Jazz /
Puncture Cycle
**300 copies** "Spreading their intuitive playing over nine, randomly sequenced improvisation titled with numbers, Benedict Taylor and Dirk Serries many variations on fiddle string twists and slurred guitar fingering produce tunes that are manually constructed, deconstructed and put back together again. Tracks often posit and resolve singular experiments. For instance, the hard dry swagger of IV opens up into a tremolo and spiccato bowed narrative. Swift, repetative slithers from Taylor enliven …
Cagean Morphology
**300 copies, 2019 stock** "The Serries-Verhoeven acoustic, chamber duo – Serries on the acoustic guitar and Verhoeven on the piano – is actually the last one to be recorded in the Tonus series but the duo distills the very essence of the series serves as a fitting introduction to this series. Cagean Morphology was recorded, mixed and mastered at the Sunny Side Studio at Anderlecht, Belgium on March 10th 2018. The minimalist layout of the Tonus series, was designed by Rutger Zuydervelt, aka Mach…
Texture Point
**300 copies, 2019 stock** "Minimal art is often presented as an act of simplification, a field in which nothing much happens and lesser (or even lazy) artists can have a field day. However, it is both in the visual arts and in music, perhaps one of the most misunderstood movements. Minimal artists not only sought out a certain core essence, but leading artists and theorists, such as Donald Judd, also offered a reaction against the extravagant focus on the subjective by the abstract expressionis…
Intermediate Obscurities I+IV
**300 copies, 2019 stock** What self-taught musicians lack in education and (sometimes) technical prowess, many make up for with the need to carve out a space for themselves. Their trajectory is often like a perpetual motion of restless movements. Even among those musicians, Dirk Serries is a special case. Loyal to whoever he comes across, but a solitary seeker at the same time. An eternal outcast whose discography expands at a swift and steady pace, building an island entirely of his own, despi…
Innocent as Virgin Wood
**300 copies, 2019 stock** "In its essence, free improvisation is a leap into the unknown. A question mark. And while it is possible to reproduce previously used ideas, in its purest sense it takes balls to accept its challenges, for the simple fact that the performer is out there alone, even when playing with others. Free Improvisation is being naked on a stage. The unavailability of form and reassurance about what is happening next cannot be underestimated. In improvised music, the musician is…
Quartet & Quintet - Double Vortex
**300 copies, 2019 stock** "Understated, tightly controlled, minimalist music always gets the better deal. There is something mature and cultured about an artist who distills and reaches for the essence instead of provoking and dabbling in exuberance, volume and a cluster of diverging ideas. In a world that is nearly driven to total chaos by a maddening abundance of impulses, Goethe’s worn out adage - that it is in self-limitation that a master first shows himself - has become the ultimate compl…
I
**300 copies, 2019 stock** "(...) Lisle, Serries and Webster reconvened again in October 2015 for another studio recording at the same studio in London, now calling themselves the Kodian Trio. This trio is supposed to be a working group and is already touring the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.The interplay on their debut release is much more energetic and experimental than the one explored on Apparitions. Serries and Webster alternate the leading roles, both sounding aggressive and assertiv…
Apparitions
**300 copies, 2019 stock** "Apparitions, unlike the volatile spirit of Live at Café OTO, stresses a different approach for this set of four collaborative free improvisations. Here the four musicians explore a kind of a slow-cooking interplay, a calm and conversational one. Apparitions begins and ends with the minimalist I and IV, where all restrain their playing to low whispers, skeletal guitar lines and brushing of the cymbals, building the tension tension patiently and methodically until reach…
Cinépalace
**300 copies, 2019 stock** "Dirk Serries and his wife, double bass player Martina Verhoeven, meet British tenor sax player Colin Webster, who also participated in the Dead Neanderthals’ Endless Voids, for a live improvisation, recorded at the DIY club Cinépalace in Kortrijk, Belgium in May 2015. A month earlier Serries performed with Webster in a quartet that was recorded as Live at Cafe Oto, and released on Webster’s Raw Tonk label. This recording, titled after the club name, highlights the hig…
Sluimer
**300 copies, 2019 stock** "Fantoom is a quartet that feature Dirk Serries, his wife, autodidact double bass player Martina Verhoeven (who is also a gifted photographer), drummer René Aquarius, and sax player Otto Kokke, both from the Dutch group Dead Neanderthals, with whom Serries played in their Endless Voids project on the 2014 edition of the Incubate festival in Tilburg, Netherlands. The quartet debut album, is a free-improvisation affair that was recorded in studio in December 2014. The …
Cult Exposure
