MUSIC
6902 products
Remixed and remastered with bonus material and released on vinyl for the first time. Deluxe 2LP edition with artwork re-imagined by Ian Anderson of The Designers Republic.
"If I could watch any jazz band in the UK, any, I would choose Matthew Halsall's band, just love what he's been doing over the last few years... It's always high level, spiritual jazz music" – Gilles Peterson
Matthew Halsall is a Worldwide Award winning and MOBO nominated trumpeter, composer, producer and DJ. Since 2008, Matthew has released seven critically acclaimed studio recordings and has been a key figure in the rise of a new jazz sound in the UK. In addition to his own releases Halsall has collaborated with many DJs and producers, most notably DJ Shadow and Mr. Scruff, and in 2013 Matthew’s music was selected by Bonobo for his Late Night Tales compilation. Halsall is also the founder of Gondwana Records, a genre bending independent record label featuring a wealth defining albums by the likes of Portico Quartet, GoGo Penguin, Hania Rani and Mammal Hands. His own rich music draws on the spiritual-jazz of Alice Coltrane and Phaorah Sanders, contemporary electronica and dance music alongside his travels in Japan, the traditional art and music of which, has left a lasting impression on his compositions.
Sending My Love (2008) and Colour Yes (2009) were his first releases and document Halsall’s first great bands featuring the likes of flautist Chip Wickham, saxophonist Nat Birchall, harpist Rachael Gladwin, bassist Gavin Barras and drummer Gaz Hughes. Joyful, life-enhancing albums, drawing on UK jazz and spiritual jazz influences but with a decidedly modern bounce, they introduced Halsall’s music to the world gathering support from the likes of Gilles Peterson and Jamie Cullum, Mojo, Straight No Chaser and beyond. But Halsall was never completely happy with how the records were presented and as part of Gondwana Records 10th anniversary decided to revisit the recordings, meticulously remixing and remastering them for vinyl and commissioning new artwork from Ian Anderson, one of his favourite designers. These then are the definitive editions of the records. Sending My Love comes complete with the beautiful bonus track This Time, while Colour Yes features the equally striking It’s What We Do and Ai.
“I am very proud of these early recordings. They represent the starting point of my musical journey in Manchester and showcase some of the cities finest musicians such as: Nat Birchall, Chip Wickham, Rachael Gladwin, Adam Fairhall, Gavin Barras and Gaz Hughes. They are also the very first recordings my brother and I decided to release on our record label (Gondwana Records). Listening back they sound full of energy and joy and really reflect how I was feeling at that precise moment. But as much as I loved the music, I was never 100 percent happy with the sound of the mixes and mastering. So I decided to go back to the original tapes to remix and remaster them and present them the way I'd always wanted, and along the way we unearthed a couple extra unreleased tracks, which we decided to include as bonus material. Myself and my brother also decided to bring in Ian Anderson of The Designers Republic to re-imagine the artwork and we are super blown away by the results!" — Matthew Halsall, Oct 2019
Ambre Ciel is a composer and singer who hails from Montreal, Canada and is a purveyor of dreamy, expansive, spacious music that draws influence from contemporary classical influenced artists, as well as the impressionist world and American minimalists.
Ambre who sings in both English and her native French, hails from a family of singers and artists, “I started my journey learning violin at six and began experimenting with pedal effects and looping melodies later on”. University followed with a focus on composition and recording. “That’s when I started exploring composing and songwriting more deeply—both the world of sounds in itself and songs built mostly with layers of violin and voice. It was also during this time that I returned to my ‘first’ instrument, the piano, which opened more harmonic possibilities.”
Her debut album still, there is the sea, represents a beginning, a first and imperfect attempt to create this other world that was living in her mind. She has crafted a beautifully refined album making a lot of space for strings arrangements and other acoustic instruments, as well as her own beautiful voice.
Inspired by the foothills of the Sierra de Guadarrama mountains north-west of Madrid, his home since August 2022, Milo Fitzpatrick presents Sierra Tracks the new album from his expansive, cinematic, chamber-jazz project Vega Trails.
Having cut 2022’s beautifully resonant debut album ‘Tremors in the Static’ as a duo, alongside saxophonist Jordan Smart (Mammal Hands and Sunda Arc), Milo now substantially expands upon that blueprint with his follow-up, ‘Sierra Tracks’, which, as the title suggests, was conceived at his new home in central Spain and adds piano, vibraphone and strings to the mix.
