MUSIC

Black Truffle is pleased to announce Symphony No. 107 –The Bard, a previously unheard archival recording of the legendary improvising ensemble MEV (Musica Elettronica Viva), captured in concert at Bard College, New York in 2012. Formed by a group of American expat composers in Rome in 1966, the MEV ensemble played an important role in the development of free improvisation, bridging the live electronics tradition begun by Cage and Tudor and the high-energy squall of free jazz. Early recordings like Spacecraft or The Sound Pool unleash volleys of metal and glass amplified with contact microphones, howling winds, primitive synthesizer bleep and raucous audience participation, the intensity of which puts much later ‘noise’ to shame. In later decades, the ensemble would go through many iterations, often including legendary free players like Steve Lacy and George Lewis. In its final years, MEV settled into the core trio of founding members heard here: Alvin Curran, Frederic Rzewski, and Richard Teitelbaum, using piano, electronics, and small instruments. Curran, Rzewski, and Teitelbaum were life-long friends blessed, as Curran says, with ‘incompatible personalities’: major figures in the post-Cagean experimental tradition, they explored countless divergent and even contradictory paths as composers and performers, from agitprop songs to brainwave-controlled synthesis. MEV is the sound of these three personalities coming together, their contributions radically individual yet attaining a state of ‘fundamental unity’ that Rzewski, in a text written in the collective’s earliest years, defined as the ‘final goal of improvisation’. Of course, listeners familiar with aspect of the trio’s individual works might hazard some guesses about who is doing what: the crisp piano figures are probably Rzewski’s, the cut-up hip-hop samples most likely Curran’s, the sliding, squelching synth possibly Teitelbaum’s. But often these identities are dissolved in a constantly shifting hall of mirrors, the listener unable to tell which of these pianos is live and which is a sample of a past virtuoso, or whether a horn blast derives from ethnographic documentation or Curran cutting loose on Shofar. The two side-long sets here occupy a similar terrain of constantly shifting texture and instrumentation, unexpected interruptions, and moments of sudden beauty. The first set is sparser, at times almost ominous, as a bell repeatedly sounds across wheezing harmonica, seasick orchestral textures, and creaking wood, making room for episodes of yodelling and delicate prepared piano before exploding into a storm of buzzing synth and piano fragments. The second set is more frenetic, moving rapidly across centuries and continents: cars crash into post-serial piano pointillism, wailing voices collide with chopped and screwed hip-hop samples, Hollywood strings are buried under layers of electronic gurgles. The performance slows in its final moments, making way for a sampled voice repeating the phrase ‘protest and the good of the world’, reminding us that MEV’s idea of freedom was always more than musical. Symphony No. 107 –The Bard is a beautifully recorded example of the endlessly multi-layered later MEV sound, accompanied by new liner notes by Alvin Curran (now the only surviving member of the group) and a selection of previously unseen photographs from across the many decades of the group’s activity. Arriving in an elegant sleeve bearing a beautiful photograph by Francis Zhou of the Olin Hall at Bard College where the concert was recorded, this is an essential document from a major group in the history of experimental music. As Rzewski wrote, this music is ‘like life, unpredictable, sometimes making sense, mostly not’.

Now issued on LP for the first time, the aforementioned cassette, Cold Drinks, Hot Dreams, is an exhilarating live recording documenting the core group plus double-bassist Claudio Enriquez performing in 1980—an expansive improvised journey marked by contrasting moments of explosive heat and cool hypnotic calm. Atrás skilfully lead the listener through this varied terrain, drawing seamlessly on their experiences of the New York loft scene, classical pianism, and the surrealistic theatrics of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Ruiz’s distinctive sound—recalling Cecil Taylor’s percussive touch, Mal Waldron’s blues minimalism, and Horace Tapscott’s meditative radiance, but remaining entirely her own—holds the session from first to last. Evry Mann’s broad palette of percussion adds a welcome element of surprise to the proceedings, enriching the music with a graceful balafon solo, sonorous hand drums, and bursts of high octane trap set playing. Henry West’s saxophone rides high throughout, weaving around the ensemble with a fierce elegance. Now finally available after forty years, the music of Átras del Cosmos will be sure to captivate spiritual jazz veterans and newcomers alike.

