We use cookies on our website to provide you with the best experience.Most of these are essential and already present. We do require your explicit consent to save your cart and browsing history between visits.Read about cookies we use here.
Your cart and preferences will not be saved if you leave the site.
Legendary saxophonist and one of the most important musicians on the British improvised scene. Member of great bands led by Keith Tippet and Barry Guy including the London Jazz Composers Orchestra, Paul Dunmall on one hand. On the other hand double bass virtuoso, known in the past as a musical companion of legendary trombonist Paul Rutherford and a crucial on the European free improv scene band Mujician, Paul Rogers. On drums Mark Sanders, for sure a key person in the British and European free m…
On a perfectly smooth surface of silence, three hurled stones create their patterns of waves. The lines intersect, unite, cancel out, or reinforce each other. Sometimes, they form together a harmonious pattern. At other times, they express the beauty of chaos and entropy. But they always remain in relation to each other - no movement goes unanswered. No energy escapes into nothingness. These three stones are Scratching Fork. Three musicians with different characters, histories, and registers. Ma…
"There are many illusive or ephemeral descriptions that are often part of how words seek to elucidate the listening experience. In the music we have on this recording from Florestan and the trio he has formed to venture his musical initiatives, words such as space, transparency, suspension, stasis, momentum, tension, multiplicity, flow, cohesion, dimension, release are some of the ingredients that come to mind to articulate the musical experience this recording offers. To me, Florestan’s musical…
Time to start the new year. Legendary trumpeter and jazz great, runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize, winner, Guggenheim Fellowship winner, NEA Jazz Masters recipient, Wadada Leo Smith and one of the greatest authorities on improvised music, educator, our friend, guitarist, and double bassist Joe Morris together! The album is a recording of a concert the two artists gave earlier this past year, on 12 February, during the famous ImprovisatioNOW concert series at Real Art Ways in Hartford, where audie…
John Surman's Jazz in Britain '68-'69 is an overview disc of his '60s band and one of the more enjoyable vintage British jazz records. These tunes come from several different sessions recorded in the late sixties, as evidenced by the alternate drummers - Alan Jackson and Tony Oxley - and the use of different instrumentation, like the three-horn modal piece "Bouquet Garni," from 1968 that places Surman in the company of only two other horn players - Alan Skidmore and Mike Osborne - and no rhythm …
2024 stock. This performance is a second coming together of a rather unusual but wonderful pair; Dame Evelyn Glennie, a household name in percussion, and Szilárd Mezei, a prolific free improviser, multi-instrumentalist, and composer. In 2018, these two artists came together in the Core-tet Project, one of Dame Evelyn’s significant forays into free improvisation. Since then, she also worked with TRIO HLK, but this live performance with Mezei and his quartet is a much different kind of performing…
CD edition, comes in mini LP replica with obi & Japanese insert. Art Yard continues their voyage into the omniverse of unreleased Sun Ra tapes with I Roam The Cosmos, an unreleased, previously unheard 1972 live session recorded at Slug's Saloon in New York. Fronting a stellar 18-piece incarnation of the Arkestra, I Roam The Cosmos finds Sun Ra taking the listener on a poetic journey to the outer limits of planetary awareness. While the captain of the space-ship declaims his message with Arkestra…
2024 stock. Claude & Ola return to the Steep Gloss label with Immara. Recorded from autumn of 2021 into 2022, this collaboration introduces new sounds and textures into each artist's catalog, while retaining and amplifying the varying degrees of abstraction inherent in their unique approaches. Claude and Ola Aldous are experimental musicians residing in the northern reaches of New York state in the US. They have previously released music on the Steep Gloss, TQN-Aut, Tone Burst, and Noise á Noise…
"This overdue duo record by longtime colleagues Tashi Dorji (guitar) and Dave Rempis (saxophones) is a monument to the endless musical curiosity that links them. These two come at it from remarkably different backgrounds – Dorji combining his Bhutanese ethnicity with a love for metal, punk, American blues and folk, and anarchist political theory, with Rempis riding the outer edges of the jazz world throughout his career, while also inspired by his Greek ethnicity and a longstanding interest in f…
