Reissues
G2, 44+/x2
Room40 present a reissue of Phill Niblock's G2,44+/X2, originally released in 2002. Matte laminate embossed sleeve; includes insert card and 24-page book with liner notes from Bill Meyer, interview, and photos. Design by Traianos Pakioufakis.
Liner notes from Bill Meyer: "In 2001, Phill Niblock wrote, 'You should play the music very loud. If the neighbors don't complain, it's probably not loud enough.' In 2019, Niblock can no longer host his annual six hour-long solstice concert at the Experimen…
The Complete Yale Concert, 1966
For a performance at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, in spring of 1966, percussionist Milford Graves invited pianist Don Pullen to play duets. The two musicians had worked together in a band fronted by saxophonist and clarinetist Giusseppi Logan, with whom they had recorded two LPs in 1965 for ESP-Disk'. Graves was already a daunting presence in free music. One step at a time, he was busy transforming the role of drumming in jazz, introducing a new way of dealing with unmetered time a…
Three Nails Left
Corbett Vs. Dempsey present a reissue of Alexander von Schlippenbach Trio's Three Nails Left, originally released in 1975. One of the all-time great records of improvised music from Europe. Period. Blisteringly hot. Uncompromisingly inventive. Staggeringly beautiful. And insanely rare. Originally issued in the mid '70s on FMP, at its core Three Nails Left features the legendary Schlippenbach Trio -- British saxophonist Evan Parker, and German percussionist Paul Lovens joining the German pianist …
Con
Bureau B present a reissue of Conrad Schnitzler's Con, originally released in 1978. Conrad Schnitzler: In the electric garden by Wolfgang Seidel, May 2020: "... Whilst on shore leave in Düsseldorf, Conrad Schnitzler heard about a professor at the School of Art (Kunstschule) who also accepted students into his class without high school diplomas. Conrad Schnitzler became one of them. The spirit of a fundamental new beginning bonded this generation of artists together, with Karlheinz Stockhausen an…
Toho Sara
Black Editions present a reissue of Toho Sara's self-titled album, originally released in 1995. A mystifying work of Japanese avant-garde shamanism, Toho Sara's 1995 debut introduced a radical new sound from Asahito Nanjo (High Rise), Makoto Kawabata (Acid Mothers Temple), and Hisashi Yasuda - playing an array of ancient instruments including tabla, piri, harmonium, biwa, shakujo, and hansho the group evokes an otherworldly ritual music, meditative and haunting. Originally released on CD by P.S.…
Far And Wee
Black Editions present a reissue of Kazuo Imai's far and wee, originally released in 2004. Kazuo Imai is one of the few artists to traverse both Japan's early avant-garde and free jazz movements. Though he began performing in the 1970s, his 2004 P.S.F. album far and wee was only the second under his name. In a series of thrilling acoustic guitar improvisations -- Imai's playing crackles with dynamic tension and physicality as well as a subtlety and nuance that reveals him as one of the instrumen…
Musica Transonic
Black Editions present a reissue of Musica Transonic's self-titled release, originally released in 1995. Musica Transonic was comprised of three of the most crucial artists to emerge from the 1990s Japanese underground: Nanjo Asahito of High Rise, Makoto Kawabata of Acid Mothers Temple and Tatsuya Yoshida of Ruins. The group's music was a supercharged combination of complex rhythms, blistering guitar attacks, and enormously deep bass momentum. Pushing the rock power trio to its miasmic, overdriv…
Music To Eat
"Why would we reissue a record that is reputed to be the second worst-selling release in the history of Columbia Records? (Legend has it that it was undersold only by a yoga instructional album.) Well, because in the 47-some years since its release, the Hampton Grease Band's Music To Eat has steadily ascended the list of Greatest Cult Records of All Time so that now it resides at the tippety-top. Indeed, modern-day jam bands genuflect at the sight of the trippy cover art alone (Col. Bruce Hampto…
Rock Satellite
Funk is the magic word on this record here. Puccio Roelens (1919 – 1985) was an Italian composer, orchestra leader and pianist active from the mid 1940s to the time of his passing in 1985. You can easily place him in the “library music” category with his heavily rhythmical instrumental funk with a jazz / fusion edge. Layers upon layers of different rhythm patterns get shifted here and your body moves at full throttle to the sensual, steaming hot grooves. Signore Roelens moves through a bunch of …
Electronic Hair Pieces
Mort Garson was the master of the moog and a pioneer in electronic music from the late 60s and 70s where he participated in some unforgotten projects such as Lucifer, The Zodiac, Ataraxia and Plantasia. The following review centers on his album “Electronic Hair pieces” from 1969 on which he tickles your senses with instrumental adaptions of the songs from the musical “Hair”. He performs all the tunes on a contemporary moog synthesizer system even with electronic percussion. Since you might recog…
Speedball Experience
In stock now!! Okay, as the title already suggests, this compilation is made entirely of early 70s library music which was recorded for so called music libraries from whose stores, movie makers and TV producers could license certain titles for their productions. In most cases the compositions were a conglomerate of popular music genres such as funk, psychedelic, rock and soul. I have experienced a few French productions of that kind before, but now it is time for some Italian stuff. I am quite p…
Light Flight / More And More
There are synthesizers, there are guitars, bass guitars, real drums and vocals in the first song. Components of rock and pop unite here in this lone 1977 effort and make way for elements of dark slow funk and soul that take you a couple of years back to the early seventies. The garment of swirling synthesizers keep it all together. The atmosphere can be soft and gentle like the touch of a lover’s hand but it can also become more and more mysterious and gloomy generating a feeling of paranoia as …
Astromusic Synthesizer
Another great but late (1928 – 2003) synthesizer artist and pioneer, this time from Italy. His works date back to the early 60s and maybe even beyond considering his age. In the mid to late 60s he became quite active in the field of western movie soundtracks for example. This album I have the honor to review is a concept album on the zodiac signs and the music it contains could not be more diverse.
