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The contest of pleasures - Tempestuous
Late-night improvisation captured on a stormy November evening in an old church during the 2006 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. John Butcher's soprano and tenor saxophones intertwine with Xavier Charles' clarinet and Axel Dörner's trumpet across 51 minutes of remarkable sustained exploration that stands as one of the defining documents of contemporary European improvised music.
Tempestuous moves between the poles of calm and urgency that the setting might suggest, with the trio navigat…
The Middle Distance
Trio improvisations for two pianos and double bass
Duet
French cellist Martine Altenburger and British guitarist John Russell recorded this live performance at the Musique en Mouvement Festival in Jarny, France in November 2008. Altenburger, Toulouse-based and conservatory-trained, moves between performances of Cage and Scelsi and improvisation with sound explorers like Michel Doneda and Lê Quan Ninh (who mastered this session). Russell, a London hardcore improviser, brings decades of experience to this encounter.
One reviewer describes listening to …
And We Disappear
The Sealed Knot—Burkhard Beins (percussion, objects), Rhodri Davies (pedal harp, e-bow), Mark Wastell (double bass, bow, beaters)—are what Clive Bell in The Wire calls "one of the great free improvisation groups, comparable to the classic 1980s SME line-up of John Stevens, Nigel Coombes and Roger Smith for edge-of-your-seat attentiveness and sheer inter-group telepathy." This single 40-minute piece, recorded live at the Ear We Are Festival in Biel, Switzerland in February 2007, captures the trio…
Music For Shakuhachi
Four works spanning two decades document an extraordinary musical collaboration between British composer Frank Denyer and shakuhachi master Yoshikazu Iwamoto. They met at Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1974, where Denyer was a doctoral student in ethnomusicology and Iwamoto artist-in-residence in the World Music programme. What emerged is a folio of compositions that run like a vein through Denyer's output - a body of work unique in contemporary music.
Denyer was not interested in east-we…
Empty Matter
Lucio Capece (soprano saxophone, bass clarinet, preparations, sruti box) and Lee Patterson (CD players, pick-ups, e-bowed springrods, springplate, hazelnuts) recorded these eight pieces in what Norman Records describes as "absolutely beautiful music" where "two masters of tiny sounds meet up." Capece approaches his reeds "more as tubes for breath than as traditional 'instruments,'" while Patterson uses all sorts of sound processes—including amplifying burning hazelnuts.
Nick Cain in The Wire not…
A Life Saved By A Spider And Two Doves
Three extended improvisations recorded at the church of St. James the Great, North London, September 2007 - the first convocation of this unexpected quartet crossing different generations and playing styles. Max Eastley (arc - electro-acoustic monochord), Graham Halliwell (computer & electronics), Evan Parker (soprano saxophone) and Mark Wastell (tam-tam, metal percussion & harmonium) document a meeting of three generations of London free improvisation.
Parker has had a venerable presence as bot…
Before Aksak Maboul - Documents & Experiments 1969-1977
Belgium’s avant-rock legends explore their prehistory in a special archival project. Retrieved from long-forgotten reel-to-reel tapes and cassettes, this collection of previously-unreleased tracks unveils some of the meanders which eventually led to the inception of Aksak Maboul in 1977. These 17 tracks and 80 minutes of music will take us for a stroll through moments of free rock, improv, quasi-kraut, modular & ambient electronics, and various experiments. Out on November 21 on digital, limited…
Oppet Tva
Biggest Tip Possible! Lars Göran Ulander Septet (1965) Lars Lystedt Quintet (1967) Per Henrik Wallin Trio (1977) Curated by saxophonist and improvisational musician Mats Gustafsson, Caprice Music continues the Öppet series, focusing on a relatively unexplored period of Swedish creative, experimental music from the 1960’s and 70’s. Öppet Två presents saxophonist Lars-Göran Ulander, who made a big impression on this series' curator in 1982, when he witnessed a solo concert at an art exhibition. Ma…
Nisse Sandström Group
Stellar Tip! Previously unreleased recordings of one of Sweden's most legendary jazz groups. A raucous and energic set of free jazz from the vibrant Swedish scene of the mid '60s – a perfect match for the groundbreaking German scene of the FMP generation! Quoting Jim O'Rourke from the hype sticker: “Someone quadruple booked the same session, because the music on this record is at the crossroads where FMP, Faust, The Insect Trust, and Catherine Ribiero met, but we know that road was never built. …
Maximizing The Audience
