For our money the weirdest and most satisfying Regis record in a while, featuring stripped, slow, highly atmospheric & muscular productions that were recorded as part of that mad 'Let The Night Return’ feature film (Regis, performing more or less alone in a 2000-year-old, empty greek amphitheater) here rendered in brilliant monochrome including contributions from Justin Broadrick, Ann Margaret Hogan and the music school chorus of Corfu. There’s something brutally bare and demented about this one, opening with the simmering choral drone ‘Epidaurus’ fizzing with whirring industrial components and rumbling subs, before 'Calling Down a Curse’ extends to terrifying dimensions with an intoxicating Ugandan Methods style percussive backbone and a slowed down voiceover by filmmaker Vasileios Trigkas, to our ears sounding like Burial as if rendered by Conny Plank as a kind of alternate version to his still entirely unclassifiable ‘Biomutanten’. 'The Blind Departing’ is a slow headmelter, all industrial synths and exposed percussion, every hi-hat and kickdrum separated and pristine, like the toughest, most angular sort of bare-boned warehouse chugger slowed to a crawl. If you shut your eyes you can almost imagine Alan Wilder and Martin Gore hitting sheets of metal with a mallet on that crazy old Depeche Mode footage that’s knocking about - played at half speed. Perhaps best of all is the closing 'Temporary Thing’, featuring Regis, Anni Hogan, and Justin Broadrick taking on a cover version of the Lou Reed classic, here extended to HD. --- Downwards Records, 2021

Limited edition of 500 units pressed on black wax. The LP contains original compositions by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Pascal Comelade, Laurie Spiegel, Lyra Pramuk, Chassol, Nicolas Godin and Pierre Rousseau, Pedro Vian and Pierre Bastien, Visible Cloaks, Kelman Duran, Raul Refree, Lucrecia Dalt, and Lafawndah.incl. writings by contemporary thinkers like Shumon Bazar and François J. Bonnet, and images from, Wolfgang Tillmans, Joel Meyerowitz, Juergen Teller, Araki, Jack Davison, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Dani Pujalte, Elizaveta Porodina, Adrià Cañameras, Larissa Zaidan, Zhong Lin and Javier Tles among others

"The band seem to move together as one, crawling and then leaping like a lurching animal, with each musical event getting slightly more crazed as it progresses forward on stamping paws." – Ed Pinsent, The Sound Projector 2010 - 2020 compilation album: Tracks 1 and 5 are taken from "Inwards opened the floor." (2020) Tracks 2 and 3 are taken from "Kadita sessions" (2016) Track 4 is taken from "From inside the log" (2010) Track 6 is taken from "Still life with apples" (2020) Played by: Gosha Hniu, Ran Nahmias, Maya Pik, Grundik Kasyansky, Amos Ungar, Tom Wheatley, Lior Lerman, Andrea Serafino, Yoni Silver, Jonathan Shohet, Matthias Moos, Uri Eichelmann, George Priymenko, Ig Yu Kun, Timurti, Guillaume Viltard, Hans Grusel and Gretel Grusel. Lyrics are based on the poems by Arthur Molev and Avenir Snyatkov.

Chra is the artist moniker for Austrian Christina Nemec (Bray, Shampoo Boy). SEAMONS is the latest missive in her ongoing exploration of suffocating abstract audio. At once designed and falling apart SEAMONS is rough and crude, a stumbling and staggering electronic expedition where nothing presents itself explicit in intent. It’s a tense obscure record that teases you into it’s peculiar vortex from it’s suggestive nature of exploring the enigma beyond it’s haunted facade. VICIOUS WATER REGIMES stutters along as an ‘ugly’ mass of grey electronica. CAST(O)RO shines from light from the depths with it’s occasional foray into glistening tones. COLONIA MARINA SERENELLA is a dank squelching backdrop for a dark age. CAST twists tension with flickering electronics chaotic in their perpetual design of order confronting inevitable collapse. LET SHARKS SLEEP is not only a great title but a mind tickling adventure of descending/rising digital dance that builds in intensity with it's relentless repetition. WIDOW WALKS gallops and creaks along a path veiled in whispers. ENGE lunges through time with an air of deep uncertainty. SEAMONS hovers on the outskirts, crawling out of the speakers with endless surprising turns, few of them comfortable. SEAMONS is progressive ambient, not the kind that makes you escape, but rather one you can't escape from. SEAMONS crawls into the very guts of sound to uncover and unravel the uneasy and unsettling underbelly within. 

