Blod is the solo project of Gustaf Dicksson (Enhet För Fri Musik, Oroskällan), a prolific and crucial figure in the Swedish Underground scene radiating out of Gothenburg and centered around a number of independent labels and including bands such as Enhet För Fri Musik, Monokultur, Oroskällan, Loopsel, and Neutral. Blod has released various home-recorded cassettes and a handful of LPs since 2014, all mercurial in nature, exploring various facets of Dicksson’s preoccupations. The melodies borrow from tradition and possess a lonesome quality inspired by Swedish melancholy, close relations, and white trash culture. Combined with intentionally banal artwork, the experience can be beguiling and sometimes bleak but at the same time warm and humorous. Missväxt is Dicksson’s greatest work yet, exploring the myth of ancient Swedish being and misery but with a sound that is uniquely ecstatic. Inspired by medieval folk music, it’s reminiscent of Fairport Convention’s marriage of traditional folk music and psychedelic rock. Missväxt features guest appearances by Elin Engström (Loopsel, Monokultur) on drums, Astrid Øster Mortensen on vocals and flute, Joakim Karlsson (Facit) on production and synth, and Magnus Jäverling on flute.

This record began in summer 2020, when I was staying at Andersabo, Sweden, where I run an artists' residency. I had access to a nearby church, and would set drones going on the organ while playing clarinet and piano. I started working with the combination of these long, sustained tones, combined with acoustic instruments, where the sound's duration was only as long as a breath or the pluck of a string. A lot of the last Blue Lake LP was made using a series of zithers that I built myself. I have always been interested in layering sounds, and had in the past made music by recording several guitar parts and putting them together. The zithers allowed me to explore this kind of layered playing live, as both hands can be used simultaneously to create overlapping patterns. In the summer that I started recording Stikling, I built a much larger 48-string zither that expanded a lot of these possibilities and ended up featuring in a lot of the new music. Each piece on Stikling began with some kind of drone - an organ tone or a frozen note on the cello. A particular phrase on piano or a series of clarinet chords would start to determine a structure, and the music grew over time, with parts being added, taken away, re-written, re-recorded. The word “stikling” in Danish means a cutting taken from a plant that is then set in new soil. During the past two years, I’ve been working with gardening - planting, collecting seeds, and making cuttings. These processes often involve a mix of creation and destruction – growth goes hand in hand with removing old material and cutting things down. This kind of circularity fed into the music as it was being developed for the LP. After starting on the church organ in summer 2020, I finished by recording on the little pump organ at Andersabo in summer 2021.

Premiere loop-age and analogue slurping from Brighton’s F.Ampism. Put simply this record is a jitterbug in a bubbling pond, coz this collection of nine fine sound pieces are all about fluid movement and itchy digit fidgets. Songs like ‘The Loosest Caduceus’ ripple like time waves, setting off yeasty fireworks behind my eyes. ‘Sand/Blood/Glass’ becomes a relic from my formication nightmare. And ‘Absolute Beyond Ill’ drives gravity back into a wood-lined barrel. Oh yeah Ampish-man YEAH! The exotic is never far from your soft lugs in this particular sound centre – picture Colin McPhee dropping his early Gamelan recordings in rose water – the bronze gongs get sticky with heady perfume right? This record is the perfect partner for reflective fellowship and riotous merry making." - Joe Posset / Radio Free Midwich blog --- Ikuisuus Records Released on vinyl LP in October 2017. Edition of 250 copies.

"Mike Cooper returns to Discrepant with a recording of a live set recorded at the Controindicazioni Festival of Improvised Music in Rome in 2003The music moves very slowly through four movements: ‘’Reluctant Swimmer’’, ‘’Movies is Magic’’, Virtual Swimmer’’ and ‘’Dolphins’’. 'Floating in out of the exotic ether and disappearing like smoke, engulfed in the alien hugeness of nature... a very elegant set by a visionary artist.'Mike Cooper says 'the first half is played on my old 1920s National tri-plate lapsteel guitar and the second half on my vietnamese electric lap steel. I also sing two songs along the way. ‘’Movies is Magic’’ by Van Dyke Parks and “Dolphins” by Freid Neil. It was the first time I had ever sung the last song.'"With beautiful artwork collage by Evan Crankshaw.

