Horace Tapscott’s Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra (P.A.P.A.) was one of the most transformative, forward-thinking and straight-up heavy big bands to have played jazz in the 1960s and 1970s. If P.A.P.A. doesn’t have the interstellar rep of that other famous Arkestra, and if the name Tapscott doesn’t ring bells like Monk or Tyner, there’s a reason why: in an industry dominated by record labels, a band that doesn’t record doesn’t count. And the Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra didn’t record for nearly twenty years. But recording success was never their concern — they weren’t about that. First formed as the Underground Musicians Association in the early 1960s, Tapscott always wanted his group to be a community project. From their base in Watts, UGMA got down at the grassroots. The group was renamed the Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra in 1971, and soon after they established a monthly residency at the Immanuel United Church of Christ which ran for over a decade, while still playing all over LA and beyond. But they never released a note of music. It was the intervention of fan Tom Albach that finally got them on wax. Determined that their work should be documented, Albach founded Nimbus Records specifically to release the music of Tapscott, the Arkestra, and the individuals that comprised it. The first recording sessions in early 1978 yielded enough material for two albums, and the first release was Flight 17. The album commences with the magnificent title track. It is effectively in three parts. It begins with unaccompanied pianos. Then the ensemble embark on a dense, circular and mechanical movement, a platform for horns and pianos to swoop and dive. We return to Earth with a beautiful solitary flute. The second track, the piano-centric, ‘Breeze’ is different to ‘Flight 17’ in intensity and also brevity but it is quietly as daring as the title track. It concludes with a moving lush wash from the full Arkestra, which sound almost like strings only more substantial. These first two tracks take full advantage of the texture of the unusual mix of the various instruments. Next though, it’s a significant change with ‘Horacio’, which is an exuberant Latin infused jingle. It’s unlike anything else on the album. I like to think it was named after the conductor’s Cuban alter-ego! ‘Clarisse’ gracefully switches between slow blues and bop and is bookended with a grand vaguely East Asian theme. The busy bass line introduces ‘Maui’. As with the previous track, it moves between a number of contrasting melody lines and rhythms but there’s still space for a tuneful sax solo. This is a must-have album. I think the first two tracks on their own make this release essential.

Grapefruit Records is proud to introduce Stenhjärta, a new duo consisting of Gustaf Dicksson & Magnus Jäverling. Both are active in the Swedish Underground music scene centered in Gothenburg. Gustaf is known for his shape-shifting prolific solo project, Blod, as well as his participation in the notable music collective, Enhet för Fri Musik. Magnus is somewhat newer to the scene, appearing on some Blod recordings as well as releasing a fascinating concept album called Bowdark on the Discreet Music label in 2022. As a duo here they are exploring classic prog-folk motifs with very Swedish influences. Gryning Kommer Röd is yet another gorgeous album delivered to us from the heads and hearts of two active musicians of the Swedish Underground.

Demeters Döttrar is the new trio of Ida Skibsted Cramer, Charlott Malmenholt and Astrid Øster Mortensen. Søndag I Spejlet ('Sunday In The Mirror') was mainly recorded in Gamlestaden, Gothenburg between 2022 and 2023 and consists of 8 tracks that lies somewhere in between 90's lo-fi experimental bedroom music and brash text-sound compositions channeled through the ever-inspiring cassette underground. Listening to Demeters Döttrar is like stepping into a parallel universe; a tiny unexplored corner with paper-thin walls or a very delicate bubble that is about to burst any moment. The instrumentation is sparse and mainly consists of guitar, vocals, prepared tapes and occasional harmonica. The recurrence of rain in different forms throughout the recording almost functions as a percussive backbone at times, the one thing except for the sound of the actual room that sort of keeps it all together. With one foot in Sweden and one foot in Denmark, the group is utilizing both countries' language in an uncompromising and peculiarly alluring way. The almost brutal intimacy brings the more mellow Deux Filles moments to mind, though music wise this owes more to Un, early Charalambides and at times groups like Dadamah. A daring, major statement and one of the most beautiful, strange and other-worldly debut albums we heard in quite a while. Mastered by Lasse Marhaug. Gloss laminated covers, comes with insert. Edition of 500 copies. 