Originally recorded in 1984, “Jumping and Standing” consists of a live performance at Musashino Art University by pioneering Japanese sound artist Akio Suzuki, accompanied by five toy rabbits. This long-awaited release epitomizes Suzuki’s approach to performance, imbued with a characteristic sense of humor and an organic interplay with his audiences, as evinced by uproarious laughter heard on the opening track. Now some three decades later, contemporary listeners are likewise drawn ever deeper into this novel noisescape featuring an ensemble of wind-up bunnies on broken boards, metallic fragments, and a reel-to-reel tape deck on the fritz. --- “Jumping and Standing” 1984"Akio SuzukiNovember 30, 1984 1-103 Hall, Musashino Art UniversityRecorded by Akio SuzukiMastered by Kiyoharu Kuwayama (Lethe).

Steve Swell: trombone Jemeel Moondoc: alto saxophone Dave Burrell: piano William Parker: double bass Gerald Cleaver: drums released April 25, 2016 All compositions by Steve Swell Recorded by Jim Clouse, Park West Studio, June 2015 Mixing and mastering: Jim Clouse Liner notes: Steven Loewy Photographs: Ziga Koritnik, Peter Gannushkin, Jacques Bisceglia, RogueArt Cover design: Max Schoendorff Cover realisation: David Bourguignon Executive producer: Michel Dorbon So, listen closely, and savor the sounds: treat them with delicate abandon, indulge in their intricately measured poignancy; but don’t forget to relax (a little) and enjoy: You are in the hands of a master soul traveler. Steven Loewy

New vinyl music by Joanne Robertson & Sidsel Meineche Hansen A limited edition 12” vinyl with 16 tracks in an edition of 250 copies with full colour sleeve. oanne Roberston is a visual artist, musician and poet based in Glasgow. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Feels’, Edouard Montassut, Paris, 2021, and, ’Natural Behavior’, Svetlana, New York, 2019. Recent publications include 1971 (a year in record review poems) and 1979 Songbook, both in collaboration with writer Byron Coley, published by Tenderbooks and Bad Taste Press.‘With a lovely series of solo LPs, Joanne Robertson has become known for the lyrical drifting beauty of her music. The Lighter (Textile), Black Moon Days (Feeding Tube), Wildflower (Escho) and Painting Stupid Girls (World Music) have all been hailed as brilliant extensions of the avant garde wing of the femme-folk tradition. She has also remained active with her friend, Dean Blunt, issuing the Walhalla LP (Textile) as a duo, and appearing on his recordings, the most recent being Black Metal 2 (Rough Trade).’ Byron ColeySidsel Meineche Hansen is a London based artist. Her artworks vary in medium and form spanning wood, clay and metals through which crafted objects are made, to Computer Generated Imagery, Virtual Reality and other reproducible mediums. Her work also includes musical collaborations with musician Nkisi and the poet Lydia Lunch. She collaborates regularly with London-based Design a Wave and Copenhagen-based Brynje recently released on the LP sex robot from 2019. Joanne Robertson and Sidsel Meineche Hansen have previously collaborated together along with artist and writer Reba Maybury on the 2020 video 12 Rules for Life, a reinterpretation of Dies irae, the thirteenth-century sequence for mourning the dead. She has an upcoming solo-exhibition at Bergen Kunsthalle in November 2021.

Stemming from Speers’ background as a percussionist and technician testing large amounts of audio equipment, ‘xtr’ctn’ pairs nanoscopic recordings of electronic equipment’s internal behaviours with samples of the natural world and feedback from no-input mixers to yield a visceral and inventively personalised view on sound phenomena and resonant spaces that lay beyond the threshold of human perception. Arranging his unique palette of field recordings, SFX library, YouTube samples and original instrumentation by Olan Monk into non-linear, non-narrative structures, he invites the listener to immerse in a form of sonic fiction which highlights the fine line between referential, objective reality and pareidolic subjectivity. Distinguished by an otherworldy, meta sense of detachment shared with music by Giuseppe Ielasi, Mika Vainio, and :Zoviet*France:, the four pieces form a fascinating sonic weltanschauung that acknowledges and articulates the complex role of non-human and material sound generators upon the self. From the way seagulls resemble death metal screams in ‘obturo’ to the uncanny manner in which Olan Monk’s piano pulse and samples of Liam Byrne’s viola de gamba in ’tombeau’ recalls a scene of ravenous whistle and horn blowing at The Eclipse in Coventry c. 1992, each piece is densely packed with acousmatic data that will stimulate a broad range of reactions as listeners fill in the perceptive gaps according to their own sferic conditioning and grasp of worlds natural, and synthetic. Where the first two pieces steer clear of any blatant emotive cues, the fragmented shrapnel that opens ’sul. locus’ changes at the mid-way point with the suggestively gloomy strokes of a Kemençe, a stringed middle-eastern instrument held in subtle contrast with the sound of ice hacking taken from a 1984 BBC SFX library sample to sound like a location recording from an alchemist’s lab, or passages of When’s proto-BM classic ‘The Black Death’, while ‘ορμή’ follows with an eerie vent of percussive improv, the sound of filing metal, and a pressure washer that recall the lurching rhythm and gauntlet grasp of textures also found in the remarkable debut by Cairo’s 1127. It all points to a penetrative pair of ears and mind that sees the world differently, and should inspire listeners to pay closer attention to the world around them. --- C.A.N.V.A.S., 2019

