings changing throughout the album’s length. Each piece has its own character, subtly distinguished from the others through mood, pacing, and timbre. On ‘déjà voulu’, for instance, O’Malley makes prominent use of slide, the woozy, bending pitches weaving through a series of lush arpeggiated chords from the piano. ‘Déjà senti’, on the other hand, is particularly spare, the gestures spaced out to the extent that they often float in isolation against the background of fading resonance. Much of ‘déjà su’ is built around a slowly pulsing single prepared piano tone, creating an almost ominous tension, whereas the sparkling guitar harmonics and arpeggios of the closing ‘déjà raconté’ have a gently triumphal air. While the music’s calm, rippling surface is immediately entrancing, these seven duos – in the tradition of the best improvised music – also reward close listening, which reveals sonic details and focuses the listener’s attention on how the music unfolds spontaneously from decision to decision, from gesture to gesture. Recorded during a period when O’Malley and Pateras were grieving the loss of recently departed friends and collaborators, these seven duos possess a reflective, at times almost mournful quality. More importantly, though, they are imbued with other qualities that can arise from personal loss: a clarity that allows one to clear away the inessential, to begin again, to renew one’s faith in friendship and music. — Out now on a limited 2xLPs with an etching on fourth side housed in printed heavyweight inner and outer sleeves. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu, Artwork by María Jesús Valenzuela Vittini, Design by Bartolomé Sanson.

Living Torch, through its unique structural form and harmonic material, is a bold continuation of Kali Malone’s demanding and exciting body of work, while opening new perspectives and increasing the emotional potential of the music tenfold. As such, Living Torch is a major new piece by the composer and adds a significant milestone to an already fascinating repertoire. Departing from the pipe organ that Malone’s music is most notable for, Living Torch features a complex electroacoustic ensemble. Leafing through recordings from conventional instruments like the trombone and bass clarinet to more experimental machines like the boîte à bourdon, passing through sinewave generators and Éliane Radigue’s ARP 2500 synthesizer. Living Torch weaves its own history, its own genealogy, and that of its author. It extends her robust structural approach to a liberated palette of timbre. Living Torch was initially commissioned by GRM for its legendary loudspeaker orchestra, the Acousmonium, and premiered in its complete multichannel form at the Grand Auditorium of Radio France in a concert entirely dedicated to the artist. Composed at GRM studios in Paris between 2020-2021, Living Torch is a work of great intensity, an oeuvre-monde that is singularly placed at the crossroads of instrumental writing and electroacoustic composition. Living Torch proceeds from multiple lineages, including early modern music, American minimalism, and musique concrète. It’s a work as much turned towards exploring justly tuned harmony and canonic structures as towards the polyphony of unique timbres, the scaling of dynamic range, and the revelation of sound qualities. GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales), the pioneering institution of electroacoustic, acousmatic, and musique concrète, has been a unique laboratory for sonorous research since 1958. Witnessing the extreme vitality of the music championed by GRM, the Portraits GRM record series extends and expands this momentum with Kali Malone’s Living Torch. The French label-partner Shelter Press is proud to continue the collaboration with GRM, which Peter Rehberg of Editions MEGO set the foundation for in 2012.

The Free Jazz Workshop came into being in 1967 but their first album, Inter Fréquences, only appeared in 1973. Unfortunately there is no recorded trace of the group including the first drummer Pierre Guyon before he was replaced by Christian Rollet in 1970. One of the slogans doing the rounds at the time sets the tone: "Aesthetic liberation is but a prelude to the liberation of humanity." The trajectory of the Free Jazz Workshop (which became the Workshop de Lyon in 1975 with the arrival of clarinetist-saxophonist Louis Sclavis) is emblematic of the emancipation of the mindset of certain French musicians during this period. It has been an exceptionally long-lived trajectory a "half-century" as the members say, during which the group - in Christian Rollet's own words – went from being "an exploratory workshop who claimed to take no account of the musical certitudes of the majority" to becoming something of a classic institution. Right from this first album it is clear that the group would function as a collective with no designated leader. The legacy and influence of American free jazz can be heard throughout: Albert and Don Ayler, or Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry for the horns of Maurice Merle and Jean Mereu; Cecil Taylor for the pianist Patrick Vollat, absent from the group after the second album La Chasse de Shirah Sharibad; Gary Peacock and Barre Phillips for the bass; Sunny Murray or Milford Graves for the rhythmic agitation; but also the Art Ensemble of Chicago for the collective aspect.

