More than half a century has elapsed since the founding of the legendary British free improvisation group AMM. We could say there would be no free improvisation as we know it today without AMM’s Eddie Prévost, John Tilbury and Keith Rowe. The mystery surrounding AMM has not faded; to the contrary, even nowadays it carries a particular appeal due to its engaged, intelligible and nonetheless radical message.As N.O. Moore writes in the ‘Until The Next Time’ liner notes:“The musician makes music audible. The improviser makes music differ from itself.AMM calls forth music at the same time as simply allowing it to arrive, unbidden, as if sound were as indifferent to us as any other natural phenomena.Against the egalitarianism of sounds (…), we reserve the right to fail – that is, we take the risk of evaluation. Next time, we will get it right? … That is the wrong question. AMM: the next time is to be heard here, now, sounding out … almost.”The 180g vinyl includes an insert with photos and liner notes by N.O. Moore. --- Eddie Prévost – percussionKeith Rowe – guitar, electronicsJohn Tilbury – piano

This is Dorothy Ashby's debut album, originally released in 1957 by the Regent label. Recognized as the woman who gave the harp a Jazz Voice, here Ashby is at the head of a highly distinctive combo featuring Frank Wess on flute, Eddie Jones or Wendell Marshall on bass and master Ed Thigpen on drums. The Jazz Harpist is an unprecedented mix of evocative classic sounds and jazz soul, awarded by Allmusic as her first and best album, period! --- Tracklist: "Thou Swell" (Lorenz Hart, Richard Rodgers) - 4:02"Stella by Starlight" (Ned Washington, Victor Young) - 3:09"Dancing on the Ceiling" (Hart, Rodgers) - 7:31"Aeolian Groove" - 4:16"Quietude" - 2:52"Spicy" - 3:41"Lamentation" - 4:03 --- Snowing Records, 2021

Basil Kirchin, a forgotten genius of post-war British music, was an influential jazz drummer, creative free-spirit and pioneer of Musique Concrète. Kirchin wrote a lot of albums, Mind on the run is one of the most representative Library record he wrote with fellow John Coleman. A milestone in british avantgarde. The world of library music is an odd, even paradoxical one. Ostensibly made to be rented and used as incidental music for TV, radio and film when budgets don’t allow for original compositions, these albums should by rights tend towards the conventional, towards characterless pastiche for the widest possible application. In fact, though, especially in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the non-commercial―or more accurately, the differently commercial―library music industry was notable for the fertile experimentation that its often unrecognized or even uncredited composers and musicians indulged in. One of the key figures attracted to the field was English jazz drummer Basil Kirchin. A true one-off, Kirchin had started out as a drummer in his early teens, working with his father Ivor Kirchin’s big band during World War II, before drumming with some of the biggest names in British jazz after the war. An early countercultural instinct took him to India on a spiritual quest of self-discovery in the late ‘50s, after which he relocated to Australia and then back to England again at the turn of the ‘60s, pursuing the parallel interests of jazz drumming and sonic experimentation. As rock ‘n’ roll and skiffle overtook jazz as the youth music of the era, he continued to work with his father, but his passion became the experimental music he was simultaneously working on, experimenting with tape recorders and found sounds to create new and unusual music. It was this strand of his work which would lead to his collaborations with De Wolfe Music, the production company that pioneered library music in the UK. --- 2021

