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The Survivors' Suite
*2024 stock* The Survivors’ Suite, recorded in 1976, is the crowning achievement of Keith Jarrett’s “American Quartet” with Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden and Paul Motian, and one of the all-time enduring masterpieces in the ECM catalogue. Melody Maker: “The Survivors’ Suite is a brilliantly organized and full-blooded work which provides the perfect setting for all four talents. This is a very complete record. It creates its own universe and explores it thoroughly, leaving the listener awed and sat…
Luminessence
Mysterious, dramatic and alluring, Luminessence comes from a peak period in the creative association between Keith Jarrett and Jan Garbarek, recorded in 1974, immediately after their vibrant Belonging album. Here, Jarrett creates shimmering orchestral frameworks to spur Garbarek to some of his most concentrated, impassioned and expressive playing. “The melodies that Jarrett writes sound like Garbarek improvisations, so great is the rapport between the two men,” wrote Ian Carr in his Keith Jarre…
80/81
Widely regarded as one of Pat Metheny's most inspired recordings and now considered a classic of instrumental and improvised music, *80/81* unveiled a bold new dimension of the then-26-year-old guitarist's sonic world. Released in 1980, this groundbreaking album marked Metheny's first collaboration with jazz luminaries from multiple generations, including bassist Charlie Haden, saxophonists Dewey Redman and Michael Brecker, and drummer Jack DeJohnette.
Drawing equally from the freewheeling spiri…
Cathodic works 1966-1976
Before video art had a name, Aldo Tambellini was making it. Cathodic Works 1966-1976, presented here for the first time on double DVD by Von, is an essential document of one of the most underacknowledged pioneers in the history of experimental media - a body of work that predates the canonical account of video art and, in several respects, exceeds it.
Born in Syracuse, New York in 1930, raised in Lucca during the Second World War - a childhood spent in a city that was bombed, twenty-one of his n…
T H I R (1972)
A milestone. T H I R - Ten Hundred Inch Radii - is among the most historically significant works in Phill Niblock's output, and one of the genuinely undiscovered jewels of American experimental film. Completed in 1972 as the fourth and final chapter of his Environments cycle - begun in 1968 - it is presented here for the first time on DVD, with two alternate soundtracks, by the Italian imprint Von.
Niblock occupies a peculiar and underacknowledged position in the history of American Minimalism. …
The Futurist Manifesto
A colossal audivisual adaption of Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, by Thomas Koner, one of the uncontested master isolationists of the ethereal static sounds, a sonic symphony of the unconsciouss and a defiant decceleration critique of today society through the ultimate modern text. The Futurist Manifesto is the ultimate 4 bpm masterpiece.100 years ago, in 1909, the italian poet and artist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the ‘Futurist Manifesto’ which became the foundation of the futurist mov…
EyEar
A singular document. EyEar presents, for the first time, the visual dimension of Z'EV's practice - a body of work that had, until this release, remained inseparable from the live event, resistant to any fixed form.
Born Stefan Joel Weisser in Los Angeles in 1951, Z'EV stands as one of the most uncompromising figures in the history of experimental and industrial music. From his first solo percussion performances in San Francisco in the late 1970s - deploying self-constructed instruments assembled…
Vezdekhod
Somewhere in the Chukotka tundra, at the coordinates N 66°37' W 172°40', September 2006. A Vezdekhod tank - the all-terrain vehicle that remains, across much of Siberia, the only viable means of transport - moves through a landscape that resists every other form of passage. Carlos Casas is inside, recording. The noise is overwhelming: the resonance of the engine inside the cabin so intense, so physically present, that the only music capable of cutting through it, the only sound that could exist …
Cemetery Archive works
The elephant graveyard is a myth. No confirmed site exists, no documented mass of bones gathered in a hidden clearing. And yet the image persists - in literature, in cinema, in the collective imagination of what wild and remote nature might conceal. It is precisely this space between myth and evidence, between the archive and the unknown, that Carlos Casas moves into with Cemetery [Archive Works]. Since 2001, the Barcelona-born filmmaker and visual artist has built one of the most rigorous and e…
The ECM Recording
Marking the occasion of Steve Reich’s 80th birthday (hup, big man!), The ECM Recordings compiles three CDs of the venerable minimalist composer’s major works, which were consecutively released in 1978, 1980 and 1982, and continue to influence and inspire myriad forms of modern music. Named “our greatest living composer” (The New York Times), “America’s greatest living composer” (The Village Voice), and “…the most original musical thinker of our time” (The New Yorker), Reich’s ardent, incisive wo…
Songs of Ascension
“Songs of Ascension” is a major new recording from composer Meredith Monk and her vocal ensemble. Written in 2008, it is conceived as a continuous composition, a departure from Monk’s earlier collaged or episodic extended works. In recent years Meredith Monk’s been expanding into the worlds of orchestra and string quartet. On “Songs of Ascension” she teams up with a string quartet of New York players well versed in new music. With winds, percussion and two vocal groups added to her already extra…
Litany
*2024 stock. Deluxe packaging* The starting point for Litany was a commission received from the Oregon Bach Festival in Eugene, US. For this reason, Pärt selected an English text as the basis for his composition.