besom presse announces the release of Ellen Fullman’s Music for the Man Who Grew Common in Wisdom. Known prominently for her sculptural Long String Instrument (LSI), these musique concrete pieces showcase an underrecognized side of Fullman’s sound investigations. In two expansive works, Fullman voyages through the comic, the menacing and the blissful all while evoking the unique kinetic and timbral aesthetic for which she is widely praised. Composed between 1987-1989, while living in Austin, Texas, the music originally served as accompaniment to choreographer Deborah Hay's dance piece of the same name. The besom presse release presents the last two movements of the full composition. In 1985, Hay, a founding member of the Judson Dance Theater, commissioned Fullman to collaborate on a new work. Hay was deeply influenced by her experience as a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and to the way John Cage and Cunningham collaborated. As such, the only relationship planned between Fullman’s music and the choreography was timing. Inspired by Hay’s open-ended approach and encouraged to use a new set of musical implements, Fullman explained, “I found this way of working to be remarkably refreshing and respectful of my process. I felt free to delve into my attraction for absurdity, knowing that I would not be judged.” With a variety of acoustic sound sources, Music for the Man Who Grew Common in Wisdom finds Fullman exploring the possibilities of the Prophet sampler. Describing her experience of using this tool she explains: “I was fascinated by what could be done with the Prophet and worked in a way that could be seen as an outgrowth from the musique concrete approach that I had used with a reel-to-reel tape recorder in earlier years.” One of the most interesting contextual aspects of Music for the Man Who Grew Common in Wisdom is the flux under which it was created. Recently relocated and using unfamiliar equipment after having dedicated so much of her time and energy to advancing her knowledge of the LSI, this record provides an ultra-rare snapshot of Fullman’s journey as a composer: a suspended moment wherein her earlier phase of sound collaging comes into direct contact with her sensibilities of movement and sound as refined by her work with the LSI. The excursion rewards careful, repeated listening. Its musical events arrive spontaneously while striking a rare balance between the poetical and unaffected. While the work is time-stamped by its technology, it evades the quaintness that beleaguers so many novel releases from the past. On side A, titled Music for the Gardener, Fullman triggers an assortment of exquisitely recorded acoustic sounds from a variety of quotidian sources including bits of glass dropped on a concrete slab, the gentle clanking of suspended woodscraps, water swishing back and forth, and her own voice. The piece begins with the glass, arranged chromatically, which Fullman playfully improvises with by triggering individual notes from a series of chord shapes. The effervescent chime and bounce is punctuated with sudden cluster chords that explode like a six-pack against a brick wall. This gives way to the round and muted tones of the swinging timber—a generous sonic foil to the icy digital aliasing of the glass samples. Shifting focus again, we hear the hi-fi swishing of water in a tub reproduced in a dazzlingly wide stereo field made possible by microphones arranged at either end of the bath. Fullman’s sampled voice, played in a meditative modal melody, signifies a kind of coda anchored by the rhythmic pulsing of clanking wood. Side B’s Music for the Aviator is rooted in Deborah’s directive: "We contain the mystery, but we don't know what it is." Like an alternative soundtrack to Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre, starter guns, percolating bubbles, cheering crowds, and a calliope organ conjure a lysergic day at the circus. More or less abrupt disturbances take place throughout. The circus is consumed by cetaceous blowhole sounds, which in turn fade into something vaguely like the Hindewhu whistle of Ba-Benzélé Pygmy music (think the intro to Herbie Hancock’s Watermelon Man). Eventually the piece settles into a satisfying rhythmic pulse of tuned breath sounds set in a cloud of woozy voice loops while a tightly packed spectrum of overtones springs forth. The Man Who Grew Common In Wisdom was performed in August 2019 at the Tanz im August Festival, Berlin, in their RE-Perspective Deborah Hay, Works from 1968 to the Present. Eva Mohn of the Cullberg Ballet, Stockholm, was the soloist, and the work has become part of their repertoire. Music from the first movement of this piece, The Navigator (aka “Staggered Stasis”), was made available earlier this year by Superior Viaduct on a reissue of Fullman's 1987 self-released cassette, In The Sea.

“Timeless minimalistic approach to composition braced by repetition and playfulness. Alberto’s music reflects calm, focus and intimacy. Ethereal and atmospheric, his pieces operate within the digital as well as the analogue realm in equal measures. Sampling, Midi sequencing and field recordings are the instrumentation used in these 15 songs recorded on a four track reel to reel tape. Highest possible recommendation for fans of Suso Saiz, Jon Hassel, Eno or Harold Budd” “Haizetxe” which stands for wind house, is the first ever record consisting of unreleased material recorded between mid 80’s and 90’s by musician Alberto Lizarralde in Zaldibia, Basque Country. One of the founders of the first school of Improvisational jazz and contemporary music (Jazzle) established in San Sebastián in the early 1990s,Alberto is a well-known figure among Basque musicians but not so much amongst the general public. In his professional curriculum we find the direction of the Plaza Festival, the Zirrara record company, his work as a producer, editor (editions 3e argitalpenak), the direction of the audiovisual installation JA Artzeren Unibertsoa, the arrangements and composition for the Iparraguirre 7 project, etc...And even so, he has managed to stay away from the spotlight. In all this time he was composing and recording music, but the right circumstances never arose for its release.Thus, it has remained stored in a drawer all these years. Finally the music of Alberto Lizarralde sees the light on Hegoa label in a limited run of 300 LPs.

