"Bassist Joëlle Léandre and pianist Elisabeth Harnik have only been playing together since 2016 but this debut CD – a recording from their third ever performance – reveals a duo who have already developed a highly simpatico and sophisticated approach to spontaneous composition that draws equally on elements of free improvisation and contemporary classical music. Rather than the waxing and waning 40 minute set that presently constitutes a lot of live recordings, there is an adroit attention to form in operation here, as the duo present half a dozen perfectly shaped and finely delineated miniatures, ranging from six to 11 minutes long. For much of the time, Léandre favours a high, tightly controlled arco full of fragile harmonic overtones that often sounds more like a cello than a double bass. When Harnik responds with pellucid splashes and rippling hazes, the two are capable of creating sustained moods of gentle wonder and delicacy. Léandre adds an element of enigma with her slightly off-mic vocalising: somewhat absent-minded, more overheard than performed, it´s ephemeral, transitory and soothing in its wordless calm, evoking the private musings of a washerwoman at work or a nursing mother cooing her love. One almost feels compelled to lean in and strain the ears, searching for fleeting meaning in her mysterious mutterings.Many of the pieces are so balanced and sensitively executed that they possess a kind of inevitability. Call it perfection if you prefer. By contrast, the more abstract and experimental gambits gleefully ride a puckish unpredictability: the scritch-scratch of agitated piano strings and polystyrene squeak slotting into Léandre´s multiphonic gossamer arco textures; dirge-like dabs of unhurried bass with arachnoid scuttlings in the body of the piano. But, even at its furthest extent, this music emanates a warmth, a patience and, yes, as the title suggests, a tenderness that´s rarely heard." - Ken Vandermark --- Elisabeth Harnik / piano Joëlle Léandre / double bass --- Mastered by Jean-Marc Foussat. Artwork by Lasse Marhaug.

For the 2021 online edition of the Counterflows festival, Glasgow-based Kay Logan (aka Helena Celle) created the hour-long electronic Music for Counterflows, accompanied by an interview with Stewart Smith. For the CD and digital release, the music has been mastered by Stephan Mathieu, and the interview along with visual artwork by Kay are included in a 20 page booklet. Extracts from Stewart’s interview with Kay can be read here. The first Helena Celle album, If I Can’t Handle Me At My Best, You Don’t Deserve You At Your Worst, was released on the Night School label in 2016. Since then, Kay has released work under an array of aliases, including Helena Celle’s Haunted Mirror, Helena Celle’s Mimetic Desire, Helena Celle’s Correspondence Table, Otherworld and Time Binding Ensemble. Kay’s Patreon supporters also receive regular transmissions from Helena Celle’s Observer Effect. Music and artwork by Helena CelleMastered by Stephan MathieuDesign by David CainesGatefold sleeve, with 20 page booklet

Omaggio a Giuseppe Ungaretti, the second Recital album of composer Loren Rush (b. 1935), contrasts the orchestral grandeur of last year’s LP Dans le Sable with plaintive just intonation piano improvisations. Loren Rush has been active in the Bay Area new music scene since the late 1950s alongside composers such as Terry Riley, Robert Erickson, and Pauline Oliveros, and also co-founded Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics in 1975. His music has been performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. Though few of Rush’s compositions have been published, he has garnered deep respect from his peers and colleagues over the decades.
The album is directly inspired by poems from “L’allegria” (The Joy, 1914-1919), the collection of poetry by Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888, Egypt – 1970, Italy) written in the trenches of World War I. During these brutal years Ungaretti struggled to maintain his humanity by creating the most beautiful images he could imagine and by recalling experiences of his earlier life in Alexandria and Paris. By this, he both revolutionized Italian poetry and demonstrated that the creation of beauty is a most effective life preserver and political statement.  
 Veglia (Night Watch)An entire nightcast beside a comrademassacred,his snarling mouthturned to the full moon In my silenceI have written letters full of loveNever have I held so fast to life.Rush’s melancholy preludes are treated with The Enhanced Piano in Just Intonation, developed at Good Sound Foundation by the composer and Alfred Owens. The process electronically enhances and increases perceived resonance, sustaining, coloristic and expressive capabilities. Just intonation describes a system of tuning in which the greatest level of consonance and resonance is achieved by adjusting intervals to the whole-number ratios of the harmonic series, the natural mode of vibration. The suite concludes with the silken chamber piece Mattina (Morning), reflecting Ungaretti’s stark words, “I illumine me, with immensity.” The addition of violin and cello suspends the listener in a prolonged space of dread and beauty. 

