Edition of 500 copies, featuring photography by Mark Fell. Mixed by Sasu Ripatti and mastered by Rashad Becker. Finally compiled on CD, Mark Fell & Will Guthrie’s Infoldings / Diffractions is an inspirational, almost 80 minute long study in four parts, informed by Gamelan and South Indian Carnatic musics. Essential listening if you’re into Autechre, Michael Ranta, The Necks, Milford Graves. Infoldings / Diffractions combines synthesis and acoustic percussion in unpredictable, pointillist arrangements where Guthrie plays against patterns derived from Max MSP patches by Fell. The album’s four longform expositions are in this sense different to the man-machine concept of Fell’s acclaimed ‘Intra’ album, where he triggered performances by Portugal’s Drumming Grupo De Percussão to play a metallophone designed by Iannis Xenakis. Here, the pair find common and sometimes contrasting purpose in a probing of rhythmic signatures, with groundbreaking results. Recorded at HFG, Karlsruhe (where Fell is guest professor), and finished later in respective isolation, the pieces were edited from iterations of call-and-response between Fell’s rhythmic patterns and Guthrie’s overdubs. They effectively propose beguiling solutions to electronic music’s problems with grid-lock, using generative processing to make physical actions seem unfeasibly effortless, while melting the computer’s clock to a real-time, free-hand syncopation. Taking the influence of gamelan and fusing it with the fractal computer music that Fell has obsessively picked-at over the last four decades, the duo zoom into a sound that’s completely captivating; mutating into polyrhythmic outer-realms and eerie universes of microtonality that are hard to fathom in a single sitting. There are trace echoes of free jazz hanging from the rafters, the post-everything chatter of Humcrush and Food drummer Thomas Strønen’s mind-expanding solo material or even Autechre at their most confounding. The genius here is that just as you convince yourself that the music could only possibly have been generated by a computer, Guthrie’s unmistakably human flex edges into focus - playing with perception and expectation in the most wild, liquid way imaginable.

There ARE no simple songs — only simple people. And since guns don't kill people, "Simple Songs" will have to do. Super-sweet terrorism from our very own latter-day Spector!

"Breathing in, breathing out. Tide comes in, tide goes out. The sun rises and it also sets: beginnings and endings. These are the first impressions given by The Visitor: a build-up and break-down. One seamless, 38-minute piece of music that completely engages its listeners. An extremely thoughtful piece that even a year later, still retains all of the qualities it had upon first listen. This record made me realize the full potential music can have when someone who actually gives a damn does something about it. Here, O'Rourke constructs an intricate and personal piece of music that unveils its beauty with every listen. Open your ears, put this record on the platter, close the door behind you, shut your eyes, and prepare for the trip. Remember to be a good visitor - and visit often..."

Félicia Atkinson’s Ni envers ni endroit que cette roche brûlante (Pour Georgia O’Keeffe) is approached as a meditation, not as meditative music, but as a reflection on the art of creation: how to inhabit one’s creation, how to convey it, domesticate it and live with it. Drawing inspiration from the artist Georgia O’ Keeffe, both in her work as a painter and in the houses in which she lived in New Mexico, and even in the landscapes that surround them, Félicia Atkinson has composed a piece that evokes and celebrates, in a poetic and holistic way, the mystery of art, the somnambulic oscillation that accompanies the act of creating. Blending fragmentary voices, islands of piano, electronic textures and patterns, and field recordings, Félicia Atkinson’s music is sincere and inspired, a meditation, then, but also a lesson we sometimes forget: being an artist is not an activity, even less a profession, it’s a singular way of approaching the world and, in so doing, densifying it. Richard Chartier’s music takes up residence at the frontiers of the audible, on the edge where sound diffracts into an inter-dimensionality where sounds, space, listening and silence recombine in an arborescence of becomings that present themselves to us and then disappear. The space-time in which Richard Chartier’s music unfolds is a stretched space-time, barely emerging in the world of sound. The delicacy, precision and accuracy of the composition Recurrence.Expansion lies precisely in this dialogue between a shape that is exposed and developed in an inspired and masterful way, and the sonic biotope in which this shape develops. It is from such an encounter that the singularity of Richard Chartier’s music emerges, music of attentive listening, but also sensitive, inhabited music, a music of discreet metamorphosis. —Francois J. Bonnet, Paris, March 2023  Multichannel electroacoustic piece for electronics and voice (stereo version) Can be performed in concert with additional live voice, grand piano and/or Fender Rhodes Composed and performed by Félicia Atkinson Published by Mute Song Limited Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi Cut by Andreas Kauffelt at Schnittstelle, Berlin, February 2023 Photos by Éléonore Huisse Sleeve design by Stephen O’Malley /// Stereo reference of original multichannel work for 26 speakers premiered at INA grm’s Présences électronique festival, Maison de la Radio et de la Musique (Paris, France), April 16, 2022 Formed, composed and recorded by Richard Chartier Richard Chartier is published by Touch Music/Fairwood Music UK Ltd.

