Musician, writer and filmmaker, Sunik Kim follows up ‘The Bent Bow Must Wait to Be Released’ (Takuroku 2021) with their second LP - a deadly serious dismantling of the limits of contemporary computer music, delivered with playful dexterity and a touch of slapstick humour, a la Henry Cow.  Enlisting General MIDI to create frenetic, vital patterns of dis-organisation made up of gleeful synthetic trumpets, wry orchestral sweeps and brutal key clusters, Sunik Kim explodes a kind of simplistic sound into complex, beautifully uncertain structures. Rather than attempting to overwhelm or stun the listener into subjectivity, ‘Potential’ is ever shifting; regularly breaking form and unfolding, discreetly nibbling at the concept of the Spectacle and un-doing fatally closed systems of cyclic music.  On first listens we recalled Cecil Taylor’s Unit Structures, Stockhausen’s Gruppen, and even those weirdo attempts at making music from inside the world of Animal Crossing, Lil Jürg Frey. The overflowing ideas of Henry Cow (to which Kim dedicated a fantastically blended mix for the Wire in 2021) never drift too far from view, but contemporary counterparts lay few except for Yorkshire's most eminent polyceleratrix, Gretchen Aury, who we asked to write the liners. Gretchen’s words are unsurprisingly as extraordinary as the record itself, so we’ll close out the call to elicit a Media response to possibly the wildest OTOROKU yet with their words: “Potential reads as a rare honest response to the disaster capitalist era of the apparent nearing end of the anthropocene, a cyborg music which is not hopelessly psychotic like so much contemporary and especially computer-requiring music, but lucidly possessed with rapture, pain, madness, empathy, ecstasy, torment, fragility; all those vital feelings and incentives which our atrociously depressing times seem engineered to quash and bleed out of us. This sound is a blistering Electro Magnetic Pulse wave of revolutionary hope, exclaiming defiantly that History is not over, that the future is not ‘history,’ that there is still a vast multitude of ideas and identities burning brightly and resiliently, despite the fact that they are inconceivable to the tyrannical Hegemonic axis of global capitalist tech-culture. I ask of you, listener, if you truly wish to plunge beyond The Known, give yourself over in full to this record.” — Artwork by Sunik Kim Layout and design by Jeroen Wille  Liner notes by Vymethoxy Redspiders Mastered by Anotine Nouel at Sound Love Studios Track 1 edited by John Wall —

Telyn Wrachïod Urquhart gan Ardival / Urquhart bray harp by Ardival. Recordiwyd gan Jethro Chaplin ar y 24ain o Awst 2023, yn Stiwdios Mwnci, Dolwilym. Recorded by Jethro Chaplin on the 24th of August 2023, at Mwnci Studios, Dolwilym. Ôl-gynhyrchwyd gan / Mastered by Sam Grant. Dylunio gan / Design by Anna Peaker. Darlun gan / Drawing by Jean-Luc Guionnet. Mae Cildraeth Sienco yn fyrfyfyriad sy’n seiliedig ar gyfuniad o nodiant a strwythur y darn Brandy Cove gan Angharad Jenkins â thiwnio tannau amgen ‘Cywair yn Nghywair y Wrach’ o lawysgrif Robert ap Huw. Cildraeth Sienco is an improvisation based on an amalgamation of the notation and structure of Angharad Jenkins’ Brandy Cove with the alternative string tuning of ‘Cywair yn Nghywair y Wrach’ from Robert ap Huw’s manuscript. Diolch i / Thank you to: Nia Daniel, Richard Dawson, Carl Ludwig Hübsch, Angharad Jenkins, Dafydd Roberts, Catrin Rowlands, Soundtrips NRW, Bill Taylor, Fern Thomas, Amy Treharne, Daniel G. Williams.

