Live at Space Mountain
Fellahin is a violin, wind and percussion format for violinist Mike Khoury. He has assembled this instrumental grouping several times under that moniker. For this album, Khoury travelled to Miami to work with Kenny Millions (Keshavan Maslak) on clarinet and guitar, and Steven Bristol on percussion. Khoury is best known for his work as a soloist, in duet with percussionist Ben Hall and dancer/choreographer Leyya Tawil and as a member of The Northwoods Improvisers, Porcelain Hammer, The Redford Ci…
Born For Years
Porcelain Hammer formed in 2018 for the purpose of expanding the direction of Ben Miller's multiphonic guitar work into a full ensemble. This new direction in Miller's music is the melding of art, psych, world and no-wave with lyrical hypnagogia.
Miller played guitar in Sproton Layer with brothers Roger and Laurence (1969-71), The Fourth World Quartet (1975), Destroy All Monsters with Ron Asheton and Michael Davis (1977-78), the avant-power trio Nonfiction (1982-85), Chicago's Dirty Old Man Riv…
Drueling
After a year of inter-continental correspondence, Turner Williams Jr. and Derek Monypeny crossed paths in the Spring of 2023. Derek was touring in Europe, playing solo sets with his electric shahi baaja, an instrumental obsession shared by Turner. Turner invited Derek down to Marseille for a session in his aerial basement studio overlooking the city. The result was the first shahi baaja duet for either musician. Spontaneous Mars music in the shadow of enormous transmission towers, pylône electri…
Forming - Concentric Rings in Magnetic Levitation
In late fall of 2018, Ryan traveled to Valencia, California to meet with Michael for a weekend of informal conversations at California Institute of the Arts. Before Ryan returned home to Colorado, Michael gifted him a recently released recording of Teodora Stepančić, Assaf Gidron, and Martin Lorenz’s realization of Michael’s Concentric Rings in Magnetic Levitation, a recording that profoundly impacted Ryan and served as the impetus for this recording.
A thrumming monadic field; a constellation o…
When you rub your eyes, you see things you can’t describe
"In the emergence of consonance out of vapor, in shapes slowly forming from static sounds, Szymon Wójcik’s music gestures toward the movement named in its title: the appearing of what cannot be described. We hear it in its porousness: despite the dense mist, the music retains a transparency, recalling Feldman’s image of a full glass that never spills, no matter how many pennies you add. We hear it in the free singing, which does not so much break away from harmonies in Just Intonation as reveal …
Any sense of where we were gone
Any sense of where we were gone is music obsessed with the infinite within the minute, with the mercurial, breakable, with shifting, sifting, cohering, and digressing. It is an improvisational framework in five parts for chamber ensembles, prepared piano, and electronics, written for and played here by my good friends. It steals inspiration from postmodern fiction, obscure geometry textbooks, and poems about time. This is a live recording of the first performance
“To do. To do something, to do g…
Perpetual Guest
For a few days at the end of July 2023, I curated a series of concerts and recordings in a few spaces in the historic, now-defunct Kreenholm Textile Factory in Narva, Estonia, a stone's throw from the Russian border. In Kreenholm's reverberant rooms, these sessions reflected on the layers of history, labor, conflict, and lives past and present that have shaped the factory and the constantly re-evolv- ing border city. A large and unexpected part of this project involved the restoration of an anti…
Beams Boy
*100 copies limited edition* A handbag purchased in Tokyo in the early 2000s reappears in the present, containing a series of personal items: a T-shirt, a CD, five cassettes, and three mini-DVs. Sifting through the material, Barbara Signer rediscovers all kinds of forgotten memories and hidden traces of the past. Whilethe video cassettes were recorded in the streets of Tokyo at the turn of the millennium, the audio tapes contain music from Nick Kamen to Vivaldi, as well as the artist’s own voice,…
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…
SSI Solo 2024
A leading saxophonist on the Japanese improvised music scene, Junji Hirose also gives performances using self-made analog noise instruments. It was in the 1980s that Hirose started presenting noise performances on his SSI (self-made sound instrument), made of various everyday objects. Over the years he continually modified the instrument, for each version attaching a different number to the name SSI. On the Hitorri label, Hirose has released the CDs "SSI-4" (hitorri-997 / 2013), "SSI-5" (hitorri…
Evoke
*200 copies limited edition* While her main instrument is baritone sax, Misaki Motofuji is a multi-instrumentalist with an excellent command of other saxophone types including tenor and alto, as well as clarinet and flute. In concerts she additionally makes wide-ranging use of electronics, vocals, field recordings and various effects and objects, spontaneously assembling splendid, amazingly well constructed performances. In May 2022 Motofuji performed a concert of this type at Ftarri, Tokyo, whi…
Biosphere
*200 copies limited edition* While her main instrument is baritone sax, Misaki Motofuji is a multi-instrumentalist with an excellent command of other saxophone types including tenor and alto, as well as clarinet and flute. In concerts she additionally makes wide-ranging use of electronics, vocals, field recordings and various effects and objects, spontaneously assembling splendid, amazingly well constructed performances. In May 2022 Motofuji performed a concert of this type at Ftarri, Tokyo, whi…
Uchidome
Seijiro Murayama is a Paris-based drummer, percussionist, improviser and composer. It was in 2009 that he first released CDs on the Ftarri labels Hitorri, Ftarri and Meena. He has since released over ten CDs of performances in solo, duo, trio and quartet formations.