Living Torch, through its unique structural form and harmonic material, is a bold continuation of Kali Malone’s demanding and exciting body of work, while opening new perspectives and increasing the emotional potential of the music tenfold. As such, Living Torch is a major new piece by the composer and adds a significant milestone to an already fascinating repertoire. Departing from the pipe organ that Malone’s music is most notable for, Living Torch features a complex electroacoustic ensemble. Leafing through recordings from conventional instruments like the trombone and bass clarinet to more experimental machines like the boîte à bourdon, passing through sinewave generators and Éliane Radigue’s ARP 2500 synthesizer. Living Torch weaves its own history, its own genealogy, and that of its author. It extends her robust structural approach to a liberated palette of timbre. Living Torch was initially commissioned by GRM for its legendary loudspeaker orchestra, the Acousmonium, and premiered in its complete multichannel form at the Grand Auditorium of Radio France in a concert entirely dedicated to the artist. Composed at GRM studios in Paris between 2020-2021, Living Torch is a work of great intensity, an oeuvre-monde that is singularly placed at the crossroads of instrumental writing and electroacoustic composition. Living Torch proceeds from multiple lineages, including early modern music, American minimalism, and musique concrète. It’s a work as much turned towards exploring justly tuned harmony and canonic structures as towards the polyphony of unique timbres, the scaling of dynamic range, and the revelation of sound qualities. GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales), the pioneering institution of electroacoustic, acousmatic, and musique concrète, has been a unique laboratory for sonorous research since 1958. Witnessing the extreme vitality of the music championed by GRM, the Portraits GRM record series extends and expands this momentum with Kali Malone’s Living Torch. The French label-partner Shelter Press is proud to continue the collaboration with GRM, which Peter Rehberg of Editions MEGO set the foundation for in 2012. 

XKatedral Anthology II is the second installment in a series of archival releases dedicated to presenting music by composers affiliated with XKatedral working within the realm of slowly evolving harmonic and timbral music. This double-vinyl set contains an array of pieces written from 2018 to 2020 by composers Kali Malone, Jessica Ekomane, Mats Erlandsson, Theodor Kentros, Wilma Hultén and Maria W Horn. This collection of pieces focuses on the use of synthetic sound and algorithmic composition languages as tools for precise work within the realm of spectral exploration. In addition to this, the electronic instrumentation in many of the pieces is augmented by acoustic instruments.

“F(r)icciones is a complicated piece of miscellaneous works. A set of experiments in preparation for a gig at a noise convention in Orozco that never happened, an 18 women choir piece composed for a soundtrack to a documentary that doesn’t have a release date yet or trying to create a drone piece by accumulating guitar noise. The result? Burnt psychedelic blues with electronics ” Partly an official soundtrack to “Durangas”, a documentary focusing on women and heritage, discussing civil war, education, sex or violence in the town of Durango, Basque Country. And partly a non musical accompaniment to an imaginary movie, F(r)icciones is the new album by A. Maiah. Self described as Guitarist / Composer / Improviser of Idiomatic Noise / Microtonal Blues Ist or Psychedelic Populist, Asier has been self-releasing albums for nearly a decade now, focusing mostly on prepared guitar or improvised noise. Durangas was composed by Asier, arranged/conducted by Garazi Navas, performed by an 18 women choir from Durango and recorded live at San Agustin Cultural Centre. All of the other tracks were recorded between 2021-2022 in between portable recorders in Burgos or at Estudios Nomadas. 