Blank Forms, a curatorial platform and non-profit organization dedicated to the presentation and preservation of experimental performance, is proud to announce the arrival of its latest collection of works by Catherine Christer Hennix and Masayuki Takayanagi. Don Cherry (1936-1995), a pioneer of free jazz as the right-hand man of Ornette Coleman, and his wife, Swedish visual artist/designer Moki Cherry (1943-2009), have been attracting attention for their collaborations with Coltrane. Don's music, Moki's art, and the family's life in the Swedish countryside of Tågarp were integrated into one comprehensive entity in the miraculous reissue of Organic Music Theatre. This reissue features the historic premiere of the piece at the 1972 Festival de Chateauvallon in Chateauvallon, southern France, mastered from tapes recorded during a live broadcast on public television. It is a mastered reissue of a tape recorded live on public television. The performance marked the beginning of a communal and "mystical" period that would culminate in soundtracks and other works. Performing in this outdoor amphitheater were such luminaries as Moki Cherry, Christer Bothén, Gérard "Doudou" Gouirand, and Naná Vasconcelos, as well as Swedish friends who accompanied them on their trip to France, and Copenhagen Christiania A dozen or so adults and children participated, including Swedish friends who accompanied me on my trip to France and Det Lilla Circus (The Little Circus), a Danish puppet theater based in Copenhagen Christiania. It was truly a breathtaking sound world!

Acclaimed guitar duo Loren Connors and Alan Licht celebrate their 30-year collaboration with release of their eighth album — At The Top Of The Stairs.Across the decades, their improvisations turned increasingly abstract and atonal, while still maintaining complex, ethereal arrangements. The harmonious blend of Licht's meticulously crafted feedback and harmonic patterns with Connors' ghostly blue tones remains the core sound of this partnership. At The Top Of The Stairs was recorded live in 2018. Across two side-long pieces, the duo ascends slowly, through layers of atmospheric tension punctuated by thunderous waves of Connors' effects.For fifty years, Connors's adaptation of acoustic Delta blues has transmuted into miniature gray scale compositions and howling riffs. His collaborators include Oren Ambarchi, Keiji Haino, and Kim Gordon. Rock/experimental musician Alan Licht was a member of the bands Love Child, Run On, and Lee Ranaldo & the Dust, and has released a range of acclaimed rock and experimental albums. He is an author with books published by Rizzoli, W.W. Norton, Faber & Faber and Blank Forms.

Elders is the debut release from Ensemble Nist-Nah, a nine-piece percussion group led by Nantes-based Australian drummer and percussionist Will Guthrie. The diverse group of French musicians that make up Ensemble Nist-Nah – whose collective experience encompasses traditional Gamelan performance, contemporary composition, noise, jazz, and everything in between – perform on drum kits, traditional and junk percussion, and a complete set of Javanese Gamelan instruments. Though building on the foundations of Guthrie’s solo work with Gamelan instruments (Nist-Nah, BT057) and primarily performing his compositions, Ensemble Nist-Nah is a collective endeavour, propelled by a breathtaking enthusiasm that has seen the ensemble manage to rehearse, perform, and even tour Europe during the Covid-19 pandemic. From the first seconds of opening track ‘Geni / Tirta’, it becomes immediately obvious that this is no dry academic exercise or exotic indulgence. Rapid arpeggiated figures are propelled by manically busy kit drumming while slow-motion melodic lines float above. After a series of abrupt tempo changes and fragmented unison passages that crossbreed the rhythmic intensity of the Balinese Kecak with the joyride of an Ornette Coleman head, the music slows to a monumental groove, equal parts Javanese court music and Dark Magus. Another sequence of thrilling divagations leads us to the unexpected guest appearance of acclaimed vocalist Jessica Kenney, who elaborates a haunting Javanese Bedhaya across a spacious backdrop of massive gong hits, shimmering cymbals, rustling bells, and gritty textures. The remaining pieces that make up Elders explore a dizzying variety of approaches, from the shifting rapid-fire muted textures of ‘Overtime’ to the ghostly bowed tones and ominous swells of the title piece (developed from a track on Guthrie’s solo Nist-Nah release), which gradually builds into waves of shuddering low resonance and asynchronous percussive clicks like a haunted clock mechanism. On the aptly titled ‘Rollin’, virtuosic twin drum kits criss-cross errant metallophone patterns in propulsive polyrhythms, while ‘Planeker’ manages to achieve a bizarrely effective fusion of Harry Partch and Autechre. Arriving bedecked in beautiful monochrome images of gongs drawn by ensemble member Charles Dubois, Elders is a feast for the ears: music that burrows deep into timbral and rhythmic possibility while possessing an intoxicating physicality and revelling in the joy of collective performance.

