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"Before we get this started, let me explain it. It's Ruff Draft. For my real niggaz only ... Sound like it's straight from the ma'fuckin' cassette! ... Let's do it." ... Thus begins Ruff Draft. These self-produced tracks make up one of the late J Dilla's least known works during his lifetime. Released on vinyl only in February 2003 this sought-after release was elusive and virtually unknown to the casual Dilla fan until Stones Throw's reissue in 2007. Recorded in the wake of a failed deal with major label, Dilla returned to solo recordings as a fiercely independent artist with Ruff Draft. The CD contains photos from this era and detailed liner notes by Ronnie Reese discussing Dilla's career in 2002 when Ruff Draft was recorded. Tracks on this disc were taken from J Dilla's original master tapes, where additional previously-unreleased tracks “Wild” and “Take Notice” were also discovered. Sleeve by Jeff Jank.

Habitat, an environmental music collaboration by Berlin based composer Niklas Kramer and percussionist Joda Foerster, is inspired by the drawings of Italian architect Ettore Sottsass. Each of the eight tracks represents a room in an imaginary building.

In Habitat the duo layers, loops and merges sonic textures and patterns into fluid blocks without the restraint of statics. African log drum, Bolivian chajchas, vibraphone, kalimba and various other percussion instruments are processed, pitched, harmonised and filtered through modular synth and script based sample cutting to form a collage of asynchronous layers.

By using acoustic instruments and expanding their sound into abstract shapes, Habitat evokes a vague intimacy, a curious state of comfort in the unknown.

Tokyo playwrite, director and artist J A Caesar sprang to prominence in the early ‘70s largely through his work with Shuji Terayama’s Tenjo Sajiki Theatre, specializing in vaguely sinister music. The Kokkyou Junreika release, often considered Caesar’s finest work, was culled from the 5 hours of music written for the original play distilled down to an album’s worth of ageless chants, Budhist mantras, heavenly invocations and fuzztone guitar vamps supported by Caesar’s droning electric organ and the eerie female vocals of Yoko Ran, Keiko Shinko and Seigo Showa. An album that sits comfortably alongside early Ash Ra Temple, Cosmic Jokers and ATEM-period Tangerine Dream.

When we can no longer move forward or look outward, some reflect and seek truth in themselves – some sharing, through the language of music, what might be impossible to say through words. --- Amidst the budding tempest of 2020, Jeremiah Carter, originally hailing from Tennessee, found himself embroiled in a near suffocating air of uncertainty and anxious tension, mainly brought upon by the first spikes in a soon to be world-wide pandemic. Only having recently relocated to the bustling city of New York, an unprecedented series of events took shape over the following months, isolating and alarming the city's residents in the process. It was during this time that Jeremiah fully turned his attention to music, discharging the emotional turmoil surrounding him, into newly composed work. Beginning with the album ‘Rejoice’, which was completed in the wake of 2020 and released on A Sunken Mall that same year, two more albums took shape in a quasi-self-induced creative tremor that materializing a wealth of work and formed a triptych of three unique albums, all produced within the span of only 6 months. Finally, presented here is the second part of the triptych; ‘Speak, You Also’, dedicated to Paul Celan and giving further insight into the heart of a beloved southerner, tangled in the mesh of existence, crisis and communication, far away from the prairies he once called home.

