27 Passports is the first “regular” full-length the band has released since 2010’s Catch My Shoe, filling that eight year gap with seven-inches and a series of musical exchanges with Ethiopian musicians. The lineup has barely fluctuated – original guitarist Terrie Hessels and percussionist-singer Katherina Bornefield anchoring the band to its 70s-80s roots, with guitarist Andy Moor still flailing since 1990. Arnold de Boer replaced founder/vocalist G. W. Sok in 2009, and has filled that role since. A slight shiver of anxious anticipation can accompany the first listen of a band that has spewed political and societal critique with a fanged ferocity for decades; while age and maturity are corkscrews to be cherished, comparing the bite of a young Talking Heads song to the reserved puddle of 21st century David Byrne can leave a fan gasping for caffeine. But more in the vein of the late Mark E. Smith, The Ex bring age and experience into the experimentation, and their barks at capitalism and humanity are still powerful. These songs wrap the listener within the disjointed riffs and Bornefield’s unpredictable rhythms that the band has been creating so well for years, driving with the sounds of frustration and moody shake that reawakens even moments from albums like 1985’s Pokkeherrie. “This Car is My Guest” showcases de Boer’s dissonant vocal lines over a drive of plunging guitar. “New Blank Document” plays with that odd and off timing, becoming a march of spasmodic walks, with the strings acting like both a down-stroked pummel and a muted plucked harp simultaneously until a robotic trance of verses settle into a pulpy discordant blast. - Brian Manley --- Arnold de Boer - Vocals, guitar, claps Terrie Hessels - Guitar Katherina Bornefeld - Drums, vocals Andy Moor - Guitar, baritone guitar --- Recorded at Electric Monkey Studio, Amsterdam, by Kasper Frenkel. October 16 &17, 2017  Artwork & Lay-out: Emma Fischer Photos: Andy Moor

Flaming Tunes was recorded by Gareth Williams (ex of This Heat) and his childhood friend Mary Currie and released on cassette in 1985. A hodgepodge of lo-fi pop songs, experiments and location recordings that sound like they were never intended for public consumption, it’s by chance or design one of the most moving, personal, memorable DIY/experimental pop albums of the 20th century, you better believe it. As Mary Currie describes it: "Flaming Tunes was a collaboration that came out of a friendship. Gareth and I would meet at 'Danger de Mort' Gareth's house in Balham usually during the daytime when my son was at nursery. Sometimes we'd be joined by others. A room full of instruments and things that could make noise. We made some of our own too and used available objects for percussion. Later on we had more sophisticated equipment - full size keyboard and 12 track recording facility. Sometimes things happened and sometimes we just indulged ourselves in making a bit of a racket. I can't begin to describe how Gareth put things together and this was often done well into the early hours of the morning. I'd go away and come back and what had started out as a fragment had become another flaming tune." After a bootlegged version came out in the late 90's, Life & Living Records - an independent label operated by Williams' close circle of friends (Williams himself passed away in 2001 at the age of 48) - went back to the original master tapes and painstakingly restored and remastered the audio. As for the music itself - oh gosh, where to start? On one level - it's a hodgepodge of lo-fi pop songs, experiments and location recordings that sound like they were never intended for public consumption. And yet - these tunes just don't let go of you once you've spent any amount of time with them. Take "Breast Stroke" for instance -  just the most unforgettable, life-affirming three and a half minutes you'll ever spend with a piece of music. The fact that the percussion was made on a casio keyboard and what sounds like a peculiarly British variant of a human beatbox, well, it's just the icing on the cake.  Really, words just do no justice. This is the Clean Vinyl version

