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A bizarrely entrancing jewel from the depths of the Japanese underground, Doo Dah Nean was originally released in small run of hand assembled cassettes by the La Musica label in the late 90’s. The album is the sole release and evidence of Nean, an entirely under-the-radar trio that crossed the sensual, disassociated female vocals of Japanese iroke kayōkyoku music with off-balance shamanic rhythm and echoing electronic rumble. Nean were the trio of Yui on bass and electronics, Naoko on voice, and Non on drums. Both Yui and Non were also part of Holy Angels, and Yui played with Ohkami No Jikan and Mauduit Nuit. Vocalist Naoko, in her lone recorded appearance anywhere, elevates the proceedings to peak outsider strangeness. Her ultra-repetitive chants and sighs balance childlike innocence with sinister knowing. Alternately distracted and humming to herself or delivering breathy, near field whispers, the simple juxtaposition of her vocalizations with Non’s stumble-drunk drums, and the amorphous blobs and gloops of tone unleashed from Yui’s instruments lands like an avant garde, proto-ASMR incantation. A truly confounding release in a La Musica catalogue that’s not exactly thin on the ground for such form. From the original cassette release: “Cult Lolita psychedelic group who smile sardonically as they fuck with contemporary classical and free jazz. The world is coming down with all-girl groups, but there are none that can compare with Nean for innocence, ignorance and plain idiocy. Totally bizarre work - exotic rhythms and avant-garde improv collide with flying Lolita vocals. 100% Lolita essence, ultra-acid.” Available for the first time digitally, on LP or any physical form aside from La Musica cassette (LA-017). Housed in a custom die-cut, "Uni-Pak" style gatefold with metallic ink, spot finishes and matching La Musica inner sleeve.
'Muzak for the Encouragement of Unproductivity' is a poetic inversion of Muzak’s traditional role in stimulating seamless productivity in the workplace. Beginning as a pre-radio music distribution network (1934, U.S.), Muzak was transmitted along electrical wires with the intention of being at once ubiquitous and indiscernible, always present yet easily ignorable. As a pseudo-science the aim was to capitalize on the potential of music to have a psychological effect on listeners, and with the goal of maximum productivity, was employed as a sonic disciplinary force in the work place.
Previously installed for Dystopia Sound Art Biennial (2024), at the Amazon Packing Station located before HAUNT-Frontviews in Berlin, Muzak for the Encouragement of Unproductivity sonically addresses utopic notions of seamless, efficient productivity, inherent to capitalist cultures, and their very real dystopic effects from labour exploitation to the impacts of over-production on the environment. This poetic inversion, further developed as an album, is not meant as a kind of melodic control but rather a reflective space in which to consider the benefits personally, globally and environmentally, of slowing down.
Reverb, essential to the Muzak aesthetic, is programmed (using convolution reverb) with the dimensions of the Berlin Amazon fulfillment centre, DBE2. Amazon fulfillment centers are global contemporary factories, promising a consumer utopia of next day delivery of almost any product imaginable. Inspired by Sam Kidel’s concept of “mimetic hacking”(1), the reverberation characteristics of the DBE2 facility perform a symbolic sonic break-in to the guarded Amazon fulfillment center, a trespass to the flow of production.
Guffond’s ambient Muzak with its drifting horn, clarinet and synth-like modulations is just too down-tempo for upbeat spending. If this is Muzak it is possibly Muzak for the end of the world, thoughtfully seeking transcendence through implied questioning after all avenues for shopping have been exhausted.
“Morette ite, Hissori ne.”, the debut album by Marewrew, returns in a newly remixed and remastered edition. This landmark recording, which brings Ainu traditional songs into the present, has been revived with updated artwork and is being released on vinyl for the first time.