Venice, 1984. Teatro Carlo Goldoni. Jan Fabre's legendary play The Power of Theatrical Madness premieres - and with it, a defining document of Pop Minimalism. This primarily European phenomenon - rooted in first-generation British minimalists Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman - took the tunefulness of Reich and Glass and gave it a pop base rather than jazz/African or western classical foundations. Mertens wrote the first full-length study of the genre, American Minimal Music (1983), before becoming…
Organic Music Society
** Temporary reduced price ** Quoting Dusted magazine "This is not a jazz album. This is the music of ritual. Any resemblance it has to jazz is purely coincidental and passing. This is the sound of utopia, of equality, of the universal egalitarian dream, of the earth, the water, and the life force in all its various guises." and "This is an album of education in practice. Don Cherry spent the summer of 1971 teaching at a youth music camp normally devoted to the study of classical music. Somewher…
Adaptation
**Original 1983 pressing, sealed copies. Few available** In the late 1970s, Steve Piccolo was a founding member of the seminal No Wave jazz band Lounge Lizards along with John Lurie, his brother Evan Lurie and Arto Lindsay. He’d studied music at Bard and NYU and was doing performances, art and sound installations at night while during the day maintaining a job as a Wall Street computer analyst. This is his second solo LP, again a minimalist and radical rethinking of song, mixing a post-punk/DIY…
Phardah - Humans and Beings
**2nd pressing, screen printed cover, risoprinted obi, letterpressed insert edition of 200** Free Jazz band with a psychedelic touch, Phardah, is set to release their debut album Humans and Beings on the 2nd of May, 2025. The band features veterans of the Finnish experimental music and Free Jazz scene: saxophonist Sami Pekkola, double bassist Eero Tikkanen, and electric guitarist Topias Tiheäsalo, along with the younger generation drummer Veeti Hietala. The album was recorded and mixed by Teemu…
Biologia
300 copies. Rural psych-jazz improvisations by Finnish bastard sons of Arbete & Fritid! This sextet - featuring Toni Laakso, Janne Martinkauppi, Sami Pekkola, Daniel Stolle, Erno Taipale and Ilkka Vekka - delivers some serious countryside free music madness. If you know Pekkola, Taipale and Vekka from their brutal Ho Chi Moon trio (also on Ultraääni), you know what to expect: freedom music with no compromises! But here it gets even wilder - six heads exploring the zones where Swedish progg, Finn…
Tilaye's Saxophone With The Dahlak Band
Tilaye Gebre was a central figure in Ethiopian music during the mid- to late 1970s, a period now hard to document but rich with talent. His saxophone and arrangements are likely featured on many recordings from Addis Ababa of that era. Despite Ethiopia’s limited formal musical institutions, Tilaye trained at the Haile Selassie First Theatre music school, where he began studying saxophone instead of guitar under mentor Ato Aymre Gemeda. This instrument became his lifelong expressive voice.
Tilaye…
50th Anniversary Edition Boxset
50th anniversary boxset containing all three Niagara albums. Limited edition of 500 copies, housed in a wooden box. Coloured vinyl. Hold on to your hats! This is the ultimate percussion trip you never knew you needed. German jazz drum legend Klaus Weiss assembled something absolutely unique with Niagara – an orchestra made entirely of drummers and percussionists. No guitars. No keyboards. No melody instruments whatsoever. Just RHYTHM in its purest, most hypnotic form.
The self-titled debut from …
To Dream
Hold on to your mind! Led by Belfast-born phenom David Lewis, Andwella made three LPs circa 1970 for London’s Reflection label, redolent with Cream-y rock workouts, soaring post-Sgt. Pepper psych experimentation, and earthbound laments The Band might’ve dreamt up at Big Pink. Barely heard back then, they now conjure a popular rock fantasia to challenge the most expertly composed and orchestrated songs of the era. This deluxe set includes meticulous reproductions of the band’s 3-LP discography, p…
Improperis - Compositions et enregistrements
6 x Black 140 grs Vinyl each one in spineless sleeve, heavyweight cardboard slipcase/custom numbered at the back, insert-photo individually signed but the artist, marketing sticker. Limited & numbered to 500 copies for the world. Pascal Comelade, the visionary Catalan composer, unveils his latest sonic meditation with Improperis - Compositions et enregistrements, a remarkable work that celebrates four decades of uncompromising instrumental music since his emergence in 1984. This extraordinary co…
French Archives Vol. III 1964-1989
An absolutely astounding accomplishment, Black Sweat's 4 LP Box set of previously unreleased material by Ariel Kalma - French Archives Vol. III - is a mind-melting immersion into the composer and saxophonist's radical experiments and stunning ambient harmonics made between 1974 and 1985. Venturing far beyond the territories for which he is most well-known, the collection takes great strides to accurately framing ambient and New Age musics as rightful extensions of the avant-garde, and is easily …