Vinyl


曲目简介 Tracks in Detail 01. 驼队 Kêrwên / Camel Caravan 02:33塔塔尔族民间乐曲 Tatar folk music 02. 你的眼睛 Kɵzdêring / Your Eyes 02:29塔塔尔族民间乐曲 Tatar folk music 03. 卡拉特根 Ⱪara têgin / Kara tegin 02:19塔吉克族民间乐曲 Tajik folk music 04. 十五满月 On bês kundik twƣan ay / Full Moon on the 15th 01:57蒙古族民间乐曲 Mongolian folk music 05. 锡伯族民歌 Sibê haleⱪ ǝni / Folk Song of the Sibe 00:56 06. 劝导 Nasyhat / Persuasion 02:43柯尔克孜族民间乐曲 Kyrgyz folk music 07. 萨热阿尔卡 Sararⱪa / Saryarka 02:36作曲 Composed by:库尔曼哈孜·萨赫尔拜吾勒 Kurmangazy Sagyrbaev《萨热阿尔卡》是库尔曼哈孜的巅峰之作,据说是库尔曼哈孜逃离伊尔库茨克监狱后,在阿尔卡地区看望作曲家塔特穆别特(Tǝttimbêt)时献给对方的作品。Considered Kurmangazy’s masterpiece, “Saryarka” was said to be a tribute to his fellow composer Tǝttimbêt, whom Kurmangazy paid a visit to in the area of Saryarka after escaping from the Irkutsk Prison. 08. 阿克拜 Aⱪbay / Akbay 04:21作曲 Composed by:库尔曼哈孜·萨赫尔拜吾勒 Kurmangazy Sagyrbaev阿克拜是曾经迫害库尔曼哈孜的村中恶霸奥巴克尔的父亲,库尔曼哈孜以这首作品痛诉乡绅的恶行。Akbay is the father of Aubaker, a village bully who used to persecute Kurmangazy. Kurmangazy wrote this piece to denounce the evil deeds of the country squires in his time. 9. 阿拉山 Alataw / Alatau 03:03作曲 Composed by:库尔曼哈孜·萨赫尔拜吾勒 Kurmangazy Sagyrbaev《阿拉山》是库尔曼哈孜在某次关押期间创作的曲子。Alataw音译为“阿拉套”,是位于中国新疆博尔塔拉蒙古自治州与哈萨克斯坦七河地区之间的山脉。“Alatau”, named after the Dzungarian Alatau, a mountain range that lies on the boundary of the Dzungaria region of China and the Zhetysu region of Kazakhstan, was written during one of Kurmangazy’s prison sentences. 10. 卸脚镣 Kisên axⱪan / Unshackling 02:21作曲 Composed by:库尔曼哈孜·萨赫尔拜吾勒 Kurmangazy Sagyrbaev这首曲子名字就反映了库尔曼哈孜多舛的命运。1857年,库尔曼哈孜因带头反抗沙俄殖民者对自己所在部落的恶行而被捕关押于奥伦堡监狱,之后在一次逃狱途中被牧民收留,《卸脚镣》就是躲藏在牧民家养伤时创作的曲子。The title itself epitomises Kurmangazy’s turbulent life. In 1857, Kurmangazy was arrested and held in Orenburg Prison for leading a rebellion of his clan against the Russian colonisers. During a subsequent prison escape, he was given shelter by a herdsman. “Unshackling” was written when he was hiding and recuperating in the herdsman’s home. 11. 令妇 Kêlinxêk / Virtuous Wife 02:00哈萨克民间乐曲 Kazakh folk music 12. 游击队之歌 Partyzandar marxe / Song of Guerrilla Forces 01:25作曲 Composed by:贺绿汀 He Luting