Relics of the Horsehair harp This collection is a companion piece to my solo album ‘Telyn Rawn’ AMGEN 001 (2020). I have invited some of my favourite musicians to respond to the eighteen improvised pieces on ‘Telyn Rawn’. I asked each contributor to imagine that the musical material improvised in 2020 was an ancient musical form that had fully existed in the medieval period, and, that each of their responses were to have happened centuries after the imagined formation of the ‘Telyn Rawn’ pieces. This album therefore proposes a new imagined repertoire that emerges from an already speculatively built instrument and equally re-imagined repertoire. As guitarist C Joynes comments, these creative responses offer a kind of ‘speculative fiction’ approach to the source material. At the point where this music reaches you, it has been filtered through imagined passages of time, various musical languages and histories, and channelled through the fictional ecologies of musicians, locations and instrumentation. The title given to this album of imaginary musical histories, ‘Creiriau y Delyn Rawn’ or ‘Relics of the Horsehair harp’, is inspired by the title Edward Jones gave to his manuscript ‘Musical, Poetical, and Historical Relicks of the Welsh Bards and Druids’ (1802), a title I have always loved. Rhodri Davies, Abertawe 

Rhodri Davies self reissue of  Wound Response originally released by Alt Vinyl in 2012. Reissued alongside the solo acoustic 'An Air swept Clean Of All Distance', Wound Response is loud, distorted and forms an attempt to work with rhythm and pitches in an open and fluid way. --- Wound Response was first released on LP with Alt Vinyl, av038 (2012) and formed a radical departure for Davies’s solo work. Inspired by the ‘Destruction in Art Symposium’ (1966). Davies used two main techniques: over-articulate the strings (what harpists are taught notto do) and attack the strings with a plectrum, forcing the tuning into new relationships until the strings eventually broke. This is the first time that this album will be released on CD. “Wound Response is a raw recording scored for solo lap harp, overdrive, volume pedal and twin amplifiers. The fuzz is particularly cranky here, giving Rhodri’s obsessively repetitive harp soundings the kinda scorch of solo Masayuki Takayanagi.”David Keenan, Volcanic Tongue 2012 --- AMGEN CD002

ll人 = Daichi Yoshikawa + Paul Abbott + Seymour Wright lll人 came from London in 2012, and played there, and internationally: Berlin, Bratislava, Budapest, Dala Floda, Glasgow, Hong Kong, Ljublana, Paris, and Tokyo. With lll人 the tools are familiar, the listening is not. VICTOR is a 2-CD for lll人's friend Victor Schonfield (1940-2022). released March 7, 2024 CD1 = yE Recorded (after a John Tilbury solo) at Cafe OTO by Shaun Crook on August 31, 2016. Mixed by John Chantler CD2 = Ah Recorded (before a KK Null solo) at Cafe OTO by Shaun Crook on December 8, 2016. Mixed by Paul Abbott

Two new solo works by Kieran Daly and Luciano Maggiore ‘Complex envelope functions from nonlinear I/O and feature extraction etc’ and ‘Automatic Love’, sharing one disc. The first instance of these two presenting work in company; they play well together, forming a cohesive ‘split’ disc from beginning to end. Composed in 2023, both pieces deal with electronic and acoustic recorded sound, whilst presenting the distinctive, recognisable and acute styles of both artists. The music is available in digital and physical formats, with mastering by Taku Unami.

Anne Gillis (Paris) is a composer and performer since the eighties, Paul Abbott (Antwerp ) is a musician, drummer, writer, and Seymour Wright (London) is a saxophonist and writer. In 2021, during Covid restrictions, the trio of Anne Gillis and XT (Paul Abbott and Seymour Wright) developed a piece remotely together for Café Oto online radio broadcast program. A one-hour piece titled “Our/s Bouture(s)” was ‘broadcast’ on 1 June 2021 to online audinece, and we present a complete program with careful CD mastering by Giuseppe Ielasi. The trio’s concept for “Our/s Bouture(s)” is to ‘plant’ sounds and movements, which will grow and evolve through broadcasting, and what you will hear is not a 'performance' but a one-hour journey of organic sonic sound structure.

