What else could Han do during the time of corona - not being permitted to perform with the ICP orchestra (or with anyone else) for a live audience. He's always playing and studying for himself, but that’s just not enough. So he made a recording with the help of Mara's pianola (situated in the lovely Frisian village of Oldeberkoop), some local songbirds, the dogs Hansje and Lou, and Han's favorite technician Marc Schots. Han used "Tiger Rag" on the pianola, it being the first record his father gave him. This is the result: a Musical Collage for Mara. -- Han Bennink - Snare, cymbals, cajon, horseshoe, some other kinds of percussion instruments, voice  -- Pianola – Marc Schots Jeux de Boule Balls – Han Bennink & Annemiek Ebbink Barking – Hansje & Lou Recording – Marc Schots Mix & Editing – Han Bennink & Marc Schots Cover Photo – Annemiek Ebbink Cover design - Oliver Barrett Recorded May 2020

Multi-instrumentalist, composer and improviser Yoni Silver lifts the roof off his garden shed and lets light and the outside world pour into his intimate rituals. With delicate hands moving between the objects around him, he scratches metal on metal, rubs circles of tonal washes on dishes and bows the strings of violins. Fragments of both melodic and atonal guitar notes appear in gentle waves of disquiet, punctuating the atmosphere alongside the comforting warble of garden birds. Whistling wind instrument notes rest and lean upon the pottery of percussion that dances around the swirl of sound, while guttural moans push from the depths of his stomach and out into the outside world. With an approach similar to Teijo Ito’s work in Maya Deren’s films, Yoni is able to conjure ethereal and beguiling material, but that of which is rooted in the nuts and bolts of the physical world.  

When Tatsuya Yoshida, Makoto Kawabata and Richard Pinhas were making their 2017 self-titled trio album for Bam Balam, Makoto made some spare loop tracks which were going to be melded together with guitar and drums to form a new piece of work. The resulting album was never made until now, where in lockdown Tatsuya and Makoto recorded the absent guitar, drum and synthesizer parts to complete an album for Takuroku. The outcome - a ravishing suite of cyber prog-rock - feels nothing near to fractals or pieces of loose meat. Tatsuya and Makoto push their technical prowess to the fore for 8 technicolour tracks, revelling in the sort of kinetic energy of Ruins and Acid Mothers Temple at their most full-frontal and ecstatic. Sounding like a machine being re-wired to operate at a different velocity - sparking, malfunctioning and panting clouds of smoke - it gives little room to breath in its overwhelming vacuum of sound. Elements hot-wire into overdrive and never cease to slow outside of their given track-length time frame. Bring a few bottles of water and a fresh towel - this a total trip, from two heroes of the Japanese underground.

Ecka Mordecai is a relatively new figure in the London experimental music scene. After a nomadic creative life in the North of England, forming relationships with the likes of Andrew Chalk, Tom Scott, Holly Jarvis and Kate Armitage, 'Critique & Prosper' is her first solo album and presents the most recent development of her solo practice. Melodic mantras, wandering improvised passages and refracted blues vocalisations find each other in her domestic world, revealing glimmers of sensual songcraft that opens outward. Critique + Prosper was developed and compiled within a collaborative project facilitated by artist-curator Katherine Ka Yi Liu and with artist Clarinda Tse. The text is a listening-response to the album as written by Clarinda Tse.  "Compass needle frantically spins near irregular electric fields of ghosts, and phones too. Receiving metallic frequencies of interconnected ghosts, stroked by scratchy fingers 1. astroturf melts into tufty faux fur. Strands of memory vibrate towards an open wound, lightly tapping on the soft box that withholds 2. mouth-a-boundary, finding space across fibres of a dried throat. The closure of lips contains a transcending hum, sealed an inhale but released an exhale into sweaty sticky-crisp air. Rubbery skins rub against each other in attempt to open 3. hot tarmax. We have to acknowledge skin as our biggest organ, shields against the losing of the individual, forming pockets of space in arrangement of skipping stones stirred into a dark glistening puddle. Before we notice, we are thrown off gravity and stuck onto some unknown surface, breathing with inflamed lungs. Outer fear unleash the voice of 4. critique + prosper to disjoin the cells of inner comfort. With wind brushing our eyes, we found a few hairs on the largest grassy rug, traces of inhabitation or passing. Consistency of domination. Air that passes through our head phones and ears, 5. did begun we hear or listen. Transmitting signals to the cell tower - Unarmed! Dismantle! 6. Show up or shut up in our library. Clashes of volatile shells, nails, the undead in the transparent vessel of bodily fluids." - Clarinda Tse https://clarindatse.com/http://www.katherinekayiliu.com/ -- Written, performed, recorded and produced by Ecka Mordecai   --     Mastered by Miles Whittaker Artwork design by Olver Barrett -- Track 4 (Critique + Propser) recorded by Guillaume Dujat'