Label description: We’ve been great fans of ‘The Duchess of Oysterville’, the first outing from the duo of Chris Forsyth & Nate Wooley on cd some years ago on Creative Sources (with a follow-up later on Chocolate Monk), and had been looking for an opportunity to work with them if possible. Their duo is one of those cases that reveal different and unexpected qualities from the participants, and points to a third mind of shorts at play, a meeting that seems to open up the two towards an underexplored territory. With a palette consisting of guitar and trumpet, they make together music that often focuses on an ugly/beautiful scorched earth territory of hissing subtlety. ‘Third’ was recorded live in concert on March 16, 2013 in Philadelphia and mastered by Bhob Rainey. Chris Forsyth is a lauded guitarist and composer whose work often assimilates art-rock textures with vernacular American influences. Long active in underground circles, he’s recently released a string of acclaimed records of widescreen guitar rock, including 2014’s Intensity Ghost (No Quarter) that have brought his music to the attention of a wider audience. Forsyth first became active in the experimental scene in the 2000s as a founding member of the unclassifiable experimentalists Peeesseye (w/ Fritz Welch & Jaime Fennelly). He’s also collaborated with Tetuzi Akiyama, Nate Wooley, Shawn Hansen, Koen Holtkamp, Chris Heenan, and choreographer Miguel Gutierrez. He is a recipient of a 2011 Pew Fellowship in the Arts and resides in Philadelphia. New York based trumpeter Nate Wooley has performed on over 100 recordings. Increasingly acknowledged internationally, Wooley’s specific style is part of a burgeoning revolution in experimental trumpet technique with the likes of improvisers Evan Parker, John Zorn, Anthony Braxton, and Thurston Moore. His own compositions expand conceptions of linguistic based embouchure manipulation and utilize the trumpet to control amplified feedback. Design and photography by Thalia Raftopoulou

With more than 10 years of experience and numerous albums released, A Full Cosmic Sound (AFCS) is released on LP 12" for the first time, with a selection of its best compositions and also unpublished material. In recent years with a stable group, the band shows a much more controlled and enveloping sound than in its previous recordings, a sound exercise developed through the mixture of harmonies, frequencies, drones and repetitions generated by instruments such as keyboards, synthesizers, bass, guitars and multiple effects. This album evokes the rhythmic and deconstructive explorations of local bands like Los Jaivas, also certain ambient passages of Popol Vuh, the psychological sound explorations of Throbbing Gristle, Sonic Youth, Experimental Audio Research, and the echoes of the busy urban sound landscape research in Chile.

FRACTALS (1981), 21’26 Composed at the GMVL from December 1979 to September 1981, this work was commissioned by Fnac. Fractals are mathematical oddities that, when crossing our path, turn the smallest island into an immensity to be explored. FRACTALS is a series of short studies, all based on the same sound source. Seeking in the sound and its very logic a proposal upon which a construction is elaborated, each Fractal remains open and is a mere fragment of itself. FRACTALS, music pieces sculpted in four dimensions, are vast microcosms that can only be inhabited by the mind. Each Fractal can be approached from several angles, far, near, etc. Some can be listened to at different speeds, forwards or backwards. FRACTALS: amorphous and endless music pieces whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere. FRACTALS are available in stereo (34'32), in 8 tracks for concerts, and as "spare parts" (separate mixing tracks open to new combinations). Brain Fever (2017), 18'00 Wherever you may be in the forest of South India, the Brain Fever bird, together with the Seven Sisters, literally gets into your head. Whether it be early morning, daytime, or nighttime, amidst the stridulations of insects, its song utterly reflects Indian life: sonorous, noisy, insistent, dense, overcrowded, mobile, swarming, frantic, overheated, deprived of rest and sleep. Brain Fever echoes sonic images caught in the Aurovillian forest, near Pondicherry, and rich fragments of improvisations made in Lyon on analog sound synthesis or feedback devices, the kind I used to do in the first GMVL studios. Brain Fever is dedicated to Sofia Jannok, a musician and sàmi singer.

In memoriam Bernard Baschet, Bernard Parmegiani and Carlos Pellegrino. A 16-channel piece inspired by astrophysics, the mystery of the pre-Big Bang era and some of the uncanny motions of the unconscious mind, where strangeness meets the ordinary. The themes that permeate Senderos de luz y sombras simultaneously engage the overwhelming, unyielding immensity of the beginnings of the universe and the forces at work in the unconscious mind. What connects these themes are the dark energies operating outside our knowledge, far beyond the conceptual scope of our limited thinking. How to convey all this and build music from these concealed forces? What Beatriz Ferreyra achieves, thanks to her trademark virtuosity, is precisely to summon energies, to bring in the raw forces that govern the laws of Acoustics, so as to trigger sonic storms as one would call the rain, to transform all sound matters into the core of a ritual. Indeed, Beatriz Ferreyra addresses the mind-body reconciliation, for in providing this unique sound and musical experience, with a rare sensitive intensity, the great composer simultaneously invites us to engage in a personal experience. François Bonnet, Paris, 2021