"Finis Africæ (or Finis Africae)". Words redolent of mystery and myth, of Europe looking out to new lands, new worlds, new times. And so it is with A Last Discovery, the work of Spaniard Juan Alberto Arteche Guel and his musical co-adventurers, recorded between 1984 and 2001. After fifteen years of musical success in Spain with his band Nuestro Pequeño Mundo, Arteche was ready to experiment with new ideas, and with the purchase of a four-track reel-to-reel recorder he did so, exploring imaginary global music-worlds with a core of like-minded explorers. The group, dubbed "Finis Africæ" by JAA after reading Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, where the term refers to forbidden books and hidden knowledge, released seven recordings over an eighteen-year period, the best of which are compiled here. Finis Afriae was part of the "new wave" of Spanish music which gradually emerged after the end of the Francoist regime. Using modern electric instruments and traditional acoustic instruments from many cultures blended together via studio alchemy, a magic which grew even stronger with the acquisition of a sixteen-track recorder after their second release, Finis Africae created an outward-looking musical multiverse, an unclassifiable amalgam encompassing elements of folk traditions from all over the world, skillfully and lovingly shaped into an inclusive pan-global whole. Deeply influenced by African music, the group's reverberant, organic minimal funk will appeal to DJs as well as all who yearn for the loving warmth that comes with the embrace of global possibilities.

Back in the early 2000s, after locating those first Moondog 78s, and adding them to the mix at Honest Jons, assembling the compilation that became The Viking of Sixth Avenue, was a kind of musical cloud nine - a voyage of discovery, attempting to chart the worlds that Moondog had created. Now it's Spring again - as winter encroaches - and Mississippi expose us to some never before heard material. It's killer grade, recorded by yet another genius, Tony Schwartz, the pioneering Folkways field recordist, the first man to record Louis Hardin, aka Moondog, who in the 1950s also recorded a day in the life of a dog [canine variety] and a New York cab driver, among many others.Behold! A survey of Moondog’s earliest recorded works - many of them unreleased until now - through a collaboration by Mississippi Records and Lucia Records. From 1954 - 1962 field recordist Tony Schwartz frequently checked in with Moondog, his favorite street musician. Tony Schwartz made recordings of Moondog’s earliest compositions as they were coming into focus. Sometimes these recordings were made right on the street as Moondog busked, sometimes they were made in Schwartz’s studio, and sometimes they were made on NYC rooftops. The resulting recordings, many of which had never been released, were deposited at the Library Of Congress as part of the Tony Schwartz Collection in 2006 when Schwartz passed away, and this record was culled straight from these original tapes.Side one kicks off with an unreleased version of Moondog’s classic composition “Why Spend The Dark Night With You?” followed by the first ever complete recording of his “Nocturne Suite,” a beautiful piece of classical music performed with members of the Royal Philharmonic. The side ends with the complete “On The Streets Of New York” 7” EP, which was released on Mars records in 1955 and subsequently re-released by Honest Jon’s Records in 2004 on their excellent Moondog anthology. Side B features sketches of Moondog compositions never released, many with the man himself howling and chanting over his homemade percussion set.Moondog’s music is as universal as it gets - part classical music, part Native American, part European folk, and part something completely unique. Moondog is one of the towering figures of 20th century music. This record comes with liner notes featuring never before released interviews with Moodog by Tony Schwartz and is housed in an old school “tip on” cover. All tracks fully licensed from the Library of Congress.

The second LP by TREVOR MATHISON.Generated in part by his 2022 exhibition in London and produced to coincide with his 2023 exhibition at Argos, Brussels. Includes contributions / interventions from GARY STEWART, ANIRUDDHA DAS (AKA DR. DAS / ASIAN DUB FOUNDATION) and KATE SHORTT.numbered + handmade in an edition of 250 copies only; 180gr vinyl in custom-made screen-printed outer (sealed), containing two risograph inserts with a specially commissioned essay by curators APPAU JNR BOAKYE-YIADOM and OLIVER FUKE; no digital

Anyone following Alina Astrova’s work since the Hype WIlliams days (us) will be all over this, finding her in that skewed but earnest pop mode that we first caught a glimpse of on a grainy Hype Williams vhs doing Sade’s The Sweetest Taboo around 2010 as featured on the Do Roids And Kill E'rything 7” for Second Layer.  Higher Powers runs 6 tracks / 20 minutes deep of material you’ll know intimately if you grabbed the files way back when, but which will scratch a very 2010’s sorta itch for the uninitiated. ‘Light Up’ is one of her best, all martial/slowed amens, unstable pads and room recorded vox that revel in questionable fidelity, in the best way. ‘B.M.W.’ is more hi-def, a clipped soundsystem anthem with gloriously fuzzed arcade machine synths, ‘Obsession 2’ feels like one of those tunes that spends 4 minutes trying to figure out what time signature it’s in, while Scratcha-hookup ‘A World in Danger III’ is the most polished thing here, ending just as it gets going.