First vinyl reissue of the landmark 1967 debut album by AMM, AMMMusic. Remastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Exact replica sleeve by Stephen O'Malley. "Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of its recording in 1966, this reissue makes one of the cornerstones of the experimental music tradition available again in its original form, replete with Keith Rowe's beautiful pop art cover and the terse aphorisms by the group that served as its original liner notes. A testament to the interaction between the experimental avant-garde and the countercultural underground, the album was originally released on Elektra, recorded by Jac Holzman (the label's founder, responsible for signing The Doors, Love, and The Stooges) and produced by DNA, a group that included Pink Floyd's first manager, Peter Jenner (the title of Pink Floyd's 'Flaming' is a tribute to AMM's 'Later During a Flaming Riviera Sunset'). Formed in 1965 by three players from the emerging British jazz avant-garde -- Keith Rowe and Lou Gare had played with the great progressive big band leader Mike Westbrook and Eddie Prévost played in a post-bop group with Gare -- AMM quickly evolved from a free jazz group into something decidedly more difficult to categorise. By the time these recordings were made, two more members had joined the group: another Westbrook associate, Lawrence Sheaff, and the radical composer Cornelius Cardew. Then at work on his masterpiece of graphic notation Treatise, Cardew brought with him extensive experience of the post-serialist and Cageian currents in contemporary composition. Using a combination of conventional instruments and unconventional methods of sound production (most famously Keith Rowe's prepared tabletop guitar, but also prepared piano and transistor radio), the group performed improvised pieces often running for over two hours and ranging from extended periods of silence to terrifying cacophonies. On AMMMusic, long tones sit next to abrasive thuds, the howl of uncontrolled feedback accompanies Cardew's purposeful piano chords, radios beam in snatches of orchestral music. AMM's clearest break with jazz-based improvisation concerned the idea of individuality. Initially through an engagement with eastern philosophy and mysticism and later though a politicized communitarianism, AMM sought to develop a collective sonic identity in which individual contributions could barely be discerned. In the performances captured on AMMMusic the use of numerous auxiliary instruments and devices, including radios played by three members of the group, contribute to the sensation that the music is composed as a single monolithic object with multiple facets, rather than as an interaction between five distinct voices." --Francis Plagne

Omnivorous, dub-diffused, modal electronic jazz skronk by Chris Hontos and Aaron Anderson's Nuke Watch ensemble Nuke Watch ensemble, hitting square between the zonked eyes of Ka Baird, Spencer Clark hallucinations, Treader curios, or Drone Operatør audness. Back with a 2nd helping on TTT, Nuke Watch chase 2021’s eponymous introduction (and subsequent live snapshots for NYPD Records and WEEDING) with a deliciously delirious new suite of ribboning sax and flute lines threaded thru lysergic electronic fractals and rhythmelodic tumult. The sound is a naturally playful and logical extension of Chris Hontos’ work with psych units Food Pyramid, Dreamweapon, and Night Court, and with Anderson as Beat Detectives. It brings all those group’s styles - and some of their personel - together for a richly polychromatic and semi-organic expression of what could loosely be described as outernational future jazz. Fathoming a sound that reaches from the sloshing modal jazz-dub dervish ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ to 12 minutes of sampledelic, aqueous exotica on ’Sun Cage’, Hontos and Anderson have our attentions rapt for the duration. As implied by their moniker, the group’s sound feels like staring into the sun for too long and doesn’t take itself too seriously, leaving a swirling impression on back of eyelids between the bittersweet psych-folk lash of ‘Lord of the Flies’ and soothing open window jazz projection ‘Portal of Corruption’, while cycling thru all styles across the 12 minutes of 4th world flight in ‘I Was Dead’, syncing minds to the lushest swelter on ‘Leonard’, and knitting processed wind and strings with subbass drops and psychoactive dubbing on ‘Anti Work’. TIP!

Occasionally, you find music outside the commercial mainstream, outside of everything – the music of visionaries, eccentrics, inventors, loners, the keepers of secrets, the path-finders. Moondog, Daphne Oram, Harry Partch are from this mould. And so too is Lori Vambe. New on Strut, the first ever reissue of Vambe’s privately pressed original albums from 1982, Drumland Dreamland and Drumgita Solo. A self-taught drummer, inventor, and sonic experimentalist, Lori Vambe is a unique figure in British music. Creator of his own instrument, the drumgita (pronounced ‘drum-guitar’) or string-drum, Vambe intended to create a kind of music that had never been made in order to pursue access to the fourth dimension. Vambe was born in Harare, Zimbabwe and his father, Lawrence Vambe, was a noted Zimbabwean journalist and author. Moving to London in 1959, Vambe immersed himself in the Brixton squat movement of the early 1970s, teaching himself to drum and creating a short-lived performance group, The Healing Drums of Brixton (Vambe, the sculptor Alexander Sokolov and outsider musician Michael O’Shea). Vambe later had a dream-vision involving a feeling of ecstasy while playing an unknown instrument that extended from his own umbilical cord; the instrument would manifest itself as the drumgita. In 1982, he privately produced a pair of home recordings, the diptych set Drumgita Solo and Drumland Dreamland, releasing them on his own label Drumony. On these records, he rejected any commercial aesthetic and employed tape effects, temporal shifts, reversed sound and overdubbing to investigate space-time and access the fourth dimension. Combining layered drums with the rhythmic throb of the drumgita and, on Drumland Dreamland, an improvised piano performance by Brazilian concert pianist Rafael Dos Santos, the albums are both hypnotic and perturbing. Both albums were cut at Portland Studios by Chas Chandler and stand as a concealed monument of Black British experimental music. 500 copies of each record were originally pressed, and both were released together. The albums were never performed live. For this first ever reissue of Drumland Drumland and Drumgita Solo, Strut presents the two albums in their original artwork, housed in a deluxe slipcase including an additional 8-page 12”-sized booklet featuring unseen photos, liner notes and an interview with Lori Vambe by The Wire magazine writer Francis Gooding. Both albums are fully remastered by The Carvery.

