One of the strangest and most beautiful documents to emerge from the first wave of British free improvisation, Cholagogues captures a single afternoon at London's Action Space, 1st April 1977 - reportedly the only meeting of the trio of Nestor Figueras, David Toop, and Paul Burwell, taped onto a Sony cassette machine during the J. Drew concert series. Originally issued the same year by the musicians' collective Bead Records, the LP slipped quickly out of circulation and remained a deep underground rumour for three decades.
What unfolds across its forty-one minutes is unlike almost anything else from the period. Burwell anchors the proceedings with drums, gongs, cymbals, deerbone fiddle, and a wild assortment of percussion. Toop deploys an arsenal of flutes - water flutes, piston flutes, New Guinea initiation flutes - alongside whistles, bone trumpet, and Basque panpipes. Figueras contributes only respiratory and vocal sounds, body percussion, and movement. The result, described at the time by critic Peter Riley in Musics magazine as a prime example of "slow music", a music slow in its conception, execution, and reception, alternates ritualistic sparseness with denser passages, glancing off non-European musical traditions while keeping a minimalist economy of means and a quiet, persistent sense of play.
Reissued by Schoolmap, remastered by Dave Hunt with Toop, faithfully reproducing the original Bead artwork with its Lucas Cranach the Elder cover drawing. An essential excavation from the buried history of European improvisation, and a record that anticipates not only later strands of experimental practice but a certain weird strain of rock to come.
