★ReR Megacorp
Year of The Dragon
A collection of 5 songs and 4 instrumental pieces that explore equally - and simultaneously - spontaneous performance values, close compositional detail and extensive processing. Made out on the rocky coast of Maine with just a TV eye keeping tabs on a world skidding to hell in a handcart, all the basic work was done by MacLean and Cutler with Julie Thompson (voice) added later – alongside additional parts played by Frank Gross (bassoon), Michael Bierylo (laptop, samples, circuits) and Ti…
Lung Tree
This is one of those recordings that arrived unannounced in the mail. I knew Lesli Dalaba, of course, but the others were new to me. The project is Eric Glick Rieman's and I found it immediately intriguing. There seemed to be something quite subtle going on; minimal, microtonal, economical and eccentric; it plays subtly with timbre, pitch and structure and never quite does what you expect. At first blush it seemed as it would be another interesting but conventional improvising trio, but …
Metamorphoses (Electronic Adventures in Flamenco)
11 pieces beautifully played by flamenco guitarist Alfredo Lagos, and then put through an electro acoustic obstacle course by Venosta and Mariani. The raw guitar is reversed, inverted, cut up, re-played, propelled by processed handclaps and swathed in delayed vocals. The large-scale hypnotic structures contrast strangely with the pristine simplicity of the original guitar pieces, and the album works as a profound meditation on culture, technology, art and authorship. Unusual, genre-bendin…
The Most of Now
An exquisite and subtle new composition by Macedonian composer Nikola Kodjbashaia exquisitely realised by a broad and mixed ensemble of exemplary - and mostly Macedonian - instrumentalists: a suite of highly imaginative variations on a theme that meanders purposively through an unusual - I'd say unique - musical landscape in which reflections of everything from lounge music, Macedonian folk instrumentals, Byzantine church liturgy, contemporary orchestra composition and exotica rub should…
Explosion Of A Memory (A Literary Canvas For Orchestra)
An extended iterative, cycling, dissipating cloud of fragments, constantly shifting focus, which throws up detail, evolves, returns, settles and re-dissolves; it's a four-dimensional explosion in which stretches of baroque, folk themes and Byzantine liturgy exist contemporaneously alongside modern and (arguably) post-modern materials and techniques, all shaken loose out of the same experiential block, much as strata emerge as tectonic plates fold one time over another. Long, beautiful, to…
Solitary Walker
Macedonian composer (tutors: Anatol Vieru, Tomislav Zografski, Sir Harrison Birtwistle and the Gyorgiâs Ligeti and Kurtag) with a unique voice, moving easily here between tape manipulation, ensemble and choral composition both contemporary and soaked in national folk influences to form a complex minimal, tangled music that answers to no genre but short-circuits straight to the 21st century ear combining the best qualities of melodic and developmental writing with ear-centred composition…
Gaps, Absences
A beautifully recorded and produced cycle of pieces that combine complexity and precision with rich and unfamiliar timbres. The ensemble pieces amplify and enrich a core piano with various combinations of harmonium, double bass, violin, percussion, Hungarian zither, citara bassa, bowed cymbals, alto clarinet, melodica, sampler and field recordings, all sparsely but powerfully deployed. This is a deep and powerful music with both crystalline clarity and cinematic low frequency power. And no fat o…
Cold Peace Counterpoints
A suite of fiendishly complex compositions for mixed real and virtual resources. Bob Drake, Djorge Delibasic, Pegja Milosavljevic and Chris Cutler make appearances - playing electric guitar, bass, drums and virtuoso violin between them, but mainly it is Stevan who plays all kinds of keyboards, strings, double bass, zither, samples and software. Three thoroughly through-composed and finely articulated pieces make up this very concentrated suite: Concerto Grosso (for keyboards, string instr…
Repetitive selective removal of one protecting group
After a long absence Stevan roars back with this dense and complex work - a rare example of a truly uncategoriseable music: neither electronic nor acoustic but somewhere in between - or outside. Taken often at impossible Nancarrow/late Zappa/Ligeti tempi, a cascade of material constantly forms and reforms into different kinds of order: fragments of New Complexity performed with a kind of rock, dance, jazz undercurrent; shards of popular musics dressed in contemporary classical and electro…
Coal Tattoo
Contemporaries of Pere Ubu and best known for their work with the Numbers Band, Bob and Jack Kidney were also essential to David Thomas’ Mirror Man project. These are stripped down, guitar based songs/stories with deep roots - the deep, dark, bluesy kind of roots. Robert has a voice and a gravitas that commands immediate respect.
From Ritual Nova I & II
Boris produced these careful and extended works over 14 years. RN 1, was only released in Jugoslavia (as was) and has long been only a collectors item. RN II was released on our POINTS EAST label. Now 70 minutes from both LP's have been assembled and remastered on one CD. This is unique and wonderful music; timely when so much insanity and horror stains the lands of its origins.
Times of Day
What Boris does is without parallel or precedent, and he’s been doing it for over 40 years, perfecting a language that is uniquely his own: not chamber music, not world music, not jazz – but demanding performance skills vital to all three. What do you call a music that is fully scored, played only by acoustic instruments and demands not only extremely high technical standards from its performers but - if they are to imbue what is written with its proper ritual body - shared histories and …
Hello Debris
After a break of almost 15 years Susanne Lewis and Bob Drake have reconvened their classic partnership. In the meantime rock and post rock has mainly moved away from the song and its classic shapes, leaving commercial pop to straighten them out and endlessly repeat the same tropes and tricks. Hail is rare amongst bands in its adherence to the notion that what makes a song interesting is the application of imagination and skill to its arrangement, performance and recording. The plan is not…
Kirk
Second Hail CD, with guest appearances from Chris Cutler, David Kerman and Bill Gilonis.
Happiness Proof
Haco and many guests (including Otomo Yoshihide, Peter Hollinger, Uchihashi Kasuhisa, Pierre Bastien and Ichiraku Yoshimitsu with a new collection of songs, in inimitable Haco style. Nothing to explain.
Consume red
First Volume of a three CD project. Ground Zero makes a monster structure that starts screaming and gets more and more intense and massive until you don't imagine there is anywhere else to go. Then it gets bigger. A classic.
Revolutionary Peking Opera
Otomo Yoshihide and frightening band deconstruct and rebuild the already sampled and reconstructed 'Peking Opera' of Heiner Goebbels and Alfred Harth. In conception, execution and in plain terms of aural excitement and intelligence, this is hard to beat. Stunning recording - with a drum sound to gasp at...
Plays Standards
Just when you thought it would be safe... Ground Zero are back with a CD of extraordinary covers, some are massive, others strange, all add something to their originals and were selected because of their importance to founder Otomo Yoshihide's personal musical biography - all explained in his excellent accompanying notes. Just the version of Shed a Little Tear is worth the whole CD.
Hommage/Vier Fauste fur Hanns Eisler + Vom Sprengen des Gartens
This long and extraordinarily fruitful partnership started here - continuing though the Sogennantes Linksradikales Blasorchester - where they picked up Christoph Anders with whom they went on to co-found Cassiber with your humble reviewer. These are jazz inflected, punk inflected but mainly spirited and imaginative renderings of Eisler material, with more pieces by the duo who, between them, cover a lot of instruments and combinations of instruments and - ah youth - are never less than hu…