As the mist clears from their Sift LP (hop9) Eyes of the Amaryllis return to Horn of Plenty with the equally enigmatic Perceptible to Everyone. Recorded in various remote locations around the northeast of the US over a few warm months in 2022, Perceptible to Everyone maps the band's poetry in nebulous song forms that dance on their constant fission between pastoral and ghostly inner galaxies. Its eight tracks utilize a wide range of instruments and techniques to span an alien, ritualistic territory where melodies and rhythms appear from meandering passages of sound and ramshackle sci-fi settings. The culmination leaves Perceptible to Everyone gesturing as if it were an alluring otherworldly ethnographic document. EotA’s non-idiomatic methods make comparisons difficult but traces of Smegma, early D.D.A.A, Garbage and the Flowers, The Tower Recordings, and Flaming Tunes will get you some of the way there. The rest is uncharted.

Back in the early 2000s, after locating those first Moondog 78s, and adding them to the mix at Honest Jons, assembling the compilation that became The Viking of Sixth Avenue, was a kind of musical cloud nine - a voyage of discovery, attempting to chart the worlds that Moondog had created. Now it's Spring again - as winter encroaches - and Mississippi expose us to some never before heard material. It's killer grade, recorded by yet another genius, Tony Schwartz, the pioneering Folkways field recordist, the first man to record Louis Hardin, aka Moondog, who in the 1950s also recorded a day in the life of a dog [canine variety] and a New York cab driver, among many others.Behold! A survey of Moondog’s earliest recorded works - many of them unreleased until now - through a collaboration by Mississippi Records and Lucia Records. From 1954 - 1962 field recordist Tony Schwartz frequently checked in with Moondog, his favorite street musician. Tony Schwartz made recordings of Moondog’s earliest compositions as they were coming into focus. Sometimes these recordings were made right on the street as Moondog busked, sometimes they were made in Schwartz’s studio, and sometimes they were made on NYC rooftops. The resulting recordings, many of which had never been released, were deposited at the Library Of Congress as part of the Tony Schwartz Collection in 2006 when Schwartz passed away, and this record was culled straight from these original tapes.Side one kicks off with an unreleased version of Moondog’s classic composition “Why Spend The Dark Night With You?” followed by the first ever complete recording of his “Nocturne Suite,” a beautiful piece of classical music performed with members of the Royal Philharmonic. The side ends with the complete “On The Streets Of New York” 7” EP, which was released on Mars records in 1955 and subsequently re-released by Honest Jon’s Records in 2004 on their excellent Moondog anthology. Side B features sketches of Moondog compositions never released, many with the man himself howling and chanting over his homemade percussion set.Moondog’s music is as universal as it gets - part classical music, part Native American, part European folk, and part something completely unique. Moondog is one of the towering figures of 20th century music. This record comes with liner notes featuring never before released interviews with Moodog by Tony Schwartz and is housed in an old school “tip on” cover. All tracks fully licensed from the Library of Congress.