**300 copies, 2019 stock** "This free improvised sax-electric guitar duo has nothing to do with previous duos of similar instrumentalists. The meeting between the muscular Brötzmann-ian sax wails of American, Amsterdam-based sax player John Dikeman, known from the free jazz bands Cactus Truck and Universal Indians, and the reserved, serene playing of the effects-laden guitar of Dirk Serries forced the two to transcend any possible comfort zone. On the first piece the two still struggle to find …
Threads
** Killer. Released in 1977 on Horo Records, first time available again after 40 years** New York-born alto saxophonist Steve Lacy became associated with the avant-garde jazz movement from the mid-1950s, playing on free jazz pianist Cecil Taylor’s influential debut LP and early work by the Canadian pianist Gil Evans, before serving a long tenure with the idiosyncratic improv pianist Theolonius Monk, whose work he would continue to reference throughout his career. Visiting Europe from the md-1960…
The Storyteller - A Musical Tribute to Yusef Lateef
Double LP version. 180 gram vinyl; includes download card. With 20 years passing since his first foray into recorded jazz, Nat Birchall now ranks as one of the premier saxophonists of his generation. With several highly acclaimed albums in the locker, he now returns with his most ambitious project yet: a tribute to the legend that is Yusef Lateef titled, The Storyteller - A Musical Tribute to Yusef Lateef.Nat Birchall on the project: "When Jazzman Gerald first mentioned to me the idea of doing a…
Sketching the Unknown
Linking the ancient and the modern across time and space, the Sokratis Votskos Quartet presents Sketching the Unknown -- a modern jazz journey into the folk and modal music of ancient Greece. Playing rich original compositions, the quartet draw freely on Greek and Balkan folk sources, jazz idioms, and the classical makams of the near East. Returning to ancient Greek modes such as Dorian, Phrygian, and Lydian, a fresh perspective is brought to the modal style that was popularized by Miles Davis, …
Omniverse
Twenty years after its first publication, Art Yard are proud to present the fully revised 2nd edition of Hartmut Geerken's long unobtainable Omniverse Sun Ra, a definitive hitch-hiker's guide to the Sun Ra galaxy. 304 full colour pages / 1850 gramms - Size: 290mm x 245mm Portrait. Revised and expanded second edition of Hartmut Geerken and Chris Trent's comprehensive reference Omniverse Sun Ra, originally published in 1994. Full-color 304-page hardcover book. French fold cover with metallic silve…
Live at The Loosdrecht Jazz Festival
Charles Tolliver began his professional career and simultaneously his recording debut with the saxophone giant Jackie McLean on Blue Note Records in 1964. Since then he has become one of the all-time preeminent trumpeters in Jazz as well as one of its most gifted composer / arranger bandleaders. He is also a Grammy nominated recipient for his Blue Note Records recording With Love.With a career that has spanned five decades he has recorded and/or performed with such renowned artists as Roy Haynes…
...For Some Reason That Escapes Us
**200 copies** "It could be a forgotten music, unearthed from the vacuum of nonusage, reincarnating into a musical form sounding obscure and nevertheless familiar, human. Vilhelm Bromander and Fredrik Rasten materialize resonant sound with double bass, guitar and subtle vocal shadings. The music puts just intonation on display and explores its potential in improvised as well as composed music. On ...For Ssome Reason That Escapes Us, the instrumental and vocal sounds entwine into a collective bod…
In the Moment - Deluxe Edition
**New 3LP Deluxe Edition** Makaya McCraven's early 2015 offering In The Moment was pared from nearly 48 hours of live, improvised performance recorded at 1 venue over 12 months and 28 shows. Working with instrumental contributions from an array of Chicago jazz players (including Jeff Parker, Joshua Abrams, Marquis Hill, and Matt Ulery), Makaya culled, cut, rendered and remixed the mass of sounds into 19 potent pieces of organic beat music for the original 80-minute, 2xLP issue.At the close of a …
The Oracle
Composer, clarinetist, singer and spiritual jazz soothsayer Angel Bat Dawid descended on Chicago's jazz and improvised music scene just a few years ago. In very short time, the potency, prowess, spirit and charisma of her cosmic musical proselytizing has taken her from relatively unknown improviser to borderline ubiquitous performer in Chicago's avant-garde. On any given night you can find Angel adding aura to ensembles led by Ben LaMar Gay, or Damon Locks, or Jaimie Branch, or Matthew Lux, or e…
Sekvenser Och Lager
**2019 stock** Fresh from releasing the solo triple-CD Piano Works, composer and pianist Lisa Ullén masterminds the rumbling new EP of Motståndsorkestern (The Resistance Orchestra), Sekvenser Och Lager. In four original compositions seething with restrained energy and melodic rage, the orchestra takes what is sometimes called contemporary music apart into an ensemble playing in which the collective will is resurrected through its total respect for individual contributions.