Habitat (what we might now properly refer to as Habitat I) arrived, fully-formed, in 2021—the product of a conscientious, exploratory, and decidedly Covid-era collaboration between two Berlin-based experimental musicians: the composer N. (Niklas) Kramer, and percussionist, J. (Joda) Foerster. Inspired by the Italian architect, Ettore Sottsass, Habitat’s simple, albeit beguiling conceit (following in the footsteps of canonical ambient releases like Music for Airports and Plantasia) was that each track ought to represent a room in an imagined building. Taken quite literally, tracks like “Curved Hallway” guided the listener through a kind of psychogeographic labyrinth, at once welcoming and slightly uncanny. Habitat II operates on a similar premise. But if Habitat I charted the perplexing intricacies of an imagined, self-contained structure, Habitat II expands the conceptual realm. Think now, not only of rooms in a hypothetical home, but of the winding hallways and grounds of a mid-century structure—perhaps slightly past its prime, but not at all an inappropriate venue for a late-night soiree. How might these features be imagined, mapped, and rendered enticing for a listener? We begin, appropriately, with “Seating (Welcome),” which, in its fluttering, aetherial suite of static, winds, and percussive depths, gently hypnotizes in the vein of Terry Riley, beckoning our entry. The clarity here, the directional flow of air, recalls the dignity and gestural simplicity of the Bauhaus school. Of significant note is the Wasserspiel (track seven)—”water fixture” (loosely translated), like the sculpture by Lily Clark, which graces the record’s cover. In an album grounded by analogies, Wasserspiel constitutes an especially mimetic highlight: a cascading, shimmering, font of radiance that does not (to its strength) rely upon a sample or found-sound reference to running water. Instead we are left with the distinct impression of the glimmer of flowing liquid, and of the attendant, refractory evening sunlight. Indeed, fountains (the most common and domesticated form of Wasserspiele)—their simultaneous kitsch and abundance—may very well epitomize the kind of cultivated, sixties home-shopping catalog aesthetic that undergirds the Habitat series. These habitats, wherever they are, however they appear to you (and there is indeed ample room for interpretation)—we can all certainly agree that they are vaguely utopian and achingly nostalgic. Of their compositional process, Kramer and Foerster reference their mutual interest in improvisation, and, furthermore, a kind of “first thought best thought” approach to recording and indexing ideas. Relying primarily on a sampler with a 15 second limit, their process emphasizes the organic layering of asynchronous (though, crucially, harmonious — perhaps even “hospitable”) loops. Suffice it to say, many rooms have been lost to the aether, casualties of a mercurial recording process. Those rooms that remain in Habitat II have been cultivated, furnished, and decorated. And they eagerly await your entry.

In 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic began, environmental sounds were recorded in the dense forests of Kerala, India, and

in 2023, in the chaotic wastelands of Karachi and Lahore, Pakistan, where suicide bombings still occur, Peshawar,

where suicide bombings still occur in 2023.

This futuristic Asian music, created by blending traditional instruments with electronics and collage, mysteriously blends with Arab and African elements, evoking the scent of the earth despite being rooted in asphalt—a truly unique masterpiece!

More Japanese lysergic madness ! The 1972  soundtrack for Shuji Terayama's visionary movie of the same name contains all the elements necessary to reach composer & theatre producer J.A. Caesar's intended pleasure-centers. Disturbing, but in the end truly innovative, this soundtrack is as certified gateway to the underworld in the vein of classic by Faust, Cosmic Jokers or early Amon Düül.

"This mighty soundtrack for Shuji Terayama's nihilistic movie of the same name contains all the elements necessary to reach J.A. Caesar's intended pleasure-centers. Here, turmoil, mind-numbing repetition, abject misery and grisly partriarchs abound, and all orchestrated by Caesar's damaged proto-metal and choral-led psychedelic sound. Mind-infesting in the truest sense, this soundtrack played in the dark is as certified a Gateway to the Underworld as any acknowledged classic by Faust, Magma, the Cosmic Jokers, Ash Ra Tempel or early Amon Düül." --Julian Cope, Japrocksampler.</p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0KGi-KJQkak?si=-GuIwoImAyG7euYw" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>

“I had the honour of remixing all of the Bamboo tapes that J.Derwort ever recorded. Most of my mixes were approved by the master himself during the last days of his life in Oliva, Spain. For ‘Eleven’, I sampled from his last live performance at Jazzcafe Dizzy in Rotterdam on February 11th, 2018. He died on the day of the release of our latest Chi Factory album, ‘The Mantra Recordings’, on February 11th, 2019. We will miss him, life will not be the same. Farewell soul brother!” Words by Hanyo van Oosterom.

J.P.A. Falzone and Morgan Evans-Weiler have been working together since 2016 in the famous ensemble "Ordinary Affects" of the Weindelweiser school. A 2-CD set containing the feature films composed individually by each is released from the famous place ! In January 19 at the Wesleyan University Memorial Chapel at the Liberal Arts University in Middletown, Connecticut, by Luke Damrosch, who is known for engineering works around Van der Weiser and co-writing with Alan Sondheim and José James. A recorded work. Both the string drone minimalist Morgan Evans-Weiler side, which accelerates isolation in the void, the melancholy piano and violin, and the JPA Falzone side, where the pointillistic sound of the vibraphone gives off a dull beauty. A very enigmatic chamber music work that makes you feel even the taste of Japanese loneliness while suppressing the number of sounds. It's ridiculously wonderful!