New Future City Radio is the first duo collaboration of longtime creative partners Damon Locks & Rob Mazurek. In a hyperactive 40-minute, 18-track suite that runs like a boombox mixtape, the two prolific multi-media artists contemplate community, transformation, and the future through the programmatic format of a pirate radio station for the people. These two artists have worked together from the peak days of the late 90s / early 00s Chicago music scene up through the present day, which has seen Locks featured as lead vocalist of multiple critically-acclaimed Exploding Star Orchestra (ESO) albums composed/produced by Mazurek and released by International Anthem (IARC) in 2020 (Dimensional Stardust) and 2023 (Lightning Dreamers). In recent years, Locks has also earned great renown from his revolutionary, expansive latter-day gospel/jazz project Black Monument Ensemble (BME), with which he’s released two albums on IARC (2019’s Where Future Unfolds and 2021’s NOW). New Future City Radio finds the artists creating a natural but innovatively-assembled blend of the sounds of those two projects, with Locks’s BME-style sample-based sound collage creating compositional beds underneath the signature Orson Welles-like vocal delivery he’s developed through his work with ESO, alongside Roland SP flourishes and arresting brass improvisations by Mazurek. Themes both sonic and text based were predetermined but improvisation leads the journey. The music these two have devised may sound hyper-charged one moment and gently transportive the next, and often somewhere in between. When asked about New Future City Radio the duo exclaim in one voice: "I'm talking post, post, post, future. I'm talking resilience and levitation. I'm talking beauty and structural integrity for my people. I'm talking light beams that tell stories and educate. Let's talk about that if you wanna talk new future!"

Masayuki 'Jojo' Takayanagi (1932 - 1991) was a Japanese jazz / free improvisational musician. He was active in the Japanese jazz scene from the late 1950s. He was one of the earliest noise guitar improvisers, and the first (with Keith Rowe) to use the table-top guitar.

"The classical musicians have a foot in improv; the jazz players get Indian music."
The Guardian, contemporary album of the month

"A record that transcends generic assumptions of the lazily termed “Eastern style”..."
The Vinyl Factory

"A truly enriching listen."
Songlines, ★★★★★

Off the back of Sarathy Korwar's much lauded Day To Day album comes the live album My East Is Your West - a performance that takes the fusion of Indian classical music with the jazz tradition further than its ever been before. Recorded live at London's Church Of Sound, the album is a homage to the great musicians of the 60s and 70s spiritual jazz movement, covering the likes of Alice Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders, and Joe Henderson. Korwar plays alongside the UPAJ Collective, a group of highly-versatile musicians who share Sarathy's passion for jazz and Indian music and who have together managed to rebalance the cross-cultural relationship between 'Western' and 'Eastern' music.


With every record Sarathy releases his music becomes more exploratory and insightful, delving into his personal influences, which also inspire much of the music in the jazz scene that surrounds him. At a time where UK jazz is being heralded for its progression, innovation and far-reaching appeal to people from varying backgrounds, ‘My East Is Your West’ is an essential record that explores cultural and musical diversity in way that will continue to be relevant for years to come.