Spewing forth from the gutter into our comfortable abodes, Wolf Eyes' own Johnny R. Spykes (aka Inzane Johnny) treats us to five mind-melting tracks, melding electronic and saxophone elements together in snapshots of disarray. Like Wolf Eyes' own work, Johnny captures the dust bowl industrial milieu of Michigan; holding dense clouds of static noise, the buzz of telephone wires and electricity pylons in a tactile compositional grip. On tracks 2 and 5 he hits out with some muffled alto sax lyricism, occasionally meeting concurrent lines of other saxophones as if lost together in a maze. Now in their 4th decade, the Wolf gang never fail at confusion, disorientation and entracing aural inzanity. -- John Olson - saxophone, electronics & recording -- Cover artwork by John Olson Artwork design by Oliver Barrett

Together in pandemic isolation we face things, including sound. These duo recordings were made in London confinement. Caroline Kraabel improvises on alto saxophone, John Edwards on double bass; gloves off was recorded on Tuesday 12 May 2020, at midday; masks off was recorded on Friday 15 May 2020, at midnight. Photo by Régine Edwards. Artwork design by Oliver Barrett. © and℗2020 John Edwards and Caroline Kraabel, PRS, all rights reserved. http://www.masskraabel.com/  https://carolinekraabel.bandcamp.com/  https://johnedwards.bandcamp.com/

Stockholm-based, Seoul-native Lisa Ullen presents 'Gold', a home-recording, scribed on June 1st 2020 in her living room on a prepared piano with ZOOM H4. Using a selection of clustered chords, fragmented notes and buzzing timbral preparations, Lisa crashes waves sounds against a dam, letting the pressure of sound build vertically into a thick mass. Half way through the recording, when the dam appears to start leaking, the notes and chord arrangements swim in different directions. Allowing a frame for each to slowly develop and emerge, Lisa brings each tiny aural gesture into being. "My intentions of the shape of the music is slow, oscillations without any intentional drama or directions, just me going through some chord changes and listening for glimmerings within each chord. Its layers at different speed..." - Lisa Ullen -- Lisa Ullen / piano, recording & mixing -- Mixing assistance courtesy of Mats Äleklint. Artwork design by Oliver Barrett.

Neil Campbell - one of the key figures in British experimental and underground music culture over the last 3 decades - treats us to a new set of acid-inflected jams; both a rarity under his 'Astral Social Club' alias and an aural harbinger for the future of the project. Made by throwing live electronic jams against a wall, seeing what sticks and sculpting from there in, Neil loses none of the turbulent energy at the heart of what he does. Like a machine malfunctioning at malignant speed, he re-ordains the language of acid house to his punk, noise and 60s pop upbringing in Corby (Northamptonshire), kicking out the jams with break-neck tempo. Towards the end of proceedings we hear sounds recorded in an abandoned warehouse within walking distance of his house (pictured on the album cover). The haunting of past raves, the rebellious graffiti on the walls and the possibility of mischievous exploration therein is lifted from the rubble and pierced into the present. -- Astral Social Club (Neil Campbell) - electronics, mixing & mastering --Artwork design by Oliver Barrett.

Dusting the cobwebs off any dry free-improvisation dogma, Kazuhisa Uchihashi serves up some rainbow coloured explorations on his guitar and Daxophone - an electric wooden instrument invented by German guitarist Hans Reichel. All created in one take with no overdub, Uchihashi is able to explore a vast array of territory with the help of a few effect pedals: There's buzzing drones, writhing cycles of wiry noodling, elastic detuning jumps and lightning-speed tonal changes. Five Strings for solo guitar hits out with some seasick & emasculated math-rock, while 'Guitar Solo Reflect' revels in near-obscene spiral of multi-fx short circuiting, not too unlike Alan Sondheim's radical early work on ESP Disk. The ridiculous sense of play and FUN extends to his daxophone, where he focuses his energy on timbral qualities of the instrument: scrapping, tapping and creating little dancing rhythmic patterns. A real treat, this one. Cover design by Oliver Barrett from an artwork by Ethan Barrett.