Hot on the heels of last year's jerky "Fast Fashion" comes another confounding madness from Lolina, aka Inga Copeland. Less abstract than its predecessor, "Face the Music" hews closer to Lolina's Hype Williams-era songwriting, coating discernible songs in surrealist poetics and edgy pop subversion.  'Forget it Left Bank' is better yet, a brain-scraping rap-no-wave freakout that's lysergic and - almost -  catchy too. Lolina's deadpan half-rapped vocal is crucial: she sounds like 'Rapture'-era Debbie Harry but gives off a couldn't-care-less iciness of Tricky, slurring over a dollar bin hammond loop that's as perfectly skewed as anything on Leila's first couple of albums. Her tightrope walk is most visible here, as she teeters from pop coherence into freeform, reality-bending outlandishness, dropping the beat for lighters-in-the-air neo-psychedelia at almost random intervals. The pristine rap-not-rap atmosphere continues on the eerily polished 'Music is the Drug (Album Version)', a nu jack jammer that almost transcends its own strangeness. If you're not listening intently you might confuse it with pop music - Lolina's earworm chorus is catchy enough - but as always her touches poke the music just outside acceptable boundaries. This time it's dissonant jazz fusion blasts, and a prolonged outro that reverses the entire thing into a dragging solo shimmy.  It's an unwitting key to understanding "Face the Music", an album that on the surface might be the most straightforward set of songs Lolina has assembled - a virtual sequel to 2019's relatively nimble electro-pop influenced "The Smoke", but lurking in the shadows there's just as much seductive dissociation as the headmashing "Live in Geneva" or "Fast Fashion". Huge recommendation.

Where Ben Vida’s music has previously explored the sound of text at the outer register of electronic composition, here, in collaboration with the Yarn/Wire quartet and the vocalist Nina Dante, the voice and the words it works to inhabit are placed back at the time-scale of a song. There is a familiarity to this music’s combination of restrained melody and heightened atmosphere. It feels, softly, like it’s made by a band: piano, percussion, voice. A composition kept aloft and even by its four stewards through a simultaneity of effort. The pace, across five pieces, hurries and relaxes but never outruns or distends language. You could find a story in the words being sung, if that’s what you need. But there are unfamiliar dimensions too. So many threads, so many timelines. A story or a thousand, or a litany of scraps: language complete but raw, language that can or cannot be translated. Singers fused at the breath. Oppositions or dualities—a question and an answer, two sides of a conflict, the sense of being here or over there—are drawn together into a single sentiment, plural with feeling. Voices negotiating in unison how to articulate a stance. Musical cues doling out tension as needed. The five pieces that make up The beat my head hit were developed with Yarn/Wire over the last four years, with roots in Vida’s 2018 performance for four voices and electronics “And So Now” at BAM in Brooklyn. The Yarn/Wire ensemble, founded in 2005, has been collaborating with a broad range of experimental composers and sound artists since its inception: most recently, they have performed work by the likes of Sarah Hennies, Annea Lockwood, Catherine Lamb, and Alvin Lucier. Vida, meanwhile, has maintained a practice as both a musician and a visual artist, which has included drone-leaning solo work for electronics as well as improvisatory collaborations with musicians including Martina Rosenfeld and Lea Bertucci. Working with Yarn/Wire, for Vida, was something like joining a band. Following a few early live performances, the material was worked through in the studio across many permutations, a process during which Vida, Dante, Russell Greenberg, Laura Barger created what Vida calls “a meta-voice out of the blending of our four voices.” Sustained presence—language bringing a group to the place of breathing in unison—becomes the backbone of the piece. That presence is an engine, but it's still full of negative spaces and exhales. It's thrilling, for example, to find oneself disarmed by the subtle harmonies introduced by the inevitable but infinitesimal distance between Vida and Dante’s voices. Or the introduction of subterranean bass on “Drawn Evening”: breath trapped? When ambient stillness steps in out of nowhere to replace fast talk on the title track, the evacuation of language is some other form of breath, too. The beat my head hit finds not just truth or reality in what happens at the periphery, but a kind of peace.