The elements that unite all the tunes are the entirely synthetic, yet warm analogue sound and the …
The Unexplained
Electronic impressions of the occult, reissued for the first time. The late, great Mort Garson (1924-2008) was a hotshot of electronic music's pioneering days, known for his groundbreaking occult works such as The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds (1967) and Lucifer: Black Mass (1971). A different side of his creativity emerged in his 1976 Plantasia project (FD 5003CD/LP), an inspired album of Moog compositions to be played for growing plants. The previous year he released this hypnotizing album, which ta…
Scelsi Revisited
In the project Scelsi Revisited the tape material is for the first time reflected in the medium of art: seven composers (Ragnhild Berstad, Georg Friedrich Haas, Fabien Lévy, Tristan Murail, Michael Pelzel, Michel Roth, Nicola Sani) were commissioned by Klangforum Wien to create new works from Scelsi’s tape music; Uli Fussenegger had prepared data packages consisting of excerpts from two to three tapes each, which Scelsi apparently had not used for the elaboration of definitive works, the latter …
Makrokosmos I-III
Makrokosmos Volume I, whose title reflects Crumb’s admiration for Bartók’s piano series Mikrokosmos, contains 12 pieces, grouped into three parts of four each, and Crumb associates each piece with a sign of the zodiac. This is paired with Volume II, which is similarly structured, after the fashion of Debussy’s twenty-four Préludes. Volumes I and II are filled with references to the history of humankind, myths, Christianity, paganism, occultism, literary works, and the composer’s own mental pictu…
Noch sind wir ein Wort
I would like to refer to Annette Bik’s project Bach gedoubelt, which was the origin of this piece, putting Bach’s b-minor partita, BWV 1002, in direct context with contemporary musical comments. Bach wrote so-called “Double” movements to the standard dances Allemanda, Corrente, Sarabande and Tempo di Borea, connected to the original as a kind of variation. Annette Bik commissioned four composers to write such “Double” movements to the four main movements of the Partita. This lead to four contemp…
Èclairs sur l'Au-Delà...
“I will say: I have given this flame to these eyes; I have drawn from the ambiguous smile of the moon […] these two naïve stars open to the infinite”, wrote the poetess Cécile Sauvage in 1908 to her unborn son, Olivier Messiaen. It is amazing that the poem in a sense expresses in a prophetic manner Messiaen’s interest in and passion for themes that were to accompany him throughout his life: the cosmos, infinity. It goes without saying that the poetic lifestyle of his mother was to have a strong …
Süden: Gastón Solnicki on Mauricio Kagel
111 cyclists reach famed opera house Teatro Colón to welcome Mauricio Kagel (1931-2008), one of the great composers of the 20th Century, who was born in Argentina, but left the country and settled in Germany in 1957. However, his adventurous music remained an inspiration to a number of forward-thinking Argentinean musicians, and in 2006 he returned to Buenos Aires for a Kagel festival, where he was to direct a major concert by the Buenos Aires Philharmonic, but also worked with a group of young …
Yamaon
Yamaon (1954-1958) for bass, alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, contra bassoon, percussion and doublebass is one of the wildest and most direct works of Scelsis. Just as the composition I presagi completed in the same year, the title warns of the destruction of a Mayan city. As Varèse in Ecuatorial and Nocturnal, Scelsi in Yamaon works with a differentiated repertoire of vowels, consonants, and syllables. These have no linguistic semantic meaning, but convey heterogeneous values of expression. “Wh…