MUSIC

In May 1984 I appeared at a German festival called Pro
Musica Nova, organized by Radio Bremen. I then travelled to
Berlin by car with Rolf Langebertels, the owner of Galerie
Giannozzo who had driven to Bremen to hear me perform. I still
remember very vividly the experience of passing through the
checkpoint to enter West Berlin, a city that floated like an island
in the middle of the still socialist GDR. I had previously visited
Berlin in 1982 to perform at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien at an event
that Rolf had organized. This time too Rolf had organized a
concert for me at the Technische Universitat. Playing off the title
of the piece (“Study Time”) I had performed at Pro Musica
Nova, I titled the piece for this concert “Zeitstudie”.

I owe Rolf a great deal of gratitude, as it was him who
encouraged me by releasing my very first cassette tape,
“Zeitstudie von Akio Suzuki”. In recent years it has become
difficult for me to carry heavy instruments around with me, and
I have started to do simpler performances with objects
assembled on site. So it feels wonderful to have the sound of
the battery of instruments I used back then to be returned to the
light of day.

On “Zeitstudie von A.S.” I used an ANALAPOS, the echo
instrument I invented in 1970, and the Suzuki-type glass
harmonica that I created in 1975. The ANALAPOS resembles the
tin-can telephone that children used to play with: two metal
cans, open at one end and connected by a coil spring. You
play it by stretching out the spring horizonally and then
projecting your voice into the open end of one of the
cylinders. The second piece features a variation, where I
would suspend several ANALAPOS vertically and play them like
a percussion instrument.

The Suzuki-type glass harmonica is in a simpler form than the
pre-existing glass harmonica, and consists of five long glass
tubes of varying diameters suspended horizontally in a metal
frame. As well as rubbing the tubes with wet hands, I developed
my own style of playing it using sticks. Once when I was
practicing with it in the Netherlands, outside the window I was
surprised to hear a bird imitating my sounds. However, later I
discovered that the bird always sang that way, and as a token
of my regret for having ever doubted it, I borrowed the bird’s
Dutch name, De Koolmees, and I s till use it for my instrument.
Recently, as I listened back to the cassette of “Zeitstudie von
A.S.”, one of Hiromi Miyakita’s drawings was lying in front of me.
There was a sympathetic resonance between the sounds and the
drawing, so I decided to use it on the cover. This is a joyful music. 

Sound Limited, formed at the end of 1969, recorded three albums in quick succession in 1970, as if to reflect Takeshi Inomata's enthusiasm. The third of these was “New Rock In Europe. This album was composed mainly of songs by European musicians such as the Beatles, Donovan, and Nino Rota. The album features many highlights, such as “Something” with the shimmering guitar of Kosei Mizutani and “Barabajagal” with its tight and exciting groove, but it was a pleasure to hear “Mustache,” an original by Inomata, which is a part of the group's repertoire. This is the third recording following “Sounds Of Sound L.T.D.” and “Sensational Jazz Vol. 1/2,” and the version here is glossy and psychedelic, as if it concentrates the atmosphere of the entire album. It is a monumental work that shows that Inomata's jazz-rock has entered a new dimension. text by Yusuke Ogawa

The jazz scene in Japan around 1970 was at its most interesting. hard bop, jazz rock, and free jazz. New music and new values were born one after another, the scene was in chaos, and up-and-coming musicians were running through the scene at a speed that swept the meter. This live recording, “Sensational Jazz '70 Vol. 1/2,” is renowned as a live recording that captures the excitement and excitement of this period. The three jazz rock musketeers, Jiro Inagaki, Takeshi Inomata, and Akira Ishikawa, all stepped on stage, free jazz musicians such as Motoki Takagi and Itaru Oki finally took the stage, and musicians who support the mainstream, such as Toshiyuki Miyama and Terumasa Hino, stepped “beyond” the stage. stepped out to the “next level. The “Mustache” sound limited, which is said to be the most dangerous jazz-rock live sound source, is at the top of the list of hot performances like a cloud of smoke rising up. text by Yusuke Ogawa