Akosh S. (Szelevényi) is a Hungarian saxophonist, multi-instrumentalist, improviser and composer. He has been living in France since '86. As the leader and founder of his group Akosh S. Unit, he has released many records at Universal. He once records and tours with the rock band Noir Désir, and he works with choreographer Josef Nadj, cultivates improvised music with Joëlle Léandre, Gildas Etevenard, Hamid Drake, etc. He composes music for theater, contemporary dance, films, and collaborates with French rappers Marc Nammour. Since 2016, he has been working with Hungarian musicians - double bassist Peter Ajtai and drummer Szilveszter Miklòs. These two young figures are already emblematic of current creative music in Hungary and a joy to see. the trio were invited to play in a trio at OCT-LOFT festival 2019, and the whole show was recorded and released as LP, DVD and CD here.  “Regarding the title of the album what I found by looking further is ‘Inside Out’. To explain in a few words from Hungarian: at the base, there is ‘itt’ = ‘here’, and ‘ott’ = ‘there’. From ‘itt’ derives ‘ide’ = ‘from there to here’, from ‘ott’ follows ‘oda’ = ‘from here to there’, so there is a dynamic in ‘ide’, which there is not in ‘itt’, which is stable. ‘Kint’ is ‘outside’. ‘Idekint' therefore means, that we are outside and we invite to be outside (while ‘Odakint’ would mean that we are inside, to designate the outside), not locked in our certainties, but in outside of it all, like free animals, or like homeless ones too, but also alive, outside our mother...” - Akosh S. --- 作曲 Composed by：Akosh Szelevényi (1, 3, 5, 7, 8)；Akosh Szelevényi, Péter Ajtai, Szilveszter Miklós (2, 4, 6)录音 Recording：曾君 Zeng Jun；罗绿野 Luo Lvye混音 Mixing：刘英 Liu Ying；Akosh S.母带处理 Mastering：David Mascunan at Mastermixlabs制作人 Producer：涂飞 Tu Fei统筹 Coordinator：周雁朝 Zhou Yanchao；尹思卜 Yin Sibo Recorded at the 9th OCT-LOFT Jazz Festival on October 18, 2019B10 Live, Shenzhen, China  旧天堂书店出品 Published by Old Heaven Books 2020

Composer Tashi Wada has performed for years with his father Yoshi Wada—artist, composer, and early member of the Fluxus movement. However, they have rarely appeared together in studio settings. Nue, the fourteenth entry in RVNG Intl.’s intergenerational FRKWYS series, finally brings Tashi and Yoshi, along with an eclectic group of close friends and extended family, together on tape. Nue draws on aspects of Tashi’s background for his widest vision to date—among them the minimalist bagpipe music of Yoshi, who co-composed three of the tracks, the psychoacoustic and perceptual explorations of his mentor, composer James Tenney, and reimagined forms of ancient and devotional music. The album, however, is not a tribute to the past or a recapitulation of familiar sounds. Instead, Nue is an intertwining of people and ideas as a means of growing, of looking inward to move outward, and of looking back to move forward. To achieve this growth, Tashi assembled a core group of fellow travelers, including Yoshi, composer Julia Holter, producer Cole MGN, and percussionist Corey Fogel, to give life to this multifaceted suite. As an experience, Nue subtly navigates the interactions, intimacy and spaciousness of this group. The album’s title itself is a nod to Tashi’s abiding interest in duality and the unknown: nue is a mythological Japanese chimera with the face of a monkey, the legs of a tiger, and a snake for a tail, a composite form, at once disturbing and otherworldly. But, as the composer points out, nue is also French for naked—stripped of complexity, bare and exposed, but also raw and essential. From the doubling of tones—and the world of harmonic nuances such an action produces—to the rich interplay between individual musicians, all baring their own personalities and experiences through shared performance, Tashi’s compositions allow space for these elements to join and grow. The multipartite creature that is an ensemble melds in the simplicity and purity of the music itself. As explained by Tashi, each part was written with an individual in mind, not simply an instrument. And each individual performer makes their mark, from Holter’s vocal performances on the cresting, oceanic “Mutable Signs” and “Ondine” with guest vocalists Simone Forti, Jessika Kenney and Laura Steenberge, to Fogel’s resonant, precise percussion on “Bottom of the Sky.” Producer Cole MGN, who has worked extensively with artists like Beck and Ariel Pink, helped to create a world of sound with minimal yet multi-dimensional materials. Like many of its influences, Nue uses deceivingly simple means to create complex, coherent worlds and narratives. Tashi notes the influence of legendary Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, whose work looked inward, investigating memory and emotion and dream, to understand the often overwhelming world outside the self. Like Lispector’s classic novel Near to the Wild Heart, Nue cleaves these archetypal dualities—world/self, old/new, complex/simple—to create a work that allows them to coalesce into something singular. As Tashi states in his liner notes: “My desire was to create something both old and new sounding—ancient and futuristic—and ultimately something of its own world and other. Nue is a vision, an endless night of dreams, and a personal history of sorts, full of joys and demons.”