Operating on the fringes of pure improv, organised chaos, minimal composition, lo-fi electronics and Italian spaghetti westerns, wide-eyed and with a healthy dose of DIY aesthetics lies the world of Jaan. It’s a poetic & cosmic universe, exploring “discreet music” whilst wandering on the edges of the Cat People soundtrack & Brian Eno’s more experimental output, in which you might yourself find floating, wandering or in the middle of a market place.

Jaan is a collective of one, a deliberately anonymous activistic unit with strong ties to the international art scene. Purposefully bypassing the know-it-all of the the internet & embracing the bygone mystery of dusty old archives and deep-dive searching, remarkably little is known about this project. Jaan is lead by veteran experimental sonic alchemist Jaan; they operate between Greenland, the Middle East and Europe, with frequent associates Lisqa, Mashid & Schneorr N. acting as local hubs for collaboration and exploration.

The purpose of this wilful obscurity: full focus on the actual music, whether live events or on recordings. Which brings us to Baghali, their first for World of Echo. It’s a deeply personal album, much like slowly browsing old family albums filled with vaguely remembered tales, some still very much present, some faded, leaving but a ghost-like reflection of what once was. Baghali was compiled over the course of a year on the road, trapped in snow storms, waiting for cancelled flights and stuck rides. It’s made up of snippets of diary, quick recordings on road sides, abandoned buildings, garden ruins, vast desert and focussed studio sessions, following a collage-like aesthetic and steeped in an exploration of non-lineair storytelling. There’s broken memories, a sense of displacement and an occasional yearning for what can’t be again, clouded in fever and unrest, but there is also hope, wonderment and bright colours seeping through the cracks in the wall. Jaan weaves home-made instruments, old tape loops, broken synths, beat-up reeds, dusty beat boxes and the occasional doom guitar squall into a tapestry of fractured sound, with tracks following their own inherent logic rather than following formats. Sounds crash in and out, field recordings placing the listener firmly in an environment then throwing several perspectives at once onto them, with individual elements - a wandering clarinet, a lone mandolin, a beat out of place yet perfectly in place - slowly walking in and out & doing their thing.

The whole album is alive, breathes, takes a wrong turn, gets lost, somehow finds its way again - effortless and with a unique sense of space and flow.

Sweet Company is the second album by Jabu. Where their first LP, Sleep Heavy, was an unflinching exploration of grief, dark and disembodied, Sweet Company’s deep, sedative soul feels like more of a lovers’ outing: optimistic, becalmed, looking outwards as well as inwards, and longing for the kind of human connections where ego and self-consciousness might dissolve. It is perhaps also an exhortation to love and accept yourself, to recover a lost innocence and peace – that paradise which has always been lost. Released via their own do you have peace? label, Sweet Company is on the one hand a very intimate and private-sounding work - the sound of life played out in a room, a bubble, a home, a head. The rhythms of everyday domesticity: listening to the plants, cars in the street, voices through the wall…. going to work, not going to work, sleeping heavy or not sleeping at all. Wavering on the brink of a revelation, of something just beyond the material world, while you wait for the kettle to boil. The core Jabu trio of producer Amos Childs and vocalists Jasmine Butt and Alex Rendall is present and correct. Sweet Company has the exhilarating sweep and confidence of a collaboration between people who trust and understand each other implicitly, and, secure in that knowledge, are able to give the absolute best of themselves to us. As before, Jasmine’s voice is a textural, painterly instrument, layered and blurred into abstraction, resisting the limits of language; the songs she sings on are portals into vast internal landscapes where the normal rules of gravity are suspended, every sound is smothered in a cathedral-like resonance, and you're both fearful and hopeful that you might never find your way back out again. Alex takes a more narrative, confessional and no less engaging pop tack: as on the gauzy, decelerated 2-step of ‘Lately’, with his masochistic, self-mocking entreaties to “be cruel to me […] I like it when you make a fool of me”. Childs has a true hip-hop fiend's ear for a striking sample, and how to loop it to most hypnotic and rapturous effect, but here takes things to ever more powerfully uncanny and auteurish places, drawing inspiration from the voidal bliss-outs of shoegaze (AR Kane’s amniotic dream-pop epic 69 is one influence cited) and the space-time disturbances of dub, commanding both a raindrops-on-cobwebs delicacy and an immense, oceanic pressure. His productions seem to resist linear progression - instead they move by a kind of unstoppable diffusion, like weeds reclaiming an unkempt garden, or alien flora patterning the sea-floor and coral-caves of the subaquatic level of a computer game which may exist only in your, or his, imagination. Perhaps it's Daniela Dyson, the British-Afro-Colombian artist who contributes her vivid, energising poetic mysticism to two tracks, who best sums up Sweet Company's ambition and effect: “Me quiero perder en los momentos tan puros en su esencia que Las Horas mismas se detienen para ser testigo de nuestro amor” (I want to lose myself in the moments so pure in their essence / that The Hours themselves stop to bear witness to our love…). For a precious half an hour, we're invited to celebrate the smallness of our lives - and the limitless grandeur which that smallness contains. When it ends, we step back from the brink but things aren’t quite the same anymore: we’re haunted by what we briefly almost knew.