From the epic five-minute opener, ‘Largo’, onwards, there’s a cinematic feel to ‘Sierra Tracks’, as each piece unfolds according to its own sweeping narrative, often wonderfully evocative of the mountains’ wide-open spaces, and also sometimes elaborately arranged with cello, orchestral strings, vibraphone and piano, to evoke their awe-inspiring natural splendour. ‘Reverie’ has a refrain that fades in and out, like a daydream”. ‘Els’ is more firmly rooted in folk melody, while ‘Dream House’ and ‘Sleepwalk Tokyo’ boost a sense of otherworldliness.
Pullman is a studio-born acoustic supergroup that emerged from Chicago’s post-rock milieu in the late ’90s, uniting Ken “Bundy K.” Brown (Tortoise/Directions in Music), Curtis Harvey (Rex), Chris Brokaw (Come), and Doug McCombs (Tortoise/Eleventh Dream Day); drummer Tim Barnes later joined, solidifying the group’s core lineup. They debuted on Thrill Jockey with Turnstyles & Junkpiles (1998), a hushed, live-to-2-track collection of interwoven guitars that critics likened to John Fahey, Leo Kottke, and Gastr del Sol. Their follow-up, Viewfinder (2001), expanded the palette with percussion, subtle electric textures, and multi-track layering, while maintaining Pullman’s rustic, cinematic restraint. Across both albums, the band became a touchstone for acoustic, song-adjacent instrumental music: folk in spirit, post-rock in method, and timeless in tone.
Two decades later, Pullman return with III, an album forged in friendship and resilience. In 2021, Barnes went public with his diagnosis of early onset Alzheimer’s at age 54. Even as his condition progressed, he and Brown began working almost daily, often remotely, with a wide circle of collaborators from Barnes’s musical past. What began as a single contribution for a compilation gradually blossomed into a full Pullman record, completed between 2021 and 2023. Edited and mixed by Brown, with early input from Barnes, III carries forward the group’s signature intimacy and space while embodying the spirit of community that has always defined their work. Both a continuation of Pullman’s singular aesthetic and a testament to the sustaining power of music, III drifts with the quiet weight of memory, persistence, and grace.
Words Were Coming Out Our Ears
Recorded at the legendary Atlantis Studio in Stockholm, Words Were Coming Out Our Ears captures a unique musical encounter in the moment. Pianist Johan Graden, bassists Vilhelm Bromander and Pär Ola Landin, and drummer Nils Agnas entered the studio without a fixed plan – the music emerged organically through improvisation and attentive interplay.
What sets this album apart is the instrumentation. With two double bass players, the music gains an unusual depth and weight, where the bass not only supports the harmony but also takes on melodic and textural roles. This is no traditional piano trio – rather, it's an ensemble where roles shift constantly, and the sonic landscape is shaped by sensitivity and openness.
One track features additional layers of sound with guest musicians Katarina Agnas on contrabassoon and Emil Strandberg on trumpet.
With Words Were Coming Out Our Ears, the ambition is to create a cohesive sonic identity – to allow each piece to take its own shape while still belonging to a unified whole. The music invites deep listening, guided by intuition and presence in the moment.
Belgian guitarist Ruben Machtelinckx lives in a world of sound. He interacts with his fellow musicians, deploying the most refined, delicate sort of interplay, as if collectively painting clouds for the ears. Diffuse harmonies, grainy textures, and rhythms that drift like fallen leaves offer a deeply meditative, gorgeously colored environment that the guitarist is helping to shape, but he’s also basking in the tones vibrating and shimmering around him. The music slows down time, forging an environment without boundaries that billows like smoke, constantly reshaping every fragile tone. It’s Machtelinckx’s sweet spot, but as much as he surrenders to the sonic ecosystem, he’s deftly aware of its subtle activity, rigorously participating in its real-time creation and development.