In 2023, sound artist and composer Weston Olencki toured across the American South. Beginning in their hometown in South Carolina, they snaked a circuitous path from the mountains of West Virginia to the banks of the Mississippi River. As the miles accumulated, so did the initial seeds of new work. Instruments and artifacts they acquired hitched a ride in the backseat, while songs and sounds filled their portable recorder: water in its various states, the familiar insectoid buzz of those summer nights, trains cutting through the landscape, the traditional music that lived alongside the communities that kept it. Olencki took it all in, and over time, found ways that these experiences coalesced into a bramble-like perspective of time, where past, present, and future intersect in ways both barbed and beautiful. Broadsides, Olencki’s newest solo full-length is the multilayered result of this journey. The album follows their landmark release Old Time Music from 2022, which presented radical interpretations of traditional tunes from Appalachia and throughout the South alongside original compositions that drew significantly on archival recordings. On Broadsides, Olencki rejects delineations between the unmoored avant-garde and the rootedness of one’s cultural heritage, revealing their porous and intertwined nature. “My mother was a quilter. Her mother before that,” they write in the album’s liner notes. “Quilting, like music, is a practice of embedding knowledge and remembrance into the very core of the thing you are making. It’s not just about the materials, but how they’re reassembled, recontextualized, stitched, woven to form new patterns - the minutiae of craft holding significance to those looking to find it. Stories woven from stories, never told the same way twice.” Like all great road trips, Broadsides unfolds slowly and continuously, with moments of dramatic reverie punctuating the endless melt of highway in the rearview. We’re immediately confronted by the uncanniness of revisiting old haunts, as Southern storms break through the initial churn of the freight locomotives of Alabama. Olencki’s interpretation of the bluegrass standard “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” captures the euphoria of melancholy in motion. The permutational plucks of banjo are bounced around the frame by a computer, its pitches determined within algorithmic sequences and transcriptions of classic three-finger licks. The tonalities of old-time are smeared and stretched until all that’s audible is the insistence that Heaven might be real. In the album’s second half, “Omie Wise,” a murder ballad made famous by Doc Watson, follows an interlude recorded on the river in North Carolina in which the titular character’s body was laid. Ghostly echoes of a dozen other renditions float through the substrata as Tongue Depressor’s Henry Birdsey accompanies them on the pedal steel guitar. The album’s central composition, “all my father’s clocks,” is a profound meditation on entropy and impermanence. The sound of their father’s extensive clock collection ticks away as Olencki pulls a bow across the length of an autoharp sourced from a rural strip mall. The instrument was left as detuned as it was found, the resonance of its deep bass drone and clanging high-end the result of years of neglect and the warping effects of Southern humidity. Historically, broadsides were an early form of broadcasting, an often-musicalized telling of current news pasted in the public square. The name was later taken up by Sis Cunningham and Gordon Friesen in the 1960s, whose Broadside magazine published songs and social commentary when American folk music resurfaced as an urgent way of communicating the multifaceted politics of its time. Olencki borrows the phrase to recall both this old form of songmaking and that later prominent reexamination of traditional music’s role in modern life, but also to draw attention to the fragmented and machine-mediated way heritage is diffused in this very different, but no less pivotal, moment. As a sanitized past is used as justification for current violence and domination, we can turn to these artifacts to better understand the history of ourselves, but only if they are consciously pushed to evolve. Broadsides represents one personal, striking vision of what far-flung futurisms could be respun from these high, lonesome sounds: a reflection of the unbridled joy and deep sorrow inherent to living together through time, and a desire to push further into the untold and unknown.
Armand Hammer and The Alchemist build worlds. Their first was Haram and it remains locked in orbit, equal parts lush and foreboding. Their new one is called Mercy and it’s made out of blood and empire, children’s laughter, unpaid parking tickets, and things that haven’t happened yet. Rappers ELUCID and billy woods are joined on the mic by Earl Sweatshirt, Quelle Chris, Cleo Reed, Pink Siifu, Kapwani, and Silka. The Alchemist did everything else.
To truly listen is not a passive gesture but a radical, embodied act of attention. Christina Vantzou’s The Reintegration of the Ear offers a slower presence: one rooted in care, intimacy, and reflection. An act beneath language. Through this reintegration, the ear becomes a quiet form of resistance.
Composed by the Greek-American composer between 2023 and 2025 after being commissioned by INA GRM as a multi-channel acousmatic work, The Reintegration of the Ear unfolds as a durational electroacoustic suite, meticulously arranged by Vantzou and performed with Irene Kurka (voice), John Also Bennett (flutes, synthesizers), Roman Hiele (double bass), and Oliver Coates (cello). Rather than a formal structure, the composition unfolds through intuition led by breath, resonance and subtle intelligence. What emerges is an acoustic ecology: an ongoing negotiation between perception and expression. An ethical act that reorients us toward the elemental.