Sun Ra, notorious for his aggressive keyboard attack and seemingly schizophrenic stylings, here offers a unique selection playing the celeste-like Fender Rhodes electric piano, which has a distinct sound (think Doors' "Riders on the Storm") and an interesting history. This is Ra sound at his most relaxed and contemplative state.This Sun Ra 1980 solo set at Haverford College has been kicking around the internet and in the digital libraries of Ra collectors for years, though it has not previously …
A duo of irony, smoke, and mirrors, computer musician Tom Mudd and percussionist/violist Áron Porteleki operate at either side of the same see-saw, teetering between realms of digital and tangible soundscapes. Mudd's artistic voyage is anchored in the realm of physical modelling synthesis, an exploration of the nuanced interplay between software and improvised music, delving deep into the multifaceted realms of algorithmic composition and digital sonic artistry. Meanwhile, Porteleki's expansive…
Joining their newly launched Luminessence audiophile vinyl-reissue series, the legendary imprint, ECM, digs deep into their own vaults and comes up with an absolute gem: the guitarist John Abercrombie, the bassist Dave Holland, and the drummer Jack DeJohnette’s groundbreaking 1975 LP “Gateway”. Rooted in approaches drawn from free jazz and unquestionably springing from both Holland and DeJohnette’s time working in Miles Davis’ electric fusion band at the end of the 1960s and early '70s, it’s a r…
"We wrote “Accept When” between 2022 and 2023, after a long, beautiful period improvising together intimately in the safety of a friend’s practice space. Our friendship, the quality of attention that colored the light of that and all our other practice spaces, became the basis for our activity and growth as songwriters and our relationship as improvisers. Friendship, how we relate to each other, is our nucleus: the central and essential part of our movement; the positively charged central core o…
The Finnish/Italian improvisational collective makes a comeback after the acclaim of 'Gan-Ri-La.' This time, they grace Pelto Studio with their presence, offering a groovy free jazz encounter filled with unexpected twist
2024 Stock. Atto is one of Vladimir Tarasov's long evolving experimental music projects. Tarasov's percussion merges with the hypnotically repetitive synth sequence into one long piece. All instruments are played by Tarasov himself. Originally dispensed by state label Мелодия (Melodya) in 1989, the 4th ‘Atto’ volume features Vladimir effortless rolling out on a 35 minute piece in two parts built from pranging percussion, hunting horns and electronics. It’s a hypnotic study in sublime tension and…
Black vinyl Cape Town, South Africa-based drummer Asher Gamedze explores relationships of time between music and history on his new album Turbulence and Pulse, out May 5th 2023. Gamedze’s critically-acclaimed debut album Dialectic Soul was released at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in July 2020. Around the release of that record, with friend and writer Teju Adeleye he organized and participated in a joint online discussion “Poesis,” with historian Robin D.G. Kelley and others. One of the no…
Tip! *300 copies limited edition* {scope} came to life in 2020, when musicians Laura Agnusdei, Matteo Pennesi and Luca Sguera got selected for Holydays Festival, an artist residency in Scopoli, a small village in Umbria, central Italy. Despite having never played together before, the musicians found a common musical language which emerged in their first album "A week from Monday", recorded during the residency and released by ViaIndustriae and Rous Records. At the start of 2022 a new opportunity…
"Repress of Johnny Dyani's 1979 LP Song for Biko, recorded in the summer of 1978 with the powerful front line-up of Don Cherry and Dudu Pukwana, the album was dedicated to the martyred South African activist against apartheid Steve Biko (1946-1977). Johnny Mbizo Dyani (bassist/composer) was born in East London, South Africa in 1945 and became one of South Africa's most internationally acknowledged musicians. Since his arrival in England in 1965 as a member of South African jazz group called The …
*50 copies edition* "Three of Europe's most acclimated and proven improvisers—pianist Robert Mitchell (Steve Coleman, Greg Osby), bassist Neil Charles, and drummer/percussionist Mark Sanders (Jah Wobble, Rachel Musson)—band together as The Flame for the first time and emerge from pandemic isolation, and the forever wars and broken civics that accompanied it, with a hypnotic performance captured absolutely live on Towards the Flame.
Recorded at London's Cafe Otto in February of 2022, The Flame co…
After eleven albums with a varying ensemble size, Martin Küchen’s Angles returns with The Death of Kalypso, its most ambitious statement to date: a jazz opera for our times. Joining forces with vocalist Elle-Kari and Angles pianist Alexander Zethson, who wrote the string arrangements and band notations, Küchen adds another volume to the band’s sizeable, yet coherent catalog, which merges infectious free jazz grooves with tumultuous emotional cadences that reflect both human and political concern…