For the time being we are unable to get to the post but if you order now your item will be posted as soon as things return to normal. Thank you for your support. "Australian born, Sweden based artist John Chantler returns to Room40 with his fifth solo edition. Tomorrow Is Too Late was commissioned by INA GRM for their Présences Électronique festival in 2018 and sees Chantler significantly expand the horizons of his acoustic palette. Moving from subtle microtonal movements to passages of intense harmonic saturation, Tomorrow Is Too Late is his most dynamic work to date. A powerhouse of reductive intensity that bares witness to Chantler’s uncompromising sonic articulations." — ROOM40 "A dizzying time scrambler that belies both a reverence for this canonized innovation of his chosen instrument and an intrepid inclination to push offshore with it." - Tiny Mix Tapes --- John Chantler / synthesizers, pipe organ --- Synthesizers recorded at 1703, Stockholm and INA GRM, Paris. Pipe organ recorded at ELB Philharmonie, Hamburg. Tomorrow is Too Late was commissioned by Francois Bonnet at INA GRM for RÉSENCES ÉLECTRONIQUE FESTIVAL 2018. Released in co-operation with 1703 Skivbolaget. Supported by the Swedish Arts Council. Mastered by Lawrence English. Vinyl cut by Andreas [LUPO] Lubich.

"Previously unreleased recordings by various lineups drawn from Derek Bailey, Tristan Honsinger, Christine Jeffrey, Toshinori Kondo, Charlie Morrow, David Toop, Maarten Altena, Georgie Born, Lindsay Cooper, Steve Lacy, Radu Malfatti and Jamie Muir. Journalists often make the brief history of Free Improvisation conform to the idea that the history of music is a nice straight line from past to present: Beethoven… Brahms… Boulez. Thus Derek Bailey, Evan Parker and John Stevens — together with Brötzmann and co across the Channel — were the trailblazing ‘first generation’, forging a wholly new language alongside contemporary avant-garde and free jazz. Figures like Toshinori Kondo and David Toop, willing as they were to incorporate snippets of all kinds of music, were the pesky ‘second generation’, happily cocking a snook at the ‘ideological purity’ of Bailey’s non-idiomatic improvisation. ‘Company 1981’ shows up the foolishness — the wrongness — of such storylines. Check the eclectic collection of guests Bailey invited to Company Weeks over the years. He had clear ideas about the music, but he was no ideological purist. One of the founders of Fluxus, Charlie Morrow injects blasts of Cageian fun into half the recordings here, whether blurting military fanfares from his trumpet, or intoning far-flung scraps of speech. Cellist Tristan Honsinger and vocalist Christine Jeffrey join in the joyful glossolalia, while Bailey, Toop and Kondo contribute delicious, delicate, hooligan arabesques, by turns. The remainder are performed by a different ensemble: Bailey, bassist Maarten Altena, former Henry Cow members Georgie Born and Lindsay Cooper on cello and bassoon, the insanely inventive Jamie Muir on percussion, and trombonist Radu Malfatti, showing his mastery of extended technique. Were that not enough, there’s the inimitable purity of Steve Lacy’s soprano ringing high and clear above the melee. Glorious! There’s always been this idea that Free Improvisation is somehow Difficult Listening, but when the doors of perception are thrown open and prejudice cast aside, you realise that it’s not difficult at all. “Is it that easy?” chirps Morrow, at one point. Indeed it is.Enjoy yourself."

TWO LIVE RECORDINGS + UNRELEASED TAPE + UNRELEASED CONFERENCE + INTERVIEWHenri Chopin came to perform in Besançon in 1995 at Garage Caméléon the birthplace of Erratum Musical activities and the label. People involved were Michel Giroud (who introduced Henri Chopin to us and helped to publish “Poésie Sonore Internationale”), Joachim Montessuis, Yvan Etienne and Masahiro Handa. This place used to be a 300m2 garage where we lived, worked and organised noise performances and poetry actions from 1993 to 1998. When Henri Chopin arrived, he was 72 years old, calm and slow, and was delighted to meet a younger generation interested in sound art and electronic sound poetry experiments. He brought his tapes and we rented a powerful sound system that would be perfect to fill all of the space with his mouth noises. He then asked us to project the sound and follow his gestures concerning volumes and dynamic panning, and the resulting high pitch echos and feedback intensity along with the slowly melting speakers (audible here) gave him an incredible excitation and joy that we all could witness - and it was a contagious enthousiasm. Direct energy ! Later in 2004 Henri Chopin gave us two tapes to release, the first one was for the CD “La danse des tonneaux roulants et brisés” and the second one was “Les gouffres des bronches sont des cavernes infinies”, which was aired for the first time on France Culture radio in 2013 thanks to Thomas Baumgartner. Henri Chopin was born in 1922, this LP is echoing his 100th anniversary and celebrates the passion he channeled and transmitted to many artists along his life and beyond.