"Combining steppy dance music, lush detail and a diaristic tone, Jack Chrysalis’ debut album dials between music that is destined to catch the ear of the club-goer and the heart of the dreamer, his signature propulsive mutations of organic techno and UK garage sounding strongly in tracks like Another Year and Coldharbour. Between these, Chrysalis threads in more introspective moments. Tracks formed by running a hand along piano keys in improvisation, or made in recollection of Koji Kondo’s clear bright musical palette for Zelda. They lend a sense of atmosphere and a deeper running mood to the album’s overworld, heightening endorphin hits from the garage swing and affording a little more bittersweetness to its textures and secrets. Whether in rush or retreat, each track on this album emerges with its own emotional resonance. There’s a sense of seasons turning, or a twilight quality that’s hard to fully pin down. “Owl music” became shorthand for Jack’s tunes, a way for Mana to capture a prescient, nocturnal flight within their environment."

Downtempo, Folk, Pop … Just a little over two years since the release of his debut album Opening the Door, Jack re-emgerges with a new full length album. On Blue Desert, the Australian-born Vancouver-based multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter and producer wades deeper into the stylistically prismatic pool of his own creation.

Well it's been more than 365 days and nights since we released a record on our small and independent record label based in Vancouver, BC. For better or worse we have always operated at a pace that feels natural to us. The same could be said for Mood Hut recording artist Jack J who has not released any music in over seven years. Do you remember his last record? It was called Thirstin' and it came out in the summer of 2015, hot on the heels of Something (On My Mind) which came out the year before. So naturally after this very long silence we are proud and excited to be able to finally share Opening the Door, the first full length LP by Jack J. Self-recorded slowly but surely between 2015 and 2019 between Mood Hut and C'est Life Studios, and featuring some crucial saxophone work by Linda Fox, this LP confirms Jack J to be a masterful mood maker as well as an incisive songwriter. Over the course of the album an undeniably blue haze settles over inward-peering ambient jazz, On-U-inspired digital-dub and quiet storm soft rock leaving a distinct sense of sadness amongst all the tangerine funk. Check it out!

A cassette version of ‘Croon Harvest’: a performance-installation for voices, field recordings, and white noise by composer and conductor Jack Sheen.

Ayatollah is an apocalyptic record, full of dread - dubwise and deep from the first chords of Jackie Mittoo's interstellar keys, over classic Wackies-style steppers drum and bass - with a dream-like atmosphere in which pain and sufferation are swirled together with devotional mystery and redemption. Originally released on the Nefertiti label, like Rocking Universally this is from the early eighties (and the B-side here is another essential, extended version of that rhythm - dancefloor murder), when Jackie Mittoo was between New York and Toronto. Such a killer.

Crucial set feat. Sly Dunbar, Robbie Shakespeare, Aston Barett, Winston Wright, Sly Morris, J. Francisque and Skully "Zoot" Simms.

A very welcomed reissue for this rare Jackie Mittoo album, originally released in 1979 on unknown label, Rite Sound inc. The original release was sold without a jacket, adding a mysterious vibe to the whole thing. The dubby effects-intensive sound of the album extends from "Russian Satelite" to the whole side A, with "Harder Than The Rest," "Stepping Tiger," and "World Of Love" being an excellent triptych of note. The thrill of Jackie's crazy keyboards intertwining with the floating dub sound like a heavenly space is beyond description. Space is the place.

Arriving on the Japanese music scene during the Beatles-inspired cover band boom of the late ’60s, Jacks instantly distinguished themselves from their fluff-peddling, copycat peers with stripped-down, original compositions, nihilistic lyrics and raw performances.

Their tenure was short - ’67 to ’69 - but Jacks managed to cut a handful of singles and two albums in that time, the first of which, Vacant World, is now widely considered in Japan to be one of the greatest rock albums the country has ever produced. The combination of Yoshio Hayakawa's arresting baritone and austere guitar work, drummer Takasuke Kida and upright bassist Hitoshi Tanino's jazzy, loose interplay, and lead guitarist Haruo Mizuhashi's searing fuzz leads was alchemical, and Vacant World captured the band at the peak of their powers.