Evening Air is the result Loren Connors and David Grubbs’s first trip to the recording studio in the two decades since their first duo album, Arborvitae (Häpna). Arborvitae stood out for its spellbinding, utterly unhurried meshing of electric guitar (Connors) and piano (Grubbs). With this long-awaited return, Connors and Grubbs take turns trading off on piano and guitar, with Grubbs at the keyboard for the two gently expansive pieces on the first side and Connors taking over the instrument for three gorgeous miniatures on the flip, including an album-closing and perfectly heart-stopping version of Connors’s and Suzanne Langille’s “Child.” The album’s wildcard is “It’s Snowing Onstage,” which finds the two locking horns with two electric guitars before Loren blew the minds of all present in the studio by unexpectedly switching to drums. Loren Connors is one-of-a-kind, one of a handful of deservedly storied musical greats gracing us with their presence, and with Evening Air David Grubbs again demonstrates that he’s a stellar musician who also ranks among the most simpatico of collaborators. A cover painting by Connors—another wordless signalling—sets the tone for this most beguiling of seances.

From Justin Broadrick: The theme of this recording is the invisible world, and one's (my) need for it. It's necessary for me, this idea of the invisible world, if I am to function on a daily basis. I find comfort in knowing that this is all not just us here and now, that there's something else around us. That there's something within us, that isn't just this frail skin and bones and the immediate environments we drag ourselves around. I am sure since I was a child, that within me I am many, I am more than this. I surely can't be just this, so I am motivated by the fantasy and/or promise of more...

In 1979, Akio Suzuki recorded a performance, ¡ÇNew Sense Of Hearing¡Ç, at the Nagoya American Centre. During the performance, Suzuki used voice, turntables, glass harmonica and his self-designed instrument the Analapos to create a series of improvised pieces that effectively charted out his sonic investigations for the proceeding decades. In 1980 these recordings were issued by ALM records as Analapos, the first work made publicly available by Akio Suzuki. For going on six decades now, Akio Suzuki has been responsible for creating amongst the most otherworldly, yet deeply affective sound works of his generation. As a musician, sculptor and sound artist, Suzuki¡Çs work threads an important linkage between Eastern and Western sound art practices. His approaches, that focus primarily on intense states of listening, ¡Çthrowing and following¡Ç and a relentless sense of open curiosity, have allowed him to continuously deepen his work. Originally published in an edition of just 200 copies in 1980, Analapos has been out of print literally since its release. Clocking in an over an hour, the original pressing of the recordings to a single LP, presented some technical limitations. This 40th anniversary edition of Analapos is entirely remastered and is published with a booklet that includes a long form interview with Akio Suzuki conducted by sound artist and collaborator Aki Onda, plus extensive photographic documentation of the development of the Analapos. The publication of this edition is announced in conjunction with the Sense Of Ekō retrospective exhibition which opens at The Substation in Melbourne late January.

Dub-infused post-punk treats from astonishing percussionist Valentina Magaletti (Tomaga, Moin, Holy Tongue) and Zongamin as V/Z. The basslines throughout really hit that sweet spot and the collaborations are killer; Coby Sey and Venus Ex Machina join the fun, along with Vanishing Twin's Cathy Lucas on 'Habadash' with a most appealing Seefeel flavour. Highly recommended.

Emerging from a generative paradox of laser precision and fluid dynamism, Metallur fuses percussive, metallic force with warping tempos and a field of ethereal resonance and debris. The result is an insurgent, elemental, time-smearing of hyperspace, where "tellurian beats merge with alien glossolalia and vocal samples blip tesseracts of human affect into a ghostly, melodic aether". Music for a crushed infinity.