The Works - one of the most famous pieces by brilliant American composer Alvin Curran - was not created by will and direct purpose but, as the composer himself states, as a “providential accident” which is to say quite organically. Combining piano and voice with found sound and a custom-built Serge modular synthesizer, “The Works” is a slowly developing piece where space and ambient tape are eventually overtaken by raga-esque chanting and frenetic piano playing, where synthesizer washes become full-on workouts all leading to a coda where the listener is “finally carried off on the wheels of the Berlin U-Bahn.”  Curran - whose initial training and musical education was as a pianist - had been living in Roma, Italy, in the mid-‘70s returning to his roots and performing regularly in cocktail lounges on Via Veneto. It was this return to piano and vocals that became the genesis for The Works. In relearning the piano, a five-note “motive” took hold. Added to this was “a recording I had made of our 14 year old dachshund Caspar just before he died. It was, in fact, a love song which he persisted in singing all day after meeting a lovely bitch in heat in Piazza Navona. This I knew would be the beginning of the piece.” As the piece expands further the listener will hear “cows munching grass, the Rome-Florence express train, a horse-fly caught against a window pane, my footsteps approaching a Roman fountain and later going up the steps of my old studio, cicadas, an Amsterdam calliope, a tin can being kicked, and a series of sounds from La Serra di Lerici.”  Though “The Works” has been performed in many incarnations over the years, it’s this performance - captured on February 24, 1980, and originally released that same year by the short-lived Italian avant-garde label Fore - that is the definitive version, and one of the finest recordings ever made by the celebrated composer. --- Our Swimmer

Tracklist Face A 1. Mother’s Song Suite 2. Stupidity March 3. Family Suite 4. Potatoes Face B 1. Father’s Song Suite 2. Mockery Suite 3. 10 Inch Screw Suite 4. Electromagnetismo “Hopscotch” is a Berlin based Company and represents Tristan Honsinger’s latest effort in a lifetime search for unity between music, theatre and poetry. This gatefold vinyl contains a collection of songs and compositions invented through the years as musical material for Hopscotch’s performances and plays, along with improvisations and dialogues. --- Credits Tristan Honzinger : cello, voice Izumi Ose : voice, toy piano Franziska Hoffmann : violin, voice Tobias Delius : saxophone, clarinet, voice Axel Dörner : trumpet Hiroki Mano : tap dance, voice Klaus Kürvers : bass Antonio Borghini : bass, voice Steve Heather : drums, voice All compositions by Tristan Honzinger. --- Umlaut Records, 2021

This sprawling collection by Belgian loner blues savant Bram Devens aka Ignatz encapsulates the mystery, murk, and melancholy of his uncanny craft at its most windswept and wayward. Originally issued via Goaty Tapes in September of 2015, this long-anticipated vinyl edition expands the saga with an additional 17 minutes of archival material. Deven’s palette remains constant throughout: feathery fingerpicking, modal loops, and intuitive six-string navigations interspersed with candlelit passages of mournful voice, alternately whispered, mumbled, moaned. His is an aesthetic of embers and resin, cracked masks and distant lights, of what’s left behind and what lingers on. I Live In A Utopia was recorded following a relocation from his longtime base of Brussels to Landen, with a second child due soon: “I remember the weather being nice and having just bought a hammock.” The change of scenery seeded a promise of slower days and lighter times – no utopia perhaps, but a sense of faint hope glowing on the horizon. The songs slide between loose acoustic spirituals and smoky basement ragas, late afternoon haze and midnight moons, a seesawing restlessness reflected in the titles (“I Have Found True Love,” “Time Does Not Bring Relief,” “We Used To Smoke Inside”). The fidelity is grainy but vivid, refracted by tape warp and Flemish dust. As always, Deven’s playing is deceptively elegant, raw but precise, attuned to resonance, radiance, and negative space. Echoes of Fahey and Jandek reverberate in certain moments but ultimately the world Ignatz maps is one incomparably his own. A landscape both doomed and dawning, weary but undefeated, tracing outlines of lengthening shadows. “I walk in the sunshine,” he sings, uneasily. This is music of a rare inner wilderness, poised at cryptic crossroads, devoted to its ghosts. I Live In A Utopia stands as an apex work by one of the underground’s most veiled and visionary talents.

