"The second release is Shape Shifters by This Friendship Is Sailing...the tone is set by the playful, childlike sounds permeating "We hear you, we hear you". Several minutes into the mewling cacophony, Nicols launches into a story about hearing a baby cry during a visit to Sicily. Instead of trying to quiet the infant, the adults of the community took a position of solidarity with it, meeting its need to make noise with reassuring vocalisations of their own. In Nicols telling, this anecdote becomes a powerful affirmation of prelinguistic sonority. Although devoid of semantic content, a baby's cries are intensely communicative- an apt metaphor for Nicol's own improvisatory practice" - The Wire ---  Maggie Nicols / voice, piano, tap danceOdie JI Ghast / voiceSam Andreae /  homemade electronics + alto saxophoneDavid Birchall / electric guitar ---Recorded live at Cafe Oto, London on 25th August 2021 by Adam MatschulatMixed by Sam Andreae and edited by David BirchallCover and the other paintings by Mio EbisuBand photographs by Andrew BrooksDesign by David Birchall

A Manchester-London lock-down special by bassist Otto Willberg & guitarist David Birchall, "exploring certain spaces that are out of touch, maybe forgotten, bypassed, existing on the fringes - ’shadowed spaces'". Created by sending each other recordings of themselves playing in spaces near to their respective abodes, they melded the material together by revisiting the spaces and playing each of the recordings back to activate each others' acoustic. The result - like a photo of a murky landscape processed through multiple exposures - is a frothing mudbath of hollers, bellied drones, clattering percussion, creeping voices and caustic vibrations, resonating through streets, tunnels, open spaces and deep into our mind nuggets. David and Otto's work together in junk-rock/no-wave group Historically Fucked and in various free music settings has showcased their taste for bin rattling improv-flex and obscene humour, but we're pretty certain they've never made anything remotely like this. Music that teeters the line between the banal, the deeply weird and the beautiful. Fans of Peter Brötzmann & Han Bennink's 'Schwarzwaldfahrt', Blood Stereo's aural slimeballs and Idea Fire Company's intimate ritualistic melancholia - dig!