Daulet Halek – Dombra Solo

Black Truffle is thrilled to announce Reverse Tree, the new LP from the acclaimed duo of Eyvind Kang and Jessika Kenney, two musicians who have established themselves as powerful voices working at a unique intersection of contemporary composition, improvisation, and Asian traditional music forms. Either individually or as a pair, they have worked in contexts ranging from performances of traditional Persian and Javanese music to collaborations with Sunn O))), but their work together as a duo (documented on The face of the earth and Aestuarium, both released on Ideological Organ/Editions Mego) most clearly represents the central concerns of their diverse practices: a music of the inner life of sound, demanding ritualistic focus and promising heightened sensations. On Reverse Tree, the duo expand their work together into the realm of the chamber ensemble, presenting two side-long works that feature Kenney’s voice and Kang’s viola alongside a multitude of other instrumentalists. Kang’s Thoughts on Being Exiled to the Frontier, for Lord Wei, inspired by a text by the Tang dynasty poet Hsueh T'ao, features an all-star international ensemble: Kang, Kenney, maverick Israeli conductor Ilan Volkov on violin, Icelandic cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir, and guitarists Oren Ambarchi and Stephen O’Malley. The piece is primarily composed of irregular patterns of pizzicato notes and guitar harmonics, gently falling in and out of sync and providing a subtly unstable support for Kenney’s voice, which sings long, wavering tones, at times reminiscent of Michiko Hirayama’s classic performances of Scelsi. Drawing on 20th century instrumental techniques, alternate tuning systems, non-western music and the experience of nature (the irregular rhythms of the piece calling to mind nothing so much as drops of rain), the piece opens a space both serene and subtly uneasy. Kenney’s ‘Elm features Kenney and vocalist Nova Ruth (of Filastine & Twin Sista) alongside an ensemble of strings and Seattle’s Gamelan Pacifica, performing on Javanese instruments tuned to the slendro scale. An uncanny timbre created by bowing the keys of the Gamelan’s instruments, supported by bowed harmonics from the strings, is heard consistently throughout the piece. After a long introductory section in which this harmonic cloud slowly descends from shimmering high notes to rumbling bass, the vocalists enter, singing a slow and stately setting of a 19th century Surakarta poem (attributed to Mangkunegara the IV). The melody is sung as a rich and wavering heterophony, with the ensemble sometimes rising up to support individual notes. The poem deals with the idea of a form of knowledge achieved through deeds, as a practice and state of the heart. This is music in slow motion, in which, in Kenney’s words, ‘scouring the edges of each syllable, each vocalist is kneeling on a sheep hide, searching for the possibilities of what this knowledge might be, shared and private, through layers of history, culture, colonialism, distance, desire’. 

Eyvind Kang & Jessika Kenney – Reverse Tree

Nearly 15 years after the release of the CD "Maison.House II-V" (in duet with his electroacoustic friend Eric La Casa), Vert Pituite La Belle is pleased to collaborate once again with the great musician Jean-Luc Guionnet this time alone and on the organ. For Arantzazu Close & Far, the vinyl medium makes perfect sense: two sides, two versions of the same sound event, the recording of the same improvisation on the organ of the basilica of the monastery of Arantzazu in the Spanish Basque country, realized during a residency of a few days in this high-place of the history of the region at the invitation of the collective AudioLab. On the first side, we hear the recording made by a pair of microphones arranged closer to the organ while on the second we hear the same improvisation but recorded in the bottom of the monastery. Maybe the best way to hear the impact of space in sound reproduction “I work since 1993 to an experimental approach of the church organ (Pentes, Tirets) : 1) we control a machine 2) the organ is halfway between vehicle and artificial intelligence : it is a public transport : a ship, a barque, a boat, a building within a building 3) passing the machinery to the filter of listening, gesture and architecture 4) bringing the blast into the space : ventilate 5) make this organ sound not like this other one 6) express the organ as one says about lemon. The blast is endless". Jean-Luc Guionnet During the week of July 22-27, 2014, French musician, composer and sound artist Jean-Luc Guionnet performed an artistic residency at the Sanctuary of Arantzazu. For that, Guionnet counted on the help of the one who is probably the one who knows best this organ, the famous brother Pello Zabala. This experience is part of a more ambitious artistic residency program proposed by the GANDIAGA Cultural Center in collaboration with the AUDIOLAB association. This project aims to promote artistic creation using Arantzazu and its surroundings, its heritage, its history and its reality as a working material. The Sanctuary of Notre Dame d'Arantzazu is located at an altitude of 750 m, surrounded by mountains and vegetation, in the Spanish basque Country, 10 km from Oñati (Guipuscoa). Its basilica, built in the 1950s, is an architectural, sculptural and artistic work of great importance, taking up the challenge of contemporary aesthetic language, a language that originally seemed totally foreign to religious experience. The new basilica has robust and simple characters, frankly rustic. It is the diamond-point cut that catches the eye when looking at the main façade, in a clear allusion to hawthorn. The Virgin would have appeared in these places in 1469 and gave, by the legend of the appearance of her image in the thorns ("Arantza" in Basque) the name of the sanctuary, the place and the virgin herself Arantzazu. Since 1514, religious of the order of Franciscans reside there. The basilica has a large facade encircled by two twin towers and protected by the tower on the left, on the left. At the bottom of this facade, a frieze of 14 apostles designed by Jorge Oteiza. Large steps give access to the large iron doors created by the sculptor Eduardo Chillida. The apse is the work of Lucio Muñoz. The stained glass windows of Alvarez de Eulate and the painter Néstor Barrenetxea, took care in the 80s of the decoration of the walls of the crypt. The tower with its bell tower measures 44 meters in height and is completed by a simple iron cross of 6m. Designed to comfortably accommodate a large number of worshipers, the Arántzazu basilica is 66 meters long, 20 meters wide and 20 meters high, covering an area of 1200 m2. Its acoustics are exceptional as is its clarity and visibility. In the choir is the organ of the prestigious house of Amezúa, built and inaugurated in 1902, whose project is specially designed so that there is an optimal acoustics throughout the basilica. The keyboards, three manuals and a pedal, are located in the first choir, the one used by the brothers. This choir has 155 seats and has an altar on which the liturgical acts of the Franciscan community are celebrated.