”Are you ready to take your turn now?” asks a mischievous voice at the beginning of DJ Marcelle’s new album. But by this point you don’t have a choice: you better buckle up for a joyride through the wild, unpredictable imagination of a true electronic music auteur. ‘Saturate The Market, Now!’ is stuffed with the kind of raw, rhythmic workouts and playful humour we’ve come to know and love from the long-serving Dutch artist. Let’s start with the music: Marcelle pinballs between pumping outsider house, brilliantly weird acid and musique concrète experiments where anything could happen at any given time. Then there are her famous track titles, which take another aim at nightclub patriarchy (‘Technicians And Their Light Effects’, the successor to last year's 'Technicians And Their Smoke Machines') at the same time as displaying a keen sense of satire (‘I Fell In My Own Cesspit!’) and revealing a difficult relationship with the sour, massive rock that for her is ‘German Bread’. With artwork featuring a collage of puppets found in her Amsterdam house and Marcelle’s own on-the-road photography, this is yet another album that sets her a mile apart from the paint-by-numbers dance music producers - or “accountants” as she’s witheringly described them. Marcelle arrived via punk, post-punk, avant garde and dub and lives by the independent, forward-thinking spirit inherent in those scenes. A sense of freedom is imbued in her work, unsurprising given that this album was written in two weeks and was made entirely on her own collection of machines (save a few choice vocal samples). It’s Marcelle’s eighth vinyl-only release for Jahmoni Music from Munich and follows on from last year’s ‘One Place For The First Time’ which swiftly sold-out and is now onto a repress. The vinyl is released alongside a 10” featuring extended and dub versions of triumphant album-cut ‘Everything Not Yet’.

Chyskyyrai, whose real name is Valentina Romanova, comes from Yakutia (Republic of Sakha), the northernmost republic of Siberia. She sings in a variety of traditional vocal techniques, drawing on folk songs, animal imitation but most of all on the ancient mythological epic Olonkho, which has a multitude of archaic delivery styles. Olonkho performance – is a traveling one man theatre and is a solo improvisation. Traditionally, the Olonkho storytellers, olonkhosuts, travelled from community to community, tribe to tribe, and performed the same function as a shaman. Mostly they were regarded as spiritual guides, teachers and keepers of cultural values. Their performances could last for several days, and were not just entertainment but also the way of teaching that people are not separate from the nature and attuned them to it. The songs presented on this LP capture a period of her life when she met with Tim Hodgkinson and Ken Hyder who had been performing together since 1978, and are well-known for their explorations in the field of shamanic cultures and free jazz. Their collaboration with the “Soviet Jazz Federation” goes back many years until finally in 1990, the duo went on an extensive tour in Siberia as “The Shams” during which they also visited Yakutia. Since then they have made numerous trips to Tuva, Altai and Buryatia playing with the local musicians and studying shamanism.

Fluence is the brainchild and first release of sound artist / provocateur Pascal Comelade. Recorded in Montpellier, France in 1974-1975, the project consists of exploratory electronic pieces in the Fripp & Eno vernacular with a Kosmische tinge. 'A Few Reasons To Stay / A Few Reasons To Split,' a title inspired by Swiss conceptual artist Urs Lüthi, features Comelade's kaleidoscopic arpeggios and Richard Pinhas' howling guitar, which variously resembles a dreamlike cello and ghostly human moans. 'Barcelona Tango's' off-kilter exotica with pocket trumpet and looping drum beats foreshadows Comelade's later work, which would create a stir in some avant-garde circles for his use of unorthodox instruments (plastic saxophone, toy piano, etc.) On the side-long 'Schizo,' Comelade's electric organ with probing, Terry Riley-esque swooshes collides with Gabriel Ibanez's thick, reedy buzz -- together forming a truly magical soundscape. These incendiary performances ably join the ranks of other dreamily cosmic, impressionistic guitar-and-synth masterworks like No Pussyfooting and The Serpent (In Quicksilver) as well as Conny Veit's work with Popol Vuh. Originally released in 1975, Fluence offers a remarkable emotional and textural range -- richly experimental and deeply progressive -- that sounds at once timeless and strikingly contemporary. This first-time standalone reissue is limited to 750 numbered copies.