HIGHLY RECCOMENDED!!!! A singular exercise in Will Guthrie's discography, “People Pleaser”, a series initiated in 2017, sees the Australian partially put down his drumsticks and wear a producer cap for a result offering a resolutely singular perspective of / on his work with a very personal dimension. On the first volume, with a cover signed Stephen O'Malley sets the tone by diverting the chamaré Warhol influenced visual of the album “Unit Structures” by Cecil Taylor. The portrait of the free jazz pianist has been replaced by passport photos of Guthrie. The result is a diversion into a fairly “Pop” aesthetic whose musical content works in a fairly similar way. Four years later, the cover art's undertones are slightly darker and Guthrie hasn't aged a bit on his new passport photo. The twelve tracks of this second “People Pleaser” combine and arrange field recordings, heady loops, twists, musical quotes stuck on bedside records, recorded moments captured during travels, ghosty voices from low-fi lands, a police interview tape and imagined exotic sounds ... Guthrie could walk us for hours on his hard drive like looking at a photo album but he chose to build pieces based on this very personal sound material, much like a mixtape, with special care given to how sounds articulate, overlap and collide. He thus invites his heroes and his friends to join him in skilfully chiseled and finely edited imaginary jams. The first to take pleasure in this “People Pleaser” is undoubtedly its author as some of his finds are enjoyably playful; we are there embarked in an addictive sound patchwork at high speed where a Balinese Squarepusher is propelled via a defective cathode ray tube in a temple where the happy marriage of the saxophone and the gong is celebrated before this too short respite is interrupted by a sustained hip hop rhythm. The multiplicity and variety of sources give the whole a very pop format and the way in which Guthrie combines sounds, textures, rhythms and vocal elements quickly takes on a narrative dimension and poses this exercise between hip hop and a very personal plunderphonic, evoking as much J Dilla or RZA as the irreverent inventiveness of People Like Us or Wobbly.Will Guthrie has never been in as good company as on a solo album, he also lists on the cover the list of friends, heroes, members of his family and countries who inspired him and to whom he pays homage / collage on this new disc; An aesthetic exercise apart in his discography, both infinitely personal and self-centered and resolutely turned towards what animates him, the aptly named “People Pleaser” reveals the music DNA of the Australian and can be listened to on repeat. --- Kythibong, 2021

Istanbul-based free music ensemble Konstrukt perform alongside special guest Alexander Hawkins building the perfect groove in a sweaty Cafe OTO on August 10th 2015.Two sets from the same night, each a 40 minute long improvisation. First set is a psychedelic warm-up where the Turkish quartet welcomes Hawkins in a whirlwind of hypnotic funky tunes going electric in the Miles way. The second set starts with Hawkins piano keys bouncing along a silent background soon to be filled with a groovy odd drum tempo leading to a wall of sound where all parts build a perfectly unpredictable dialogue.Pressing info: 200 copies on black

On the first Monday after the summer holidays Arnold decided to not start the morning with a pile of emails about canceled, rescheduled or possible concerts but instead walk around Amsterdam. Following the Ring road A10, both from the inside and the outside, he walked without a map, tried to keep as close to the highway as possible but got lost several times. When home, he sat down and played what came to mind. The recordings of those sessions have been released in edition of 100 CDs and 200 LPs and after 300 downloads and 300 streams the tracks will be taken offline. --- Arnold de Boer is also playing under the monicker Zea and is part of Dutch band The Ex.

This wonderful album, originally released in 1974 on the Memphis-based Hi Records label, deserved a wider audience than it ended up getting at the time. It played to Ann Peebles' great strength, her poised and sultry voice, and surrounded by the sparse, easy funkiness of the trademark Hi rhythm section and producer Willie Mitchell's perfect use of horns and strings, she sings like a resilient but disappointed angel on this impressive set of songs about the darker side of love. Her best song is here, the eccentric but brilliant 'I Can't Stand the Rain,' along with a marvelous version of Joe Simon's '(You Keep Me) Hangin' On,' and perfect readings of a pair of Earl Randle songs, 'If We Can't Trust Each Other' and 'I'm Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down.' Peebles sings her heart out, and with those somehow bright-sounding Hi grooves behind her, it all comes together to make a classic album of dark, bouncy, and beautiful Southern soul.

Ground-breaking percussive ambient recordings to induce altered states of consciousness through ecstatic dance. Gabrielle Roth and The Mirrors were a world unto themselves.Despite featuring an extraordinary cast of musicians (with credits including Pharoah Sanders, Miles Davis, Sun Ra, Santana and Milton Nascimento) and selling hundreds of thousands of albums, the music of Gabrielle Roth and The Mirrors remains largely unheard beyond their sphere. Conceived as live, improvised soundtracks to Roth’s transcendental dance workshops, musical acclaim was never on the agenda. --- Timecapsule, 2021