Paired with "Observations, edits, a cure for restlessness", a companion suite of domestic fragments and temporal drift, the album unfolds as a dialogue between the inward persistence of what is felt and the outward pull of what remains unresolved. A continuum that traces the porous boundaries between the intimate and the infinite. Through electronics, field recordings, and acoustic instrumentation, Vantzou maps atmospheres charged with psychic and temporal residue. "Observations, edits, a cure for restlessness" unfolds as a precisely sequenced constellation of sonic impressions gathered across nearly a decade, where the real and the imagined bleed into one another, like the mutable moods of places where time folds, drifts and reassembles itself.
Time here is embodied, a porous medium through which perception drifts and reforms, stretches, contracts, and suspends itself, blurring the boundary between presence and impermanence. Within this fluid temporality, intuition replaces structure; sound becomes a site of renewal rather than arrival. Each resonance carries the trace of what has passed and what is yet to unfold, an ever-shifting threshold where listening becomes a form of existence and time reveals itself as both instrument and witness.
The two side-long pieces are presented alongside digital renderings by the Belgian visual artist Eva L’Hoest, a longtime collaborator, extending this sensorial language into image. Her surreal images, containing fragments of Greek iconography - a sphinx in a coffee cup, votive ears, arrangements of laurel leaves - mirror Vantzou’s sonic landscapes in texture and tone. In Vantzou’s work, sound becomes a portal to states of perception where time bends and consciousness softens. The Reintegration of the Ear listens not only to the world but through it — a quiet, expansive meditation on presence, transformation and the invisible architectures of relation.
The Reintegration of the Ear will be released by Editions Basilic on February 20th, 2026 as an edition of 300 LPs with printed inner sleeves.
Text: Melis Özek
John M. Bennett’s BLANKSMANSHIP is a totemic representation of something impossible: a linguistic object containing a totality. Written and recorded in the early 1990s and released as a sound poetry cassette and chapbook, BLANKSMANSHIP begins and ends with a ten word mantra, distilling the poem’s ten cantos that act as phases of an extended meditation. Performed by the author accompanied only by minimalist shakuhachi flute and bell, a narrative emerges from a mythic place, spoken by a single voice that eventually multiplies into a horde of selves. The author states that BLANKSMANSHIP refers to a state of mind, the "empty yet swarming void from which the poem’s voice arises, as if it were the voice of completeness itself". An unheralded masterpiece of avant-garde writing, this is a poetry that has its roots in the most ancient and enduring forms of poesis. Remastered from original tapes, the LP includes a 24 page poetry booklet containing the full text of BLANKSMANSHIP. Edition of 200 copies.
At the beginning of the 1960s, at the Berklee College of Music, Byard Lancaster met some feisty friends: Sonny Sharrock, Dave Burrell and Ted Daniel. It is easy to see why he rapidly became involved in free jazz. Once he was settled in New York, he appeared on Sunny Murray Quintet, recorded under the leadership of the drum crazy colleague of Albert Ayler.
In 1968, the saxophonist and flutist recorded his first album under his own name: It’s Not Up To Us. The following year he came to Paris in the wake of… Sunny Murray. He would come back to France in 1971 (again with Murray) and in 1973 (without Murray for a change). This is when he met Jef Gilson, the pianist and producer who encouraged him to record under his own name again.
On Palm Records (Gilson’s label), he would release four albums: Us, Mother Africa, Exactement and Funny Funky Rib Crib.
“Us”, the first of the four records was recorded on November 24th, 1973 with Sylvin Marc on electric bass (a Fender… Lancaster?) and the evergreen Steve McCall on drums.
On the album, the trio works from the John Coltrane model; free jazz shook up by the timely contributions of the bassist, followed by a mesmerizing atmospheric music. Then, Lancaster delivers a sinuous solo path, which is a reminder of his unique tone. On the album’s companion single, the trio launches into great black music of a
different genre which would lead the clairvoyant François Tusques to claim that Byard Lancaster is an “authentic representative of soul/free jazz”, to sum up this is Great Black Music!