Following nearly 20 years of working together as a trio, and numerous cross-collaborations in different configuration between them, Ideologic Organ presents Placelessness, the debut full-length by Chris Abrahams, Oren Ambarchi, and Robbie Avenaim, comprising two long-form works at juncture of ambient music, minimalism, rigorous experimentalism and improvisation, and machine music. Having carved distinct pathways across a diverse number of musical idioms for decades, Chris Abrahams, Oren Ambarchi, and Robbie Avenaim are each, respectively, among the most noteworthy and groundbreaking figures to have emerged from Australia’s thriving experimental music scene. Ambarchi and Avenaim first encountered Abrahams when seeing the Necks - the project that has served as the primary vehicle for his singular approach to the piano since its founding in 1987 - together during the late 1980s, not long after having met in Sydney’s underground music community. The pair’s collaborations date back more than 35 years, criss-crossing Ambarchi’s pioneering solo and ensemble work for guitar and Avenaim’s visionary efforts for SARPS (Semi Automated Robotic Percussion System), robotic and kinetic extensions to his drum kit. In 2004, fate brought the three together in a trio performance at the What Is Music? Festival, the annual touring showcase of experimental music founded and run by Ambarchi and Avenaim between 1994-2012. For the nearly two decades since, Abrahams, Ambarchi, and Avenaim have intermittently reformed in exclusively live contexts, in Australia and abroad, cultivating and refining the fertile ground first tilled in that early meeting. Placelessness is the first album to present this remarkable trio’s efforts in recorded form. Placelessness is the joining of three highly individualised streams, working in perfect harmony; the point at which friendship, mutual respect, and decades of creative exploration produce a singular spectrum of sound. Featuring Abrahams on piano, Ambarchi on guitar, and Avenaim on drums, the album’s two sides draw on each artist’s enduring dedication to long-form composition. Its two pieces, Placelessness I and Placelessness II, initially began as a single, 40 minute work, before being divided and reworked into distinct, complimentary gestures for the corresponding sides of the LP. Beginning with restrained clusters of reverberant piano tones, Placelessness I progresses at an almost glacial pace, with Abrahams’ interventions increasing met by sparse responses, darting within vast ambiences, on guitar and percussion by Ambarchi and Avenaim. Remarkably conversational within its convergences of tonal, rhythmic, and textural abstraction, over the work’s duration a progressive sense of tension unfurls and contracts, refusing release, as each of the ensemble’s members contribute to an increasingly tangled sense of density at its resolve. While an entirely autonomous work, Placelessness II rapidly realises a distillation of the energy hinted at across the length of its predecessor. Following a luring passage of harmonious calm, Abrahams’ launches into shimmering lines of repeating arpeggios, complimented at each escalation of tempo by Avenaim’s machine gun fire percussion work and Ambarchi’s masterful delivery of tonality and texture, as the trio collectively generate dense sheets of pointillistic ambience within which individual identity is almost lost, before slowly unspooling into unexpected abstractions and dissonances that deftly intervene with the work’s inner logic and calm. What could easily be termed a maximalist take on Minimalism, Placelessness is a masterstroke of contemporary, real time composition, that blurs the boundaries between ambient music, experimentalism, free improvisation, and machine music. Drawing on Chris Abrahams, Oren Ambarchi, and Robbie Avenaim’s decades of respective solo and collaborative practice, and the culmination of nearly twenty years of working together as a trio, it’s two durational pieces - Placelessness I and Placelessness II - take form with a startling sense of effortlessness and grace, neither shying away from explicit beauty or rigorously tension within their forms. 