New album on bison from Kumio Kurachi, whos only performance outside of Japan was here back in 2009. "After 11 albums and unknown quantities of cassettes, compilations and split releases, Sound of Turning Earth is the first release outside of Japan for one of the most original figures in Japanese music, Kumio Kurachi. Recorded by Jim O’Rourke at his home studio, Sound of Turning Earth is Kurachi solo on vocals and guitar, mixing surreal lyrics and theatrical vocal personas with unorthodox tunings inspired by Japan’s national instrument, the koto. Lyrically Kurachi draws life from the small events of life, the hira, - the joy of choosing a lipstick in springtime, the business of changing the tatami, raindrops deciding whether to fall as snow. Set to his own brand of progressive folk in the Hirajōshi scale and laced with winding melodies which can be hard to forget, Kurachi maps his own territory for the people who inhabit his everyday. As much a visual artist as a musician, we are pleased to present Sound of Turning Earth in the form of a deluxe CD accompanied by new artwork by Kurachi and full translation of his poetic lyrics. These striking songs speak for a liberated imagination." “The music is so melodious that the mixture of the strange wording, guitar and variations of voices thrives all together and it can haunt you without noticing it, just like the small events of everyday life you can't escape from." - Midori Ogata  --- All songs written by Kumio Kurachi Guitars and vocals by Kumio Kurachi Recorded and mixed by Jim O'Rourke Mastered by Daichi Tokunaga (PLUM) Translation by Midori Ogata Design by Maja Larrson Special thanks to Midori Ogata --- Kumio Kurachi has performed actively in Japan since the 80's, and still plays shows in Fukuoka regularly. Past collaborators include Taku Unami and Tatsuhisa Yamamoto. He has played with Tenniscoats, Kazuhisa Uchihashi, Katsura Yamauchi, Tori Kudo, Jim O'Rourke and Eiko Ishibashi." 

Full recording of one of the most engaging and beguiling Late Junction live sessions we’ve ever heard - the one off first meeting between Korean multi-instrumentalist Park Jiha and writer and performer Roy Claire Potter. Park Jiha plays the saenghwang, a Korean mouth organ which she blows in long multiphonics to set pace for Potter’s words. Together they unfurl a scene slowly in front of you, rich and focused, shifting your field of vision and drawing you in, elsewhere. It’s impossible not to follow, not to look for where they point. When the piri sounds for a flooded town on the B side, the water flows between your own feet; Potter’s words a sometimes frightening hörspiel in scouse.  Though the details are fine, the space each artist gives one another and their instruments, their language, is given to the listener in turn. A careful melody picks out a route for words with no fixed meaning, a body with no fixed direction, and we are invited to listen and see a kind of music made visible in its inference. A truly very special record we are very proud to share. --- Influenced by linguistics and performance theory, Roy Claire Potter makes performance, text, drawing, installation and film, and often collaborates with musicians and sound artists to make audio for music festivals and radio. Across the wide range of their practice, Roy tells stories built from fragmented, intense images that depict moving bodies or domestic scenes and architectural settings. Roy’s interest in subtext and narrative sequencing is felt in the way they use fast-paced talking or reading speeds, and restricted or partial views of space. Complicated social or group dynamics and the aftermath of violent events are common themes in Roy’s work and are usually treated with a dark, sometimes wilful humour. Park Jiha creates exploratory music rooted in traditional Korean instrumental performance. To this session she brings three instruments: a Korean hammered dulcimer called a yanggeum, a saenghwang which is an instrument made of 24 slender bamboo pipes attached to a bowl and played like a harmonica and a double-reed bamboo flute called a piri, which sounds similar to an oboe. --- Park Jiha / yanggeum, saenghwang, piri Roy Claire Potter / voice --- Recorded and mixed on: 30 January 2020 by Rob Winter, Pete Smith and Andy Rushton at Maida Vale Studios, London for “Late Junction - Roy Claire Potter and Park Jiha in session”. Produced by Rebecca Gaskell, Katie Callin and Alannah Chance at Reduced Listening for BBC Radio 3. Originally broadcast on Friday 28th February 2020, apart from Track 4 which aired on Late Junction the 21st February 2020.  Mastered by Katie Tavini. Original artwork: “Three Boys” by Claire Cansick. Liner notes by Frances Morgan.