Great Day is one of the very best albums on the Music De Wolfe label and certainly one of the most sought after library records, full stop.
It's been sampled by such heavyweights as Madlib, LTJ Bukem, El-P and The Alchemist (among many others). You likely already know all this. If you don't, get to know. One listen through and the £350 asking price for a VG copy starts to all make sense...
Originally released in 1972, it's credited to Music De Wolfe legends Simon Haseley (real name Simon Park) and "Peter Reno" (a collaborative alias used by composers Clifford "Cliff" Twemlow and Peter Taylor)
Confused? No matter. It's one of the most consistent libraries you'll ever hear, packed with heavy blaxploitation-esque drama-funk break themes.
This is that absolute stank-face filth: hard, espionage drama-soul and tough, jazzy street-funk. Hogan, The Hawk & Dirty John Crown sounds like the soundtrack of a blaxploitation movie from the early 70s and, packed with funky fusion and smoother orchestral numbers, it is basically that.
Featuring a veritable who's who of killer library break snakes - Alan Parker, Alan Hawkshaw (under sneaky alias William Parrish), Simon Haseley, Reg Tilsley and Gordon Grant - it's not hard to see how this commands over £350 on secondary markets.
This beautifully presented reissue, part of Be With's fresh campaign with the legendary library label Music De Wolfe, is well overdue.
Be With Records proudly presents this limited-edition 140g LP (just 750 copies worldwide), remastered by Simon Francis from the original Music De Wolfe tapes. Originally released on Rouge—a subsidiary of the esteemed British library label—the album features the in-house talents of composers Chris Rae and Frank McDonald under the Soul City Orchestra moniker. Pressed at Record Industry in Holland with restored iconic artwork, it captures driving instrumental funk-rock enhanced by dramatic strings.
A Senegalese Griot singer, an Amsterdam improviser and a Puerto Rican jazz drummer find eachother on an open playground, a stage build for improvisation, an old cinema now used for minute made story telling. Equiped with an m'bira, a xalam, a drumkit, a voice, percussion, house hold tools and an electric chlavichord on 220 volt, they sit down and take off: Wrrrrrraaang!
Singer and percussionist Mola Sylla is in many ways a musical explorer. Born and raised in Dakar, Senegal, he grew up in the tradition of the griots. Griots play conveying stories – sometimes decorated with music, theater and dance – which all play an important role in West African culture. His rhythm and melodic compositions differ from the western agreed schedules and provide surprising twists.
Puerto Rican drummer Frank Rosaly has been involved in the improvised and experimental music scenes since 2001 when he became an integral part of Chicago's musical fabric, navigating a fine line between the vibrant improvised music, experimental, rock and jazz communities.
Oscar Jan Hoogland is the sound of Amsterdam in person. He is an instant composer and inventor of his own instrument by joining a clavichord, a keyboard instrument from the 17th century, to 220 Volt electricity. As the last student of the late pianist, composer and improvisor Misha Mengelberg he tears like a tornado through the Amsterdam jazz and impro scene.
Together they are MOTHER TONGUE.
About a hundred kilometers south-west of Bamako, on the left bank of the Niger River, the Malian village of Kela is known to be home to a large community of griot musicians (jeliw) mostly belonging to the Diabaté family. Their art is recognised throughout West Africa and many griots come from all over the world to stay there, sometimes for several years, in the hope of becoming immersed in it. The six pieces for voice accompanied by guitar or traditional koni lutes were recorded in 1978 (tracks 3 to 6) and in 2019 (tracks 1 to 3), in the same traditional dwelling, which still serves as a "studio". The accompanying booklet contains the testimonies of several important musicians who took part in the recording, and evoke key elements of their universe
“Children Of The Fire” is a monumental spiritual‑jazz suite from 1974, led by trumpeter Hannibal Marvin Peterson and his Sunrise Orchestra. The album explores themes of war and prayer, anger and hope, unfolding as a powerful, large‑scale work of deep emotional and spiritual intensity.