Jean-Luc GUIONNET – Arantzazu Close & Far

"Gallarais was recorded between 2013-2015 in the shaft of the Brunel Tunnel. The shaft itself is 50ft in diameter and 50ft deep with an acoustic decay of three to four seconds. The square window located in the ceiling of the shaft invited a filter of sound from the outside world; trains from 14ft below, overhead planes, and a pump mechanism, all synthesized with my own sonic contributions, becoming part of the shaft’s unified breath. This transformed the tunnels structure into a ‘mystic cave’ and host for transmigrational sound.I’d launched my previous release ’Anything bright or startling?’ at the Brunel Tunnel Shaft in June 2013 to celebrate the tunnel’s 150 year anniversary, and to commemorate the passing of six men who died during the tunnel’s construction. Shortly after the launch, I began to consider the larger sonic potential of the space, and thanks to the generosity of director Robert Hulse was granted regular access to conduct my investigations.I began to explore the notion of a personalized abstract heritage relating to the bean chointe, or Irish keener, who were professional mourners revered for their improvisational vocal skills. It is said that they were outcasts, imbued with a type of madness, and they traveled across the countryside, barefoot and dishevelled on unmarked paths.Due to the fact I was unable to track down any known living keener in 2014, and the lack of available audio documentation, this triggered my creation of an imagined reinactment, with sitespecific sounds and additional instrumentation taking on the roles of ceremonional dirge.Although I have never been privy to an actual keening ceremony, the memory of a relatives funeral evoked what I imagined to have held comparable emotional weight. I had performed the exit music for the congregation, and after they had left, heard from my overhead position on the balcony the traumatized screams of bereavement from my family below. These horrific atonations stuck with me for both their emotional purity and phonetic power.Gallarais, or the Gallarus Oratory, translates into ‘church of the place of the foreigner’ or ‘rocky headland’. It is a funerary chapel which takes the shape of an upturned boat, and is situated on the Dingle peninsula, Co Kerry, Ireland, representing in this instance a touchstone for abstract heritage, and the expression of the female voice." - Áine O'Dwyer 

Áine O'Dwyer – Gallarais

E was the name of a periodic journal which Marshall Reese co-edited and co-published with composer Gene Carl. The name was taken from the vowel from cognate words in Indo-European languages – meaning to go, to fly, to be in transition and the publication was an attempt to unite the worlds of poetry and music. This LP is the third number of E magazine. It has taken over 40 years to be published and documents influences that reached Marshall Reese via Charles Amirkhanian in the 70s and early 80s. According to Reese his generation was “at the forefront of an expansion of literacy combining indigenous poetries, graphics, still and moving images, recorded words, music and sound, an oral/aural culture experiencing poetry and music as synaesthesia”. Curated by Marshall Reese selections of this record cover the many different aspects of sound poetry in relation to sound art and include Hannah Weiner’s multi-voice reading of her Clairvoyant Journal; Jackson Mac Low’s Vocabulary Gatha (both Hannah and Jackson were associated with Language writing); Steve McCaffery of the Four Horsemen and Toronto Research Group (one of the organizers of the Toronto Sound Poetry Festival); the Irrepressible Bastards, sound and performance project of cris cheek and Lawrence Upton; CoAccident, the poetry performance group Reese was part of in Baltimore; the flautist Greta Monach, composer Vladan Radovanovic and finally a text sound composition of Gene Carl.