Some have described Jacks as the Velvet Underground of Japan — a singular, revolutionary group that had little commercial success in their day but whose influence and legend grows exponentially with each passing year. The comparison is apt. Unlike V.U., however, Jacks remain largely unknown outside Japan, and Mesh-Key hopes this first-ever officially licensed international release does something to fix this injustice.

“The album that gave birth to Japanese underground/psychedelic rock, and the one that influenced me the most when I was young.” — Shintaro Sakamoto

Vinyl only release. 

JACKSON C. FRANK is the highly regarded debut and the only official album he ever released, produced by friend and fellow musician PAUL SIMON in England and released on Columbia Records in 1965. Jackson has been called the most famous folk singer of 1960s that no one has ever heard of and his influence was felt more in England, where his album was a hit, rather than in the U.S., where his record was a commercial failure at the time of its release. His most famous song “Blues Run The Game” has been covered by scores of musicians including Simon and Garfunkel, Counting Crows, Colin Meloy, Bert Jansch, Laura Marling, and Robin Pecknold, while Nick Drake also recorded it privately.

40th Anniversary Edition - newly remastered from the master tapes, with an additional bonus LP of instrumentals and the previously unreleased “Narration Theme.” 

Daytime Viewing (1979-80) is an extended narrative song, based on a casual analysis of daytime television drama and the audience phenomena such programming addresses. The piece explores the use of fantasy as a survival mechanism against loneliness, illustrating the human compulsion to inflate the mundane to mythological proportions. A central female character weaves tales, using threads of personal experience and the idea of TV as friend, as mantra, and as transformational window between imagined spectacle and the pedestrian plane. 

Originally released as a private cassette edition [recorded, 1982; Chez Hum-Boom release, 1983] documenting the collaborative performance piece of the same name by Jacqueline Humbert & David Rosenboom. This heady, thoroughly enjoyable work was first made available on CD and LP in 2013 by Unseen Worlds. Jacqueline Humbert (aka J. Jasmine) is a songwriter of brains and wit on par with Robert Ashley, with whom she's worked extensively. David Rosenboom's complex, harmonic electronic arrangements are accentuated brilliantly by percussion from William Winant. Daytime Viewing can happily be added to a small but significant group of work that, through lesser-known paths, engaged in an equally revelatory reexamination of the Great American Songbook as Minimalism did with 20th Century composition. 

Jacqueline Nova (Ghent, Belgium, 1935 - Bogotá, Colombia, 1975), a representative figure of Colombian avant-garde music, developed important and radical work within the field of electronic and instrumental music, as well as in interdisciplinary forms. This album, Creación de la Tierra - Ecos palpitantes de Jacqueline Nova: Música electroacústica e instrumental (1964-1974) ("Creation of the Earth - Throbbing Echoes of Jacqueline Nova: Electroacoustic and Instrumental Music (1964-1974)")¸ under the curatorship and research of the Colombian composer Ana María Romano G., recovers Nova's most important electroacoustic works: "Creación de la tierra (Creation of the Earth)" (1972), "Oposición-Fusión (Opposition-Fusion)" (1968) and "Resonancias 1 (Resonances 1)" (1968-69), as well as the music for the film Camilo el cura guerrillero (Camilo the Guerrilla Priest) (1974), composed during her stay at the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) , of the Torcuato Di Tella Institute, in Buenos Aires, as well as in the Study of Phonology of the University of Buenos Aires. The compilation also includes the instrumental works "Omaggio a Catullus" (1972-1974), "Transiciones (Transitions)" (1964-1965), and "Asuimetrías (Asymmetries)" (1967), in which she explores randomness, timbre possibilities or the encounter between acoustic and electronic media. The interest in experimenting with the human voice, and interdisciplinary work involving visual arts, were some of the aspects that have defined Jacqueline Nova's work. Ana María Romano has written: "Nova lived in an environment hostile to change, to debate and discussion, hostile to her being an autonomous and lesbian woman. She undertook feats that make her a pioneer, even though she did not set out to be taken as one, but only as a result of the commitment, dedication and passion of a creator with her society. Jacqueline Nova died in Bogotá of bone cancer. Her tragic and early death not only cut short a career in full creative force, but also directly affected the development of electroacoustic music in the country. After her death there was a great silence -- close to 15 years -- in musical creation with electronic means. Nova challenged a conservative milieu and survived alone, working in a field thought to be exclusively masculine. But it was a woman who strengthened the use of technology in Colombian music. A risky bet that sadly represented a high cost: Nova was relegated during her lifetime, but her noises managed to shake and question the comfort zones of the Colombian musical establishment." Includes a booklet with extensive information written by Ana María Romano G.; edition of 300.

