New Arrivals
Proceed with Caution!
Whereas the earlier black jazz album Shawn-Neeq had its share of riff-based funk, Calvin Keys' second outing Proceed with Caution! (1974) sticks close to straight-ahead jazz verities with the 30-something guitarist in the studio with seven similarly young, on-the-rise musicians including Charles Owens (saxophones, flute), Oscar Brashear (trumpet), Al Hall Jr. (trombone), Kirk Lightsey (electric piano), Henry Franklin (bass), and Leon "Ndugu" Chancler (drums). Keys can really play the guitar, e…
Zack Gluck
Effortlessly fusing krautrock with jazz and ethnic music, Embryo were unparalleled in the world of progressive fusion and 1984's Zack Glück is one of their most ambitious and rewarding LPs. Flutes and saxophones mix with oud, marimba and violin to make an intoxication concoction. Originally released on Italian's Sonori label, Mirumir is pleased to present the very first official vinyl reissue of this prog classic.
Amulet
Oren Ambarchi live recordings assembled on Cheryl Cole's iPhone at her house in Winnipeg. Not really, but it's that's how I first misread the description. Amulet actually presents two iPhone recordings assembled at Chez Cole, Winnipeg, July 2013 by the inestimable Oren Ambarchi. We've no further info but from what we can hear these are rudimentary iPhone recordings excerpted and crudely edited from a live performance (a shard of applause possibly gives the game away) between rippling, dynamicall…
Dance of the vampires
"Roman Polanski’s 1967 film ‘Dance Of The Vampires’ (as it was originally called, but more widely known by its re-named title ‘The Fearless Vampire Killers’, or ‘Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are In My Neck’) is a camp horror cult classic. At the time the film was marketed as a ‘farce’, which overlooked the fact that this film is fantastically eerie. The major part played by the soundtrack in giving the film this effect cannot be understated, and the cold-as-snow production did much to enhance the b…
The Mortimer Trap
The Mortimer Trap is an epic, 77-minute "variation" of Morton Feldman's For Bunita Marcus, constructed by German experimentalist and techno icon Thomas Brinkmann and Australian sound artist Oren Ambarchi. Pulsating waves of claustrophobic ambience generated from who-knows-what patiently builds into a throbbing, rhythmic pulse of gorgeous sonic density. Since the '80s, Thomas Brinkmann has experimented with sound, its textures and its construction methods. His custom-built two-arm turntable …
The Celebrate Music Synthesizer Group
The Celebrate Music Synthesizer Group is a spice-hunting collective formed in Rotterdam in the summer of 2012, when multi-media cultural center The Worm graciously opened their world-class synthesizer studio to the current incarnation of Sun Araw Band. Cameron Stallones (Sun Araw, Magic Lantern), M. Geddes Gengras , Tony Lowe (CEO Raw Tings), and Butchy Fuego (San Gabriel, Boredoms) spent a week amidst Syrinx, Serge, and Surinamese victuals, tracking the self-titled double album live to two-trac…
Temple
'Temple' is the final installment in Jan Jelinek's series of four vinyl compilations that bring together the wide variety of his music: commissioned works, live recordings, collaborations with other musicians as well as unreleased material from the last five years. Temple stems from a collaboration with French-Canadian choreographer Sylvain Émard. Temple is a re-worked excerpt of the music for the dance piece Fragments – Volume I and is a 10 minute drone work that builds from nothing more than a…
Lava
"Lava is a wonderfully apt title for this duet between Liudas Mockunas on soprano, tenor and bass saxophones and Barry Guy on bass. The music was recorded live at Kaunas Artists House Concert Hall in Lithuania on the 2nd of April, 2011, and released in a limited edition run of 300 vinyl LP's. Lava is the appropriate name for this music as it flows slowly and inexorably forward. Guy is a rock solid bassist who is a stalwart on the avant jazz and classical scene in Europe, and his skills ar…
Live at the Cairo High Cinema Institute
I saw him at a street party in Giza where a few hundred people had amassed to dance and scream into the night. Flanked by Khaled Mando and Islam Tata, his two drummers pounding furiously asthe signature tone of his synth intensified for almost two hours, Islam Chipsy demonstrated his completely revolutionary take on modern Egyptian Shaabi. The sound was raw and distorted, thevolume was deafening, and the energy was high. Thirty minutes into the set, the trio pulled out blindfolds and put them on…
Day and night
Saxophonist Gerd Dudek's 2012 concert in London at the Vortex in a quartet with Hans Koller (piano), Oli Hayhurst (bass) and Gene Calderazzo (drums), with Dudek and Koller picking some of their favorite jazz tunes including works by Nichols, Shorter, Coleman, Wheeler, &c. Gerd Dudek (soprano & tenor saxophones), Hans Koller (piano), Oli Hayhurst (double bass), Gene Calderazzo (drums). Gerd Dudek came to London early in 2012 to give a concert at the Vortex. The next day the quartet went to…
Take a chance In the void: Harold Norse at the Beat Hotel
Historical recordings made by Harold Norse when he was living with William Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Gregory Corso at the notorious Beat Hotel in Paris during the early sixties. By the time Norse arrived in Paris he had traveled extensively in Morocco and Europe and his poetry was already championed by people like W. H. Auden, William Carlos Williams and Tennessee Williams.