Rie Nakajima has been a key figure in our OTO community for over a decade now, treating us to countless solo sets and collaborative work in O Yama O, with David Toop, and many more. Rie's practice is situated here in her abode in London, where she whips the objects around her off the ground and sends them spiralling into the magic realm. Using kinetic machines, she taps, rattles and scrapes rhythms, melodies and phrases. What sounds like a china dish is lifted into the air on a little propeller. Gentle ascending melodies emerge from tickling small bits of metal onto glass. As the piece develops, Rie transfers her dancing brainwaves into the physical world, bringing to life a small legion of kinetic drummers in a tribal cacophony. Her work here - like Bachelard or Proust - attributes an acute sense of awareness to the beauty and possibility of what is around us in our homes. "I really try to look for something between what I’ve known and what I don't know. I wanted to have some order, some sense of constant movement but don’t want to be given any pressure from them. The structure should be kept open, but how? The only way to get closer there is to start, get involved, and finish." - Rie Nakajima -- Rie Nakajima / objects & motors --  Recorded in May 2020. Artwork design by Oliver Barrett

Ikuro Takahashi is a central figure in the Japanese free improvisation scene, having released countless solo and collaborative records, as well serving duty in eardrum-shaking heavyweights High Rise, Fushitsusha and LSD March, not to mention sunshine-searching ramshacklers Maher Shalal Hash Baz and Nagisa Ni Te. Here he empties out the contents of his drum kit and percussion box and gifts each individual instrumental component a track each, treating them as a bed to explore, investigate and have fun. There's a near Taoist focus to each petri-dish of percussion; what at first seems like a simple repetition or rhythmic cycle unfurls itself as something more elemental, like the sound of rain sputtering on selection of hard and soft surfaces. Toward the end of the album the tempo rushes and Ikuro jumps over to oscillators for a final track of stress-wave exploration; utilizing the same approach, focus and sense of play, but with a whole new set of tools. --- Ikuro Takahashi / various percussion & oscillators --- Recorded by Ikuro Takahashi in April 2020 Mastering & artwork design by Oliver Barrett.

Belgian multidisciplinary experimental artist Floris Vanhoof shares with us 3 new tracks, bursting technicoloured electric energy through fields of static. Dealing with found sound and homemade old electronics and positioning them in the lock-down context, Floris reigns the line between the ecstatic present and the reflective past. Phrasing his narratives with dizzying spirals of iterative sound and off-kilter rhythmic punctuation, he offers us a portal in his world: an introductory leap into his fascinating practice. "Falala Falderiere Falderaldera are three snapshots from my studio, as a happy goodbye to the old world. Enjoying a system’s complex behavior, whether that system is a network of primitive homemade electronics or frogs in an Australian pond." - Floris Vanhoof -- Floris Vanhoof / various homemade electronics & sound founds -- Mastering & artwork design by Oliver Barrett

Featuring a distant collaboration with Ben Vince; an online exercise class with Hannah Aspinall; fermented memories captured on a portable recorder and a multitude of 3-D printed reed instruments, synths, voices and more, Wojciech Rusin gifts us a six part celestial journey as if fished from a dream. Drawing on inspiration from alchemical and gnostic texts and early renaissance choral music, Wojciech's work takes a pluralist approach, letting contradictory elements bathe together, coagulate and be brought forth into the awkward present. A sci-fi, ancient and futuristic micro opera for our extremely strange times, shooting from the bedroom to the fourth dimension. Jodorowsky, Parajanov and Miguel Gomes would be proud."Rusin builds beautifully eccentric dreamscapes, audaciously blending courtly choir song, prim cello, occult mutterings and technological squawks." The Wire"FEARLESSLY INVENTIVE PUZZLEBOXX. File under: Eh?! '" - Low Company -- Wojciech Rusin - recording, mixing & mastering Feauturing guest appearances from Hannah Aspinall (voice) & Ben Vince (saxophone) -- Artwork design by Oliver Barrett