Ben Ellul-Knight & Tom White - I’ve had it up to hear with fish & chips (CCP006) I've had it up to hear with fish & chips is a hörspiel about 'care work' of all kinds. In part it is auto-ethnographic, as it draws on Ben's experience working as a play worker, social worker and as a volunteer with refugee and asylum-seeker support services. More personal reflections are mixed with conversations Ben had with support workers, social workers, play workers and mental health nurses to form a script. Different speakers/singers were then invited to record themselves reading the script in any way they wanted and this was used as Tom's raw material for the composition. I've had it up to hear with fish & chips was first performed live in the Radiophrenia studio, Glasgow 2016.

Enhet För Fri Musk album, recorded in Gothenburg and Malmö 2020 by Hugo Randulv, Sofie Herner, Gustaf Dicksson, Matthias Andersson and Dan Johansson. A concept album on relationships, family values and broken promises. 18 songs. Embedded in the ever exciting Swedish underground scene Enhet För Fri Musik continues the quest for innovation numerous legendary Swedish bands started during the 70s, Pärson Sound, Trad Gras Och Stenar, Arbete Och Fritid. Taking the ideas of communal music craft and experimentation and continually re-inventing what music is about through free improvisation and lengthy folk meanderings

Marine weather reports recorded from radio broadcasts by Sven-Åke Johansson in 1970 at the Kollektiv für Kommunikative und Ästhetische Forschung in Mariental, Lower Saxony, Germany. Edition of 300 with printed inner sleeve containing liner notes by Thomas Millroth about forms of artistic appropriation in Johansson's work. "During my communal life at the former Mariental monastery in Lower Saxony, in the late hours behind thick monastic walls – there was no village pub – I played with my radio in my chamber. Often we would sit together and listen to the late-night marine weather forecasts (Seewetterbericht), broadcasted alternately via shortwave and FM. Particularly we liked the navigational warnings (Seewarnnachrichten). In the announcers' way of speaking – very slowly –, we found a new type of poetry; realism. I recorded many hours with my Uher Report tape recorder and a Sennheiser microphone placed in front of the loudspeaker. A small selection is presented on this LP." (Sven-Åke Johansson) "In the unknown and confusing names of this boundless poetry, it's impossible to see your own reflection; your face is not visible here. You have to disrupt your patterns. Find yourself in this psycho-geographic map of storms and winds. Sven-Åke Johansson does not use appropriation as cultural recycling, he creates culture by simply giving the objects new paradigms." (Thomas Millroth)

Second Editions is pleased to present Things Opening by Lori Goldston.Lori Goldston's approach to the violoncello is true and immediate. Describing herself as "classically trained and rigorously de-trained", Goldston indeed defies all conformities of genre, style and technique. Her playing reflects as much of Baroque as it does of American roots or experimental traditions. It is elegant, gritty, restless, delicate, irreverent, utterly pure. This album comprises of two parts, highlighting Goldston as both a distinct composer as well as a many-faceted performer. The first side holds a suite of songs written by Goldston to accompany the poems of Melinda Mueller, while the second features pieces written for Goldston by Jessika Kenney, Satchel Henneman and Julio Lopezhiler

1 Hum Menina 2 Sparks Fly 3 Guardian Angel 4 Old Teardrop 5 Flask of Wine 6 Gold Entwine 7 Dali Rama 8 Nun of the Above 9 The Sum of Us AllA beautifully observed baroque masterpiece, part dream pop, part futuristic psych-folk with ambient synths and Josephine Foster’s plaintive guitar. Godmother is a slowly unfolding song cycle that marries a myriad of previous musical escapades with electronic experiments. Exploring new horizons on this record, it sees Foster at her most expressive and hypnotic. Now back home in the mountains of Colorado, Josephine’s 20-year journey to this new nirvana becomes enthralled further with a symphony of synths that sound like they are played in some neighbouring netherworld, through cotton gauze. It’s music that’s devotional, spiritual, a fitting soundtrack for any journey within or without, a means to experience places and vibrations beyond the boundary of time and space. Discussing the record, Josephine explains “You may notice me travelling a bit further sonically from our precious earth, aspiring to rise into broader astral perspective, to contemplate the light and origins of it all, as I do believe there is a grand source that is the sum of it all, us all. Performing all the parts on this recording, you may sense me focussing gestures of my singing into the instrumentation, which is a very great relief indeed, as the voice has such grand dreams to be set free.”