Banabila returns with a second LP release on Knekelhuis. The renowned Dutch producer is up there among the stars when it comes to ambient music and the so-called ‘fourth world’ legacy. On this eleven-track album, we witness soul-wrenching, kraut-tinted, and early-yet-modernist electronics. Coming from his heart, these imaginative recordings center around otherworldly voices – fictional characters chanting in a made-up language, imbued with a captivating spirit, transcending linguistic barriers. Through remarkable complexity and technique, 'Unspeakable Visions' is full of sonic textures, together evoking a layered, emotional arc. While the track 'Rattles' still references the artist's first album on Knekelhuis, 'Echo Transformations', the style of most other tracks departs towards an intriguing new mix of both pop-infused songs and gloomy abstraction, balancing between a sense of anticipation and desolation. (Luke Cohlen, May 2024)

Irish supergroup Princ€ss arrives to wherethetimegoes to release their self titled debut album.

YĪN YĪN, the highly touted Dutch quartet from Maastricht, returns with a sonically expansive third album Mount Matsu. Recorded collectively in their own studio in the Belgian countryside, the album is a kaleidoscope of sounds and influences, occupying a no man’s land between Khruangbin and Kraftwerk, surf music and Southeast Asian psychedelia, Stax soul and mutant 80s disco, City pop and Japanese instrumental folk (sōkyoku). Mount Matsu sees YĪN YĪN at their most mature and adventurous stage yet. Infectious pentatonic melodicism calling for multiple rewinds.

Matador is pleased to announce the reissue of a collection of classic albums and EPs from the weird, grotesque, and unparalleled first decade of Butthole Surfers, a legendary band of weirdos who mix hardcore, metal, psych, funk, and even hip-hop to create their own unique sound! The three vinyl releases are the most junk-heavy and malevolent of the three, the first "Psychic... Powerless... Another Man's Sac", the first one is the most junky and malevolent, the second one is "Rembrandt Pussyhorse", a scum sound that goes back and forth between punk/garage/funk covered in psychedelic noise, and the third one is a live show featuring the band's twin drummer system for the first time. EP, PCPPEP, all of which were remastered under the band's supervision. Butthole Surfers, formed in 1981 by Gibby Hines and Paul Leahy, who met in Texas, was an avant-garde band that emerged from the American '80s underground and gained a cult following for their insane live performances, and their legend has Their legend has always shone brightly. Now their scum career is being reevaluated and rediscovered!

crys cole returns to Black Truffle with Making Conversation, her third solo release for the label. After the intimate song-like constructions of Other Meetings (BT096), Making Conversation documents a different facet of cole’s work, presenting three rigorously conceptualised commissioned pieces, each of which extend her signature approach to highly amplified small sounds into new directions. The side-long title piece is a stereo version of an 8-channel sound installation exhibited in 2023 at the Tabakalera Art Center in Donostia / San Sebastian, Spain. The piece uses a multitude of instrumental, vocal, concrete and electronic sounds to evoke the soundscapes cole encountered during nocturnal listening session in Bali, Indonesia in 2018 and 2019. In this world of night sounds, she explains, she ‘observed the complex interplay between amphibian, lizard, bird and insect communication, domestic animals (roosters, dogs), man-made sounds (airplanes, vehicles, conversations and evening activities) and sounds that were difficult to place’. Drawing on field recordings as memory aids (but including none in the finished piece), cole’s piece uncannily reproduces the spatiality and pacing of environmental sound without attempting strictly to replicate it. We hear insect-like twittering and birdsong fragments, resonant thuds and distant roars, furtive crunches and taps, muffled breath and metallic scrapes. While at times it can be difficult to imagine the source of these sounds, at other points they are clearly instrumental or electronic in origin; in its placement and layering, though, the whole assemblage suggests the glorious, unthinking richness of a non-musical sound environment. Suggesting at once the electronic gardens of Rolf Julius and the little instrument expanses of classic AACM, the piece is a brilliant enactment of the Cagean drive to ‘imitate nature in her manner of operation’. ‘Valid ForeverrRrrRRrrr… (pt. 1)’ began as cole’s contribution to an Issue Project Room commission to realise a score from Alison Knowles and Annea Lockwood’s Women´s Work, a 1975 collection of text and conceptual scores by women artists and composers. cole’s piece begins from Beth Anderson’s Valid for Life, a complex arrangement of the letter R in various typefaces. Where the composer suggests a realisation on a trio of acoustic instruments (playing rolls with velvet beaters), cole translates the piece into her characteristic sound and object language as a trio of rolling sounds on ‘two large similar paper things and one 5-pin bowling ball’. Rolling from one side of the stereo field to the other, the bowling ball’s uneven movement is the heart of this immersive textural array, created with the simplest materials, which generates phantom sensations of pitch and phasing effects solely through amplified friction. On ‘Valid ForeverrRrrRRrrr… (pt. 2)’, cole makes a first foray in translating her signature approach into conventional instrumental sounds, here in the form of a transcription for MIDI percussion ensemble. The result is refreshingly puzzling, comparable perhaps only to the sparsest moments of Keiji Haino’s classic “C’est parfait…” Accompanied with extensive liner notes, photographic documentation and a download code, Making Conversation is an exciting next step in cole’s work, extending her signature concerns in new sonic and conceptual directions.