Shelter Press and Ina grm are pleased and moved to present two previously unreleased recordings of Peter Rehberg, two live performances given at the GRM which, each in their own way, vividly illustrate the extent of his sonic palette. On 22 July 2021, Peter Rehberg passed away, leaving a great emptiness in his wake. Many initiatives have already celebrated or will soon celebrate his memory and the titanic work he put at the service of so many artists - a whole musical community, in fact - through Editions Mego. INA grm, Shelter Press and Stephen O’Malley, who are continuing some of the collaborative Editions Mego sub-labels (Recollection GRM, Portraits GRM and Ideologic Organ), wanted to pay tribute more specifically to the musician Peter Rehberg, and to his immense talent. Peter Rehberg, as an artist, has collaborated with the GRM on numerous occasions, both with Stephen O’Malley (as KTL) and solo. This release features two concerts given for the GRM, each time as part of the Présences électronique festival. The first concert, given on 15 March 2009 at the Maison de la Radio in Paris, marked the first collaboration between Peter Rehberg and the GRM and the beginning of a long and fruitful friendship. The second concert took place on 6 March 2016. Between these two concerts, 7 years have passed, 7 years in which the ties between Peter Rehberg and the GRM have been strengthened, 7 years in which Peter Rehberg’s music has flourished. What is striking in these two concerts is how Peter Rehberg’s unique musical sensitivity and ‘grammar’ can be heard beyond the instruments. For while the first concert is pure laptop music, the second is extended to the field of modular synthesis. However, in both concerts, the elements that are so personal to Peter Rehberg’s music are present and combine in a layering of sonic abrasions, raw sensations and a sensitivity that is as much about formal awareness as it is about the invocation of overwhelming emotions, even though a little hidden behind a radicality that is always a bit provocative. Peter Rehberg offers us a “portrait music”, a music that gives some clues about the personality of its author and whose absence continues to deepen an inconsolable sadness.

Ernstalbrecht Stiebler (b. 1934) is a German composer of minimalist and reductionist contemporary music. Since the early 1960s, he has been developing a unique compositional style that draws on minimalist structures and repetitions, though not in any way related to the so-called Minimal Music, but rather influenced by Minimalism in visual art and characterized by long static tones that slowly change and evolve over the course of a piece. Stiebler has composed for solo instruments as well as for different chamber musical and orchestral line-ups. Many of his ensemble pieces are built around long tones coming together in specific intervals, often alternating between dissonance and harmony, sometimes involving microtonal structures. Often, the single instruments are hard to distinguish, instead the musical space opened up by the complex harmonies, disharmonies and pulses of interference becomes the focus of listening. This double LP collects four live recordings of pieces journeying "between the tones" ("zwischen den Tönen"): "Intervall 19" and "Slow Motion", composed in 1997 and 2003, respectively, are apt examples of Stiebler's style employed for chamber ensembles, with static tones putting every tonal nuance under microscopic view, and slow movement allowing for observation of the slightest variations. The third piece, "Zwischen den Tönen" (1997) is an anomaly in his oeuvre in that it makes use of his distinct techniques but is written for women's choir. The edition is rounded off by a recent recording, "ortung" (2018), again for chamber ensemble, that displays a newfound ease and compositional intuition that has become apparent in his recent work. All recordings are previously unreleased. "With great concentration the essence of sound becomes clear in Stiebler's late work, here in the heyday of his advanced age, and this has brought his music to the listeners and locations of the alternative avant-garde of noise, ambient and the real-time music scene, in which a culture of heartfelt dedication to sound has long existed. The fact that Stiebler's initiation of precise listening also constitutes a challenge to the cultivation of classical music (he is a great admirer of Mozart) has not yet been properly recognized." (from the liner notes by Matthias R. Entreß) Edition of 300 in single sleeve with two printed inner sleeves. Liner notes in German and English by Matthias R. Entreß and Ernstalbrecht Stiebler.