LSD March is a band from Himeji, Hyogo Prefecture, whose members revolved around Shinsuke Michishita, guitarist/singer, the band’s black star, before being reborn nowadays, after several years of hiatus, as a duet with Ikuro Takahashi, legendary drummer who was the heart muscle of Fushitsusha, and of most of the underground Tokyo bands. Shinsuke Michishita has a taste for immersion, for plunging into the electric waves of gaping amplifiers, psychedelic surfer haunted by this sonic ocean and its crushing shore breaks, where the self dissolves, becomes one with the sound, where the self escapes to his dreams and nightmares. This album recorded in 2008 is caught in a crazy time spiral, as in a dream where one desperetaely runs without moving, with the ground slipping away under our feet. The clock turns celibate, Ikuro Takahashi fractures the rhythm, hammers it further like an impossible point to reach. Sometimes, the guitar follows or precedes him, resets the clock, with its chords slammed on the ticking, a ceremony of fleeing time. And the voice weeps like rain, or a prayer. LSD March has often been compared to the Rallizes Denudes, a sort of poisonous resurgence of them, with Shinsuke Michishista being seen as a revenant from those psychedelic dark times. The same dark Moire, spilling from a bog overflowing with distortion, the same nihilistic, maladjusted, collapsed lyricism, a similar sad voice singing from within the ruins of time.  --- Shinsuke Michishita : vocal & guitar Ikuro Takahashi : drums --- Released: An' Archives, 2021

The intimacy of Akiyama’s Thaumaturgy is immense. In nine short through-composed pieces written over a ten-year period, Akiyama captures something melodic, simple, and utterly transfixing. In his first instrumental solo acoustic guitar record in more than a decade, Akiyama, widely known for his improvisatory collaborations as well as his hypnotizing boogie-drone guitar pieces, here works without effects and maintains a strict harmonic palette throughout. Every note is given ample space to ring out and decay, together slowly and deliberately building the frame that is to become the completed structure. The resulting atmosphere of his pared down grammar threads each individual track to the next as the songs work together with the gravity of a single object. In fact, one might think of each track like a room in a house. The record, as its name hints, is suffused with phenomenological magic. The pieces function architecturally, in a Bachelardian sense, sheltering the daydreamer and encouraging charged stillness. The record envelops like a long-vacant shelter, made sacred by memory. Repeated motifs, like building blocks, waft through the air, exacting the psycho-durational and transportive power of a music box. And while, like a music box, the music lends itself to the tracing of inner landscapes, critical listening reveals that this is no mere background music. The acoustic field is richly ornamented with combination tones that are intensified by a pacing in step with Rothko-philes, Morton Feldman and Loren Connors. While the enclosure of home serves for many as refuge from the world, Akiyama’s Thaumaturgy speaks to a basic drive for a sense of place in an epoch dominated by the disassociation of global nowhere-culture. The simplicity-bordering naivete of the pieces evokes a discomfiting nostalgia and melancholy pointing us home or, as Bachelard would suggest, to the “miniscule phenomenon of the shimmering consciousness.” 

First LP from Donna Candy, the bass-vocal-drums trio trawled from the sub genres of experimental rock and busy pushing to the front of heavy music. Nu metal bass riffs, switch-pitched fuzz vocals and big, splashy drums layer over unsettling narratives and extreme loops to bring a bit of the pit to the dancefloor.Begun as an off the cuff party band with the idea of finding a live sound that would fit between 4am trance sets, the trio soon found themselves addicted to the euphoric sludge they created. Swapping their usual guitar for a bass, JS Donny drives Donna Candy with simple riffs, split half clean and half shredded with Boris / Sunn O))) like distortion. Head-banging the whole way, they’ll switch speed or stop suddenly, bending and drawing out notes to ratchet things up for release. Nadja's vocals tear through the top layer - heavily processed and warped with weird imagery. Together there’s a feeling of what it might be like to see Sightings slowed by codeine but with Elvin Brandi on the mic.Always set up facing each other, off stage and surrounded by the audience, Donna Candy encourage catharsis - reciprocally transforming energy between themselves and the crowd. They build a queer euphoria that pulls apart metal’s narrow dichotomy of nihilistic machismo vs. hyperfemininity, and begins to make the visceral faux-hybridity of nineties nu metal feel possible this time around. ‘Blooming’ brings us six offerings from the band on a four way split release that speaks for itself - once on board with the DC energy you’ll want to be a part of it.  --- Music by Donna Candy Alex (drums), Js Donny (bass), Nadja Meier (vocal) Produced and recorded by Anotine Nouel at Sound Love Studio, Grrrnd Zero (Lyon) Mixed by Anotine Nouel and Js Donny. Mastered by A.P. Mastering and Post.

