Jazz /
Cosmo Earth Fantasy: Sub Underground Series Vol. 1 and 2
A Saturn release from the 1960's featuring a wide-range of pieces from studio recordings, rehearsals, and live concerts that are all heart-felt and made in the traditional Sun Ra style, starting with eight delirious minutes of kora and piano frame -- almost certainly the Strange Strings instruments, whatever they were. And then Ra's signature clavinet of the period and an unidentifiable double-reed instrument, probably played by Marshall Allen. Enter the xylophone. I sense you're getting the …
Sieve
As a duo Tim Catlin and David Brown aka Candlesnuffer come together as 'Helium Clench' and boast long histories in the Melbourne and international avant-garde music world. Both have independently developed a fascination with microtonal sound, in particular through Catlin's construction of harmonic overtone guitars and metal rod instruments tuned in just intonation, and in Brown's case through his explorations using the quartertone bass guitar. 'Sieve', their first duo recording is a stud…
Cocaine blues
Guitarist and founding member of Maajun in 1969 (That released one album under the Vogue label), Cyril Lefebvre recorded three beautiful albums during the Seventies. Cocaïne Blues, the second one, is one of the finest achievements of the Golden Age of the musical underground in France. Here is an unclassifiable and pataphysician music based on a traditional repertoire, drawing briskly in blues, ragtime, waltz, foxtrot... It has all the major qualities: subtlety, innovation, luxury, humor. Publis…
Long Story Short
Long Story Short, the festival organized as the 25th edition of the Unlimited Festival in Wels, Austria (November 2011) designed a festival around Peter Brotzmann's musical practice -- not a retrospective, but a representation of the contemporary musical spheres that Brötzmann and his comrades are investigating today. Eighteen performances in this box document Brötzmann's close ties to the Chicago scene, his inclination to work with Japanese artists, his cultivation of old and new friendsh…
Solo 1973.3.30 Pit Inn Tearoom
Latest (and final) volume of the long dormant J.I. Collection - PSF's groundbreaking collection of rare Japanese free jazz recordings from the early 1970s! Kaoru Abe was easily the brightest shooting star of the late sixties and early seventies Japanese free jazz scene, a wilful iconoclast who specialized in solo improvisations on alto sax and bass clarinet that seemed to slice and dice the air, glittering with a dangerously honed edge. Abe would burn himself out by the late seventies (he…
Bulletproof Brass
The HBE family are in full effect on this 6-track mini-album. Forming like a brass-plated Voltron, they spin from swaggering Hip-Hop funk on 'Starfighter' to sparky, feel-good breakbeat funk on 'Touch The Sky' and more sultry, jazzed up styles for the Sun-Ra sampling 'Pluto' on the A-side. Flip it for the more brooding, cinematic themes of 'Kyptonite' feat Crow, and the record's highlight 'Black Boy' easing off the punchy percussion for a more spiritual vibe with spoken words by their pat…
Stellar Pulsations
Originally schooled in the foundations of hard bop, cornetist Rob Mazurek, quickly surpassed the form's conventional limitations; his multihued electro-acoustic work over the past two decades has subsequently drawn inspiration from numerous genres besides jazz. Mazurek's unfettered creativity and stalwart leadership skills have thereby cemented his reputation as a key figure in the Chicago scene—primarily as organizer of the venerable Chicago Underground Collective and several other innovative e…
Trente belles annes
Triumphal new CD, the first new recordings in an age, from one of the greatest bands on the goddamn planet, the trio of saxophonists Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich and guitarist Donald Miller aka Borbetomagus: this is a roof-raising performance, recorded live at Instants Chavires, France, 19th December 2009. Borbetomagus combine the elevated amplifier violence of Jimi Hendrix at his most combustible with the spontaneous free music polyphony of Ascension-era Coltrane and the ‘guitar smashing’ h…
Bell Trove Spools
Northern Spy is proud to present two of John Butcher’s most recent experiments in moving sound waves through space. On Bell Trove Spools we hear Butcher in two distinct situations: Richmond Hall, a Houston art gallery housing a permanent Dan Flavin collection that has been compared to a bowling alley; and the high-ceilinged marble room in Brooklyn which is the new home to Issue Project Room. Butcher is heard on his two saxes of choice, the soprano and the tenor, and suspended in space, fluid, ch…
Joining the queue to become one of those ordinary ghosts
Koboku Senju, meaning something like a Selection of Dead Trees', is the quintet of Tetuzi Akiyama, Toshimaru Nakamura, Martin Taxt, Eivind Lønning, and Espen Reinertsen. Akiyama and Nakamura, on guitar and no input mixing board respectively, have long been two of the leading improvisers from the Tokyo scene, and Lønning, Reinertsen and Taxt, on trumpet, saxophone and tuba respectively, are three young and active improvisers from Norway with an increasing reputation for their adventurous yet matu…