Previously unreleased, the three tracks on Pays Noir come from recording sessions held at the same time as those for the cult No Man's Land produced by Jef Gilson in 1976, and published on vinyl by Souffle Continu Records in 2017. "Singled out at the time of its release by Actuel, Rock & Folk and Melody Maker, the tabula rasa of No Man's Land is the result of free-flowing experiments born of chance, if the two musicians are to be believed. Indeed, their approach to free improvisation was uninfluenced by those in the know of what was going on in such circles, which makes it even more incredible! To emphasise the point, the saxophonist Evan Parker (already a leader in the field) remarked on the album at the time, surprised by the innovation of the two Frenchmen! Brimming with the same fervour as No Man's Land, mainly on guitar and drums (but once again, not only…), Jean-François Pauvros and Gaby Bizien invent an amazing unbridled chaos of instinctive combinations, which are the fruit of their immense complicity, born of days on end playing together, trying to transform the rebelliousness of rock into free-form sparks unlike anything heard before, and which are often poetic – ah, that final song! Carried along by the frenzied clatter of Gaby Bizien, Jean-François Pauvros emerges without doubt as one the great French improvising guitarists, alongside Gérard Marais (Dharma Quintet, Stu Martin Trio), Joseph Dejean (Cohelmec Ensemble, The Full Moon Ensemble), Raymond Boni (who, like Pauvros and Bizien, is present on the Nurse With Wound list), Dominique Répécaud, Noël Akchoté and Jean-Marc Montera. Furthermore, the duo has a crazy intensity heard only on recordings by Bill Orcutt / Chris Corsano, Arto Lindsay / Paal Nilssen-Love, Thurston Moore / John Moloney and Mesa Of The Lost Women! A kind of French no wave ahead of its time!"

Souffle Continu Records present the first ever reissue of Workshop De Lyon's Tiens! Les Bourgeons Eclatent..., originally released in 1978. The collective methodology of the Workshop De Lyon led to the creation of the Association Searching for an Imaginary Folklore (ARFI) in 1977, their aims were very much a mission statement "encourage improvisation, spread diverse musical styles and provide means of expression to others with similar ideas, establish a folklore..." Their reference was the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (A.A.C.M.) created twelve years previously with the similar idea of providing material assistance to and defending the interests of creative musicians, in order to encourage the emergence of new music. The open-structured ARFI self-produced their music thanks to their own label, on which almost all of the albums of the Workshop De Lyon appeared, from Concert Lave (1980) onwards. Their third album, Tiens! Les Bougeons Éclatent... is a perfect example of how the group sounded when it was released in 1978, about a year after the studio recording. Pianist Patrick Vollat had left but was still very much a part of ARFI (in particular as part of the excellent La Marmite Infernale), so the Workshop De Lyon stabilized to a quartet of Louis Sclavis, Maurice Merle, Jean Bolcato, and Christian Rollet, and already had at the time an unparalleled repertoire. This never ceased to expand, through the meetings and personnel changes, while losing nothing of its generosity, nor showing any signs of aging. This proffers on the Workshop De Lyon a certain universal dignity which honors their original models, Albert Ayler or the Art Ensemble Of Chicago to name but two, transfiguring them into a new, exciting aesthetic approach bursting with openings and exchanges. Irresistible. Licensed from Bisou. Reverse printing; 12-page booklet; Obi strip; Edition of 500

Souffle Continu presents the seventh release in its series of reissues from the catalog of the cult French underground Futura label. Travelling was a keyboard-based trio that probably represents best what the Futura's RED series was about -- jazz, rock, and experimental inquisitiveness. Often described as the French answer to the Canterbury scene, Voici la Nuit Tombée contains echoes of Soft Machine, Caravan, and Supersister, especially on the sidelong opening track, "Voici la Nuit Tombée." It's the album's tour de force, with its fuzz bass, distorted organs, piano jazz, and complex meter. This is the first-ever vinyl reissue of this pioneering 1973 prog jewel, fully licensed by Futura founder Gérard Terronès. Presented in a 350-gram reverse-printed sleeve with obi strip. Limited edition of 500.