After "Today, the organ has played beautifully again" and "32 bpm" from 2019, Edition Telemark presents three new LPs by Dutch sound artist William Engelen, released on the occasion of his exhibition "Klinkt goed" at Kunstmuseum Den Haag. All three LPs are released separately but may be listened to as a whole because they portray three work groups that are representative of Engelen's compositional methods: Falten, Verstrijken and Gebrauchsspuren. The Dutch word "verstrijken" means the same as its German counterpart "verstreichen": the time that passes. It is the name of a compositional method that William Engelen has been using since 2005. For a Verstrijken piece, he asks one or more musicians to keep a diary for a defined time period, usually a week. He then transforms each diary into a graphical score for the particular instrument played by each musician, where every hour is translated into eight seconds of sound. For the purposes of the composition, every activity described in the journal must belong to one of four general categories: sleeping, eating, working and free time. These will be represented by different colors in the score and later by different types of sounds. The quality of each individual sound is influenced by the quality of the particular activity, e.g. if the player slept well or not, how a particular meal tasted, etc. In this way, the musician performs a kind of self-portrait. Due to the nature of the composition, every score belongs to the particular player who has written the underlying journal and must only be performed by themselves. It is possible to perform Verstrijken in ensembles, though in this case each musician essentially performs solo and must not listen to the other players. Verstrijken has been realized for a large number of musicians and instruments. Some recordings have been released in 2008 on CD as part of the catalogue "Verstrijken (Audio Works 1999–2008)" by Verlag für Moderne Kunst Nürnberg. This LP pairs two unreleased solo recordings: "Verstrijken for Ko Ishikawa" (2010, played on shō) and "Verstrijken for Luc Döbereiner" (2007, for computer). Edition of 300.

Two previously unreleased recordings from Philip Corner's "Gong/Ear" series of works. Side A was recorded on a South German night train ride in 1990, side B in the Alps in 1994. "Riding the rails. Down the Rhine at-night alone in a compartment making music for my-self with those Korean-shaman-cymbals given as a gift from Ho-Sun Cheon (husband of Hong-Hee Kim who later will organize the festival 'The SeOUL of Fluxus' and invite-me come-and-participate) when he was cultural attaché to Denmark and came to the 'Fantastics' festival in Roskilde) ... yes consider them part of the 'Gong/Ear' series of (call them) Metal Meditations which started manyyear befor from HighSchool teaching, an Experimental Music wher i turnd-out to be the lerner, reducing the possibl-abilitys of all resonant metals to a rezonant essensetial, and so following me my whole life into now. In to the Rail Road wher outersound ov an other kountry enters into my manipyulayshunz ov those sacred circles. At othertimes that sound going-out to be ears of other dancers and so their bodys body'smove-ments coming bak to me as a kind-ov audiovisual feedbackloop---many ov such artistic lovers, until coming in-a-way to that same Korea sound enshrined forever on the 'Gong/Ear: Shaman' recording: The Wormhole CD completing a circl in-a-way even bak to Korea. Later, as progresses (one coud say) in all my creativwork-concepts-becoms the greater generlizayshun 'Withinstacys'---a fulfillment of 'extasy'---wher every notesoundaction must be perfect, by immediate and uncontrovertabl certeinty." (Philip Corner)