Michael Gendreau and Suzanne Dycus-Gendreau have been working under the name Crawling With Tarts from 1983 to 1998. They have released musical work on cassette and vinyl and have appeared on several compilations. In 1991 they released a video collection which included their works made with video, 8mm film, and with the PXL2000 camera. Their musical work ranges from structured composition to free improvisation, and their output documents a varied approach to music as well as highlighting collaborative efforts which have spanned the years and the globe. While Crawling With Tarts (Michael Gendreau and Suzanne McKee) are now best remembered for their lengthy experimental works, their 1984 cassette Tearoom, reissued on LP for the first time by Concentric Circles in an edition of 300, reaches back to a more primitive, elemental time for the duo. Tearoom is a notable document of Gendreau and McKee’s early music, where guitars and voices collide in unexpected ways, with buzzing organs and wispy clarinets tangling over thudding drums. While it sits comfortably within the parameters of the eighties cassette underground, Tearoom has its very own character, one untroubled by any need to align with the dominant stylistic moves of the music made by their peers. Opening track “Ithurial’s Spear” remarkably foreshadows the pared-back, home-baked non-rock of labels like Siltbreeze and Majora. With wah-fuzz guitar scrawled over a Peter Hook-esque bassline and McKee’s naive, almost childlike voice murmuring in the listener’s ears, it’s a perfect example of kitchen-sink psychedelia. From here, Tearoom continually unravels itself, taking off layers as it progresses to its close. The delay-drenched guitar of “Gentle Wind” could have fallen from an early Roy Montgomery release, while “Chilada” takes slurred, slowed voices and rubs them up against clattering guitar, tin can percussion and tetchy bass. The rest of the second side is a wild ride, shuffling between organ/clarinet spray, scrawling tape spew, and on closer “House Spirit,” a typewriter ticking out letters as the city goes about its everyday business outside the bedroom window. Tearoom is the perfect example of an album with surprises lurking around every corner, ricocheting from and finely riding the line between the most abstract of pop and experimentation in the truest sense of the term. With the humblest of means Crawling With Tarts created a musical world all their own, in the process making a truly revelatory experience for curious ears and gently twisted brains alike.

LuckyMe present the new album from New York based percussionist and composer Eli Keszler Previously releasing music on Empty Editions, ESP Disk, PAN as well as ‘Stadium’ on Shelter Press – Boomkat’s 2018 Album Of The Year A frequent collaborator to Oneohtrix Point Never, Laurel Halo and Rashad Becker Keszler’s work has shown at The Lincoln Centre, MoMA PS1, MIT List and The Barbican.

Keszler’s latest solo venture offers up a latticework of melodic percussion, drum set, and electro-acoustic instrumentation, built upon fragments of American abstraction, ancient scales, industrial percussion, and jazz-age film noir to achieve its feeling of imperial decay. Keszler’s instrumental performances are framed by panoramic recordings of New York City and the Odyssey Cave, along with other on-location audio from his global travels, defining an expansive music that takes on hyperreal forms difficult to describe outside of the loss and wonderment that defines our age.

CALAMITA = KARKHANA members TONY ELIEH, SHARIF SEHNAOUI and Lebanese drummer MALEK RIZKALLAH join forces with the Egyptian singer AYA METWALLI - the result is the improbable meeting between free jazz / improv, punk rock & Oum Kalthoum! CALAMITA is the “rock project” of SHARIF SEHNAOUI and TONY ELIEH, two of the most active musicians on the Lebanese experimental scene (among others projects, both are members of the “free Middle Eastern music” collective KARKHANA). SEHNAOUI comes from a jazz and improv music background, ELIEH is primarily a rock musician and founding member of the Lebanese post-punk band THE SCRAMBLED EGGS whose work in the last decade has covered many directions from pop-rock to plain experimental. They are joined by Lebanese drummer MALEK RIZKALLAH (WHO KILLED BRUCE LEE, ex THE SCRAMBLED EGGS). As trio they develop instrumental pieces that draw their inspiration from artists as diverse as Tony Conrad, Last Exit or Oum Kalthoum. AYA METWALLI is an Egyptian singer/songwriter, composer and sound artist currently based in Beirut. Grown up in Cairo, her father would play non-stop Oum Kalthoum songs on road trips to the beach and Aya’s mother; known to have the most beautiful voice in the family, she always sang at home and at family gatherings, so long before Aya was able to form her own music taste, immense amounts of Arabic classic songs and melodies already settled in her subconsciousness … After her first EP „Beitak“ in 2016, Metwalli (named “a musical enigma” by The Guardian) started to integrate more experimental and eerie sonic excursions into her avant-pop, so the collaboration with CALAMITA feels like a natural or logic step. The roots for „Al Saher“ („stay awake“) were laid when SEHNAOUI and METWALLI first worked together in “Night”, a dance piece by ALI CHAHROUR which included a wide collection of Arabic songs and ancient poems, later Sehnaoui invited her to work with CALAMITA. The four met in a recording studio in Beirut, using songs by "The Voice of Egypt" Oum Kalthoum as starting point. Together they aim to fully revisit the song format and explore the possibilities of classical Tarab songs, extracted from their origins and reframed within the music of the twenty-first century. The result is a mix of various styles and influences that often seek to stretch the contrasts to towering extremes - an improbable blend between free jazz & improv, punk rock & Oum Kalthoum!