Double CD documenting the magic meeting of one of the all-time great rhythm sections in jazz: percussionist Hamid Drake and bassist William Parker, with London’s brilliant Black Top (Orphy Robinson and Pat Thomas) and Elaine Mitchener. Across two sets the quintet are infectiously energetic and inspired, striding from synchronised heavy groove to star bright solos, whilst incorporating dub effects, guimbri and sumptuous blues piano playing.  Formed by Orphy Robinson and Pat Thomas but always realised with an ever changing number of invited musicians, Black Top's blend of lo-fi samples, dub effects and experimental electronics has been daring free improvisation since 2011. Their virtuoso performances draw on their Afro-Caribbean roots with delicious spontienty and humour; the histories of Ridley Road Market, the LIO and Islamic West Africa are sounded out side by side on iPad, marimba and vibraphone. Having met in 2006, Black Top played with bassist William Parker and drummer Hamid Drake as part of their residency at Cafe OTO in 2016; forming a quartet grounded in transatlantic kinship but which looked outward to the Carribean, calypso music and Saharan gnawa rhythms. When Parker and Drake returned to OTO in 2019 Black Top reformed again, but this time with the brilliant addition of vocalist Elaine Mitchener.  Over the last few years the clarity with which Mitchener has explored vocal expression in the global Black Avant Garde has been stunning, but here the range in her influences is manifest, moving effortlessly between phonetic and poetic experimentation and spoken word, all the while at ease with soul soaked jazz and dissonant free fall. A hand drum duet with Hamid Drake astonishes before being laced perfectly with cosmic theremin and Parker’s fantastic acid shehnai.  --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO on Sunday 28th July 2019 by Paul Skinner and mixed and mastered by James Dunn. Photos by Dawid Laskowski and artwork by Oliver Pitt. 

Nathaniel Mackey is a hugely influential American poet, novelist, anthologist, literary critic and editor. He is the Reynolds Price Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University and a Chancellor of Academy of American Poets. His on-going series of epistolary novels (begun 1978) From A Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate narrate the music making, dreams and creative life a group of imaginary jazz-based musicians making a fictional music, at the edge of words, dream and physical possibility in late 1970s and 1980s Los Angeles.The idea for the Creaking Breeze Ensemble emerged in 2016 in response to a reading of Mackey's books by a group of musicians, writers and artists closely connected to the creative community around Cafe OTO in East London: Billy Steiger, Evie Ward, Paul Abbott, Ute Kanngiesser and Seymour Wright. Each have their own distinct voice, and respective connection with the musical traditions at the core of From A Broken Bottle. As a group of artists they felt that what Mackey explored as the making of a fictional music articulated something close to their actual, respective and overlapping musical lives. The group was named and so doing established a space for them to undertake an on-going 'reading' of the novels. And  led in turn to them inviting Mackey to come to London to work, somehow, on this 'reading' of the novels and their ideas.Mackey agreed and this mysterious proposal was realised in June 2019. Together Mackey and the ‘Breeze developed a working method and honed their attention on close reading of two letters from the books. What emerged was an open mobile process moving through the letters (and their content) in ways that shaped rich, sensual and playful spaces for reflection and improvisation, iteration and inter-textual pleasures.The result is Fugitive Equation a remarkable and beautiful long-song across two nights. The first night Lit by Eclipse takes as its point of departure, reads and develops a letter from book five, Late Arcade; the second night Skeletal Water, X-Ray Water takes as its point of departure, reads and develops a letter from book two Djbot Baghostus's Run.The album is a complex, unique and long-form (2 hours plus) composition of sound and word, unlike the previous work of any of those involved. The six unique voices, drums, violin, cello and saxophone and Mackey and Wards' words. It is a work that continuously collapses, questions and flips many poles - word/sound, voice/music, vocals(foreground)/band(background), recorded past/improvised present and fact/fiction.The art work for the album cover is ‘Clutch’, a painting by seminal London based artist Frank Bowling whose retrospective was on show at the Tate Britain during Mackey’s visit to London.The project was supported by the Arts Council of England and Cafe Oto.  --- Nathaniel Mackey - voice, readings, vinylEvie Ward - voice, improvised poetry fragmentsPaul Abbott - acoustic drums, synthetic soundsUte Kanngiesser - celloBilly Steiger - violin, pianoSeymour Wright - alto saxophoneRecorded in concert by Shaun Crook and Paul Skinner at Cafe OTO,London on June 7 and 8, 2019. Mixed by Shaun Crook.