Arvo Pärt: “The English language lacks plasticity which is brought to music with long words. Working with a text in English, I had to make new discoveries and use melodic constructions that I normally don’t use in my music, to extract material from words and sentences. The text for Lita…
Te Deum
*2024 stock. Deluxe packaging* "Te Deum employs Pärt's signature tintinnabuli compositional style. Tintinnabuli is often described as a minimalistic compositional technique, as its harmonic logic departs from that of the tonal tradition of Western classical music, creating its own distinct harmonic system. Tintinnabulation is a process in which a chosen triad encircles a melody, manifesting itself in specific positions in relation to the melody according to a predetermined scheme of adjacency. I…
Miserere
*2024 stock. Deluxe packaging* For reasons perhaps too numerous to list here in full, Arvo Pärt’s Miserere remains my most cherished of the Estonian composer’s ever-growing book of masterworks. Suffice it to say that its magic lies in its stillness. For such an expansive piece—scored as it is for choir, soloists, organ, and ensemble—it is remarkably introspective. Its opening invocation of Psalm 51 fleshes out a corpus of spoken language made melody. A statement from the clarinet follows every w…
Book Of Days
Meredith Monk is generally described as an avant-garde artist of many talents. Of her many talents there is no question, but what exactly makes her “avant-garde”? The Random House Dictionary defines the term as meaning “of or pertaining to the experimental treatment of artistic, musical, or literary material.” This raises another question: What does it mean to be experimental? The same dictionary gives us: “founded on…an act or operation for the purpose of discovering something unknown or of tes…
El Corazon
The trumpeter sketches a succession of melodies and moods around and over the rich textural detail and earthy solidity of Mr Blackwell’s drumming,” noted Robert Palmer in The New York Times. “The melodies come from Spain, Africa, Jamaica and the modern jazz compositions of Thelonious Monk, but Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell transform them into a personal music that is as urbane and international as they are. Together, they make El Corazón one of the most impressive duet albums of recent years.” Thi…
Urban Bushmen
*2024 stock* Urban Bushmen is a live double album by the Art Ensemble of Chicago recorded at the Amerika Haus in Munich over two days in May 1980 and released on ECM in March 1982. The quintet comprises trumpeter Lester Bowie, saxophonists Joseph Jarman and Roscoe Mitchell and rhythm section Malachi Favors Maghostut and Don Moye.
A Few We Remember
A Few We Remember is the new album by Jonah Parzen-Johnson and Lau Nau. The recording debut for the new duo of Finnish composer Lau Nau, aka Laura Naukkarinen, and American baritone saxophonist Jonah Parzen-Johnson, it cycles between moments of knotty ambience, whispered melody, and innocent tinkering, as the duo improvises over 8 narrative scores composed by Parzen-Johnson. Jonah Parzen-Johnson says: “For me, telling a story is about more than sharing a set of facts. A well told story is the pr…
Shadows
On Shadows, Magnus Carlson & The Moon Ray Quintet reconvene after a decade apart to steep 8 songs in late‑night jazz grain: slow burns, noir ballads and subtly psychedelic covers where Carlson’s voice moves like smoke through the band’s velvet swing.
The Call (Magazine)
The fourth issue of We Jazz Magazine, "The Call" for Horace Tapscott. 128 pages 174 x 250 mm in size and printed on 140g Edixion paper with laminated 300g Invercote covers. All articles presented in English. Stories include Horace Tapscott by Andy Thomas, Ava Mendoza by Stuart Smith, Tigran Hamasyan by Rui Miguel Abreu, Istanbul Scene by Alper Kaliber, Isaiah Collier by Daniel Spicer, Bill Frisell by Debra Richards, DJ Old Crank by Matti Nives, Tokyo Jazz Joints Vol. 2 by Philip Arneill, reviews…