Back in 2019 he explained the motivation for his long-running, open-ended Porous Structures concept, saying, “We’re trying to achieve a state of being. It doesn’t have to go anywhere or have a direction.” At the time he was exploring the idea alongside reedist Joachim Badenhorst, fellow guitarist Bert Cools, and French percussionist Toma Gouband. Some of the music on the group’s 2019 Aspen Edities album was composed beforehand but even the fully improvised pieces featured Badenshort’s reeds and ghostly falsetto voice cutting through this dreamy sound world, nascent melodic strands that seemed to emanate from the collective resonance itself. Five years later Machtelinckx has remade the project, which continues to feature Gouband’s sui generis sonification of organic materials like stones and tree branches. The new quartet is rounded out with a pair of distinctive guitarists, long-time Belgian collaborator Frederik Leroux—Machtelinckx’s partner in the tender duo project Poor Isa—and the Berlin-based Norwegian Fredrik Rasten, a more recent creative partner with whom he also maintains a duo.
“What remains is the choice of acoustic and fragile sounds, comprehensible to the listener but with an undercurrent of tension and complexity,” says Machtelinckx. “What is new is the intertwining of acoustic guitars. The melodic voice is exchanged for yet another stringed instrument, resulting in a group sound in which individuals are barely distinguishable. The classical roles of an ensemble are abandoned: the three guitars weave a web in which the percussion moves freely. The quartet makes use of microtonality and plays a stubborn game of endless, subtle variations.” In some ways this assemblage furthers his earlier statement that the music doesn’t need to go anywhere, and indeed, on first blush the three pieces on this album appear to levitate. Still, when one digs deeper that claim isn’t entirely true. While the music doesn’t usually feature any traditional sense of propulsion, the performances definitely go somewhere.
Theoretically three acoustic guitars are indistinguishable from each other, but each musician has his own personality and style. The stacked guitars create a vertical sort of tension. Each player simultaneously adheres to a collective timbre, but within those limitations they can’t help but express a certain aesthetic essence. While I can’t identify who does what, there’s no missing the thrilling way individual aesthetics peek out in short, elegant flourishes; the humid harmonic churn giving way to poignant snatches of melody, only to dissipate as quickly as they formed. Machtelinckx’s decision to eschew a more conventional melodic voice gives Gouband greater freedom than with the previous line-up, which led to a change in the studio process. “I wanted all the details of the acoustic guitars, and at the same time I wanted Toma to be able to play full force,” Machtelinckx explains, so to preclude potential sound bleed and balance issues, the percussionist played in a separate room from the guitarists, with all of them listening to one another on headphones but without being able to see one other. Instead, the communication all came from listening. “The first Porous Structures album had some compositions of mine to steer the music in a specific direction. With this ensemble I did not feel the necessity to do this. We had a couple of conversations about different directions the music could go, and made some decisions before we started, but that's it.”
The sidelong opening piece “In my earliest memory I see trees'' is a marvel of deceptive stasis, where the music absolutely reflects “a state of being.” As the three guitars float on delicately intertwined arpeggios, single-note runs, and fleeting harmonic clusters, Gouband punctuates, prods, and caresses the action, sometimes inserting the sweet tintinnabulation of chiming cymbals, sometimes accentuating the drifty guitars with rustling friction, and sometimes pulling on the reins with a sudden stuttering tom-tom tattoo. The group does create something far more driving in “Falling forward becomes a walk,” which cleaves to the titular suggestion of gravity fomenting a kind of motion. Gouband is decidedly active and the guitarists toggle to three-way riff-oriented spontaneity—a kind of forceful walking in place. The quartet might not be moving from point to point, but it is sizing things up and pushing against edges. Tuning differences impart dizzying clouds of harmony on “Void of Narration,” the arrival of bowed guitar expanding the palette so that the slow motion entrance of Gouband on a quietly shimmering cymbal initially feels like a halo of the strings.
Astonishingly, this recording was the ensemble’s first ever performance together. “I feel that there can be something magical in a first meeting,” says Machtelinckx. “When you record a first meeting there is a sort of extreme focus and awareness of time, a gentle way of exploring each other and the music, a conscious doubt that I find very interesting.” It would be hard to disagree.
Peter Margasak
Berlin, March 2024
Latency presents the first-ever arrangements of iconic Ethiopian composer Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru’s music for piano and strings, honoring her desire to broaden the interpretation of her work beyond the piano.
Led by pianist, composer, and Emahoy’s friend Maya Dunietz, a nine-piece string ensemble performed her compositions during two tribute concerts at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, in April 2024. This album celebrates the centenary of Emahoy’s birth and commemorates the first anniversary of her passing.