Together with Sinclair Beiles, Burroughs and Gysin, Norse was one of the first to apply the cut-up method. He made the tec…
Don't tell the driver
Finally, after 15 years, Big Mick Turner has turned in the big rock record we always knew he had in him. Yeah, Don't Tell the Driver is a different kind of record from all the Mick Turner records -- not just his own, but the ones he's done with Dirty Three, Bonny Billy, Cat Power, Fungus Brains, and Venom P. Stinger put together. So, what's so different about Don't Tell the Driver anyway? Well, Mick grew a mustache for this one. That must mean it's his Sgt. Pepper; a consolidation and developmen…
Ununhexium/Collapsed
Ununhexium is the sixth release in Raster-Noton's Unun series. Emptyset is a Bristol-based project formed by James Ginzburg, director of the Multiverse Studios and the curator and electronic artist Paul Purgas. Collapsed is Emptyset's first release on Raster-Noton and investigates the threshold where sonic structure is destabilized to the point where a chaotic order emerges. Across the four tracks a structural grammar is defined and then pushed to excess to the point where it reforms from re…
Exile in Paradise
Established in 1978 by Truus de Groot in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, she tinkered with toy and electronic instruments in her flat - amidst the explosion of Punk Rock. Even though Truus was very active in that genre and “New Wave” as well, the more experimental side gradually took over and the concept of Plus Instruments was born. Plus Instruments released their first e.p. single in 1979 on Dutch label Plurex:
Playing odd electronic instruments, Bass and vocals, most of their performances were im…
Piano solo
Recorded live at Cafe OTO in March 2009 during Otomo Yoshihide's first residency here. This was one of only a handful of solo piano performances Otomo has given where he uses the instrument as a control matrix for harmonically rich feedback tones and devastating clusters of complex noise. Beautifully rendered with maximum dynamic range by Lupo's 45rpm cut!
Jigokuhen
Jigokuhen is the final instalment in Masami Akita's 15 part Bird Series for Important Records. Inspired by Olivier Messaien's Catalogue D'Oiseaux, the Bird Series saw the release of one CD per month for 13 months while a 14th disc was released free via download to series subscribers and on CDr with the purchase of Merzbow's EcoBag. This 14th Bird Series release is being issued on the 2 year anniversary of the start of the Bird Series and in conjuntion with Vampilla's new album on Important …
Hassaniya Music from the Western Sahara and Mauritania
In 2006, Hisham Mayet returned to West Africa to continue his search for an unknown musician he had heard six months earlier on the radio in a Morocco hotel room. Knowing only that it was Sahrawi music -- music of the south -- he headed down through the vast and remote desert landscape of the Western Sahara and Mauritania in hopes of finding someone who could identify these revelatory recordings. The story of how he finally found this elusive artist is the stuff of ethnomusicological legend. But…
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…
GYU
Gatefold double LP version. Tujiko Noriko returns to Editions Mego after a period of relative silence, this time in collaboration with Tyme. (aka Tatsuya Yamada, member of MAS). This album was developed from songs that the duo made once a year at the end and beginning of the new year, for a period of six years. These were sent to friends and people who asked. After six years, there were six tracks and they added five more tracks based on the illustrations of Kimura Toshiko to complete the a…