"Born in France in 1957, Sonami studied with Éliane Radigue in Paris before moving to California in 1978 to study electronic music at Mills College, going on to make important innovations in the field of live electronics interfaces and multi-media performance. Sonami is perhaps most closely associated with one of her inventions, the Lady’s Glove, an arm-length tailored glove fitted with movement sensors allowing the performer fluidly to control digital sound parameters and processing, as well as motors, lights and video playback. Having performed with the Lady’s Glove for 25 years, Sonami retired it in 2016, turning her attention to the interface/instrument heard and pictured here, the Spring Sprye. In Sonami’s own description, “The Spring Spyre is composed of three thin springs that are attached to reverb tank pickups, mounted on a metal ring. The audio generated when the springs are touched, rubbed or struck is analyzed in Max/MSP. The extracted features are then used to train machine learning models in Wekinator and Rapidmax and control the audio synthesis in real time. We never actually hear the springs.” After decades of aversion to documenting her work on recordings, a Song for two Mothers / Occam IX treats listeners to two side-long performances with the Spring Spyre: the very first piece developed for the instrument and the most recent, the two contrasting remarkably in sound palette, energy and form. A Song for two Mothers (2023) spins an intricate web of rippling synthetic burbles, rapid sweeps and fizzing textures. Performed in real time with the sensitive and partly uncontrollable Spring Sprye ("a bit tyrannical," Sonami calls it), the music is delicate yet chaotic. Abrupt gestures hover against a backdrop of silence, "devoid of spatial or temporal direction". After several minutes, the sound-world becomes metallic and percussive, tapping and ticking in pointillistic flurries before a wavering harmonic cloud emerges, sprinkled with resonant drips and pops. Occam IX is a radically different proposition. At the outset of Sonami’s exploration of the Spring Sprye, she asked her former teacher Éliane Radigue to compose a piece for it—and her: like all of Radigue’s work since she ceased working with analogue electronics at the beginning of the 21st century, Occam IX is written not only for an instrument but also for a particular performer. These scores are developed verbally, through meetings and conversations between performer and composer; each is grounded in an image (usually kept from listeners, to avoid influencing their experience); all magnify the subtlest acoustic phenomena and require great commitment and patience from the performer. Sonami’s is one of the few Occam pieces to make use of electronics, bringing it closer to Radigue’s famous longform pieces for ARP 2500. Beginning from a rumbling low tone, the listener is gradually immersed in slowly lapping waves of synthetic tones, eventually thinning out into delicate bell-like pings against a background of white noise, reminiscent of one of the most beautiful sections of Kyema from the Trilogie de la Morte. Accompanied by notes from Sonami, her longtime collaborator Paul DeMarinis, and Radigue, and illustrated with scores, photographs and images of the Spring Spyre, a Song for two Mothers / Occam IX is an essential document celebrating an under-recognised pioneer of electronic music and performance."