When the second Nu Creative Methods album was released, New And Rediscovered Musical Instruments by Max Eastley and David Toop had already been available for almost three years. Without being able to say that there was a direct, real-time influence, the direction taken by the British and French duos was however the same, combining research and tradition in a quest for a new imaginary folklore. The name chosen by the pair was anything but innocent, linking them to both the track 'Nu Creative Love' by Don Cherry (from Symphony For Improvisers) and the book My Creative Method by Francis Ponge. Because the first outlines the route of a free jazz the boundaries of which have constantly been demolished and through which Pierre Bastien and Bernard Pruvost traced their own path, while the second, an anarchist creating a bomb with the irrational as gunpowder, is close to providing an intellectual method. Close, because even this is undermined by other essential routes taken by Nu Creative Methods. The Oulipo, for example, encouraged all sorts of creativity; or perhaps pataphysics, according to which a banal saucepan is equivalent to the Mona Lisa! To get closer to the source of their imagination, the following names would have to be added to the list, Locus Solus by Raymond Roussel, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Harry Partch, New Phonic Art and 'Zwei Mann Orchester' by Maurizio Kagel. That shows, in broad strokes, the creative wheels in motion behind Nu Creative Methods and Nu Jungle Dances offers a taste of the pathways offered by chance, following improvisations using instruments from the five continents. By proceeding thus, that is to say entering an esthetic zone where popular and esoteric music come together at last, an infinite palette of sounds opens up, offering fantastic perspectives. Between free jazz and ancestral music, Nu Jungle Dances makes it happen without pretence but with a rare and luminous extravagance. But also with the willingness to take on board unexpected surprises, and with a natural charm combating for the craft of sound creation.

Souffle Continu Records present a reissue of Jean-Francois Pauvros and Gaby Bizien's No Man's Land, originally released on Un-Deux-Trois in 1976. Whether it is with the label Palm, or for Un-Deux-Trois, Jef Gilson has produced some of the best albums of French free jazz and improvisation. But that's not all: he also offered perfect recording conditions enabling some of the fresh young talent to emerge, including Daunik Lazro, André Jaume, and Jean-François Pauvros, all three of whom released their first recordings on one of those labels. Recorded by Jean-François Pauvros (guitar, but not only...) alongside Gaby Bizien (drums, percussion, aquatic trombone, marimba, bird calls), and, of course, produced by the audacious Jef Gilson, the appropriately named No Man's Land had virtually no equivalent in France (nor worldwide) when it came out in 1976. Radical, free, primitive, timeless: in the image of the musicians, it is not for nothing that it appears in the famous Nurse With Wound list of major influences concocted in 1979. No label can be placed on this vertiginous sensory adventure: an explosive flow of shrapnel and tearing intensity, full of mystery and life. To be clear, No Man's Land is the key recording of French improvisation. So much so that it is difficult to imagine it coming out of nowhere, the two musicians must surely have been listening to the latest forays of the British Music Improvisation Company and decided to reply in their own way. But not at all! If you believe what the protagonists have to say, these experiments were carried out in secret isolation, and with a total lack of awareness of everything that was going on in the avant-garde of improvised music. Indeed, it was only after the album was published that Jean-François Pauvros and Gaby Bizien learned that there was a movement going on with similar ideas. That tells us something about the level of invention of this album, which comfortably bears comparison to other similar duos such as Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley, Fred Frith and Chris Cutler, John Russell and Roger Turner, or Gary Smith and John Stevens... The Frenchmen were well served by their unbridled variety and poly-instrumentalism Edition of 500