The album marks the culmination of a journey that began nearly two decades ago, in 2005. While browsing a London record store, pianist and composer Maya Dunietz and conductor Ilan Volkov discovered a CD by Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, released as part of the acclaimed ‘Éthiopiques’ series. Intrigued, they sought out the esteemed musician, eventually locating her in a small monastery in Jerusalem. Their initial meeting blossomed into a deep, lengthy conversation. Emahoy recounted her life in the monastery and the challenges of making music in that setting. They delved into her music, discussing it in great detail. When they asked Emahoy about notation, she invited them to read her notebook, which contained compositions written that very morning. Maya and Ilan played some on the piano. At that moment, Emahoy began to trust them. Before leaving, Maya wrote her phone number in Emahoy’s notebook and invited her to call if she ever wanted or needed anything.
A few years later, the call came: Emahoy invited Maya to the monastery, handing her a couple of wrinkled old Air Ethiopia plastic bags filled with hundreds of her composition manuscripts. She asked Maya to help create a book of her piano compositions, making them accessible to people around the world. Faced with such a monumental undertaking, Maya partnered with the Jerusalem Season of Culture to embark on this ambitious project. This collaboration resulted in the publication of a book of sheet music and a collection of essays in 2013, as well as numerous concerts performed worldwide. These concerts, along with Maya’s work on Emahoy’s music, grew from a deep bond of love and mutual respect between the two women.
During one of their many meetings, Emahoy mentioned her dream of arranging her songs for orchestral instruments. She remarked that it was too late for her, but, with her trademark smile and a wink, suggested: «Maybe you could do it?» For Maya, this tremendous compliment became the catalyst for all the string arrangements she would create for Emahoy’s beautiful music—arrangements now collected in this album after years of collaboration and discussions between Maya and the record label Latency.
This album celebrates the centenary of Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru’s birth and commemorates the first anniversary of her passing. All compositions were recorded during two tribute performances at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, held in April 2024 in her memory.
New LP from New York/Tamil Nadu-raised singer Ganavya - co-produced by Nils Frahm.
"New York-born, Tamil Nadu-raised singer and transdisciplinarian GANAVYA – “among modern music's most compelling vocalists,” according to the Wall Street Journal – has announced details of a new album, Nilam, due May 23, 2025. It follows last year’s Daughter Of A Temple, Gilles Peterson’s BBC 6 Music Album of the Year, similarly declared one of 2024’s Top 10 Best Global Albums by The Guardian, who applauded GANAVYA’s ability to harness “the power of communal harmony to touch something deeper than song.” Co-produced by Nils Frahm at LEITER Studio in Berlin’s Funkhaus complex, the new album by “the singer whose work,” says the New York Times, “feels like prayer…with listeners hanging onto her every word” will be released by LEITER on vinyl and via all digital platforms.
Listening to the remarkable Nilam, it seems implausible now that its inception might ever have been in doubt. So astonishing is its stillness, so profound its communication of sentiment, it feels as if it was always meant to be. A celebration of the ties that bind, and possibly the most tender-hearted music we’ll hear this year, it’s intimate and honest, a poignant expression of gratitude for the blessings which keep us grounded, if only we’ll recognise and welcome them. Indeed, it could have been transmitted directly from soul to stereo, from the way ‘Not A Burden’ lifts a weight off the world’s shoulders to the peaceful ‘Sees Fire’, with ‘Land’’s gentle groove full of space, ‘Nine Jeweled Prayer’ serenely precious, and, throughout, GANAVYA’s vocals like ripples on a lagoon.
Yet the truth is it owes its existence to chance – an entity, like truth, to which GANAVYA is forever faithful – and the few days between her 2024 Berlin sold out debut and another sold out performance at London’s Union Chapel. This opportunity, she was persuaded by LEITER’s co-founder Felix Grimm, could be exploited to capture at last songs she had often performed live. And so, accompanied by long-time touring companions, bassist Max Ridley and harpist Charles Overton – with whom she’s toured over a decade, describing them as “two of [her] most precious friends and teachers” – she entered the hallowed Funkhaus with Frahm behind the desk.