Remains Of The Light, the debut album by Japanese trio Usurabi, is a gorgeous thing – six generous, deftly melodic songs that stretch out slowly, breathing deeply, yet never outstaying their welcome. The members of Usurabi started playing together in 2017, but they’d known each other for several decades, meeting via their involvement in a music club at university. Led by songwriter, singer and guitarist, Toshimitsu Akiko, previously of psych-pop duos Doodles and Aminome, the trio is completed by Kawaguchi Masami (New Rock Syndicate, Hardy Rocks, Miminokoto) on bass and guitar, and Morohashi Shigeki (Majutsu no Niwa, Uchu Engine, peaflan, Alraune) on drums. Kawaguchi and Morohashi had already played together in the legendary Broomdusters, a group they formed when they were both university students. Toshimitsu, long a fan of Broomdusters, formed Usurabi to explore what she describes as “rock music that features vocal mainly and floating sound like waves.” It’s a clear, simple and apt description of what they do. Toshimitsu’s songs are graceful, each having a dynamic arc to their construction, while allowing for all kinds of subtle inflection from her guitar, sometimes tussling with Kawaguchi’s flinty, overloaded blues; Toshimitsu drives the songs with subtletly and wit, sculpting waves of energy from his kit. Throughout, Toshimitu’s songs hint at questions, complexities, metaphors: allusions and illusions. Songs like “Brunnera” and the closing “Constellation” are adrift, beamed out on rays of light, the trio’s empathic playing harnessing a subtle kind of psychedelia. “Constellation” explores Toshimitsu’s thought, “Am I allowed to turn the feeling I can nothing to do into a constellation, like ancestors did?” The lovely, shaded pop of “Autumn Rain” translates a Toshimitsu solo arrangement into a stripped-back, delightful slice of happy-sad nostalgia; “The rain is always sweet to me,” Toshimitsu says of the song. Ask the trio what other music informs Usurabi, and they share names, some expected, some surprising: Kaneko Jutok, Les Rallizes Denudes, The Doors (“The first real rock experience to me,” Toshimitsu recalls), Captain Beefheart, The Rolling Stones. You can hear elements of all of this music in their songs, but mostly it’s more a hint, or a tint, than an obvious acknowledgment; the playing certainly shares the hopeful freedom of Kaneko, and the stridency and sensitivity of the Stones at their best. It also recalls the independent music of groups like The Pastels; like that outfit, Usurabi have absolute integrity in their sound. It’s quietly ambitious, and quite beautiful.  --- An'Archives, 2021

This is a very special release of music from long ago and far away. When I heard Keiko Shichijo play this on a run down and wobbly piano in a basement-made-art-space a few years ago I could not believe my ears. Oscar Jan Hoogland, who invited Keiko to come and play, presented it with a story about Keiko who found this old Armenian music and fell in love with it. I think we all did that night. I immediately asked Keiko after the show what it all was exactly and she showed me copies of the score with the Armenian letters. I asked her if this music was out, if she had recordings and had put it out. She did not. I searched on the internet and found a few video’s and a recording of the Six Dances but none was as compelling, playful and enchanting as what I heard from Keiko. A few months later we met again, and I heard Keiko play the dances again, and then Oscar Jan and Keiko and me sat together and decided to record it and put it out. About twenty minutes, I thought, that is perfect for a 10” record. That would be quite something to have. Keiko invited me and my recording equipment to the Geelvinck Hinlopen Huis in Amsterdam; a 16th century house along the canals in Amsterdam where she sometimes gives concert on a piano that’s just a bit younger. So we were going to record this on a historic instrument; a Steinweg Nachf piano, built in 1880, from the collection of Hans Kramer. Wow. And Hans was there too to help with the tuning and to be stand-by in case of anything. This was all quite unique, I was a bit situation-struck: a wonderful place, an amazing piano and this beautiful music. But it worked, we took it from the air and with the help from a few machines we got it cut into vinyl. So here we are now with 300 pieces of 10” vinyl and some boxes filled with CDs waiting for the rest of the world to put their ears down to listen and been taken into the world of Komitas presented by Keiko Shichijo. Who’s first?  Arnold de Boer, Amsterdam, October 2016.