"Their 5th album finds the band in a studio again, in their label Trost Records hometown Vienna, with time and the desire to try something new. Seven compositions in the disctinctive strong FULL BLAST nature get an exciting electronic treatment by Michael Wertmüller (sounds/electronics by Gerd Rische- head of Berlin Acadamy of Electro-acoustic Music 1995-2014) during and after the recording." "With all the projects Peter Brötzmann is currently working on, Full Blast -- with the precise and dynamic Swiss rhythm section of Marino Pliakas and Michael Wertmüller -- is the most consistent and the longest-running. Their fifth album finds the band in a studio again, with time and the desire to try something new. Seven compositions in the distinctive, strong Full Blast nature get an exciting electronic treatment by Michael Wertmüller (with electronics by Gerd Rische, recorded months before his death in October 2015) during and after the recording. For mixing the band decided to work with Gareth Jones (well-known for his work with Einstürzende Neubauten and Depeche Mode), whom they have used with Pliakas's band Steamboat Switzerland before. Full Blast have created an album that in its nonconformity and richness in variety stands on his own in contemporary jazz."  --- Peter Brötzmann / reeds Marino Pliakas / e-bass Michael Wertmüller / drums Gerd Rische / electronics --- CREDITS:Recording: Martin SiewertProduction: Konstantin DrobilMix: Martin SiewertMastering: Martin SiewertArtwork: Peter Brötzmann

"In the two compositions for vibraphone she wrote for mappa editions, Sarah Hennies analyses the psychoacoustic dimensions of space. Sisters is a sonic exploration which opens the space between the rough walls of the church, an infinite pulse penetrating into every crinkle, hole and fold. In the sense of her quote "When you pulse one note on a vibraphone for 20 minutes, why do you need to do anything else?", we witness the fullness of one single tone, disappearing resonances and gentle changes, which reveal various performative, spatial, psychic and listening situations. Sisters was a challenge for Lenka Novosedlíková, who is slovak composer, performer and organizer. Novosedlíková is well known distinctive figure of the youngest composers generation in Slovakia. She moves across contemporary composition and interpretation (percussion instruments), improv or electronic music projects. She is member of Cluster Ensemble which is renowned Slovak ensemble with many international achievements.    We discovered the church in Kyjatice three years ago during our irregular wanderings across southern Slovakia. We were completely enchanted by this well hidden medieval building standing over the village, surrounded by sunny fields and dense forests. We asked ourselves how we could bring life again to the church, how we could fill it with sound which would not interrupt the contemplative character of that specific environment. The result should have been the sound intervention which would awaken and reveal every corner inside of the church. Just for a moment, we wanted to caress all the monumental fresco paintings, creaking wooden benches, pipes of howling organ, hand painted ceiling and carved saints by sound which could release them from the long guarded and abandoned silence.  The church in Kyjatice is a sacred place of mappa editions. It blesses all our activities. It's a place of inevitable distance from our everyday life. Here we find distance from our everyday lives. By buying a recording you contribute to better accessibility and maintenance of this significant Roman-gothic monument with valuable fresco decorations.    --- composed by Sarah Hennies performed by Lenka Novosedlíková    ---Recorded by Jonáš Gruska. Mixed and mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Design by Jakub Juhás and Zoltán Czakó. Cover photography by Zoltán Czakó. Liner notes by Jennie Gottschalk. Special thanks to Janka Miháliková, Nina Pacherová and Lukáš Ďurian. Released by mappa as MAP011 in 2018 Supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council