Various Artists (Steve McCaffery, Co-Accident, Greta Monach, Jackson Mac Low, Vladan Radonowicz, Irrespressible Bastards, Hannah Weiner, Gene Carl ) – Slowscan vol. 48: – E3

1977 Days of Free Music Festival recording, restored and released for the first time. "Paul and Limpe Fuchs played superbly. As archaic as the instruments may seem (sand shovel, circular saw, hand-knitted crumhorn, sheet metal), as simple as the musical patterns and structures are, far from all virtuosity, the two have meanwhile found a complete harmony in making music together. The most beautiful thing about this music is probably the unfamiliar; no role model is used here." -  Baldur Brockhoff,  Süddeutsche Zeitung "In 1968, the Austrian classical and jazz pianist Friedrich Gulda organized the First International Music Forum of Ossiachersee with the theme "Improvisation in Music -- Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow". During the third edition of the festival, Gulda got to know the band Anima Sound and was fascinated by their "absolute free music", which they played on home-made instruments. Anima Sound was Limpe and Paul Fuchs, who had already released two albums in 1971, Stürmischer Himmel (Stormy Heaven) on Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser's OHR label and the self-released Musik für Alle. Musik für Alle developed during a 4,000-kilometer tour throughout Europe when the band and their two children hitched a handmade mobile home and stage to an old Hanomag tractor, bringing their anarchic, uncompromising improvisations to an impromptu public, free of charge. German documentary filmmaker Helga Tiedemann captured part of the tour for the film Mit 20 km/h durch Europa. Gulda and Anima Sound often toured together throughout the '70s and the band became regulars at Gulda's festivals of free music. In 1972, they released the simply titled LP Anima. In 1973, Tiedemann captured one of the shows, and the film Gruppe Anima in Salzburg. The International Music Forum of Ossiachersee ended in 1974. In the same year, Gulda and Limpe and Paul Fuchs went on tour with some of their festival musicians and recorded the double-LP "It's Up To You." Gulda and partner Ursula Anders' festival in Ossiach attracted top-class guests, including among others Pink Floyd, Weather Report, Tangerine Dream, and many great jazz and world music musicians. The follow-up festival, Tage Freier Musik (Days of Free Music) at Castle Moosham in the Lungau region of Salzburg, Austria in 1976 again offered a high-class bill. A year later in 1977, the guests were Don Cherry and Moki, The Revolutionary Ensemble, Günther Rabl, Makaya Ntshoko, among others, and Anima Sound with Limpe and Paul Fuchs. The recordings here were made during the 1977 festival and have been restored and are released for the first time ever. The music critic Baldur Brockhoff wrote for Süddeutsche Zeitung about the Anima Sound concert: "Paul and Limpe Fuchs played superbly. As archaic as the instruments may seem (sand shovel, circular saw, hand-knitted crumhorn, sheet metal), as simple as the musical patterns and structures are, far from all virtuosity, the two have meanwhile found a complete harmony in making music together. The most beautiful thing about this music is probably the unfamiliar; no role model is used here."