It appears that the award-winning composer is here joined by their Curl collective in ‘Blue Alibi’ for an album that almost preternaturally collapses the vernacular of grunge rock, free jazz, indie-pop, rap, and chamber music, into scenes limned with the skill of a proper soundtrack scorer. At this point we’re just going to refer to this style as Mica Music, because for all intents and purposes, there’s just nobody making anything quite like it in the modern sphere. It’s the type of music that would puzzle a computer tasked with classifying its taxonomy, all asymmetric, bittersweetly discordant and metered off-centre in a way that defies categorisation. While there’s no explicit mention of lockdown fuckries, aside from Brother May’s “middle finger to Boris Johnson and all the cops now” on the album’s bitterly puckered ace ‘Om Om Om Om’, the album’s sore blue pallor certainly feels like it was sculpted by the experience, or is implicitly realised as a salve for it. From the scratchy, free-jazz Company-isms and deadpan vox of ‘Whack’, to the mumbly introspection of ‘Rose’, thru the Sub-pop styles of ‘Liquorice’, and exquisite nap anxiety ambient in ‘Monk’ and ‘Blue Shit’, or the devastating torpor of ‘Waves’ and biley reflux of Flying Nun-esque guitars in ‘Outro’, it’s an ideal soundtrack to miserable, locked down times. --- 2021

Avant-garde jazz drummer Rashied Ali played with John Coltrane up until his death in 1967, appearing on final recordings like The Olatunji Concert and Interstellar Space. After Coltrane's death, Ali soon formed his own quartet, with Fred Simmons on piano, Stafford James on bass violin and Carlos Ward on alto sax and flute. The quartet's first release, New Directions In Modern Music, released on Ali's own Survival Records in 1973, exploded onto the free jazz scene, influencing the likes of Don Cherry and Archie Shepp (as well as many outside the jazz idiom), becoming a kind of manifesto for avant-garde music of the period. --- Klimt, 2021

LP comes in deluxe gatefold sleeve with cover artwork and liner notes from Alvin Lucier. Includes a download code featuring hi-res vesions of the LP material. CD comes in deluxe 8 panel digipak with liner notes from Alvin Lucier and a 16 page booklet with live images. Features two additional pieces not included in the vinyl version. --- Tracklisting: 1. Tilted Arc - 17:47 2. Double Helix - 16:02 3. EPO-5 - 12:12 4. Semicircle - 18:35 5. Two Circles - 18:24 6. Braid - 16:10  Black Truffle’s documentation of the prolific recent work of legendary American composer Alvin Lucier continues with Works for the Ever Present Orchestra. This is a very special release for the composer as it presents pieces written for the thirteen-member Ever Present Orchestra, formed in 2016 exclusively to perform Lucier’s works. At the heart of the ensemble are four electric guitars, an instrument Lucier began composing for in 2013 with Criss-Cross (recorded by two core members of the Ever Present Orchestra, Oren Ambarchi and Stephen O’Malley, for whom it was composed, on Black Truffle 033). Through the use of e-bows, the guitars take on a role akin to the slow sweep pure wave oscillators heard in many of Lucier’s works since the early 1980s, but with added harmonic richness. Like much of Lucier’s instrumental music, the pieces recorded here focus on acoustic phenomena, especially beating patterns, produced by the interference between closely tuned pitches. The work presented here is some of the richest and most inviting that Lucier has composed. Though all of the pieces clearly belong to the same continuing exploration of the behaviour of sound in physical space and make use of related compositional devices, each takes on a strikingly different character. Titled Arc, for the full ensemble of four guitars, four saxophones, four violins, piano and bowed glockenspiel inhabits a world of sliding, uneasy tones, punctuated by a single piano note. Where Double Helix, for four guitars, rests on a pillow of warm, low hum, EPO-5, for two guitars, saxophone, violin, and glockenspiel possess a limpid, crystalline quality. Accompanying the four new compositions are two adaptations of existing pieces for radically different instrumentation, demonstrating Lucier’s excitement about the new possibilities suggested by this dedicated ensemble. Works for the Ever Present Orchestra is an essential document of the current state of Lucier’s continuing exploration, as well as offering a seductive entry-point for anyone who might yet be unacquainted with his singular body of work.2CD release presented in a deluxe 4-panel digipak with cover artwork and liner notes from Alvin Lucier plus a 16-page booklet with live photos. Disc 2 of this release includes the bonus Adaptions for the Ever Present Orchestra featuring two pieces (“Two Circles” and “Braid”) that are not included on the vinyl version. Mastered by Rashad Becker. Design by Lasse Marhaug.