Ken Ikeda pushes his multi-faceted electronic dream music skyward in this dizzying new release. Compiled at home using a selection of dub based fx components and improvised techniques, Ken splashes collapsing waves of digital synthesis against one another, creating moments of crescendo before pulling the plug and letting the sounds drain out completely. In between each small cyclical movement Ken enters wandering phrases that blip and bob, as if his electronic space station is caught in free fall, teetering on the edge of lost transmission. There's a timeless feeling to this 27 minutes - the sort of thing you can imagine aliens discovering somewhere alongside Morton Subotnick's 'Silver Apples of Moon' and thinking, "hey, do you think they know about us?" -- Ken Ikeda / electronics & fx --  Artwork by Oliver Barrett.

"Under the declared state of emergency due to the COVID 19 pandemic, I am recording the next album in my room. For me, recording is about creating my own future, and I am working on it everyday sometimes suffering from auto-intoxication. Recording makes the future, In other words, my present might be reflected in what was recorded in the past. So I dug out three songs tracks from my old hard drive that mirror the current situation and edited a mini-album. Synthesized dimensions for Len Lye Trilogy is the sound source I provided for the exhibition Sensory Agents at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in 2018." - Phew --- Phew / voice & electronics --- Recorded at Phew’s room in Kawasaki 2015-18Mixed by Hiroyuki NagashimaPhoto by Masayuki Shioda Artwork design by Oliver Barrett 'Synthesized dimensions for Len Lye Trilogy' - Recorded in 2018 Courtesy of Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and the Len Lye Foundation. Commissioned by the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery for the exhibition Sensory Agents, 2018 'Can you keep it down,please?' Recorded in 2016. Featuring Hiroyuki Nagashima on synthesizer. --- Phew's Bandcamp page

As the title of this piano cycle implies, these Songs of Insurrection were sung for an important purpose. That Frederic Rzewski quotes Walt Whitman on the first page of the score - "Viva to those who have fail'd!" - reminds us that the struggle is far from over. The first and second of these songs were sung during World War II, the Moorsoldaten in Germany and Katyusha in Russia where the tune originated, although it also became very popular among the partisan movement in Italy. Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around was a well-known song during the civil rights movement in the USA. Foggy Dew and Oh Bird, Oh Bird, Oh Roller respectively sonify the Easter Uprising in Ireland and the Donghak Peasant Revolution in Korea. Frederic Rzewski remains one of the very important pianist-composer-improvisers alive and active today. His continued output includes new piano works such as Amoramaro for pianist Lisa Moore and America: A Poem, based on the poem by Allen Ginsberg and dedicated to pianist Stéphane Ginsburgh. Bobby Mitchell's pianism oscillates between approaching the standard repertoire in a way that makes it sound like new music, and approaching new music with an ear grounded in the classical pianist-improviser-virtuoso tradition. Right now, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Frederic Rzewski keep him spiritually well and pianistically in shape. Artwork design and mastering by Oliver Barrett

Japanese sound artist & improvisor Toshimaru Nakamura treats us number 62 in his solo 'nimb' series, now in it's 21st anniversary year. Nakamura plays a 'no-input mixing board', connecting the input of the board to the output, then manipulating the resultant audio feedback to create textures that hiss, spin, garble, crackle, crumble and shimmer. Here, the ghosts in his machine dash round the circuit, zapping shots of iterative and indeterminate sounds that hot wire in lightning flashes, building towards quaking crescendos of bulbous noise. An essential for Nakamura fans, and a great starting point too to his prolific catalogue. --- All music made & recorded by Toshimaru Nakamura. Mastering by Oliver Barrett. Cover design by Oliver Barrett from a photo by Abby Thomas.

Assembled & recorded in a small village in the Vosges hills in Frances, Marianne Schuppe treats us to 3 new tracks brought to life by her voice, a lute and uber bows. Shared with an eerie, spine-tingling intimacy, Marianne's ghost-like presence feels like she's sharing her own headspace with the aural world, conjuring songs stripped to their bare components. Each folk song, refrain and lament - presented in a mixture of English & German - carries with it a malleable weight that seems to suck the air around it into a vacuum, rupturing space and capturing a sepia-soaked moment in time. A tender, precious release by a singular artist.  --- Written and recorded by Marianne Schuppe. Artwork design and mastering by Oliver Barrett