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🔥 Cage, Xenakis, Dumitrescu, Feldman, Cardew, etc. Avant-garde and contemporary vintage records and books 🔥
🔥 Cage, Xenakis, Dumitrescu, Feldman, Cardew, etc. Avant-garde and contemporary vintage records and books 🔥

Alterations

From Paradigm Discs comes an absolute burner, the first ever vinyl reissue of Alterations' stunning second LP “Up Your Sleeve”. Drawing on the collective radicalism of British free improvisation's leading lights - Steve Beresford, Peter Cusack, Terry Day, and David Toop - while harnessing an astounding range of sound sources, tactical approaches, and reference points, after 40 years out of print the album emerges as a missing link between contemporaneous bands like This Heat and Swell Maps, and the groundwork laid by The Scratch Orchestra, AMM, and Spontaneous Music Ensemble.
By Bradford Bailey, 27 May 2022

Compared to many of its European and American counterparts, the context of British free improvisation has always been a bit of an outsider in the mix. Radical, principled, and often bound to social and political upheavals of any given moment, the output of this scene - currently spanning more than a half-century of furious activity - includes some of the most singular and visionary gestures within the entire field of experimental sound. It was from this fertile territory - bubbling from the early groundwork laid by projects like The Scratch Orchestra, AMM, Spontaneous Music Ensemble, The Music Improvisation Company / Company, etc. - that Alterations emerged during the second half of the 1970s. A “supergroup” made up of Steve Beresford, Peter Cusack, Terry Day, and David Toop, the project produced a small handful of releases between 1978 and 1984, that remain some of the most coveted artefacts of the second wave of British free improvisation. After remaining out of print for more than 40 years, Paradigm Discs has lovingly delivered a long-overdue vinyl reissue of the second Alterations LP “Up Your Sleeve”. Beautifully produced in an edition of 500 copies, immaculately reproducing the original cover and including a numbered 4-page insert, it’s a truly astounding document of the heights of improvisational artistry that feels as fresh and forward thinking today as the day it was laid to tape.


Up Your Sleeve (LP)
Alterations
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Despite the fact that Terry Day had been part of the first wave of British improvisation as a member of The People Band during the 1960s, Alterations can be regarded as a definitive voice in the scene’s second wave. Each of the other members - Steve Beresford, Peter Cusack, and David Toop - were in the process of laying crucial groundwork for the movement's evolutionary and forward push across the late '70s and '80s. The band had sprung from the ferment of the London Musicians Collective - founded in 1975 as an open network of players to explore the possibilities of free improvisation - to which all of the members belonged.