Horacio Vaggione (born 21 January 1943) is an Argentinian composer of electro-acoustic and instrumental music who specializes in micromontage, granular synthesis, and microsound and whose pieces are often scored for performers and computers (mixed music). His music is regularly played worldwide in major centers and festivals of contemporary music. La Maquina de Cantar is his first solo recorded work; originally released on the Italian Cramps Records label as the 18th volume of the Nova Musicha series dedicated to contemporary avant-garde composers, La Maquina de Cantar is now made available again on Dialogo in a faithful reproduction of the original gatefold cover artwork, including also an inner sleeve with the English translation of the liner notes. From the original liner notes of “La Maquina de Cantar”: Horacio Vaggione was born in Cordoba (Argentina) in 1943. He co-founded, in 1965, the Centro de Música Experimental de la Universidad de Cordoba, Argentina. In 1966, he was awarded a Fullbright scholarship that allowed him to travel through the USA, where he visited several electronic music studios (Columbia, Illinois, California) and met John Cage. From 1969 to 1972, while living in Madrid, he belonged to a “live” electronic music group with Eduardo Polonio and Luis de Pablo. He was also in charge of the ALEA group’s electronic music studio. In 1973, he visited the Far East. In 1974/75 he toured in the USA and Europe, more precisely with E. Wiener and the Kevan Cleary and Dance Company, while he was working in various electronic music studios (New York, Oakland, Montreal and Paris). [From 1978 he] lives in Paris, where he teaches electronic music techniques (synthesisers) and collaborates with Martin Davorin-Jagodic and Costin Miereanu on audio-visual performances. - - - La Maquina de Cantar was produced in 1971, using the IBM 7090 computer owned by the data processing centre of the University of Madrid. Sound synthesis was carried out by a team under the technical advice of Florentino Briones, director of the centre. The complete system is a “hybrid”, as it is made up of digital and analogue operations. To begin, the composer writes his “score” in musical notation and then transcribes it into decimal numerical notation. This numerical notation is then transcribed into the machine’s language, in the form of punch cards; in this way, the computer receives all the data that it has to process and translate into sound. At the same time, the POPOVA program, which supports all the operations, is also launched. The sound is produced in the central unit of the IBM 7090, via high-speed magnetisation changes. So, the sound values will be expressed in the form of the number of magnetisation changes (bits). Once the sound and its envelope have been generated through this digital process, the next step is to send this information to an analogue section, consisting of a series of filters, a VCO (voltage-controlled oscillator), and an echo chamber. Contrastingly, Ending is a work for live electronic keyboards. In this version, three Minimoog synthesisers (played by the composer) and a Yamaha organ (played by E. Wiener) were used. The work is dedicated to Robert Ashley.

David Eugene Tudor (January 20, 1926 – August 13, 1996) was an American pianist and composer of experimental music. Originally an organist, he went on to become one of the leading performers of avant-garde piano music, giving first or early performances of works by, to name a few, Pierre Boulez, Morton Feldman, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Christian Wolff, and La Monte Young. Tudor is particularly associated with John Cage, who wrote a number of compositions for him. His solo record Microphone was originally released on the Italian Cramps Records label as the 16th volume of the Nova Musicha series dedicated to contemporary avant-garde composers, Microphone is now made available again on Dialogo in a faithful reproduction of the original gatefold cover artwork, including also an inner sleeve with the English translation of the liner notes. From the original liner notes of “Microphone”: David Tudor was born in Philadelphia in 1926. He studied organ and theory with H. William Hawke, piano with Irma Wolpe Rademacher, analysis and composition with Stefan Wolpe. He began his concert activity as an organist. He has been known as the most important avant-garde pianist since the day he performed, to great acclaim, the American debut of Pierre Boulez’s Deuxieme Sonate pour Piano (1950), and subsequently introduced the works of Earle Brown, Sylvano Bussotti, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Christian Wolff to a larger audience. At the beginning of the 1960s, he and Cage switched to live electronic music as opposed to music performed in the studio. As a composer, Tudor relies on technological tools that are both flexible and complex: he uses mostly modular electronic devices, many of which he built himself. His method requires the choice of specific electronic components and transducers, whose interconnections define both composition and performance. The sound materials he employs unfold through broad movements in time and space, with many of his compositions associated with visual sources: light systems, dance, television, theatre, film or 4-colour laser projections. - - - The only source of Microphone’s sound is the modulation of a microphone feedback produced in a distant echo chamber. The incidence and duration of the sounds are produced by the action of extremely close (narrow band) peak/notch filters (used in both modes), inserted into the lead signal. Each of the 9 versions is performed by the composer and simultaneously recorded on four tracks. Then the four tracks are spliced onto two, using a pan-matrix. The final product is a library of 9 stereo tapes, each about 32 min. long, which can be used in any combination, for live performances or for electronic installations. In these performances the tapes are played and stopped at any point, rewound and played again, altered in amplitude and/or equalisation, rotated on any given channel, etc., at will, for any period of time. A live performance of Microphone (for instance without tapes) can be achieved by employing (a minimum of 4) performers using duplication systems, each one with 2 speakers. This 1973 instantiation of Microphone covers a work originally conceived for the Pepsi Pavilion of Expo ‘70, in Osaka, Japan. Conceptually, the original work derives from discoveries made through the composer’s collaboration in the design of the Pavilion’s acoustic system. Sound diffusion was achieved through the use of 37 loudspeakers placed in a rhomboid grid system covering 3/4 of the sphere. The original tapes for Microphone were recorded in May 1973, at the Mills College Centre for Contemporary Music, using funds from their multi-track recording research project. The recordings were conducted by Robert Sheff, with assistance from John Bischoff.