Fresh output from John Chantler's 1703 Skivbolaget - the new duo from two masters of very different string instruments. ‘The Air Around Her’ beguiled its audience when recorded live in a bakery at Edition Festival in 2016, and carries beautifully through to this release. Microtonal timbres meet gnarled defiance - the result is surprisingly symbiotic. Ellen Fullman’s Long String Instrument has been a long-term life-work of incredible ambition and dedication. The result is immediate, exciting and inspirational. Okkyung Lee has completed rewritten the possibilities for the cello in solo and group improvisation whilst maintaining a steadfast defiance to the many attempts to contain her work within pre-defined genres. ‘The Air Around Her’ was recorded on 20 February 2016 during the First Edition Festival for Other Music in Stockholm, Sweden at Kronobageriet — the former bakery to Swedish Royalty that dates back to the 17th Century and is now the site of the city’s Performing Arts Museum. The Edition Festival was given access to the space while renovations took place and Fullman allowed the requisite time to install and tune her long string instrument along the full 26 metre length of the room. --- Music by Ellen Fullman and Okkyung Lee. Recorded during the First Edition Festival for Other Music, Stockholm on 20th February 2016. Concert producer: John Chantler. Recording Engineer: Maria W Horn. Mixed by Ellen Fullman and Thomas Dimuzio. Mastered by Andreas [LUPO] Lubich at Calyx, Berlin. Artwork by Bill Nace. Made possible in part by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists (2015). The title, "The Air Around Her" is a quote from "Vermeer Interiors" a poem by Margaret Rabb, from her book, "Granite Dives". This release has been supported by the Swedish Arts Council. © 2018 Ellen Fullman (BMI) / Okkyung Lee (ASCAP) Released by 1703 Skivbolaget in cooperation with Ideell Edition

Debut full length release from the UK/Italian duo of Ecka Mordecai and Valerio Tricoli, working together as Mordecoli. Individually these two travellers have carved out a path of ghostly musique concrete (Tricoli) and textural cello wandering (Mordecai). Alter is proud to present the album Château Mordécoly, a result of two musicians (and friends) coming together to explore the middle ground of their individual investigations. The results of a red wine induced residency at London’s Cafe Oto, Château Mordécoly is a panoramic audio field exploring both the physicality of sound, informed by the voice, cello and pictish harp of Mordecai, and the artificial manipulations of Tricoli’s revox tape machine. The delicate tension between the physical ‘real’ and the distortive ‘new’ leverages this release far beyond a tipsy residency and shifts it into a top tier electroacoustic take on the zeitgeist. Solo cello and voice appear rooted in the timbre of time. The magnetic tape is both a friend and covert manipulator. The physical elements open themselves to disfigurement as a means of propagating the fantastical audio that unfolds from the initial enquiry. There’s no witchery or wizardry on part of either player but rather a symbiotic passing of the baton as the line between the real and the non-real flow in and out of themselves. The results are at once sedate, shocking and subversive. Château Mordécoly is a disembodied sonic landscape; a phantasmagorical world of fantasy unfolds as the delicate beauty of Mordecai’s playing and singing is transformed into a playful and unusual landscape. Epoch’s are evoked as the visual stimuli resulting from these alchemical transformations conjure everything from a haunted house to the Middle Ages. At once sleek and modern mental images of a marriage between the ultra present and the deep vast past. A heavenly cloud unveils a clear symbiosis of the Italian church and all of its cobwebs frolicking amongst pagan Britain.