10 Albums – 91 total tracks – 594 minutes (10 hours) of all new music created expressly for this collection. That William Parker is a bassist, composer and bandleader of extraordinary spirit and imaginative drive is common knowledge among any with an interest in the progressive jazz scene of the past 25 years or more. What’s become increasingly apparent, though, is Parker’s stature as a visionary of sound and song – an artist of melody and poetry who works beyond category, to use the Ellingtonian phrase. The latest multi-disc boxed set from Centering Records/AUM Fidelity devoted to Parker’s expansive creativity underscores his virtually peerless achievement in recent years. Migration of Silence Into and Out of the Tone World (Volumes 1–10) is a 10-album collection of vocal and instrumental suites all recorded expressly for this set between late 2018 and early 2020, with women’s voices at its core. This is music as empathetic as it is intrepid, as philosophical as it is visceral, as resolutely modernist as it is attuned to tradition. Parker’s art not only draws from the deepest well of African-American culture; it breathes in inspiration from across the globe, with sounds drawn from Africa, Asia and Indonesia as well as Europe and the Americas; there is free improvisation and re-imagined sonic collage; there are album-length explorations of solo piano and solo voice, along with string ensembles and ancient wind instruments. There are dedications to jazz heroes, Native Americans and Mexican migrants, plus tributes to the great African-American culture of Harlem and the mix of passion and compassion Parker found in vintage Italian cinema. Migration of Silence Into and Out of The Tone World conjures a vast world of music and feeling, and its creation is a feat that ranks with that of the most ambitious talents in any genre.  --- MUSICIANS William Parker: compositions, bass & addt’l instruments Featuring: an international, inter-generational array of singers & musicians, drawn from both long-standing colleagues and a new generation of devoted artists. --- Composed, Arranged & Produced by William Parker for Centering Records, © Centering Music (BMI) Recorded, Mixed & Mastered by Jim Clouse at Park West Studios, Brooklyn, NY : November 2018 – February 2020 [ except THE MAJESTY OF JAH - click on 'lyrics' above, and as noted in booklet ] All text written by William Parker (except as noted in booklet) Artwork throughout this work by Jo Wood-Brown Box Set Production & design by AUM Fidelity

Remastered CD edition of Une éclipse totale de soleil, Ghédalia Tazartès' third LP, originally released in 1984. Far away from contemporary music intellectualisms and the works of synthetic noise purists, this album features a new form of musical expression and is certainly one of the most original and creative records of the '80s. The value of this work was at the time underestimated and only a few people had a chance to listen to this beautiful music. The record utilizes collage, Tazartès' unique vocals, trance-ethno backing splices, droning organ, and childish naiveté, in a spirit all its own. Originally conceived in two parts, Une éclipse totale de soleil is here supplemented with a 25-minute piece titled "Il regalo della befana" or "Une éclipse totale de soleil (Part III)," composed expressly for the original 1996 release of this CD edition. The original two parts are constructed from sung passages of Middle Eastern musics, drum machine noises, distorted signals, and the voices of small children. The newer third part takes some of the same sorts of cues but is more in keeping with turntablism or sampling culture, dipping into recordings recycled from pop culture. Tazartès' music compiles fragments from a wide variety of sources in a stunning, idiomatic fashion, still undiminished by the passage of time. --- Vocals, Music, Recording, Mixing: Ghédalia TazartèsVoices: Alain Rigout, Bruna Filippi, Daniel Kenisberg, Rafaël Glucksmann, Yumi Nara Released by: Alga Marghen