Originally released on September 30, 1991, Orbital's eponymous debut album became known as "The Green Album" to distinguish it from their second album (known as "The Brown Album") The Green Album includes the seminal 'Belfast' and a live version of 'Chime', the landmark dance track that launched their career in 1990

The popular ambient project by Wolfgang Voigt, presided over by the prestigious , GAS released the early masterpiece "Königsforst" in 1998 from the prestigious on CD! It's a tremendous depth. It's like William Basinski meets DUB TECHNO ... A masterpiece with a mysterious dopeness that makes you feel like something you don't even know is writhing in the darkness of your heart, and it's about to crawl up. Dub / Ambient. It is a masterpiece that has reached a terrifying and solitary view of the universe!

The early masterpiece of 1997 released by GAS, a popular ambient project by Wolfgang Voigt, who presides over the prestigious , is reissued on CD! This is terrifying, like William Basinski meets DUB TECHNO ... A masterpiece dub / ambient with a miasma-like dopeness that blows up from the depths and envelops the sound field. It is a masterpiece that shows off a solitary view of the universe!

Jim O'Rourke's Burt Bacharach covers album "All Kinds of People ~love Burt Bacharach" (2010) Reissued in limited edition in double-jacket LP format. It features 11 vocalists including Haruomi Hosono, Tadashi Kosaka, Thurston Moore, Donna Taylor, Kahimikari, and Etsuko Yakushimaru, and is composed of unique Bacharach numbers. Together with "Eureka" and others, this is one of Jim O'Rourke's best-known works.

I stayed at memu earth lab, based in Memu (mem, Taiki Town), located in the southern part of Tokachi, eastern Hokkaido, for a total of five weeks during the winter and spring of 2021 and 2022, and recorded the sounds I encountered at various locations around the area.
Loading the recording equipment into the car, I would drive on the vast land while thinking, “Where should I go today?”
There are forests and rivers all around, and lakes and marshes dotting the coast. Away from the town centre, one rarely sees passing cars or people. On the other hand, wild foxes, red-crowned cranes, and squirrels can be seen from time to time, and the snow reveals a smattering of animal tracks.
I’d park the car at a suitable spot, carry our bags of equipment, and keep walking until I found a point that looked interesting or contained the atmosphere of something I could record. The various sounds that I encountered in this way are recorded in this work. In addition, we talked to the people who live in the area because I was interested in how and what kind of sounds they heard in their daily lives.
When I stepped out of the bungalow where we were staying on a snowy morning, 
I shivered with such silence that I thought my ears were clogged. Even in places where it seemed like one can only hear the sounds of “nature” with their own ears, the microphones captured a variety of sounds associated with human activity. For example, there are the sounds of large trucks driving on national highways, hunters shooting their prey in the mountains, airplanes passing overhead, the sound of the outdoor units of neighbouring residences, and of course, the sounds I myself make subconsciously. Still, a place where there is little background noise and small sounds can be heard clearly is worthwhile in itself. This is just such a place.
Considering both the ambient sounds I encountered in Memu, and the voices of people, without distinguishing them, I try to perceive the two things as the voice of this land. By attentively listening to the voice of the land, recording it, and listening deeply to the recorded sounds, what kind of world will emerge? The word ‘Memu’ (mem, in Ainu sound) apparently means ‘a place where springs wells up and fish gathers’ in the Ainu language. It is my hope that these sounds will intertwine with the memories and physical experiences of each listener and nurture their imagination towards the world like spring water.
 

mint.conception.recordings: "This record contains four tracks taken from a live performance which took place on December 3rd 2021 at the vinyl harvest record store in Esch-sur-Alzette Luxembourg. The concert was curated by non-profit organisation I am esch twenty too and the label mint.conception.recordings. I am esch twenty too was founded in 2020 as an alternative suggestion to the city of Esch-sur-Alzette being European Capital of Culture 2022 and its role and program. The budget for this concert was generated by the entrance fee to the concert only. Jan Jelinek has for more than 20 years been one of the most essential voices in contemporary electronic music. Arthur Clees is a young percussionist from Luxembourg and a bright talent intent on finding his own way into jazz, improv and electronic music. Both performers had never met each other before."