CALAMITA = KARKHANA members TONY ELIEH, SHARIF SEHNAOUI and Lebanese drummer MALEK RIZKALLAH join forces with the Egyptian singer AYA METWALLI - the result is the improbable meeting between free jazz / improv, punk rock & Oum Kalthoum! CALAMITA is the “rock project” of SHARIF SEHNAOUI and TONY ELIEH, two of the most active musicians on the Lebanese experimental scene (among others projects, both are members of the “free Middle Eastern music” collective KARKHANA). SEHNAOUI comes from a jazz and improv music background, ELIEH is primarily a rock musician and founding member of the Lebanese post-punk band THE SCRAMBLED EGGS whose work in the last decade has covered many directions from pop-rock to plain experimental. They are joined by Lebanese drummer MALEK RIZKALLAH (WHO KILLED BRUCE LEE, ex THE SCRAMBLED EGGS). As trio they develop instrumental pieces that draw their inspiration from artists as diverse as Tony Conrad, Last Exit or Oum Kalthoum. AYA METWALLI is an Egyptian singer/songwriter, composer and sound artist currently based in Beirut. Grown up in Cairo, her father would play non-stop Oum Kalthoum songs on road trips to the beach and Aya’s mother; known to have the most beautiful voice in the family, she always sang at home and at family gatherings, so long before Aya was able to form her own music taste, immense amounts of Arabic classic songs and melodies already settled in her subconsciousness … After her first EP „Beitak“ in 2016, Metwalli (named “a musical enigma” by The Guardian) started to integrate more experimental and eerie sonic excursions into her avant-pop, so the collaboration with CALAMITA feels like a natural or logic step. The roots for „Al Saher“ („stay awake“) were laid when SEHNAOUI and METWALLI first worked together in “Night”, a dance piece by ALI CHAHROUR which included a wide collection of Arabic songs and ancient poems, later Sehnaoui invited her to work with CALAMITA. The four met in a recording studio in Beirut, using songs by "The Voice of Egypt" Oum Kalthoum as starting point. Together they aim to fully revisit the song format and explore the possibilities of classical Tarab songs, extracted from their origins and reframed within the music of the twenty-first century. The result is a mix of various styles and influences that often seek to stretch the contrasts to towering extremes - an improbable blend between free jazz & improv, punk rock & Oum Kalthoum!

Michael Ranta has collaborated with Takehisa Kosugi, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Jean-Claude Eloy, Conny Plank, Mike Lewis, and Hartmut Geerken, just to name a few. He was also assistant to Harry Partch and performer in the Gate 5 Ensemble in the 1960s. Additionally, Ranta performed in Stockhausen's ensemble during the 1970 World Expo in Osaka. Ranta's resume also includes recordings by Helmut Lachenmann, Herbert Brün, Toru Takemitsu, Josef Anton Riedl, Mauricio Kagel, among others. Throughout his extensive recordings and live performances, Ranta has furthered the trajectories of contemporary percussion composition alongside works for tape and electronics. His works are fully immersive which evoke vast spaces, ritual, and create an expansive presence for his accompanying multimedia commissions. For this CD release, two of Ranta's longform pieces are included: "The Great Wall" and "Chanta Khat". Originally scored for the HT Chen Dance Company as a theater production, "The Great Wall" premiered in 1984 at the La MaMa experimental theater in New York. This highly detailed composition for electronics, voice, percussion, and tape offers a massive drone-based accompaniment for Chen's stage presentation of the legend of Meng Jiangnu. Yet, Ranta's composition also creates a fully formed soundtrack that stands beautifully on its own. The atmosphere is very much in the spirit of Kosugi's multimedia masterwork Catch Wave and Jean Clade Eloy's large-scale production Yo-In which also features Ranta. "Chanta Khat" was completed in 1973. An early version of this piece originally premiered as part of a multimedia installation at the 1972 summer Olympics in Munich. This powerful work for tape and electronics includes Ranta's field recordings documenting his travel in Laos during a lunar eclipse earlier that same year. The piece is a haunting and equally frantic work where the local villagers are heard responding quite emotionally and viscerally to the celestial event of the day. "Chanta Khat" was later reworked and remixed in 1973 at the NHK electronic music studio in Tokyo. This version is featured here in its entirety. Packaged in a six-panel digipak with fully remastered and restored audio. Includes detailed notes by Michael Ranta and features new artwork by Timo van Luijk.

More than any other of Ranta's releases this album shows his multiple roots and ideas as a composer, percussionist and concrete/electronic musician, building a seamless bridge between Eastern and Western avantgarde. Ranta is one of those rare composers able to organically melt his wide artistic span into a singular but yet diverse universe morphing his rich vocabulary as a percussionist with the Oriental esoteric tradition, the psychedelic underground and the realm of electronic minimalism.