Birds In Their Cages dives further into the Paris 1942 tape archive. While the main album juxtaposes original compositions with SCG-style group improv, this bonus LP features cover songs and guest sessions that would commonly take place in Moe's living room. Highlights include Srogoncik's bulbous Beefheartian sketch "Berlin Mood" and early Alan Bishop rager "Let's Hop Trains." Side Two opens with a beautifully demented take on VU's "Heroin." Closing the set is a live performance of "White Light/White Heat" from P42's first show, 5-18-1982 at Merlin's, Tempe, AZ.
The Montreal duo Library L’Amour weave a delicate, dream‑like synth‑pop romance on Premier Caprice. The EP gathers four songs recorded by Yasmine Ixe and Richard Ryan Wenger over the course of their three‑and‑a‑half‑year relationship.
William Basinski's epochal four-album box of slowly decomposing memories gets its long-overdue deluxe reissue, with liner notes from Laurie Anderson and a fresh mastering job from Josh Bonati.
Undoubtedly one of the greatest "ambient" albums of our era, 'The Disintegration Loops' is an enduring aesthetic touchstone. It didn't exist in a vacuum when it appeared in the early '00s, as the dust settled after 9/11, but Basinski's prescient meditation on decay in the wake of tragedy felt like a musical mark in the sand - a body of work that changed the way we think about repetition and tape saturation. The story goes that the composer, who'd been recording loop-based, minimalist experiments since the '70s, inspired by Brian Eno's 'Discreet Music' and Steve Reich's 'It's Gonna Rain', was going through his archive of reel-to-reel tapes when he realized the ferrite was flaking away from the plastic. Not willing to give up on the material, he recorded the output, letting the tape head destroy his pieces irreparably and adding reverb to the output.
Now, this would have been good enough without the additional context, but Basinski finished 'Disintegration Loops' on the morning of September 11, 2001, and played the first piece to his friends as they sat on the roof of his apartment block, watching agape as events unfolded. He used the footage he shot at the time for the covers of each disc, and the suite's solemn, thoughtful decline served as the unofficial soundtrack of our collective grief, an unfussy reminder of tragedy that plays out its haunted remnants of the past until they die, quite literally. There's been plenty of music that's aped Basinski's method since, and we don't doubt there'll be plenty more, but there's nothing quite like the original, and this latest remaster is the definitive version.
Luciano Cilio was born in Naples, Italy, in 1950. He studied music and architecture and, in the late '60s, collaborated with local artist Alan Sorrenti, American expat Shawn Phillips and various avant-garde theater groups. A virtuoso guitarist and self-taught composer, Cilio released only one LP before his untimely death at the age of 33.
Dialoghi Del Presente (1977) is a work like no other, one that sounds both ancient and ahead of its time. Produced by Renato Marengo, it features a series of muted tableaux for strings, woodwinds, guitar, chorus, piano and percussion. Cilio carves out a space where subtle, repetitive phrases yield – almost imperceptibly – to breathtaking silence.
As Jim O'Rourke writes, "These recordings sound as if they were to please no one but himself; they feel self-contained, introspective, and determined ... You can feel in the music a sort of necessity that can be rarely found, like in This Heat's debut or Nick Drake's Pink Moon."
While each subsequent "quadro" grows more abstract, Cilio draws the listener into an expansive, pastoral soundscape. The closing piece, "Interludio," begins with a plaintive guitar, which is joined by haunting strings and woodwinds before concluding, poignantly, as the album began, with Cilio and his guitar, alone once more.
Superior Viaduct's edition reproduces the original sleeve design. Sourced from the original master tapes. Recommended for fans of Johann Johannsson, Talk Talk's Spirit of Eden, Arvo Part and Popol Vuh.
“If I have anything to contribute to this art form . . . It’s a voice of our culture. This is a voice right out of them cotton fields—this ain’t out of the conservatory. This is out of the neighborhood. And that’s where my impetus comes from . . . I have seen it from the bottom up.”.—Julius Hemphill
“Throughout my years of talking with Julius, the desire on his part to reach a directness of expression, to communicate in a direct way, was an ongoing imperative in his thoughts. The Dogon A.D. recording session introduces him to the world as a protean composer, as a singular and passionate improviser and instrumentalist, and as a cultural thinker. In this striving toward transcendence, he brings in a sense of celebration and high spirits, of tough loss and sadness, and of proud resistance and survival. This recording, made on a cold February day in St. Louis in a studio with little heat, has lit up the musical world for so many for so long. It is wonderful to have it available again in this iteration for a new generation of listeners.” -- (from the liner notes)
Meticulously remastered & includes a 28-page booklet with new notes by Marty Ehrlich, complemented by several stills from a 30-minute film of an early ’70s dance performance featuring complete performances of Dogon A.D. and Rites with Hemphill, Baikida Carroll, Phillip Wilson, and John Hicks.