Faitiche welcomes Andrew Black aka blackbody_radiation. His debut album Ultra-Materials gathers six ghostly drones, created with the help of sound masking. Andrew Black, who hails from one of the UK's post industrial North West Milltowns has a sensitive feeling for space and its acoustics. Having trained as a designer and operated within the realms of architecture and public space, it was only natural to extend his interest to manipulating field recordings.

The six pieces collected on Ultra-Materials provide an insight into Black's highly sensitive minimalism: they stand for a subtly meandering mediation on room acoustics and place, which are manipulated with the help of sound masking, among other things - that is, the addition and superimposition of artificially generated frequencies to mask unwanted sounds. 

Sometimes the pieces are reminiscent of warm engine noise, sometimes one thinks of carefully captured natural phenomena. Their strength lies in their elusiveness: free of concrete attributions or musical location, they can unfold their hypnotic pull without revealing anything about their origins. Harmonics at times shimmer, at times warble and at times coexist. It is an attempt to get in touch with our listening abilities.

 

Marking its first decade of activity, Blume returns with the composer Ben Vida’s “Vocal Trio”. An intoxicatingly beautiful, groundbreaking work of compositional conceptualism - combining the ideas of systems based synthesis with real-time vocal collaboration - the album represents a striking step forward for one of the most ambitious and outstanding sonic artists working in the United States today. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu.
** 200 copies. Color Vinyl. 140gr Audiophile pressing. Including printed inner sleeve housing a Nagaoka anti-static record sleeve, plus an original insert that functions as Obi. Comes with a leporello insert offering the piece visual score. ** Since its founding back in 2014, Blume has carved a unique place in cultural landscape, issuing free-standing works, spanning the historical and contemporary, that represent singular gestures of creativity within the field of experimental sound. Joining their broad efforts in building networks of context and understanding that already includes the works by Werner Durand, Sarah Hennies, Bruce Nauman, John Butcher, Jocy de Oliveira, Mary Jane Leach, Valentina Magaletti, Alvin Curran, Julius Eastman, Alvin Lucier, and shortly after returning with the first ever vinyl release to attend to James Tenney’s legendary “Postal Pieces”, the label is now offering a brand new, ambitious work by the American composer Ben Vida, entitled “Vocal Trio”, conceived, performed, and recorded in Bremen, Germany, during the Spring of 2022. A truly stunning work of compositional conceptualism, combining the ideas of systems based synthesis with real-time vocal collaboration - issued in a highly limited vinyl edition of 200 copies mastered by Stephan Mathieu, featuring specially commissioned liner notes by Bradford Bailey and a leporello insert offering the piece visual score - it’s a landmark in contemporary experimental practice and arguably the most forward-thinking and exciting piece by one of the most exciting American artists working today.

Ben Vida first emerged during the mid 1990s within a loose constellation of experimental musicians, centred around a performance series of improvised workshops at the Myopic Bookstore in Chicago, alongside Jim O'Rourke, Kevin Drumm, Chad Taylor, and the other future members of Town and Country - Jim Dorling, Joshua Abrams, and Liz Payne - the band within which he would gain widespread recognition over the following years. Like many other members of that scene, Vida remains a restless product of a fleeting context - Chicago during the 1990s and early 2000s - continuously undermining concrete notions of idiom and signifier within a practice that witnessed him rendering bristling abstractions within Pillow, glacial melodies with Town and Country, the art-rock mayhem of Bird Show Band, and the angular, driving indie rock of Joan of Arc, before becoming immersed in a practice of systems based synthesis, beginning in the 2010s, that guided much of his first decade of output as a solo performer and composer.