Recording of the stunning first set performed by the trio of Peter Brötzmann, Steve Noble and John Edwards at Cafe OTO in January 2010 during Brotzmann's first residency at the venue. This was also the first time the trio had played together. Recorded at Cafe OTO by Shane Browne, mixed by John Edwards and Mastered by Andres [LUPO] Lupich at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. REVIEWS "On an east London side street, Café Oto hosts a programme of international experimental sounds to shame subsidised arts temples, drawing demographic-defying crowds of all ages through its doors. The first release on Oto's own label, available as an authentic vinyl slab or a slippery download, is a 40-minute splurge of sax, drums and bass skronk, live at the venue in 2010, from the German free-jazz giant Brötzmann and two stars of the London improv scene. Unrepeatable moments of collective inspiration and sudden sunlit shafts of modal near melody punctuate the continuing energy blur. Business as usual down Dalston Junction." Stewart Lee, The Sunday Times  "Since it opened in Dalston in April 2008, Café OTO has become London's new music venue of choice for the likes of the Sun Ra Arkestra, Joe McPhee, Mats Gustafsson – and Peter Brötzmann, whose first residency at the club in January 2010 yielded this inaugural release on OtoRoku, Café OTO’s new in-house label. The night in question was the first time Brötzmann had played with bassist John Edwards and drummer Steve Noble, and the decision to team them up was inspired. With Alan Wilkinson, or in Decoy with Alex Hawkins and NEW with Alex Ward, Edwards and Noble have a deserved reputation as a thrilling high-energy rhythm section. And as Brötzmann is no slouch when it comes to high-energy playing, the combination is explosive. Right from the start of the set – the first that evening – it's obvious why this was selected to christen the label. All three players jump straight into top gear, with Brötzmann setting a cracking pace, his torrent of sound characterised by that hard-edged tone which makes him such compelling listening. ...the worse the better sets a high standard for subsequent releases to match. But, as every night at Café OTO is recorded and there's a wealth of fine music waiting in the wings, including quality recordings from Otomo Yoshihide and Wadada Leo Smith, OtoRoku looks like a label to watch." John Eyles, Paris Transatlantic "These two extended improvisations, recorded in January 2010 during Brötzmann’s first residency at OTO, finds the group attaining near-telepathic modes of interconnectedness, despite this being the trio’s first outing together. From the off, Brötzmann’s gills are gurning, throwing up torrents of molten roar, while Noble’s mule-kicking at the traps reels out ride hits like a baby sporting a bonnet of bees." - Spencer Grady, BBC Music "Does the world need another Brötzmann album? Probably not, but as the inaugural release on Cafe OTO's in-house high quality vinyl-only label, this one is cause for celebration. Recorded there - superbly well, too - during Brötzmann's residency in January 2012, this is no frills straight-up free jazz, solos and all, pitting the Firebreather of Wuppertal against the might local rhythm team (yes, they can and do swing hard) of John Edwards and Steve Noble. All three are on outstanding form, from the opening yelp - when it comes to Big Bang beginning, nobody does it better than Brötzmann - to Edwards's snarling drone 38 minutes later. Shame engineer Shane Browne slammed thos faders down so brutally: for once, you feel like joining in with the whoops and hollers of the punters." - Dan Warburton, The WIRE

Poetry and reality. The music goes in and out of, and away from, and into again. Reality and poetry. The music is uninterested in genre denominations and ideological markers. Music grows and is shaped by and out of realities, living and artistic. Sound is an audible reflection of you. Even you in silence. And you from sound, from the particular music that invaded your way of life; the ever-increasing global audible pressure chamber in which your spirit falls again and again in a Sisyfonian way ... Titles, on the other hand, are single-living creatures. Sometimes pointing to other titles, other phenomena, but usually standing entirely solitary, like pillars of stone in a desert, like rocks in a forest area. Over, under and around, the music is moving and moving unobtrusively. On Leiber Heiland, Laß uns Sterben historical events intersect right into the contemporary sound making, slit through their titles sharp cuts in our listening present era and pry our eyes towards the seemingly inexplicable backyard of history; which nevertheless created the plateau of disintegration and opportunity that we now seem to live on. At the same time all the sounds on this recording - all the scrunching, the breathing, all the tones, all the composed-processed material - completely and fully give themselves to the listener, escaping all human epithet making and denominations, as the sound becomes manifest, becomes apparent. This is my wish. To contemplate names and sounds, around music and the name of music. A couple of measured hours during a wondrous and almost tropical evening in May 2016, Jakob Riis and myself were in the Crypt of the Lund Cathedral, while student orchestras rehearsed with open windows near the old monastery park, birds were screaming and hot spring -high people raved just outside the crypt's small, low windows . The crypt is perhaps Sweden's oldest room still existing.  And precisely in this mysteriously echoing room, we were still in a hair-rasing now, rinsed clean by the music as big and tiny sounds ran in rays along the stone floor from the year 1121 providing some relief. - Martin Küchen, April 2017