Anima – Im Lungau

"Based around the married couple Paul and Limpe Fuchs, the group Anima, also known as Anima-Sound, was one of the most radically avant-garde and creative groups to emerge from the thriving Krautrock scene of Munich at the end of the 1960s. In fact, their improvised atonal sounds and unconventional instrumentation is much closer to the spirit of experimental free jazz than anything remotely close to rock music. The Fuchs began in the late '60s as part of the counterculture at the time. Adding to the conventional instruments such as drums, bass, and cornet, as well as wordless vocal yelps and screams, they created their own homemades, like the Fuchshorn, Fuchszither, and Fuchsbass to further enhance the strangeness of their structure-less music. A 1970 appearance of them in an X-rated exposé movie, Sex Freedom in Germany, finds Limpe, naked except for black body paint, banging away on drums and Paul on various inventions creating musical anarchy. Anima-Sound's first album, Stürmischer Himmel, was recorded in a 1,000-year-old cottage and released by Ohr Records in 1971. That summer, they also played the Ossiach, a three-day outdoor festival organized by famed Austrian classical/jazz pianist Friedrich Gulda that included Tangerine Dream and Pink Floyd. By then, Gulda had become close friends with the Fuchs and even joined them on their next few albums, including Anima released by the Pilz label and Musik für Alle, both of which came out in 1972. During the next few years, the Fuchs would often tour with Gulda and make guest appearances on his records as well. "Anima" continued to release records of their eccentric music, from the double It's Up to You in 1974 to Monte Alto in 1977. Recorded between 1978 and 1982, the double LP Der Regt Mich Auf/A Controversy included new bandmember Zoro Fuchs, son of Paul and Limpe, on drums. This same lineup of the three Fuchs is also on the double album Bruchstucke für Ilona, recorded in the summer of 1985 and released later that year. By 1987's Via, Anima had become Limpe Fuchs' solo project. She continued this solo career after that with an album every several years in a similar vein to the Anima records, with a high emphasis on creativity." - Rolf Semprebon

Anima – Monte Alto

For the time being we are unable to get to the post but if you order now your item will be posted as soon as things return to normal. Thank you for your support. Maryanne Amacher (1938 - 2009) was a composer of large-scale fixed-duration sound installations and a highly original thinker in the areas of perception, sound spatialization, creative intelligence, and aural architecture. She is frequently cited as a pioneer of what has come to be called “sound art,” although her thought and creative practice consistently challenge key assumptions about the capacities and limitations of the genre. Amacher’s work anticipates some of the most important developments in network culture, media arts, acoustic ecology, and sound studies, yet due to its expansive interdisciplinary nature it has rarely been documented. Following two CDs for Tzadik and her inclusion in the monumental collection OHM: The Early Gurus Of Electronic Music (1948-1980), this publication of Amacher’s 1991 piece Petramarks her first commercially available instrumental work as well as the first time her music has ever been available on vinyl. Petra was originally commissioned for the ISCM World Music Days in Switzerland. Written for two pianos, the piece is a unique example of Amacher’s late work, a direct extension of her working methodologies for electronic composition taken into an acoustic realm that alludes to the music of Giacinto Scelsi and Galina Ustvolskaya. Petra is a sweeping, durational work based on both Amacher’s impressions of the church in Boswil where the piece was premiered and science-fiction writer Greg Bear’s short story of the same name, in which gargoyles come to life and breed with humans in a post-apocalyptic Notre Dame. This solemn interpretation of Petra was recorded at its 2017 American premiere at New York’s St. Peter’s Episcopal Church with pianists Marianne Schroeder, who originally performed the piece alongside Amacher in 1991, and Stefan Tcherepnin, who performed it alongside Schroeder in 2012 at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. Weighing tranquilizing passages of glacially-paced serenity against stretches of dilapidated, jagged dissonance, the recording illuminates a crucial node in the constellation of Amacher’s enigmatic oeuvre. Artistic director of the Giacinto Scelsi Festival in Basel, Marianne Schroeder is a Swiss composer and pianist specializing in the interpretation of New Music. She has collaborated with and premiered work by John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Dieter Schnebel, Anthony Braxton, Morton Feldman, Pauline Oliveros and Giacinto Scelsi, with whom she studied. She is currently a professor at Hochschule der Künste Bern, and has also taught at the International Summer Courses in Darmstadt. Stefan Tcherepnin is an American electronic music performer, contemporary artist, and composer in fourth generation, continuing the family heritage of his great-grandfather Nicholas, grandfather Alexander, and father Ivan Tcherepnin. As a family friend of Amacher’s and a student of hers at Bard College he is uniquely qualified to navigate the labyrinth of Amacher interpretation.