2001 release. The compact disc by Anton Bruhin issued by Alga Marghen is titled r o t o m o t o r and covers two different areas of the artist's research. The first one is represented by a group of works including the short and mysterious environmental recording "ORAX" as well as "Lange Tone," "VERSUCHPILZ 6," and "Paul Is 35," three excerpts from the epic "MC-10 zyklus" created between 1976 and 1977, recording various layers of sound sources on two cassette recorders with loudspeakers. T he complete zyklus consists of 12 different episodes (each one 10 minutes long) which investigate the multi-layer ping-pong recording technique; the spatial illusion of the monoaural replay which moves away from the listener's ears into the depth of space. Far away sounds coming from a cosmic dimension or from an abyssal space, moving fore and back. The loss of sound quality considered as stoned space improvement. The title-track is a 28 minute-long reading of one of Bruhin's major works. Rotomotor is a poetic Idiotikon of the Swiss-German dialect where, instead of the straight alphabetical order, the words are organized according to the similarities of their letters (each word differs from the previous one by just one letter). For this reading, a delay is repeated in the signal after 0.6 seconds and each word is superimposed into the echo of the preceding one. On one hand this echo generates the rhythm of the performance, on the other it supports the acoustic metamorphosis of the words. Again, a very simple concept perfectly accomplished. What results from the whole program is maybe difficult to describe, and maybe more easily perceivable in a state of alternate consciousness. But surely, it is a quite unique sense of acoustic approach; so no surprise to see him mentioned in the mythical Nurse With Wound reference list.

This recording gathers all of the music from the final night of Otomo and Sachiko's first residency in 2009 which saw the pair joined by the long running trio of Evan Parker, John Edwards and Tony Marsh and special guest John Butcher. Butcher played duos with both Otomo and Sachiko and joined the quintet for a rousing sextet: stunning twin saxophone interplay, the unparalleled open-ness of the Marsh/Edwards rhythm pairing, Sachiko's deft high frequency interventions and Otomo's guitar at the centre - moving between abrasive textural invention and suggestive single note runs of ever-shifting melody. REVIEWS "As for indicating a place in the curiously sculpted bridges between improvised music and sound art, well, the simple singularity of these daring and committed performances should bear out their significance." Clifford Allen, Tiny Mix Tapes "This Quintet/Sextet album is recorded beautifully and it needed to be to capture all the nuance involved ... These are musicians at the top of their craft." Free Jazz Blog "...fresh and inspired. The recording stands as a finely-honed classic of classically approached free improvisation: the players dance and flow smoothly and effortlessly with and around the sounds of their partners." - Henry Kuntz Point of Departure Review

