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La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura
Experiencing La lontananza utopica futura has enriched my musicianship. The unusual openness of the original materials by Nono required the establishment of an interpretive path through tapes and scores. This need has led to the emergence of a creative approach to performance, where the lines between roles and figures are blurred; with La lontananza, we cannot identify the composer as the provider of clear and direct instructions, and the performer cannot remain an invisible score-reproducer. A …
Il silenzio dei tuoi passi
"Another luxurious CD in book’s clothing here on the 13 / silentes label, which specialises in combined music and photography into one hopefully cohesive entity. This is the second thing now involving Italian veteran relaxer Gigi Masin, this time accompanying photography by Stefano Gentile. While the matt black book contains 68 pages of some nice dusky imagery of a european city centre to immerse yourself into, I’m gonna concentrate on Gigi Masin’s 30 minute suite that’ll be doing the other imme…
Sound of Sounds (Book + 2CD)
*2024 stock* Pianist, composer and sound artist Hans Otte is still undervalued in Europe, and the Anglo-American cultural scene just starts to notice him. Ingo Ahmel's bilingual study of his biography and artistic work highlights Otte’s view of life and his aesthetical orientation, providing the fundamentals for an adequate reception. At the centre of the book are the solo piano cycles Das Buch der Klänge (The Book of Sounds, 1979-82) and Stundenbuch (Hours Book, 1991-98) as well as the related …
Un anno, a partire da lunedì. Dopo Silenzio (Book)
*Italian language edition* "I guess as contemporary music continues to change in the way I am changing it, what is to be done is to completely liberate sounds more and more from abstract ideas about them and let them with increasing exactitude be themselves physically, and that's it." - John Cage
Considered the creator of experimentalism in the 1950s, John Cage was a major inspiration to conceptual artists in the 1960s, and his music was instrumental in the emergence of minimalism in the 1970s a…
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…
Topographie Parisienne
2025 repress. Originally released in 2019, this essential 4CD box set documenting one of the rarest trio meetings in the history of European free improvisation is finally available again.
Eleven years after the legendary The Topography of the Lungs (Incus, 1970) - one of the landmark early albums of English free improvisation, co-founded the Incus label itself - the trio reunites at 28 rue Dunois in Paris. Almost three and a half hours of non-idiomatic free improvisation captured by Jean-Marc Fo…
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…
Béke
**2nd pressing, screen printed cover, risoprinted obi edition of 250** “Peace is not the word to play” rapped Large Professor on Main Source’s 1991 debut album. His plea to stop abusing the word “peace” simply for rhetoric flair sounds just as valid in today’s genocidal world as it did in the streets of New York over 30 years ago. For Oiro Pena to name this album Béke, meaning peace in Hungarian – or white people in French Caribbean creole – it seems like they finally have something to say. With…
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…