Maryanne Amacher – Petra

In Japanese folklore, Afuma indicates a time of day marked by spiritual or mysterious encounter. In Latin, one who inhales. Together as Afuma, Stefan Tcherepnin, and Taketo Shimada breathe sepulchral energies into the brooding, cosmic fringes of guitar-based song vernacular. Tcherepnin’s baritone and Shimada’s lap steel guitar intertwine, smearing across world’s-end horizons that propel Tcherepnin’s ragged, foreboding vocal delivery and its lyrical portents of departure, of life’s vessel unmoored onto a fathomless periphery. Shimada, a Tokyo-born musician and artist who has lived with Herbert Huncke and worked with Henry Flynt, also contributes Indian double-reed instrument shehnai to the band. And Stefan Tcherepnin, a contemporary artist and composer in fourth generation (continuing the family heritage of his great-grandfather Nicholas, grandfather Alexander, and father Ivan Tcherepnin), embellishes their dirge-scapes with electronics from the Sonica, a lute shaped version of the Serge synthesizer developed by his uncle. A family friend and student of Maryanne Amacher, Tcherepnin’s piano playing alongside Marianne Schroeder’s additionally graced Blank Forms Edition’s publication of Amacher’s Petra. Tcherepnin and Shimada are joined by drummer David Silver for Songs From The Shore, their debut LP, featuring artwork in the form of A Rip In The Void, a newly commissioned painting by Bobby Beausoleil.

Afuma + Songs From the Shore – Assisted Suicide

First ever Vinyl and CD reissues of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela's seminal 1969 debut,  31 VII 69 10:26 - 10:49 PM / 23 VIII 64 2:50:45 - 3:11 AM The Volga Delta (The Black Record) La Monte Young was born in Bern, Idaho in 1935. He began his music studies in Los Angeles and later Berkeley, California before relocating to New York City in 1960, where he became a primary influence on Minimalism, the Fluxus movement and performance art through his legendary compositions of extended time durations and the development of just intonation and rational number based tuning systems. With his collaborator since 1962, artist Marian Zazeela, they would formulate the composite sound environments of the Dream House, which continues to this day. Seeing reissue for the first time since its initial 1969 release, Young and Zazeela's first full-length album is often referred to as "The Black Record" due to Zazeela's stunning cover design, complete with the composer's liner notes in elegant hand-lettered script. Side one was recorded in 1969 (on the date and time indicated by the title) at the gallery of Heiner Friedrich in Munich, where Young and Zazeela premiered their Dream House sound and light installation. Featuring Young and Zazeela's voices against a sine wave drone, the recording is a section of the longer composition Map of 49's Dream the Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery (begun in 1966 as a sub-section of the even larger work The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys, which was begun in 1964 with Young's group The Theatre of Eternal Music). According to Young, the raga-like melodic phrases of his voice were heavily influenced by his future teacher, the Hindustani singer Pandit Pran Nath. Side two, recorded in Young and Zazeela's NYC studio in 1964, is a section of the longer composition Studies in the Bowed Disc. This composition is an extended, highly abstract noise piece for bowed gong (gifted by sculptor Robert Morris). The liner notes explain that the live performance can be heard at 33 and 1/3 RPM, but may also be played at any slower speed down to 8 and 1/3 RPM for turntables with this capacity. Track Listing: 31 VII 69 10:26 - 10:49 PM 23 VIII 64 2:50:45 - 3:11 AM The Volga Delta

La Monte Young / Marian Zazeela – 31 VII 69 10:26 - 10:49 PM / 23 VIII 64 2:50:45 - 3:11 AM The Volga Delta (The Black Record)

LP / CD

Souffle Continu Records present the first vinyl reissue of Cohelmec Ensemble's Hippotigris Zebra Zebra, originally released in 1971. The Cohelmec Ensemble celebrate, above all, the pleasure of collective music-making. A group without a designated leader, they base their approach on reciprocal listening, but also on a dialogue between written and improvised material, in which all members have an equal responsibility whatever their instrument. This is even demonstrated in their name: COH as in Jean Cohen (saxophones), EL as in Dominique Elbaz (piano) and MEC as in the brothers François and Jean-Louis Méchali (respectively, amongst others, bass and drums), joined for this album by Evan Chandlee, known for his participation in Love Rejoice (1969) by Kenneth Terroade, and accepted, of course, as a full group member. Fitting together like hand in glove, the five musicians build something together, rather than trying to destroy an established order, as was the thing to do at the start of the 1970s, leaving the expression of an openly political agenda to others. In France, there was a tendency to explore an imaginary folklore which allowed certain elements of free jazz to be circumvented without being ignored. Which is why it is reminiscent of, in the melody of "Hippotigris Zebrazebra" when played with collective intensity, the best of American cosmic jazz, while also occasionally hearing McCoy Tyner or even Cecil Taylor under the fingers of Dominique Elbaz, or the vibraphone of Walt Dickerson evoked by Jean-Louis Méchali. Globally, however, their identity is original (even seminal), a fact which was to be confirmed by their next two recordings. For the record, it should be noted that the first album by the Free Jazz Workshop (from Lyon), another French group with a similar approach, would only be published two years later. Licensed from Cohelmec Ensemble. Deluxe reissue with high definition remastered audio; 12-page booklet on 200 gsm art paper. Includes liner notes and rare pictures; Gatefold LP with obi strip; Edition of 700.