Alemayehu Eshete
Hard-grooving Ethiopiques killers from the "Ethiopian Elvis". This eponymous collection gathers some of his finest moments from 45's recorded between 1967 and 1974, nine total, mixing R&B, soul, rock'n'roll with that magically mystical blend of modern flair and traditional groove that makes the Ethiopiques series such a treasure trove. You could imagine each of these being classics in their own right way back when, from the soulful organ burn and infectious breaks of 'Kenoru Lebetchahe' w…
Stone/Water
With any sizeable Brötzmann group, the temptation is always there to compare it to his classic Machine Gun unit. This new tentet doesn’t match up to the unbridled ferocity of that earlier grouping, but then what has? Perhaps the greatest sea change since the heavy-drinking glory days of 1968 is that ecstatic playing is now as much an idiom as an instinctive response. For all its supposed iconoclastic freedom, this idiom now has its own traditions, its own heroes, and its own stock cliches. Youth…
Born broke
Stripped-down' probably isn't the right term for a release like this, but Brotzmann's reeds and Uuskyla's drums are the only two constituents of this double disc set, setting themselves up for comparison with fellow free improv pillars Ken Vandermark and Paal Nilsen-Love on their Dual Pleasure recordings. These lengthy improvisations (four pieces stretch across over an hour and a half of recordings) are a feat of endurance - not only for the improvisers themselves, but for even the most i…
13 miniatures for Albert Ayler
Would it be that when everything finishes that everything starts? Rather than a postlude or a coda, the five minutes a cappella by Joe McPhee on the tenor saxophone placed here in thirteenth position, sound like a song of love and hope coloured utopia which condenses the invisibility of lives which are here and then are no longer here.from the effervescence of an aviary where chirpings and warbling intersect (from Raphael Imbert, Urs Leimgruber, McPhee, Evan Parker and John Tchicai each sax seem…
Three compositions
Despite the compositions’ respective demands, Nicole Mitchell and Black Earth Ensemble fully and vividly represented Roscoe Mitchell’s varied means of creating chemistry between written and improvised materials. At every turn in the program, they played with a palpable sense of familiarity and ease with the composer’s vernacular and methods. They sounded like they’ve been playing this music every night for a long time. Bill Shoemaker, excerpt from the liner notes
Watershed
If the three compositions proposed by Denis Fournier have already been recorded, they merit to be here as resurgences, like scenarios encouraging the freedom of transformation without which free interpretation is nothing. “I often say that I don’t make improvised music, but that I improvise music. In other words, I put together there and then elements of my life, of my history, of my culture…” In other words, no structure commands the action. Every structure opens to the action (to sharing) whic…
Passages
Lawrence Butch Morris developed the concept of “conduction” to account for a mode of Instant Composition based on the creative freedom of the players stimulated by the gestures of a central conductor. AP/DP, with this cd, invent the practice of musical transduction. Just like the French language is not “translated” but transducted into Kamau Daáood’s unique prosody, DP’s cello does not “translate” the playing of a thumb piano, an oud or a kora: all of these instruments, all of their phrasings el…
Alan Silva & The Celestrial Communication Orchestra
Unboxed editiion. 4 x CD: for some time now, alan silva has commented that the market value of his records should more closely resemble the price of a lithograph or an artist's print than the price an ordinary record. we remind him that his albums are not produced in special gallery editions, but "mass produced" for a niche market. silva has responded with THE TREASURE BOX. eremite agreed to support the effort, giving away four of its catalog numbers, & what little sanity & peace of mind t…
White Cable, Black Wires
A stunning series of duo improvisations from two of the world's finest string players, whose shared dynamism and intensity of purpose produces fluid, powerful music that ranges from dense viscosity to swift effervescence.With all-strings improvisation there's often a danger of pseudo-classicism, of sounding vaguely like modernist chamber music, replete with refined flourishes and familiar motifs. Edwards and Lee don't just avoid this but go nowhere near it, heading off in another direction entir…
Al-Khwarizmi Variations
A major solo statement, Al-Khwarizmi Variations traverses the history and the physicality of the piano.Working both inside and outside the instrument's body, at times playing with recognisable musical material, at others going deep into sonic abstraction, Pat Thomas presents a compelling vision of what the piano can do in the 21st century.Extremes entwine in his playing: solidity and flow; seriousness and laughter; uproar and imperturbability.