Edition of 300 LP on black vinyl. Audiophile pressing, including printed inner. Perfect replica of the original packaging and newly remastered for optimal sound.At long last, after remaining out of print for decades, the Milan based imprint, Dialogo, dives into the legendary catalog of Cramps, bringing forth the first ever vinyl reissue of Steve Lacy’s LP, "Straws", issued as the sixth instalment of the label’s DIVerso series in 1977. Truly singular in the legendary American saxophonist’s discography - featuring stunning solo excursions and dialogs with himself - it remains one of the great documents of 1970s improvisation, and is as engrossing, creatively riveting, and as ahead of its time today as it was when it was laid to tape. Complete with original liner notes penned by Lacy himself, it’s not to be missed!   For the scale of its impact, Cramps was a relatively short-lived endeavour, running for roughly seven years between 1973 and 1980. Founded in Milan by the producer, publisher, and graphic designer, Gianni Sassi, the label was a near perfect emblem of revolutionary temperaments emerging within Italy during that era; creatively radical, globally minded, without profit motive, and bridging numerous musical idioms. Subsequently, few labels associated with experimental music have garnered as much affection, or as devoted a following as Cramps. It’s seminal albums by John Cage, Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, Giusto Pio, Demetrio Stratos, Juan Hidalgo, Robert Ashley, Walter Marchetti, Cornelius Cardew, Raul Lovisoni / Francesco Messina, Alvin Lucier, Derek Bailey, and so many more - the vast majority of which have remained largely out of print and nearly impossible to obtain for decades - rank among experimental music’s great holy grails. Now, at long last, the Milan based imprint, Dialogo, has begun a stunning series of vinyl reissues from the Cramps catalog. A little while back we celebrated their reissues of Costin Miereanu’s Luna Cinese and David Tudor’s Microphone, and now they’re back with the seminal American saxophonist Steve Lacy’s 1977 LP, Straws, their first exploring the Cramps’ legendary DIVerso series. First emerging during the mid 1950s, saxophonist and composer, Steve Lacy (1934 – 2004), has long been regarded as one of the most important contributors to 20th Century musical canon, producing groundbreaking records with Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry, Thelonious Monk, Kenny Burrell, The Jazz Composer's Orchestra, Alan Silva, Roswell Rudd, Globe Unity Orchestra, ICP Orchestra, Miles Davis, and numerous others. An early adopter of free improvisation and experimental forms of jazz, despite his incredible catalog of collaborations, it is Lacy’s work as a solo artist and band leader that towers above the rest.Released in 1977, Straws encounters Lacy more than two decades into his professional career, brimming with confidence, versatility, and at the top of his game, building on the back of an incredibly prolific period of recording that grew from his move to Paris in 1970, where he remained for the bulk of his remaining years. The album, sparse and visionary, features six individual works - two solo pieces, two with celeste accompaniment, and two tape collages - dedicated to figures from various disciples of the arts, Brion Gysin, Janis Joplin, Art Tatum, Marilyn Monroe, Igor Stravinsky, and his wife, the singer Irene Aebi. Easily among the most adventurous of Lacy’s output from the period, Straws deftly rises to the demands of each challenging venture, creating something entirely brave, singular and visionary from clusters of tone, airy spaces, deconstructed melodic structures, playful moments, and truly radical dialogs with himself.Freejazz that’s not quit freejazz, and experimental music as it should be understood and rarely is, Straws, heard more than fourty years after it first emerged, heaves with life, and stands as a potent reminder of what a powerful creative voice Lacy was. It’s absolutely incredible and engrossing from the first note to the last. This first-time vinyl reissue from Dialogo comes in a beautifully produced sleeve that faithful reproduces the original cover artwork and inner sleeve. A must for fans of Cramps, Lacy, or experimental music and freejazz at large.