Comes in Blu-ray sized Gatefold Digipack with 16-page booklet featuring liner notes by Anthony Braxton and score excerpts. Early in his career, Anthony Braxton established a foundational taxonomy of musical concepts and gestural categories for improvisers and performers to use in the interpretation of his music - what Braxton calls Language Music. You can hear his first rigorous exploration of many of these on his celebrated 1969 record For Alto. There are only twelve basic varieties to his Language Music: long sound, accented long sound, trills, staccato formings, intervallic formings, and so on. An association with a particular variety of one of the Language Musics is a defining aspect of any of his individual works.Braxton has also developed a series of compositional modalities: different ways of imagining and structuring how a musician, or musicians, may participate in a given piece. Since 1995, he has been primarily concerned with his Holistic Modeling Musics. Each is associated with one of the Language Musics: Ghost Trance Music (long sound), Falling River Music (accented long sounds), Diamond Curtain Wall Music (trills or ornamentation), Echo Echo Mirror House Music (multiphonics), and Pine Top Aerial Music (short attacks).Firehouse 12 Records is pleased to release the latest iteration of Braxton's musical system, called ZIM Music, which is derived from language number 11: gradient logics. Gradient logics pertain to aspects of music that continually change, faster and faster, slower and slower, brighter and brighter, darker and darker. 12 Comp (ZIM) 2017 documents 12 performances over the course of two years, showcasing the development of ZIM music as the compositions and ensemble adapted to new musical situations.The very first ZIM Music composition was in fact presented to the quartet with Nels Cline, Greg Saunier, and Taylor Ho Bynum documented on Quartet (New Haven) 2014. During that session it was used only sparingly, and later became the first of four ZIM compositions (398 - 401) to be recorded during a residency at the University of Alabama in the summer of 2015.While the first four ZIM compositions were short, linear, single-lined and mostly graphic, Composition No. 402 was scored for a quintet of reeds, brass, tuba, and two harps. Combining traditionally notated sections with sections of individual and tutti graphic notation, Composition No. 402 was premiered in Poland in November 2015, and appears on this Blu-ray as the opening track, recorded live at Wake Forest University in March 2017. At the Big Ears Festival in 2016, Braxton debuted Composition Nos. 403 & 404 which are primarily non-linear graphic compositions.After the Wake Forest performance of Composition No. 402, the recordings in this set move through Composition Nos. 408 through 420. Recorded in a variety of contexts, these compositions maintain the gradient logics of dynamic and timbre change, but infuse gradients into the notated material itself. He dubs this computer-aided notation "extraction notation": the musicians are given technically impossible music and are expected to "extract" a performance from the notation as part of their improvisational process. This resulting transformation, from notated to performed is in itself a gradient process.The stellar core ensemble of Taylor Ho Bynum, Dan Peck, Jacquline Kerrod, and Shelley Burgon is augmented and altered with roster of star emerging musicians, including Tomeka Reid, Adam Matlock, Jean Cook, Stephanie Richards, Ingrid Laubrock, Brandee Younger, and Miriam Overlach.12 COMP (ZIM) 2017 is available as a single disc Blu-ray, as well as high-resolution digital files through Firehouse 12 Records' Bandcamp page and the usual streaming and download outlets. "For a project of this scope, more than 11 hours or music, Blu-ray was the obvious release format for us. To make each performance available in the native high-sample rate and also to issue immersive surround mixes of the incredible soundscapes generated by this ensemble, there was really no other option" says Firehouse 12 Records co-founder and chief engineer Nick Lloyd. "We were lucky to be able not only to record a number of the pieces on this release at Firehouse 12, but also to make location recordings in North Carolina and Montreal of ZIM in its natural habitat - in front of a live audience!!" 

Since his 2006 debut under the L'Ocelle Mare moniker, Bonvalet has gradually moved away from traditional notions of composition and diverted his attention purely to the textural and timbral quality of sound. His tenure playing guitar in various bands - notably Cheval De Frise and Powerdove - provides the experience needed to isolate his instruments, zeroing-in on the gestures of performance - plucks, strums, vibrations - using them to assemble component parts that are essentially free by design.  Flute, piano, strings and various percussive instruments collide with all manner of effects and assorted sound objects like a telephone, metronome - even masking tape, each recorded and assembled through a no-method process that rejects traditional notions of composition. But while the assembly is for all intents and purposes dispassionate - just take a look at the track names - the resulting recordings are a marvel, gradually building into individual mood pieces that betray a buried instinct for harmony.  Take 'Guitare Classique, Métronome, Tambourins…’ as an example - Spanish guitar, pitch bent, a frenzied metronome, an arpeggio, something rattles - a non-linear, complex rendition, a miracle of sound that lands like the most inspirational film music you’ll have heard in years. Or on 'Piano, Banjo, Orgue, Métronome' - a more angular, interesting take on the sort of thing Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto have tried over a number of collaborative albums - a 3 minute recital punctuated by increasingly agitated piano notes, all moving key changes and brittle strings.  Through its curious construction, 'Sans Chemin’ (literally, ‘without path’) feels to highlight the way our instinctive interaction with harmony, beauty, and dissonance can quickly ignite or extinguish heightened feelings without easy explanation. Perhaps all the pieces here were really made without direction - an aimless meander through sound - or maybe there’s something significantly more intricate and complicated at play. Either way, the result is the same; a richly textured and evocative, often startling transition from chaos and into the sublime, mirroring our own complex existential topographies. --- CREDITS Music : Thomas Bonvalet Recording : Manuel Duval and Pierre-Henri Thiébaut* Mastering : Manuel Duval Photography : Thomas Bonvalet Design : Bartolomé Sanson --- Shelter Press, Murailles Music, 2021