This, at long last, is the definitive edition of this seminal jazz masterwork.
In the pantheon of classic free jazz, Noah Howard's The Black Ark looms large. Recorded at Bell Sound Studios in New York City in 1969 - just prior to the alto saxophonist's relocation to Europe - the album was eventually released in 1972 on Alan Bates's Freedom label, and has since acquired near-mythical status among collectors and devotees of the music. Now, Superior Viaduct presents the definitive remastered edition on vinyl, restoring this landmark to the visibility it has always deserved. Born in New Orleans in 1943, Howard grew up saturated in gospel and the deep traditions of the Crescent City before making his way west to Los Angeles, where he studied with Dewey Johnson, and eventually to New York, where he fell into the orbit of Sun Ra. By the mid-1960s he had already cut two remarkable records for ESP-Disk - Noah Howard Quartet and At Judson Hall - but The Black Ark was something else entirely: a quantum leap, the moment when everything locked into place.
The Black Ark exhibits not only the power and imagination of Howard's playing, but also his breadth as a composer and bandleader. Listeners expecting unrelenting blasts of "energy music" might be surprised to find a cohesion atypical of free jazz; amidst the wild, impassioned solos, Howard weaves in Latin rhythms and fat-bottomed grooves. The first side, consisting of Domiabra and Ole Negro, sets the album's tone - both tracks sound as if they could have appeared on some of Blue Note's proto-spiritual jazz, groove-heavy releases, evoking the likes of Horace Silver or Bobby Hutcherson, before ceding the floor to the horn players' anarchic firepower. Mount Fuji, the extended centerpiece, builds from a spare, almost Japanese-inflected melody into fifteen minutes of breathtaking interplay, while Queen Anne closes the record as a ballad of devastating lyricism - proof that Howard's command of his alto was as refined in whisper as it was in fury.
The ensemble Howard assembled is nothing short of extraordinary. As John Corbett writes in the liner notes: "Two players stand out. Bassist Norris Jones - who would soon consolidate his name into a one-word reversed amalgamation/permutation of the two, Sirone - is given ample room, largely unaccompanied; his corporal approach foreshadows later work with the Revolutionary Ensemble. But the secret weapon on The Black Ark is Arthur Doyle. Straight from basement rehearsal sessions with Milford Graves, whose ensemble he had joined and who remained a favorite of the drummer for decades, Doyle is a human flamethrower." Trumpeter Earl Cross's guttural, vocal effects complement Doyle's take-no-prisoners approach, while the estimable combination of Muhammad Ali (Rashied's brother) on drums and Juma Sultan on congas adds an ever-shifting propulsion. The septet is rounded out by the enigmatic pianist Leslie Waldron, who anchors the group with imaginative accompaniment and occasional boppish flourishes.
Noah Howard would go on to record prolifically through the 1970s and 80s, founding his own AltSax label and living between Paris, Nairobi, and Brussels before his death in 2010. But The Black Ark remains the burning heart of his legacy - every bit worthy of its reputation as an "out-jazz" holy grail, a record that only sounds better with age. It remains the ideal album to convert the remaining free-jazz skeptics.
Brazilian avant-jazz vanguardists Grupo Um celebrate their 50th anniversary, sharing a second previously lost 1970s album from the vaults. Nineteen Seventy Seven (titled after the year it was recorded) is another rip-roaring instrumental fusion treasure from the band which spawned from within Hermeto Pascoal’s famed mid-1970s São Paulo collective.
Like their debut album Starting Point, Grupo Um’s Nineteen Seventy Seven was recorded when Brazil's military dictatorship was at its most repressive. “There were no open doors to those who dreamt to be protagonists in creative instrumental music”, remembers drummer Zé Eduardo Nazario, “even popular composers and singers had to submit their songs to censors and many records were banned and confiscated from the stores.”