Nilam’s central theme, GANAVYA confesses, is “doing what we need to do to keep carrying on.” This perhaps isn’t surprising given her touring not one but two albums in a single year. Earlier in 2024, she’d released the equally acclaimed like the sky i've been too quiet, recorded with Shabaka Hutchings, and a debut single for LEITER, ‘Draw Something Beautiful’, arrived soon after in July. “I feel like I barely made it out this past touring cycle,” she says. “Some days are good, and some days are bad. But the actual singing is always good. I realised, with every bone in my body, that unless you absolutely, absolutely want to be a musician, there's just no sense doing this professionally. And still... I wake up every day and I am certain that I want to keep singing.”
Nilam takes its title from “nil”, the Tamil word for ‘land’, a decision made instinctively, and not just because firm ground was what she was seeking during a difficult period of touring. “The word ‘nil’ can be a command either to move or to stay still,” GANAVYA points out. “To the person being senselessly quiet, it is a command to stand up for what is right. To the person being senselessly loud, it is a command to stand still. To me, it is balance, the heart of the true rhythm of life, of change, of land, of landing.” All the same, the word perfectly describes these songs she’s played, on and off, across the years with Ridley and Overton. “The world changes and shifts and everything becomes dizzying as the earth keeps disappearing from under you,” she concludes, “but these songs have always been a place for me to stand, a place for us to be in a way that I don't really know how to describe. Music has always been the one true land...”"
Sweeping ambient from Colorado's Matthew Sage.
"Tender / Wading finds Matthew Sage, aka M. Sage, in the foothills and pastures of Colorado, writing, recording, and returning to a patch of his homeland and identity, one act of sympathetic care informing the next. Constructed primarily on piano and clarinet, and then embellished with guitar, modular synthesizer, percussion, and field recordings captured around the perimeter of his home, the album is a sweeping, serene vision of vitality, radical softness, and the reassuring sense of coming home, even if home has changed. Since the early 2010s, Sage has assembled an idiosyncratic catalog of music that sprawls in various sound directions, manifesting with releases on Geographic North, Orange Milk, and Moon Glyph, and garnering both critical attention and a loyal listenership present for each new turn. In 2023, Sage debuted on RVNG Intl. with Paradise Crick, which coincided with his ongoing output within the improvisatory ambient jazz quartet, Fuubutsushi, and he now delivers his next solo endeavor and direction. Tender / Wading follows Sage’s return to Colorado after nearly a decade in Chicago, now nurturing a couple acres of neglected space with his young family thirty miles outside his hometown. In a holistic contrast to Crick’s synthetic sound-world, Sage renders art from the act of stewarding new growth, questioning constructs of domestic life, and understanding the footsteps of his former self through the dirt-smeared, sweat-fogged lens of the present. The yield is his most autobiographical material to date, marked by time and changes in perception and meaningful details from Sage’s psychic search."
For many bands, having all their gear stolen would be catastrophic. For Third Ear Band, this unfortunate 1968 incident opened a portal to beneficial change that would ultimately define one of British experimental music's most singular statements. Now, Antarctica Starts Here presents the first-time vinyl reissue of the group's self-titled 1970 sophomore album - often called Elements due to its elemental track titles - complete with new liner notes by Dave Segal that illuminate this remarkable chapter in acoustic psychedelia's evolution. Leader and percussionist Glen Sweeney viewed the theft as a sign to alter Third Ear Band's approach entirely, switching to exclusively acoustic instruments just as electrified psychedelia reached full bloom. Alongside Paul Minns (oboe, recorder, whistles, flutes) and Richard Coff (violin, viola), Sweeney struck out on an individualistic path that blended Indian raga with chamber music - without plugging in. Following their powerful 1969 debut Alchemy, which established them as a solemn force in the global underground, Third Ear Band's self-titled album represented the full flowering of their alchemical vision. The four tracks - "Air," "Earth," "Fire," and "Water" - correspond to the basic components of medieval European alchemists' doctrines, creating what Dave Segal describes as "epic, trance-inducing jams that suggested secret knowledge of infinity." What distinguished Third Ear Band from their contemporaries was their peculiar estrangement from the counterculture on a sonic level. As Segal notes, "Even outré contemporaries such as Comus and Jan Dukes De Grey sounded like pop groups compared to TEB." Having no traditional front person or electric instruments, the group forged a path that flowered most vividly on this album. The methodology was deceptively simple yet profoundly effective: "Sweeney laid down a steady pulse on hand drums, while Minns and Coff wove in melismatic patterns on