Renowned vocalist and composer Lore Lixenberg presents her new project: Conlon Nancarrow’s Studies for Player Piano. These iconic works, which inspired the writing of Ligeti, Carter, Reich and so many others, have been transcribed for piano and ensemble before, but never before for the human voice. She sings one part live with pre-recorded tracks of her own voice coming through different channels. As she writes, ‘When you perform the rolls ‘live’ you get the mechanical inevitability of the pre-recorded voices with the visceral excitement of witnessing someone attempting the dizzying complex polyrhythms in the moment.’ Prepare for thrilling virtuosity and a kaleidoscopic, immersive experience.

Plein Air the album presents recordings from a plant-driven synthesizer. A custom built instrument that uses scientific sensors and software programming to generate real-time tree leaf data. Light, photosynthesis and transpiration modifies sound: the rhythm, melody, texture, tempo and harmony shift with atmospheric conditions and tree response – electronically. The sounds of each leaf of regional deciduous trees by scientifically sensored data-sonification are much more musical than one could imagine. Their timbre and volume always depend on light and temperature, number of audience. It varies from site to site and from country to country. We can hear loops of rhythmic sequences, groups of tiny computer generated signals, long drones which change constantly and are hard to describe.

Famed free jazz concert registration of an early New Direction for the Art performance. Recorded in 1971. Old-style Gatefold LP, with rare photographs & extensive liner notes by Alan Cummings.The performance by Takayanagi Masayuki New Direction for the Art at the Gen’yasai festival on August 14, 1971 was an intense, bruising collision between the radical, anti-establishment politics of the period in Japan and the febrile avant-garde music that had begun to emerge a few years before. The ferocious performance that you can hear here was received with outright hostility by the audience, who responded first with catcalls and later with showers of debris that were hurled at the performers. Takayanagi though described the group’s performance to jazz magazine Swing Journal as a success, “an authentic and realistic depiction of the situation”.In 1962, Takayanagi, bassist Kanai Hideto and painter Kageyama Isamu went on to form an AACM-style musicians’ collective called the New Century Music Research Institute. Every Friday, members gathered at Gin-Paris, a chanson bar in the fashionable Ginza district of Tokyo, to push the outer limits of jazz creativity. But the pivotal moment for his music was the creation a new trio version of his New Directions group in August 1969, with the free bassist Yoshizawa Motoharu and a young drummer Toyozumi (Sabu) Yoshisaburō. Experiments eventually led to the creation of two basic frameworks for improvisation that Takayagi referred to as Mass Projection and Gradually Projection.  “La Grima” (tears), the piece that was played at the Gen’yasai festival, is a mass projection and listening to it, you can get a clear sense of what Takayanagi was aiming at. Mass projection involves a dense, speedy and chaotic colouring in of space that destroys the listener’s perception of time, and thus of musical development.The ferocity of the performance of “La Grima” at the Gen’yasai Festival in Sanrizuka on August 14, 1971 was consciously grounded by Takayanagi in a particular historical moment, ripe with conflict and violence. A month after the festival, on September 16, three policemen would die during struggles at the site. This was the context that the three-day Gen’yasai Festival existed within. The line-up reflected the radical politics of the movement, with leading free jazz musicians like Takayanagi, Abe Kaoru, and Takagi Mototeru appearing alongside radical ur-punkers Zuno Keisatsu, heavy electric blues bands like Blues Creation, and Haino Keiji’s scream-jazz unit Lost Aaraaff.New Direction for the Arts trio topped the bill on the opening day, playing an aggressive, uncompromising “mass projection” set of polyphonic improvisation. Alongside drummer Hiroshi Yamazaki and saxophonist Kenji Mori, Takayanagi soloed hard and continuously for forty minutes. This was performance as precisely calibrated metaphor: three musicians responding to the demands of the moment with instinctive force and fury, untethered by rules, leaderless yet not rudderless (the direction part of the group’s name was no accident). The piece was entitled La Grima – tears - and the fusion between the palpable anger of the performance and hopeless sadness of its title were also perfectly apt for the situation. This was a fight that the state was always going to win. Yet, by all accounts, the band’s set went down like a fart at a funeral. The band were showered with catcalls and debris throughout, and by chants of “go home” when the music finally came to an end. However, looking back at the event in the year-end issue of Japan’s leading jazz magazine, Swing Journal, Takayanagi was surprisingly upbeat: New Directions brought a solid political consciousness to our performance and succeeded in an authentic and realistic depiction of the situation. But journalism revealed its superficiality in its inability to penetrate the core of the music. I don’t know much about anyone else, but we at least left behind a competent record. It’s a fascinating statement in many ways. Perhaps on one-hand it can be read as stubborn, solipsistic and self-justifying, yet in conjunction with his statement in 1971 there are points that guide us towards an understanding of just what Takayanagi intended with his performance at the festival. As Kitazato Yoshiyuki has argued, it becomes an almost religious act, directed at the earth deities of the land. A union of anger, sorrow and malevolence that can be placed nowhere effective, all it can do is find expression and channeling. The forcible land seizures at Narita, the eviction of farmers from land that had been in families for generations, the destruction of communities: none of this can be prevented, not least by an artistic action. All that can be done is an attempt to mark the land itself, to soak it with the combined force of emotions and the volume of the performances, to bury something there that cannot be drowned out, even by the coming roar of jet engines.