Cohelmec Ensemble – Hippotigris Zebra Zebra

Souffle Continu Records present the first vinyl reissue of Cohelmec Ensemble's Next. The Cohelmec Ensemble celebrate, above all, the pleasure of collective music-making. A group without a designated leader, they base their approach on reciprocal listening and equal responsibilities. This is reflected in their name, created from the first syllables of the founding member's names, which would remain unchanged in spite of the subsequent personnel changes: COH as in Jean Cohen (saxophones), EL as in Dominique Elbaz (piano) and MEC as in the brothers François and Jean-Louis Méchali (respectively, amongst others, bass and drums), Evan Chandlee joined them after they had already been playing together for a while, at the time they recorded their first album, 1971's Hippotigris Zebra Zebra (FFL 019LP). The follow-up (appropriately named Next) saw the original pianist leave, to be replaced by guitarist Joseph Dejean, who had already played with the Full Moon Ensemble, known for having accompanied Archie Shepp at the Antibes Jazz Festival in 1970. In spite of the personnel changes, the understanding and cohesion remain total within Cohelmec. They also maintain their trademark ambitious mix of written and improvised material. From this point of view, Next is even more audacious than its predecessor Hippotigris Zebra Zebra. Relatively brief tracks follow hot on the heels of one another, bolstered by a poly-instrumentality which stands out even more than in the past, giving the album the feel of a contrasting suite. There is a lot going on, leading to evocative atmospheres in which rigor and fantasy go happily hand in hand. Which is enough to say that this album should please fans of a style of free (chamber?) jazz which includes intelligent composed structures, a form in which French musicians have always demonstrated a personal approach, as in the example of Oeil Vision by Jef Gilson in 1964 (OI 012LP). Profoundly original and, it has to be said, seminal. Licensed from Cohelmec Ensemble. Deluxe reissue with high definition remastered audio; 12-page booklet on 200 gsm art paper. Includes liner notes and rare pictures; Gatefold LP with obi strip; Edition of 700

Cohelmec Ensemble – Next

"Derek Bailey’s guests for Company Week at London’s ICA in July 1982 were contemporary classical pianist Ursula Oppens, folk/jazz singer-turned-improviser Julie Tippetts and her partner pianist Keith Tippett, violinist/electronics wizard Philipp Wachsmann, guitarist Fred Frith, trombonist George Lewis, harpist Anne LeBaron, and from Japan free jazz bassist Motoharu Yoshizawa and sound artist Akio Suzuki. Altogether they performed the stunning extended improvisation Epiphany.In different, more intimate lineups they detonated numerous Epiphanies. Here, to start, Yoshizawa and Oppens (both on the keyboard and inside her piano) bounce ideas off each other like ping-pong balls. Then Tippetts, Wachsmann and Bailey do extraterrestrial cubist flamenco; and Lewis and Frith rumble at everyone magnificently.Tippett and Oppens kaleidoscope the entire history of the piano into just over fifteen minutes (Fourth and Fifth) with added seasoning from LeBaron and Wachsmann. To close, Akio Suzuki — despite once describing himself as “pursuing listening as a practice” — makes one hell of a racket with his self-made instruments: a flute, a spring gong and his analapos (two single-lidded cylinders attached by a long steel coil, which he can manipulate and strike, besides vocalising into the tube). Yoshizawa and Bailey give him a real run for his money, and it all builds to an ecstatic, swirling, grinding climax, with Suzuki whooping and hollering wildly."

Company – Epiphanies I-VI