oboe, recorder, violin and viola." This approach created what Segal describes as "a communal transcendence in sound – a hypnotic swirl that doesn't swing, but rather wafts and undulates with cloistered beauty." The album's four elemental compositions exist in what Segal calls "an eternal now, a perpetual wow. It is an ouroboros of organic textures, seemingly magicked into the air spontaneously, yet possessing a rigor that suggests long hours in the lab." Without electricity, Third Ear Band somehow "burrowed deeper into your consciousness" than their amplified contemporaries. Originally released on Harvest in 1970, this album has remained out of print on vinyl for decades, making ASH Records' reissue a significant event for collectors of British experimental music. The influence of Third Ear Band's acoustic approach can be traced through subsequent generations of artists from Popol Vuh to Trad, Gras Och Stenar and beyond - groups that understood how acoustic instruments could achieve psychedelic transcendence without electronic amplification. This reissue preserves the album's original four-part structure while presenting it with the sonic clarity that reveals the intricate interplay between Sweeney's rhythmic foundation and the melodic explorations of Minns and Coff. The inclusion of Dave Segal's comprehensive liner notes provides crucial context for understanding Third Ear Band's unique position within the experimental music landscape.
The 12th full-length by Pacific Northwest artist Liz Harris aka Grouper is a collection of songs spanning fifteen years. She characterizes Shade as an album about respite, and the coast, poetically and literally. How one frames themselves in a landscape, how in turn it frames themselves; memories and experiences carried forward mapping a connection to place -- 'an ode to blue / what lives in shade.' Songs touch on loss, flaws, hiding places, love. Deep connections to the Bay Area, and the North Coast, with its unique moods of solitude, beauty, and isolation -- a place described and transformed by the chaos and power of rivermouth, wild maritime storms, columns of mist that rise up unexpectedly on the road at night. Portions were recorded on Mount Tamalpais during a self-made residency years back, other pieces made longer ago in Portland, while the rest were tracked during more recent sessions in Astoria. Throughout, Harris threads a hidden radiant language of voice, disquiet, and guitar, framed by open space and the sense of being far away -- 'Echoing a lighthouse, burying the faults of being human / Into things that we project upon the sky at night.
Our season's first edition by the mighty Woo is an ode to Sweet Peas. It is a thoughtfully curated collection of ambient, minimalist, and new-age soundscapes designed to be the perfect soundtrack for moments of sowing these seeds, which accompany every release in quiet reflection.
Composed by the renowned duo Woo—Mark and Clive Ives — this is one of a series of five unreleased albums from their archives. The release combines soothing tones from clarinet, guitars, percussion, and electronic elements, creating the perfect soundtrack for gardeners and music lovers alike. Featuring tracks like “Golden Hours” and “Earth Angels,” this album is an ode to the slow, rewarding process of growth and new beginnings. “Like nature, our approach has always been quite random,” the brothers state, “ as with planting seeds the process has a purity that can bring unexpected results.”
Accompanying each release will be a special seed insert chosen by the artist to enhance the tactile and organic experience of the music. These seeds symbolise the potential for growth and connection to the natural world, aligning with the music's meditative and nurturing qualities.
For this release, the brothers have chosen Sweet Peas:
“To our surprise and delight, Sweet Peas can be planted in the autumn and they’ll blossom in the coming spring”
Each release will be in physical form on a recycled cassette, which will precede its digital counterpart by a few months, allowing the music to be experienced in its intended form first.
As Clive puts it: “Much like nature, music is an ever-evolving process. With this project our aim was to achieve an unpredictable organic flow that still feels harmonious.”
'Sweet England' along with its sister album 'False True Lovers', was recorded in the spring of 1958 when I was twenty-two years old. I had been living for the previous two years in London with Alan Lomax, the American folklorist, working for him as editorial assistant on his book The Folk Songs of North America and on his field recordings from America, Great Britain, Italy and Spain. The tracks that make up these two albums were recorded by Peter Kennedy and Alan in two days at Peter's home 'studio' in Belsize Park. English traditional music, at its best, expresses and provides everything in song that I need and feel, both musically and emotionally. Sweet England represents the first shaky steps of a journey that I have been on all my life, and that, happily, I still am." (shirley collins)
Soft piano notes kiss trippy electronic tones: “Kossaiko”, the only collaborative record that japanese piano player Saiko Tsukamoto and globally known electronic producer Kuniyuki Takahashi ever produced, is an unmissable profound soft classic music burner.