Musique Plastique and Séance Centre are proud to present Jacques Charlier’s “Art In Another Way”, a 45RPM double LP compilation of the Belgian multi-disciplinary artist’s inimitable chanson regressive recordings from the 1980s. Throughout a long career in the visual arts, Jacques Charlier has maintained a multi-disciplinary approach that includes forays in poetry, underground comics, acting, filmmaking and music. Besides performing with his punk group Terril (sadly, never recorded), Charlier took inspiration from the minimalist sounds of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, La MonteYoung, John Cage, and Meredith Monk. Throughout the 1970s he performed psychoacoustic pieces in Liège, Antwerp, Eindhoven, Rotterdam, Milan and Düsseldorf, and in the astounding performance art video Desperados Music, filmed by Paul Paquay for Belgian television. Charlier hit a creative stride in the 1980s — armed only with a synth, drum machine, fuzz box, and his custom guitar, with occasional duets with vocalist Martine Doutreleau. He recorded a trove of proto-pop tunes which he self-released on three cassettes (Musique Regressive, Chansons Idiotes and Chansons Tristes) between 1984–1987. “Art In Another Way” collects selections from these tapes, in addition to an ample supply of previously unreleased material, all mixed and mastered from Charlier’s original 4-track recordings for a wide angle view of his creative range. From the proto-house rhythm of “Jingle – Crepuscule”, to the minimal EBM experiment “Top” and Art Of Noise- inspired “PassingTime”. There are certain resonances within the catalogs of Belgian labels Crammed Discs and Les Disques Du Crépuscule, yet even with these genre-bending precedents, Charlier’s music is idiosyncratic and visionary to the extreme. Accompanying the release is a postcard featuring a behind-the-scenes performance photo and visual score by Charlier. RIYL: Flying Lizards, Y Records, Young Marble Giants, Ashra, Naffi, Tuxedomoon, Aksak Maboul

To write these few lines, we spoke to saxophonist François Jeanneau, an old friend of Jacques Thollot who also played on several of his albums, including the “Watch Devil Go” which interests us here. He told us a story which, according to him, sums up the personality of Thollot. A noted studio had reserved three days for a Thollot recording session. The first morning was devoted to sound checks and putting some order in the score sheets which Jacques would hand out in a somewhat anarchic manner. Then everyone went for lunch. When the musicians returned to the studio, Thollot had disappeared. He wasn’t seen again for the three days. When he reappeared, he had already forgotten why he had left, The music of Jacques Thollot is in the image of its’ author: it takes you somewhere, suddenly escapes and disappears, returning in an unexpected place as if nothing had happened. Four years after a first album on the Futura label in 1971, Jacques Thollot returned, this time on the Palm label of Jef Gilson, still with just as much surrealist poetry in his jazz. In thirty-five minutes and a few seconds, the French composer and drummer, who had been on the scene since he was thirteen, established himself as a link between Arnold Schoenberg and Don Cherry. Resistant to any imposed framework and always excessive, Thollot allows himself to do anything and everything: suspended time of an extraordinary delicacy, a stealthy explosion of the brass section, hallucinatory improvisation of the synthesisers, tight writing, teetering on the classical, and in the middle of all that, a hit; the title-track - that Madlib would one day end up hearing and sampling. “Watch Devil Go” was in the right place in the Palm catalogue, which welcomed the cream of the French avant-garde in the 70s. But it is also the story of a long friendship between two men. Jacques Thollot and Jef Gilson had known and respected one another for a long time. Though barely sixteen years old, Thollot was already on drums on the first albums by Gilson starting in 1963 and would play in his big band (alongside François Jeanneau once again), ‘Europamerica’, until the end of the 70s. In a career lasting half a century and centred on freedom Jacques Thollot played with the most important experimental musicians (Don Cherry, Sonny Sharrock, Michel Roques, Barney Wilen, Steve Lacy, François Tusques, Michel Portal, Jac Berrocal, Noël Akchoté...) and they all heard in him a pulsation coming from another world.