Where To Now? cordially invite you into Lutto Lento’s ‘Dark Secret World’. After a string of releases on labels such as FTD, Proto Sites, DUNNO Recordnings and ourselves, we now find Polish artist Lubomir Grzelak ready to present a fully realised, full-length distillation of his distinctly exuberant and unique electronic narratives. ‘Dark Secret World’ takes it’s cues from a ridiculously diverse palette of influences… from Dancehall, Jungle, and American Sacred Hymns to more abstract influences such as Goosebumps, Caribbean magic beliefs, Rudolf Steiner, and Disney’s ‘The Godess of Spring’. Upon initial digestion of these influences your initial reaction is probably that this is an amalgamation of voices which appear too diverse to entwine, but for those who know Lutto’s work will also know that it’s exactly this psychedelic and wild stirring pot of source material partnered with Lubomir’s precise percussive and improvised sample led persuasions that make him stand out as a unique and flourishing figure in electronic music. ‘Dark Secret World’ is certainly a mystical trip, with Lubomir conversing with and pooling from a sampled palette that is ultimately a deep, personal, dark and twisted tale of horror and intrigue, melding this gambit with his signature air of light & wildly percussive beat led playfulness has allowed him to create something wholly other. ‘Dark Secret World’ stands as an expertly and clearly painstakingly crafted 43 minute movement through ethereal & fantastical unfamiliar realms to sudden sweeps of the totally familiar where rewinds, heavy breaks, bass waves, whistles, airhorns, sirens, etc weave together to form an album which is both extremely odd yet totally cohesive and absorbing. --- Where to Now, 2017

The second release from Leisha Thomas under the Alpha Maid moniker, "CHUCKLE" is nowhere near as upbeat as the title might suggest. Grey and overcast, it ties together a sort of submerged/ Slint-adjacent post-rawk-via-jazz technicality with the DIY grit of '90s Seattle, but roots everything in contemporary London. Thomas's vocals lash out with range: sometimes a disquieting snarl, sometimes a pleasing, echoing hum, but always entrancing. There's an eccentric spirit that recalls both Dean Blunt and This Heat in its disregard for stasis or formality. She pieces the record together like a sketchbook, cutting-and-pasting samples and editing her instrumentation with gleeful anarchy. It's pop music, just about, but charged with South London's hybrid energy and a distinctly British sense of socio-political unease. Opener 'MILD WEATHER’ sounds like an inebriated brass band dipped in fuzz, 'NEWLY WOKE & THOUGHT PROVOKED’ could have been lifted straight off Yves Tumor’s PAN debut, all lowercase hooks and bursts of disruption, same with ‘SUM1’ but here skewed into a kind of insular pop reminiscent of La Timpa’s bruised avant-soul. ‘WOWOWOW’, features Diane Abbott being skewered by Today Programme numpties to grinding riffs, while ‘DOGGY' ends the set with a sort of beautiful art-rock coda that’s one part Virginia Astley to a slug of Micachu’s chopped & screwed London Sinfonietta headwreck. --- C.A.N.V.A.S. , 2021