"As a discarded record collection of notorious Cafe Extase crossed their path, Left Bank constructed their own warped version of club music. The era was acid-jazz, p-funk and rare groove, the records covered in thick layers of mold and dust. Recorded a few streets from where the action once took place, Kelder Extase forms a musical resurrection of a basement that has disappeared."

Recorded Live in Italy in October 1985 and mastered directly from the old dusty cassette, here's a previously unheard Steve Lacy recording from a rare duo appearance with pianist Martin Joseph, a little known yet fascinating British musician who had worked with Harry Beckett, John Surman, Ian Carr, Tubby Hayes among others, and who later became a regular presence on the Rome mid 70's creative Jazz scene. This recording gives us an opportunity to listen to the soprano sax giant in a repertoire not frequently found on his other duo recordings with pianists. The set list includes some of Lacy's finest compositions like "Prospectus", "Flakes" and "Coastline", plus Thelonious Monk's classic "Bemsha Swing" a tribute to Monk's visionary mastery where Joseph's contrapuntal response to Lacy's angular lines leads the music towards a multidimensional space, a quality to be found throughout the whole album, This is a wonderful discovery! and a significant addition to Lacy's discography and legacy. Contains printed inner sleeve with archival photos and extensive liner notes by two Italian soprano saxophone specialists Roberto Ottaviano and Eugenio Colombo, and pianist Martin Joseph himself.

Originally released on CD as part of the 40th anniversary Henry Cow Box and reissued here for the first time on vinyl, these high quality Swedish Radio live recording, made in 1977, include previously unreleased material including Tim Hodgkinson's "Erk Gah", a long, epic, large scale composition considered as one of Cow peaks, a breathtaking rendition of Phil Ochs' "No More Songs"- in fact the only real song ever played by Henry Cow - and Fred Frith's "The March", plus the legendary "Ottawa Song" and other untitled free improvised pieces. Over an hour of outstanding experimental rock music performed by the Henry Cow original lineup.

Few copies available. Exclusive translucent red vinyl. Limited to 500 numbered copies. Includes In Concert At Yale University and Nommo with reproduction of hand-painted sleeve and historical inserts. The late percussionist Milford Graves was one of the most unique artists the world has ever seen. Born in Jamaica, Queens in 1941, he began his career in the early '60s as a part of New York's vibrant Latin jazz scene. His focus quickly turned inward, shifting towards a practice that explored the very nature of self. From his work in the New York Art Quartet and collaborations with Albert Ayler, Sonny Sharrock and more to his important contributions during NYC's loft era – he is, simply put, free jazz royalty. In April 1966, the duo of Graves and pianist Don Pullen played at Yale University. As John Corbett writes in the liner notes, "This performance was something of a turning point for Graves. Until then he had been working in other people's bands or collective ensembles. He was phenomenally busy. In 1965 alone, he recorded with NYAQ (two LPs), Giuseppi Logan Quartet, Paul Bley Quintet and Lowell Davidson Trio, and he made his first recording released under his own name, Percussion Ensemble. Every one of these is important in its own way, but none of them quite anticipate how radical was the music that he and Pullen would unleash that evening in New Haven." Originally released on the artists' own Self-Reliance Program label, this legendary one-night performance would be split into two volumes: In Concert At Yale University and Nommo. While rooted in African rhythms, Graves' music has its own sense of time. As the drummer stated in a 1966 DownBeat interview, "Time was always there, and the time I see is not the same as what man says time is. It works by impulsion."

The late percussionist Milford Graves was one of the most unique artists the world has ever seen. Born in Jamaica, Queens in 1941, he began his career in the early '60s as a part of New York's vibrant Latin jazz scene. His focus quickly turned inward, shifting towards a practice that explored the very nature of self. From his work in the New York Art Quartet and collaborations with Albert Ayler, Sonny Sharrock and more to his important contributions during NYC's loft era – he is, simply put, free jazz royalty. In April 1966, the duo of Graves and pianist Don Pullen played at Yale University. As John Corbett writes in the liner notes, "This performance was something of a turning point for Graves. Until then he had been working in other people's bands or collective ensembles. He was phenomenally busy. In 1965 alone, he recorded with NYAQ (two LPs), Giuseppi Logan Quartet, Paul Bley Quintet and Lowell Davidson Trio, and he made his first recording released under his own name, Percussion Ensemble. Every one of these is important in its own way, but none of them quite anticipate how radical was the music that he and Pullen would unleash that evening in New Haven." Originally released on the artists' own Self-Reliance Program label, this legendary one-night performance would be split into two volumes: In Concert At Yale University and Nommo. While rooted in African rhythms, Graves' music has its own sense of time. As the drummer stated in a 1966 DownBeat interview, "Time was always there, and the time I see is not the same as what man says time is. It works by impulsion." First-time vinyl reissue. Sourced from the original master tapes.