Continuing Black Truffle’s series of releases documenting the recent work of legendary American experimental composer Alvin Lucier, String Noise presents three major works for violin solo and duo composed between 2004 and 2019. Lucier has developed his compositions in close collaboration with many instrumentalists over the years; the three works presented here are performed by the violinists for whom they were originally written, Conrad Harris and Pauline Kim Harris, who together make up the innovative violin duo String Noise, and have premiered works by a plethora of major figures in contemporary music. The long-form compositions presented here continue Lucier’s life-long exploration of acoustic phenomena, drawing on aspects of some of his most well-known compositions and extending them into new instrumentation. Tapper (2004) extends the experiments with echolocation – gathering information about an environment by listening to the echoes of sounds produced within it – that Lucier began with his classic 1969 work Vespers, where performers explore a space equipped with hand-held pulse oscillators. Here, the same principle is put into practice for solo violin, the body of which the performer taps repeatedly with the butt end of the bow while moving around the performance space. The result is a subtly shifting web of echoes and resonances produced by the reflection of the sharp tap off the surfaces of the room (in this case, the Drawing Center in New York). In Love Song (2016), two violinists are connected by a long wire stretched between the bridges of their instruments, causing the sounds played on one violin to also be heard through the other. As the two violinists play long tones using only the open E string, they move in a circular motion around the performance space, thus changing the tension of the wire, which creates a remarkable array of variations in pitch and timbre ranging from ghostly wavering pitches reminiscent of a singing saw to near-electronic tones. In Halo (2019), one or more violinists walk slowly through the performance space in a zig-zag pattern while sustaining long tones. As in Tapper, the consistent sound production reveals the sonic properties of the environment. As the title of the piece suggests, the outcome is a shimmering halo of sound produced by the reflection of the violin’s extended tones off the walls and ceiling of the performance space (in this case, Alvin's home).  

From David Toop What are field recordings? “My memory is not what it used to be, David,” my grandfather, Syd Senior, said to me as we huddled round a fireplace in 1979. Thanks to a cassette tape I have the memory of his gradual loss of memory, hearing him speak of Queen Victoria’s funeral and the severity of patriotism back in those old days, 1901. Syd Senior is long dead, no longer part of the field of living relations but still within the field of memories that can be revived by technology, albeit an old one that squeaks like a mouse, hisses like a cat.Where is the field? The field is populated by all the ravishing, painful, poignant, nondescript moments of remembered life. Field recordings forget, just as memories forget. My recording of Ornette Coleman forgets that he fell asleep as we were talking together. I sat quietly, waiting for him to wake; the tape machine continued its work, oblivious.During lockdown, a warm spring day, I sat working in the garden. A small fox appeared close to me, started, retreated into the shelter of plants by my pond. I took a photo with my phone but when I looked at the image no fox was visible. Earlier that day I had been reading Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, a collection of short stories written by Pu Songling during the course of his life in the late seventeenth/early eighteenth century. In many of these tales, fox spirits inhabit the physical spaces of living humans in a variety of guises. Some are malicious; some benign. Their presence in the material world is wrong and yet accepted as either a temporary nuisance or a blessing that would later be regretted.“All the memories are very incomplete,” said Annabel Nicolson during a conversation I recorded with her in the early 1990s. “It’s like trying to substantiate something that was important to us . . . When I was younger I thought that didn’t matter. I thought everything could be transient because people would always be creating more . . . when you get older it seems rather different because you realise many wonderful things have just vanished. Which in some ways doesn’t matter but it also means that they can’t be shared with anyone other than those who were there.” 

Joe McPhee and Ingebrigt Haker Flaten at the Sugar Maple/Okka Fest on Saturday, June 6th, 2015. Joe McPhee - tenor and soprano saxophone. Ingebrigt Haker Flaten - double bass. Recorded live by Dave Zuchowski. Mastered by Martin Siewert in July/August 2016.  