As early as 2013, he began to incorporate acoustic sound sources - specifically the human voice - into his work. It was this shift, evolving and refining itself over the last decade, that underscores radically the leap in his practice represented by “Vocal Trio”, a work that encounters Vida composing for the human voice with the ideas that allow for synthesis - transferring the underlying concepts and structures of both subtractive and additive synthesis to the acoustic realm - without using a synthesiser.

During the Spring of 2022 Vida was in Bremen, Germany, collaborating on a dance piece with the choreographer Fay Driscoll, when the production fell into delays. Finding himself with time on his hands, a space at his disposal, and the company of two dancers - Amy Gernux and Lotte Rudhart - who were also singers, the idea for the piece - to utilising the larynx as audio paths (multi-harmonic or harmonically pure) while conceptualising each person’s mouth as a filter to sculpt the timbre and resonance of a given tone - began to take shape in his mind. Considering how typographical scores might be developed into a non-linguistic social framework, Vida drafted a single page of text - what became the score for “Vocal Trio” - accompanied by a set of harmonic suggestion and loose parameters, seeking a core meaning from each word's phonic make-up by each of the three singers (Vida, Gernux and Rudhart) singing as slowly as possible.

At the core of the pulsing vocal drones - intoxicating, harmonically rich long-tones - that make up the duration abstraction of “Vocal Trio”, is Vida’s regard for music as a social space. It is an experiment that seeks liberation through the act of collective music making, by challenging the terms through which the act of composing is perceived and then relinquishing control. The piece’s rehearsals were simply the three performers hanging out, allowing their knowing each other and natural dynamics to contribute to its form as the score, before recording during a single afternoon at the end of a number of days sharing company and space.

Creatively visionary and groundbreaking on numerous terms, as well as being intoxicatingly beautiful and remarkably listenable, Ben Vida’s “Vocal Trio” represents a striking step forward for one of the most ambitious and outstanding sonic artists working in the United States today. Issued by Blume in a highly limited vinyl edition of 200 copies mastered by Stephan Mathieu, featuring specially commissioned liner notes by Bradford Bailey and a leporello insert offering the piece visual score, this is hands down one of the most important contemporary records we’re likely to encounter in 2024.

Phil Ranelin’s first record as a leader is worlds away from his later 1976 offering, Vibes From the Tribe. The Time Is Now is a vanguard jazz record, full of the spirit, determination, and innovation inspired by John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Cecil Taylor, Pharoah Sanders, and Archie Shepp. Recorded in 1973 and 1974 and released at the end of 1974, the set shows Ranelin to be an imposing composer and frightfully good trombonist. The original album contained six compositions that are a deep musical brew of avant-garde improvisation, hard bop jazz esthetics, and soulful melodic ideas that were superimposed as a jump off point for both harmonic and rhythmic (read: Latin) invention. The stamp of Detroit is all over this thing. Tracks like the title and “Black Destiny” reflect the anger and vision of the era, while moving it all in a positive musical direction. Soloists on the set include the rest of the Tribe collective — Marcus Belgrave and Wendell Harrison — as well as local players who deserved far more than they received in terms of national recognitions: bassist Reggie “Shoo-Be Doo” Fields, trumpeter Charles Moore, pianist Keith Vreeland, drummer Bill Turner, and others including Ranelin himself. The arrangements on The Time Is Now were ahead of their time, clustering a rhythm section as part of the horn’s front line (“13th and Senate” and the title track) and a stylistic angularity that reflected both musical history and futurism in jazz and R&B (“Time Is Running Out” and “Times Gone By”). The Time Is Now is a must for any vanguard jazz aficionado or anyone interested in the strange, rhythm-oriented evolution of Detroit music.

Guitarist Lee Underwood’s syncretic blend of jazz, folk, and blues was a tremendous force behind Tim Buckley’s genre-stretching late 60s/early 70s music – but his 1988 acoustic guitar opus California Sigh has remained a unsung footnote to his story. Until now! This first time vinyl-edition reveals Lee’s free-floating acoustic moods, with synths and co-production from ambient avatar Steve Roach, as a soulful work of tranquility and transcendence.