The late percussionist Milford Graves was one of the most unique artists the world has ever seen. Born in Jamaica, Queens in 1941, he began his career in the early '60s as a part of New York's vibrant Latin jazz scene. His focus quickly turned inward, shifting towards a practice that explored the very nature of self. From his work in the New York Art Quartet and collaborations with Albert Ayler, Sonny Sharrock and more to his important contributions during NYC's loft era – he is, simply put, free jazz royalty. In April 1966, the duo of Graves and pianist Don Pullen played at Yale University. As John Corbett writes in the liner notes, "This performance was something of a turning point for Graves. Until then he had been working in other people's bands or collective ensembles. He was phenomenally busy. In 1965 alone, he recorded with NYAQ (two LPs), Giuseppi Logan Quartet, Paul Bley Quintet and Lowell Davidson Trio, and he made his first recording released under his own name, Percussion Ensemble. Every one of these is important in its own way, but none of them quite anticipate how radical was the music that he and Pullen would unleash that evening in New Haven." Originally released on the artists' own Self-Reliance Program label, this legendary one-night performance would be split into two volumes: In Concert At Yale University and Nommo. While rooted in African rhythms, Graves' music has its own sense of time. As the drummer stated in a 1966 DownBeat interview, "Time was always there, and the time I see is not the same as what man says time is. It works by impulsion." First-time vinyl reissue. Sourced from the original master tapes.

Chìsake [Algonquin]: to chant; to conjure; to cast a spell; this generally involves a shake-house, or shaking tent, in which the conjurer goes into a trance; the conjurer then has an out-of-body experience, going into the future to predict coming events, or into the past; as well as going into any locality in the universe to seek out someone or something generally practiced for ancestral divination. The unaccompanied flute pieces within this album are adaptations of Anishinaabeg shaking tent chants. The Anishinaabeg also known as Anishinaabe are a group of culturally related Indigenous peoples that reside in areas now called Canada and the United States. They include the Odawa, Saulteaux, Ojibwe (including Mississaugas), Potawatomi, Oji-Cree and Algonquin peoples. The word Anishinaabeg translates to “people from whence lowered”. The Anishinaabeg origin myths describe their people originating by divine breath. The shaking tent or conjuring lodge was the setting for a divinatory rite performed by specially trained shamans otherwise known as Chìsakewininì. During the shaking tent ceremony the Chìsakewininì would construct a special cylindrical framework typically of birch or spruce uprights planted in the ground with respective wood hoops to bind it together. This created a tensile structure of which birch bark, deer skin, or cloth was used as a covering. Rattles of caribou and deer hooves, or cups of lead shot, were tied to the frame. The floor was usually softened with freshly cut spruce boughs. The vertical axis of the shaking tent represents the realm of mediating beings, while the horizontal axis the earth or world of humans. The Chìsakewininì would enter the shaking tent at night and once inside would not be visible from onlookers. The singing of chants and drumming would summon the Chìsakewininì’s spirit helpers, whose arrival was signified by animal cries and erratic tent shaking. During this transcendent state, the Chìsakewininì could dispatch these spirit helpers or Manidò to distant regions to answer questions from the onlookers about the most auspicious places to hunt, the well-being of a distant relative, and what would happen in the future. The chants were usually sung using vocables before, during, and after the Chìsakewininì entered the shaking tent. Like many other similar divination ceremonies, singular or collective, the opening chants begin lyrically. They gradually turn to more reductive abstract structures midway and then end in lyrical chants. This symbolizes the performer and listener leaving the external literal world, entering a more abstract state of mind, and then returning. Traditionally all songs were carved on birch bark for record-keeping with mnemonic pictographs or other marks for future use. Tally mark clustering, sometimes used for song-keeping throughout the Anishinaabeg, is used for this album’s track titles and numerical sequence. The album intro begins with the shaking of a necklace of otter penis bone, fish spine, bear teeth, elk teeth and deer hide, gifted from Algonquin Elder Ajawajawesi. It is meant to focus the listener’s attention before the flute pieces begin. The warble or multi-phonic oscillation prevalent in the middle tracks traditionally represented the “throat rattling” vocalization of the tonic note or sometimes known as the horizon of which the melody floats off of. Due to the repetition of multi-phonic oscillation the performer will breathe erratically creating an altered state correlating with the Chìsakewininì ceremonial actions. All songs are repeated seven times to signify the seven sacred directions: east, south, west, north, above/sky, below/earth, and center. -Timothy Archambault