Duo (London) 1993 is a live album featuring performances by saxophonists Anthony Braxton and Evan Parker which was recorded at the Bloomsbury Theatre as part of the 1993 London Jazz Festival and released on the Leo label

Unity Variations is an album by British jazz saxophonist Evan Parker and German pianist Georg Gräwe, which was recorded in 1998 during the Empty Bottle Festival of Jazz and Improvised Music and released on Okka Disk. Before this live performance, they had played in duo just once before at the 1991 October Meeting at the Bimhuis in Amsterdam

Improviser Jean-Marc Foussat has been appearing in these pages on a regular basis, sometimes solo or in groups, often presenting excellent releases on his own Fou Records label. Today’s double disc set Cafe Oto 2020 (FOU RECORDS FR – CD 38/39) holds a special personal place in his heart, I would assume. We’ve long known that he was drawn to free improvisation in the early 1980s, and personally made some great recordings of live music that ended up on the Incus label. He told the story of his epiphany to this magazine in 2004 (TSP 12th issue). “Travelling from Nice to Italy, because I’d read in a Jazz magazine an advert about the Florence/Pisa festival in 78 or 79, I received confirmation of the kind of music I wanted to engage with, hear, listen, do, live and love. Something was happening in this festival as a meeting between the US and the European way of music, between Jazz and Contemporary music, and the confrontation of those two spirits was marvellous…listening to the Lovens/Lytton duet I thought the music I was hearing was genuinely coming directly from the brains of those two human beings playing together.” Further episodes of the story, and connections with great musicians, are contained in the liner to today’s release; he met Daunik Lazro at Angouleme around this time, and counts him as a lifelong friend. And he met Evan Parker at that Pisa and Florence festival, confirming that “I was so overwhelmed by the power of their music that I decided on the spot throw myself into the adventure, body and soul”. Some forty years later, these musicians remain his friends, and he is still in love with the music. When invited to play at Cafe OTO in London, he was delighted at the chance and invited his two “prime friends” to play with him. The results of this 22 January 2020 concert are now ours to enjoy…the opening set is Foussat solo for 31:35, playing his Synthi AKS – an instrument he has made all his own – and adding wailing tones with his singing voice. ‘Inventing Chimeras’ is strikingly original synth music, 100% improvised on an instrument not often associated with or heard within this genre. Characteristically for this very passionate player, the music is filled with emotion, passing through numerous turbulent and stormy passages (some of them verging on the terrifying), balanced out with melancholic and still sequences of plaintive wailing. Voice and instrument merge seamlessly, and the classical imagery of the title is enough to allow us to hear other supernatural beings from antiquity, such as the Furies or dead spirits from the house of Hades. Heartfelt and haunting music for sure, and stamped with the very honest and expressive personality of Jean-Marc Foussat. It’s some way from the wild noise of his 1980 solo LP i, but the subtlety and craft of this work is non-pareil. The second disc, titled ‘Présent Manifeste’, is the trio of Daunik Lazro (tenor and baritone sax) and Evan Parker (soprano), playing with Foussat on the Synthi and voice. What makes this work so well is that it’s a glorious polyphony – four voices (effectively) all sounding at the same time and not getting in each other’s way…the circular loops, intricate repeated patterns, and inventive drones of Parker, the alienated cries and heroic warrior-shouts of Foussat, his freaky synth noises and echoed repeats, and the romantic and florid lines of Lazro. Everything overlapping and mutating in a free-form and free-floating array of ideas. Also much to enjoy in the full-on continuity of the music; no mindless droning on automatic pilot, nor is the music fractured into multiple unconnected outbursts of sputtering, restless, “free” music. It couldn’t have turned out better if the whole 44:50 had been composed and scored from start to finish; this is real interaction and telepathy at work. And yet apparently it was the first time they played as a trio. “For the past 40 years we have been dreaming the music we could make together,” writes Jean-Marc wistfully, “and finally, here we are, the three of us, for the very first time.” From 1st June 2020; an essential set.