Extracts from the Farewell performance at Kings College, London 1978. Jgjgjgjg formed at the  London Sound Poetry Festival in June 1976. Reissue of tape on Balsam Flex. 200 copiesIn those days a number of British poets were producing works influenced by radical international currents in sound art, conceptual art, visual poetry and performance art. Bob Cobbing (1920-2002) was a central figure in this continuation of the ‘British Poetry Revival’, a rather loose poetry movement of the 1960s and 1970s which can be seen as an internationally oriented modernist reaction to the English traditionalist and nationalist approach of poetry of ’The Movement’ (Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin et al.) Many of the Balsam Flex cassettes brought poets connected with ‘Writers Forum’, a small publisher, workshop and writers’ network founded in 1963 by Bob Cobbing, Jeff Nuttall and John Rowan. After Cobbing’s death in 2002 ‘Writers Forum’ has been directed by poet and artist Lawrence Upton (1949), who is one of the poets of the improvisational group JGJJGJG (‘as long as you can say it that’s the name of the band’). The other two members are Cris Cheek – originally from London but currently on the staff of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio – and Clive Fencott, who lectures at Teesside University. Slowscan #37 contains extracts from the Farewell performance of the group at King’s College, London 1978.Lawrence Upton(b. 1949) – poet, prose writer, essay writer, critic, publisher. Author of a great number of publications in literary magazines, collections, miscellanies both in Great Britain and abroad, and also of www-publications on various literary sites. Editor and publisher of a number of magazines and international anthologies, author of numerous books of poetry and prose. For many years he has been collaborating with different literary and artistic associations and perform-groups.

**Regular edition of 350 copies, gatefold sleeve** John Driscoll is a composer who is a founding member of Composers Inside Electronics (CIE) and collaborated on David Tudor’s Rainforest V starting in 1973. He has toured extensively in the U.S. and Europe with CIE, David Tudor, Phil Edelstein, Douglas Dunn & Dancers, Maida Withers & the Dance Construction Co. and as a solo performer. His work has focused on robotic instruments, music for dance and compositions and sound installations for unique architectural spaces. He’s exhibited his sound installations at the Fridman Gallery (NY), the Museum of Modern Art (NY), Museum of Modern Art (Warsaw), Museum der Moderne (Salzburg), Lyon Biennale, Subtropics (Miami), Univ. of Maryland (College Park). Driscoll has collaborated with Phil Edelstein on numerous works including their recent sound installation Cluster Fields.His collaboration with Edelstein on Rainforest V (variations 1-4) has resulted in acquisitions in the collections of Museum of Modern Art (NY), Museum der Moderne (Salzburg), Arter Museum (Istanbul) and Musée d’art Contemporain (Lyon). For the first time on vinyl, this essential publication includes 4 key audio works spanning an era from 1979 to 2018.

Super limited edition by the legendary ClausBöhmler. Since the late 60s he has remained faithful to radical experiments with visuals and sound material from the cultural everyday; generating drawings, texts, radio-based sound works, artist’s books and video clips in tumblr. mode. He has become the champion of a low-tech, but high-end analysis of language, technology, and entertainment. Claus Böhmler (1939-2017) was a Fluxus artist from Hamburg. In the mid-1960s Böhmler was one of Joseph Beuys’s students at the Düsseldorfer art academy. From 1974 to 2005 he himself was an art professor at the art school of Hamburg, where Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen were two of his students. Like Oehlen, Böhmler joined the ‘Lord Jim Lodge’: a mock secret society founded by Kippenberger and Jørg Schlick, the motto of which is ‘Nobody Helps Nobody’ and the logo of which consists of a sun, a hammer and a pair of breasts. Böhmler took an early interest in reproduction techniques. Like sound works, readymades, radio and film, they have remained part of his work since the 1960s.

Slowscan vol. 38 is a expanded re-issue on vinyl of the Dances Interdites tape originally released on Balsam Flex, a London-based label run by artist Erik Vonna-Michell in the late 1970s-early 1980s. Peter Finch is a poet and short story writer living in Cardiff, Wales. He works in both traditional and experimental forms and is a performer on the reading circuit. In the sixties and seventies he edited the ground-breaking literary magazine, second aeon, exhibited visual poetry internationally and toured with sound poet Bob Cobbing.  Bob Cobbing (1920-2002) was a central figure in this continuation of the ‘British Poetry Revival’, a rather loose poetry movement of the 1960s and 1970s which can be seen as an internationally oriented modernist reaction to the English traditionalist and nationalist approach of poetry of ’The Movement’ (Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin et al.)

Another crucial excavatio from the elusive The Balsam Flex legendary catalog is now available again thanks to Jan Van Toorn Slowscan imprint. Balsam Flex was a cassette label run by the artist Erik Vonna-Michell in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and evidence of a relatively overlooked moment when a number of London-based British poets were producing work that was influenced by performance art, conceptual art, sound art, text-sound composition, Fluxus, and situationism.