Together they composed and produced an eight-chapter strong deeply absorbing narrative, whose enthralling story arc dives profound into authentic drama zones, that sound like they jumped right out of a Claude Sautet movie.
Originally released in 2007 as cd only, the perfectly put together longplayer now enters the world for the first time in a vinyl edition that is tragically hip. deeply starry-eyed composi-tions full of minimalistic piano melodies that creep, twist, and dance around unobtrusive electronic notes who never call the tune, but always elevate the spectacle into higher elec-tronic spheres.
In the center of each between five- and nine-minutes long composition is the piano play of Saiko, gently hitting the keys, giving space to each note to vibrate in an endless “Pauline Oli-Veros” way, drifting until the very last sound vanish. around them, Kuniyuki plays his charming electronic tricks, opening the space for tones that sometimes pulsate, sometimes flow the ambient way.
Furthermore, occasionally a guitar notes pop up or accordion melodies cover the sorcery with a severely romantic veil.
Modern classical music, that has no fear of electronic meltdowns, that embraces digital tones while staying organic in its very inner circle.
A wise man once said: when words leave off, music begins. Those who fall for the eight poems of Saikoss will lose their speech and in return get pleased all agitations of their soul.
Bitterviper is the brand-new quartet of Nikos Veliotis (cello), Taku Unami (synthesizer), Sarah Hennies (percussion), and David Grubbs (guitar, piano), four individuals who separately are responsible for some of the most striking and wildly idiosyncratic music of the past couple of decades -- not to mention the duo collaborations between Grubbs and Unami (the albums Comet Meta and Failed Celestial Creatures) and Veliotis and Grubbs (The Harmless Dust). Athens-based Nikos Veliotis set Bitterviper into motion with four overdubbed pieces of dense psychoacoustic marvels on the cello; Grubbs responded with characteristically subtle tracery on piano, guitar, and lap steel; Unami weighed in electronically from Tokyo to mysteriously thicken both the plot and the low end; and Hennies applied her compositional gifts to structure the whole thing with an Occam's Razor approach to percussion. But once you drop the needle on Bitterviper, its origin story becomes ancient history; you're suddenly in the presence of an ensemble that sounds like no other and for whom there are no false steps. It's all fair game when this is how you choose to play; Bitterviper is a salvo of confidence and conviction, and this is only the beginning. David Grubbs is Distinguished Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. He was a member of Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and has performed with Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, Luc Ferrari, Will Oldham, Loren Connors, Jan St. Werner, The Red Krayola, and many others. Sarah Hennies is a composer and percussionist based in upstate New York whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer and trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the social and neurological conditions underlying creative thought. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College. Taku Unami's work is influenced by science fiction, supernatural horror and weird fiction. He's the composer of film scores for directors including Isao Okishima and Takeshi Furusawa, was half (with Toshiya Tsunoda) of the group Wovenland, is one-third of the group Hontatedori, and has collaborated with, among others, Annette Krebs, Radu Malfatti, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Jarrod Fowler, and Graham Lambkin. Nikos Veliotis founded Mohammad with ILIOS and Coti K. (renamed MMMD in 2015). In the 1990s he developed an experimental practice, exploring image and sound, mainly through the cello; he also performed in numerous groups, most notably CRANC (with Angharad and Rhodri Davies) and Looper (with Ingar Zach and Martin Küchen)."
There’s no mistaking the sultry lilt of Eliana Glass—alternating between an offbeat, searching quality and her poignant, awe-inspiring range. Her piano playing also possesses this stirring push and pull between the otherworldly and painfully human—each melody its own unique, aching realm. Glass’ sparse, meditative music often captures, in her words, the “condensation of everyday life,” an image that suits the bittersweet, ephemeral, and abstract nature of her work. Glass’ debut album, E, arrives via Shelter Press, and not only is it a tender portrait of her lifelong relationship with the piano, it’s also a distillation of entire lifetimes into song.