LP - Edition of 300 copies, handmade textile artwork w/ printed inner / CD Edition of 150 copies, handmade textile artwork Sylvain Chauveau has been releasing quiet and minimal compositions on various labels for more than two decades. ultra-minimal marks his debut for Sonic Pieces and takes the minimal approach even further, centring on reduction and limitation. The album was recorded live at Café Oto, London in March 2022 - one of Sylvain’s rare solo concerts and the first time he performed publicly with only acoustic instruments; no machines, no recorded sounds have been used, only piano, guitar, harmonium and melodica, played one at the time. While some of the compositions are completely new, others are live versions of previously released pieces which have either been performed close to their original or stripped-down, reduced to a single instrument and partly rearranged. This reveals a predilection for repetitions and variations that Sylvain shares with Jim Jarmusch, and at the same time it is a personal attempt to avoid electronic devices as a tool for live music. The artwork and track titles follow this reductionist idea and an aesthetic of miniaturization that Sylvain has developed for many years. They refer to the minimalist, concrete poetry that he writes regularly. In this context rewriting some of the original titles was a consistent implication to achieve a complete work, an album that perfectly represents Sonic Pieces’ aesthetics, both musically and visually.

Switchback - Plywie Kacza 201 Paradiso Infernal - Live 2022 Schlippenbach / Johansson - The Fox Let's Go 2017 Full Blast - Moods 2007 Uruk - Live 2019 Last Dream Of The Morning - Shaken Light 2021 Snekkestad / Guy / Fernandez - Ripples 2018 The End - Translated Slaughter 2019 Schnee - No Time 2018 Jim O'Rourke - Live 2010 InAWhirl - Nido IV 2021 Joelle Leandre - Live 2013 Also - Twelve 2021 Amado / Corsano - Seeking 2019 Caspar Brötzmann Bass Totem - When Black Days Never End Part 1 2021 Bruch - Sugary 2017 Vandermark / Kurzmann / Kern - Swan Song 2021 The Thing - Live 2017 Part 4 They Shall Not Pass  /  No Pasaran!Live on planet earth - in the spirit of freedom, peace and solidarityAs we saw the horrible events going on in the Ukraine, we wanted to do something as a label as well beside donating on a personal level. many (trost related) artists answered right away and were enthusiastic to participate. the material-collecting and mastering took some time, but sadly it is still an issue and no-one knows how long this despicable war will last. the title of the compilation is "No Pasaran" (they shall not pass) translated into Ukrainian. it was a shout in the 30s to defend democracy in spain, to fight against the fascists.big thanks to all artists, bookers, venues and helpers involved.the great work of Martin Siewert and Lasse Marhaug was happening in support of this project, longtime cd pressing company Gusstaff Records made a special price and the austrian SKE fonds gave financial support.all proceeds of this compilation are donated to an artist-run Ukrainian aid organisation helping victims of the war, recommended by Ken Vandermark

all music by Brötzmann (Gema) and Nilssen-Love (Tono) published by Cien Fuegos Note: tracklist is different for LP and CD / digital format credits released January 26, 2024 Peter Brötzmann - tarogato, bb clarinet, contra-alto clarinet, bass saxophone, bass clarinet Paal Nilssen-Love - drums, gongs, percussion recorded by Michael Huon at Zuiderpershuis, Antwerp 25-26th of August 2015 mixed and mastered by Martin Siewert produced by Paal Nilssen-Love and Peter Brötzmann woodcut by Brötzmann, used for duo tour 2013 cover design by Lasse Marhaug

On the occasion of improvisor and composer Wadada Leo Smith's exhibition Ankhrasmation: The Language Scores, 1967-2015 at Chicago's Renaissance Society, Corbett vs. Dempsey is pleased to present Red Chrysanthemums, a previously unreleased live recording of solo performances by Smith, documented in Los Angeles in December, 1977. Three adventurous, spacious tracks feature Smith's unique and innovative trumpet, as well as percussion, tuned percussion, and flute, all captured as Smith was in the process of confirming his place in the pantheon of AACM greats. A candid snapshot of one of the most vital musicians to extend the jazz tradition, testing his craft and artistry with a bright, pure toned sensibility and deeply soulful melodic imagination. Wadada Leo Smith: trumpet, flugelhorn, flute, steelophone, percussion, gongs