"Uchidome," Murayama’s fifth solo album from the Hitorri label, consists of three tracks recorded in France in January 2025. All his drum solo albums are outstanding, and this CD, with its unique and inimitable performances, is no ex…
Oui, Mais 68 ! Maybe 68 ?
Tip! Edition of 300 copies. François Tusques needs no introduction to serious listeners of European free jazz. His 1965 Free Jazz album - recorded with Bernard Vitet, Michel Portal, Beb Guérin, and François Jeanneau - helped establish Paris as a vital center for the transatlantic avant-garde, laying groundwork for the city's role as spiritual home to visiting American firebrands like Don Cherry, Sunny Murray, and Clifford Thornton. His subsequent work with Barney Wilen (Le Nouveau Jazz, 1967), h…
Particularly Dangerous Situation
*150 copies lmiited edition* Ian Wellman's “Particularly Dangerous Situation”, his first release for Elevator Bath and first vinyl LP, is a meditative, at times harrowing, interpretive document of the catastrophic California wildfires of 2025. Wellman's stunningly descriptive field recordings plus his signature tape loop textures and sampled drones combine for a dramatic ten-part narrative that is both frightening and sorrowful in its depiction of calamitous events. "On January 7, 2025 Southern …
Fumine
*200 copies limited edition* Born in 1954, Katsura Yamauchi is a saxophone player based in Oita, Japan. Since he began performing in earnest in the early 2000s, he has been touring and expanding his distinctive musical activities in Japan, Europe, North America and Asia. Koto player Kohsetsu Imanishi has an active career inside and outside Japan, performing music of various genres including classical Japanese music, improvisation and contemporary classical music. In addition to performing as a s…
Live At Ftarri
*200 copies limited edition* Gintė Preisaitė is an up-and-coming pianist from Lithuania. Currently based in Copenhagen, she is active on the improvised/experimental music scene, using electronics and vocals in her performances in addition to piano. During a visit to Japan in September 2024, she performed at Ftarri, Tokyo, on the 23rd in a duo with no-input mixing board player Toshimaru Nakamura. An internationally active musician known for improvised performances using mixer feedback, Nakamura h…
Support Surface
*200 copies limited edition* French musician Bruno Duplant, who uses both analog and digital instruments in his performances, has produced a succession of excellent solo and collaborative works and released many recordings on numerous labels including Ftarri. Pierre Gerard is a Belgian improviser and composer. Like Duplant, he makes wide-ranging and skillful use of various instruments, including guitar, piano and electronics, and has presented many works on Ftarri and other improvised/experiment…
Tangerine And The Invisible
*250 copies limited edition* Three Chinese musicians performed at Ftarri, Tokyo, on January 2, 2024. Li Song is a computer programmer and musician who lives in London. Zhao Cong and Zhu Wenbo are experimental/improvisational musicians based in Beijing. This album is made up of two performances (each over 30 minutes): "The Invisible Tangerine," a duo by Zhao Cong and Li Song, and "Three Lines," a trio by Li Song, Zhao Cong and Zhu Wenbo.
The compelling feature of "The Invisible Tangerine" is the …
Spring
*250 copies lmited edition* Bryan Eubanks (born in 1977) is a Berlin-based American musician who performs using soprano saxophone, electronics and computers. Gert-Jan Prins (born in 1961) is an Amsterdam-based musician whose performances make use of electronic noise and percussion. Both are well known on the international improvised music scene and carry out wide-ranging musical activities, including composition and sound installations in addition to improvisation. No-input mixing board player T…