The Australia-born, Seattle-bred, and New York-based singer-songwriter and pianist learned to sing and play piano by ear as a child. Glass took an immediate liking to her parents’ piano, frequently hiding underneath it and letting her imagination run wild. “I felt protected under the wooden beams, and I remember looking up at the legs, wires, and foot pedals and seeing the instrument in a new way—everything suddenly everted,” Glass recalls. “I like to think about E as recalling this memory in sound.”
Glass spent years learning jazz standards, and she also learned to sing in Portuguese after falling in love with Brazilian music. Glass studied jazz voice at The New School under teachers Andrew Cyrille, Ben Street, Jay Clayton, and Kris Davis, and she began singing in piano/bass/drums quartets around New York City. In the latter half of her studies, she started writing her own songs inspired by boundary-pushing artists like Ornette Coleman, Asha Puthli, and Jeanne Lee. During the height of the pandemic, she lived with her brother Costa (who now records as ifiwereme) and felt drawn to the piano again, and they wrote songs together for the first time. Then, over a four-year span, Glass teamed up with Public Records co-founder and producer Francis Harris (Frank & Tony, Adultnapper) and engineer Bill Skibbe (Shellac, Jack White) to record what became E in various studios in Nashville, Brooklyn, Memphis, and Benton Harbor, Michigan.
Glass’ experimental, improvisational works evoke the sensual minimalism of Annette Peacock, the joyful mysteriousness of Carla Bley, and the wistful intimacy of Sibylle Baier. Her reverence for leftfield jazz and free improv greats is evident, but it’s always filtered through her signature nascent, naturalistic sound. “Dreams” is a majestic take on Peacock’s spine-tingling 1971 track of the same name, “Sing Me Softly the Blues” is a minimal, arresting reimagination of Bley’s jazz standard with lyrics adapted by Norwegian vocalist Karin Krog, and “Emahoy” is a languorous tribute to Ethiopian pianist, composer, and nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou and her 2006 compilation Éthiopiques. Glass’ music rests on a tactile, mercurial sound and her vocal brawn and versatility. E’s slippery stabs of double bass and drums tickle the ear canal and accentuate the percussiveness of her distinctive low voice, which blends sonorous, androgynous poise with fluttering delicacy.
E also has an enigmatic electronic bent that heightens the blurry emotions of Glass’ songwriting. From background hiss and windy vocals to kaleidoscopic synths, these subtle, tasteful adornments often came from specialized analog equipment: a 1960s underground echo chamber, a Cooper Time Cube (essentially, the hardware equivalent of processing audio through a garden hose), and a 1940s AEA ribbon microphone. But that doesn’t mean E sounds dated—Glass’ songs bloom with a forward-thinking spirit and ultimately function as vehicles for her heady emotions and fragmented memories and dreams.
For E, Glass challenged herself to channel full lifetimes within each track. Astonishingly, the seductive opening song “All My Life” manages this feat with just its three-word title. Songs like this one, the breathy ballad “Shrine,” and the spare, folky “On the Way Down” brood over past lives and reflect on memories as if disembodied and viewed from above. From missed connections to retired nicknames (“Good Friends Call Me E”), there’s a pervasive sense of disintegration and a fear of lost time. Other tracks like solo piano-and-voice numbers “Flood” and “Solid Stone” engage in more elusive storytelling, marked by brutal imagery and timeless characters. Then there’s “Human Dust,” a tranquil, rhythm-driven rendition of conceptual artist Agnes Denes’ 1969 text—a quite literal summary of a life.
Eliana Glass has come a long way since daydreaming beneath a towering keyboard. Glass’ peculiar vocal alchemy and vivid piano saunters are masterful and wholly her own, and her forthcoming debut full-length is a gift of resonant beauty and rewarding ambiguity. She now performs around New York City with bandmates Walter Stinson (bass) and Mike Gebhart (drums), in addition to solo shows perched in front of a 1979 Moog Opus organ. Also an accomplished visual artist in her own right, Glass is firmly in control of her inspired visions, even if E is spiritually adrift—though that’s kind of the point. As a musician and an improviser, Glass is enamored by and an adept wielder of the search—for meaning, for sounds, for newness, for connection. And just like Krog crooned on “Sing Me Softly the Blues” in 1975: “Life’s so thrilling / if you search.”