Just like Hermeto Pascoal's Viajando Com O Som (1977) and Grupo Um's previous album Starting Point (1975), both of which remained unreleased until the 21st century, Zé Eduardo asserts that the 1977 album was flatly 'without any chance to be released at that time."
Recorded at Rogério Duprat’s Vice-Versa Studios in São Paulo, the group were under both time and space restraints, “we chose the small Studio B,” Lelo Nazario recalls, “which had a Tascam (TE AC) 12x8 console and a 4-channel AMPEX AG 440 machine. Therefore, we had to record without overdubs, everything straight to tape.”
Expanding from a trio to a quintet, original Grupo Um members Lelo Nazario (keys), Zé Eduardo Nazario (drums), and Zeca Assumpção (bass) were joined by saxophonist Roberto Sion and percussionist Carlinhos Gonçalves. Carlinhos, Zé and Zeca had already played together in the group Mandala, while brothers Lelo and Zé had just finished a stint backing Hermeto Pascoal during his years in São Paulo.
Lelo was deeply immersed in modular synthesizer experimentation during this period, working extensively with the ARP2600 and EMS Synthi AKS. These electroacoustic explorations formed the sonic foundation for "Mobile/Stabile," one of his first compositions to merge modular synthesis with Brazilian music, a fusion that would ripple throughout the Brazilian jazz scene. The piece premiered at the first São Paulo International Jazz Festival in 1978, performed by Grupo Um with guest trumpeter Márcio Montarroyos. In a shocking moment, festival organizers interrupted the show mid-performance, sparking fierce backlash from both audience members and journalists who denounced the incident as artistic censorship during Brazil's era of political and cultural repression. The version on Nineteen Seventy Seven is the first recording of the composition.
Nineteen Seventy Seven combines Afro-Brazilian rhythm, modular synthesis and a plethora of whistles, percussion and effects pedals. Album opener “Absurdo Mudo” - so titled for the absurd difficulty it poses to the musicians performing it - starts out in a cloud of mysterious dissonance, before the haze breaks for a glorious keyboard and saxophone interplay atop an uptempo samba groove. “Cortejo dos Reis Negros (Version 2)” (Procession of the Black Kings), based on the maracatu rhythm, inverts the traditional jazz song structure by beginning with improvisations, which are followed by the theme and a final coda. “The studio also had two Parasound electronic reverb units,” Lelo notes, “and the timbre is very audible on the soprano sax and percussion.”
Grupo Um’s daring music represents a manifesto of resistance during the dictatorship years, but it’s one which remains just as relevant today. As Lelo puts it: “For me, the aesthetic issue has always been about combining contemporary avant-garde languages with Brazilian music, independent of categories and commercial interests. The result of this fusion takes music to a new level.”
Nineteen Seventy Seven will be released for the first time on vinyl LP, CD and digitally on 23rd January 2026 via Far Out Recordings.
Lost Coast: Some Visionary Music from California (1980-1992) assembles little-known sounds from California’s metaphysical underground. Each recording is stylistically different—dream pop, guitar soli, fourth world, avant-electronic—but they are held together by a regional ethos of the “visionary.” This is music that sees through the mind’s eye and conjures new worlds.
Some people say that California is where “the nuts stop rolling”—where those too eccentric to fit in elsewhere often find themselves. What was meant pejoratively is easily reclaimed as a celebration of the free-thinking and the freely-freaking. Until the turn of the millennium, all manner of seekers rolled westward until they hit the pacific. Stationed along this edge, music was a way to roll still further, imagining territories unencountered and wavelengths as yet unheard.
Lost Coast is a commemoration of the people who made these journeys and a resurrection of recordings they made little effort to broadcast. While some pieces were originally released with modest distribution, others were only shared among friends or never shared at all. All tracks were found on cassettes in flea markets, barn sales, rural thrift stores, and even stranger places—outside a gem and mineral shop, for example, and on the ranch of a retired mescaline dealer.
Regardless of their obscurity, these recordings are eminently listenable. California, after all, is a place where the strange and the pleasurable are frequent bedfellows.