Imagine yourself as a grape in a Belgian glasshouse, is the theme of this quietly immersive suite conjured by Christina Vantzou (CV) and Lieven Martens (Dolphins Into The Future) for the latter’s Edições CN  The musical component of a broader project incorporating poetic texts and photography, ’Serrisme’ conveys the cyclical experience of table grapes growing in vast glasshouses in the Flemish countryside. It was commissioned by the Flemish Heritage Fund to artfully document a peculiar culture that has existed for around 150 years, and has supplyied sweet little orbs to mouths from Russia to UK and USA.  The grape growing industry there is now a paler shade of what it once was, but the remaining glasshouses offer Vantzou and Martens a rich atmosphere and range of textures to work with. Maybe best known for his tropical dream sequences as Dolphins Into The Future, Lieven Martens plays to his strengths in evocative field recording for the first half, variously placing us under rain on glass and  between snipped vines for a nuanced evocation of the glasshouses’ day-to-day sounds.  Beloved for her work solo, with The Dead Texan and recently with a run of dead strong CV & JAB recordings; Vantzou takes a more impressionistic approach to the subject with two slow burning ‘Glisten’ beauties. Both working around he 10 minute mark, they offer amply room to drift with long, sustained glassy tones encouraging sublime states of mind, with strings and choral touches that suggest a sort of fading glamour of an old world viewed from outside. --- Serrisme is: a musical illustration - by Christina Vantzou, sound registrations - by Lieven Martens, a long poetic text - by Jan Matthé, analogue photographs - by Christophe Piette, and the usual perfect design - by Jeroen Wille. --- Edições CN, 2021

Pug Life worked on L`Annee Perrotique during the time of Covid-19 pandemic. The tracks were recorded separately in accordance with the social distancing protocol. Having lost the opportunity of playing together, it was no longer an option to improvise in real-time. This led to introducing compositional elements, new to our joint venture, which has now been on-going for roughly ten years. In result, this is Pug Life. --- Taneli Viitahuhta / amplified alto sax, baritone sax, flutephone, mouth harp and cymbal, loop and effect pedals Lauri Hyvärinen / electric guitar, fuzz box, laptop Ilia Belorukov / mixing and mastering Niilo Viitahuhta / design --- Edition of 100 

After making and scoring her own experimental short films (The Hum, 2018 & Echomaking, 2020), publishing her first monograph High Static, Dead Lines (Strange Attractor Press)—all while working full-time as museum curator of technology and researching how Q*bert learned to cuss from a phonetic synthesizer developed by an auto parts company in Detroit—Kristen Gallerneaux took a break. She plucked her beloved cat Forrest J. Ackerman off her synths, dunked her head in a tub of reverb and made an album. Bring on the 808 bleed and 19th Century conchs. The granular processors and spectral resonators. The “gnarled-up drum sample kit,” the bells from Arcosanti, and the random chunk of driftwood that washed ashore, ruing the cannonball that sank its mothership. EMBELLISHMENT ALERT. To be clear, this album had me at “Russian meteor run through a contact mic.” The work of a folklorist/unrepentant homebody who enjoys quietly making bangers and a mean peach cobbler, Strung Figures was recorded in Kristen’s home studio in Metro Detroit during fall of 2020 and into winter 2021, and eventually mastered by Miles Whittaker in Manchester in the spring. In pandemic conditions of temporal drag and border decay, the terms of reverb and time stretch find their way outside, field recordings that echo the woods in Belle Isle, Detroit, or Kristen’s rural Ontario childhood haunts. If desperate for a label, try “Smoking Backwoods Industrial.” Strung Figures is listening through the modular (fogging up the glass case that holds the Moog prototype in the basement of her day job) and the analog (see driftwood), often processed through her experiences with Meniere’s Disease, an inner ear affliction that submarines her hearing, unexpectedly taking the afternoon on a pressure dive. “A constant underlying internal filter,” Kristen treats her condition with more reverb—and us with Strung Figures. --- Shadow World, 2021