Both responsible for some of the most beguiling releases in recent memory, Tomoko Sauvage brings her porcelain bowls, water sounds and array of hydrophones to Francesco Cavaliere’s dreamlike staging in ‘Viridescens’ for an utterly spellbinding suite that transcends the sum of its parts.  Both artists draw each other out of themselves and on to a shared plane of surreality, with Cavaliere opting to omit his usual vocals but still infuse his playfully oneiric spirit, while Sauvage’s elemental sounds feel unusually magnified and part of a far plusher ecology of environmental recording. The duo point to influences ranging from Henning Christiansen’s Green Music on a conceptual level, and a lineage of environmental music from Walter Tilgner to Knud Viktor and the likes of Kankyo-Ongaku and Hiroshi Yoshimura, and we can also hear analogs everywhere from Dolphins Into The Future’s field recording sojourns to Ora Clementi’s ambient inceptions or the liminal zones of Elodie. Anyone previously snagged by either of their solo works will surely recognise the emergence of structures new to either of their oeuvres developing from the stroked bells of ‘a man with a green hat’ to the spikier, overgrown variegation of ‘Rainforest Synthesis’, with ‘≒ AO (blue light is green)’ finding tantalising new interstices of quietude that make the the album’s 9 minute standout ‘Twin Emerald Dolphins’ appear intoxicatingly lush in relief. --- Marrionette, 2021

Latency · MOHAMMAD REZA MORTAZAVI – Ritme Jaavdanegi (Latency 018)Mohammad Reza Mortazavi is a virtuoso percussionist known for playing traditional Persian instruments such as the tombak and daf. After developing more than thirty new striking techniques and progressing to be one of the most prominent players in Iran, Mortazavi travelled to Germany, eventually settling in Berlin to record and perform regular concerts the world over. His acclaimed performances have taken in venues such as Berlin Philharmonie and Sydney Opera House. In recent years, he has been embraced by the experimental electronic music community, collaborating with Burnt Friedman, Fis and Mark Fell.Ritme Jaavdanegi is Mortazavi’s sixth LP, and his first one available on vinyl. The album came together from recordings made in Berlin in June 2019, inspired by Mortazavi’s vivid reminiscence about profound experiences he had listening to music as a child. As he drifted in this time slipping reverie, the phrase ‘ritme jaavdanegi’ or ‘rhythm of eternity’ came to mind, and he found the phrase itself to match the 11/8 metre he was striving for. As such, all eight pieces on this album adhere to this time signature, which in itself harks back to the Aksak, a rhythmic pattern based on the alteration of binary and ternary quantities executed in a fast tempo, intrinsic to traditional music from Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan and the Balkans.In the same way these non-standard folk rhythms started to impact on Western music in the early 20th Century, so now you can hear an ever-increasing embrace of polyrhythms and metres that break away from the dominant 4/4 ideology. What’s most striking about Ritme Jaavdanegi, perceived through a lens of modern Western experimental music, is how Mortazavi’s virtuosic playing rivals the intensely programmed dynamics of electronica. His rapid, needlepoint drum hits bend their tonality in incredibly musical ways, but there is still an underlying focus on cyclical repetition that encourages the same ancient transcendental quality that so many contemporary artists strive for.

The first of three volumes: stomping, rollicking gospel music, intermingling with raw soul, searing blues, hard-rocking doo-wop and jazz, and storming r&b.; Infused and incandescent with the hurting, surging indignation of the Civil Rights movement, here are twenty-four precious scorchers by giants like the Staple Singers and Jimmy Scott, alongside devastating sides by less celebrated names like the Harmonising Five of Burlington, North Carolina, and teen-group the North Philadelphia Juniors, culminating triumphantly with slamming, sanctified versions of 'Hit The Road, Jack' and 'Wade In The Water'.

First full length album from hardcore punks Bad Brains recorded at Inner Ear Studios in 1979. Black Dots contains the first full length session of Bad Brains in a studio. It was recorded at Inner Ear Studios in 1979, which at the time was in Don Zientara's basement. The tapes sat in Arlington, VA for 17 years, until they were mixed and released in 1996 by Caroline Records. It's an outstanding document of the band at the start of their career, sounding fierce, loud and at their best.

Shizuka were a mysterious, hooded collective out of Japan led by the eponymous Shizuka (also expert doll maker) who released several albums in the nineties. Their songs were slow, heavy and sensual - perhaps recalling early The Velvet Underground as played at 16rpm  - but are both world weary and soaring. This re-issue should give you opportunity to hear what you may have missed. --- An'Archives, 2021