Māpura Music is a collaborative and spontaneous music making program for people living with disabilities set in Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland. Its facilitator, Stefan Neville (of Pumice etc.), has been active in the New Zealand underground for over thirty years, personifying an Aotearoa DIY sensibility that effortlessly links melodic song formats with open ended experimentation. On surface level, this collection of improvised group jams verges towards the latter, but soon structures of a playfully melodic sensibility reveal themselves and references beyond the Corpus Hermeticum / Kye axis can be considered. This is neither avant noise nor is it sound collage, but it also barely adheres to any (western) folk, rock or pop song formats. Kinship might be sensed with other disability music projects such as Reynols and Les Harrys, the anarcho stew of London's Triple Negative and even Basil Kirchin's elaborate 'Worlds within Worlds'. But whilst Kirchin famously used the voices of neurodiverse people as source material – with all its possible implications – here we have the people themselves taking agency and center stage. A wildly original sound vision is put forward by this fairly constant crew of ad hoc music makers (Jemima Aherne, Hugh Bawden-Hindle, Trevor Bull, Tom Cathro, Allyson Hamblett, Colin Harris, Dave Kane, Cheyenne Minhinnick, Thais Nesbitt, Stefan Neville, Sushannah Shaw, Yung Sung Chen and Kevin Tan) and a wicked sense of humour ripples through unusual arrangements and track titles like 'Here when You Don't Need Me'. Ominous clatter and drone rock give way to mantra-like vocalisations, slide-guitar workouts to sheets of dreamy keys, chaos is summoned and resolved into clarity. As Neville puts it: "every feeling that is possible is released into the air". 

Edition of 250 copies with Yves Klein Blue innersleeve and A4 insert with score. First ever release of Yves Klein’s groundbreaking conceptual symphonie “Monoton-Silence” conceived 1947-1948. Scored for 20 singers, 10 violins, 10 cellos, 3 double basses, 3 trumpets, 3 flutes and 3 oboes, the piece consists of a single 20-minute sustained D major chord followed by a 20-minute silence. The Symphonie ”Monoton-Silence” was a precedent to Klein’s later monochrome paintings and to the work of minimal musicians & composers, particularly La Monte Young’s drone music or John Cage’s 4′33″ and transforms Klein’s monochromatic paintings and sculpture into a monotone auditory experience. Performed April 1998 at Chapelle Ste Reita, Paris Conducted by Philippe Arrii Blachette Yves Klein (1928-1962) was the most influential, prominent, and controversial French artist to emerge in the 1950s. A leading figure of Nouveau Réalisme, Klein developed a ground-breaking practice that broke down boundaries between conceptual art, sculpture, painting, and performance. He is remembered above all for his use of a single color, the rich shade of ultramarine that he made his own: International Klein Blue. But the success of his sadly short-lived career lay in attacking many of the ideas that underpinned the abstract painting that had been dominant in France since the end of the Second World War. Animated by a quest to ‘liberate colour from the prison that is the line’, Yves Klein directed his attention to the monochrome which, to him, was the only form of painting that allowed to ‘make visible the absolute’. By choosing to express feeling rather than figurative form, he moved beyond ideas of artistic representation. His practice revealed of new way of conceptualizing the role of the artist, conceiving his whole life as an artwork. “In 1947, at a time when the consequences of Schönbergian compositional technique were still being heatedly debated and wrestled with in new music circles, the young man from Nice was thinking up a symphony that refrains from all development. It was composed of a single consonant sound – at rest in itself – that is sustained for twenty minutes, followed by a silence of equal length in which the sounding tone completely dissolves, leading beyond reverberations into the immateriality of sound space. Yves Klein himself saw the »Symphonie Monoton« as his central work, whose »subject is what I wanted to make of my life.« Everything that would characterize his future work is already apparent in this symphony. In the reduction to one sound and the following silence, Klein anticipates the effect of his monochromes, while the concept of the symphony points toward his aim of dematerializing art. From today’s standpoint, one might be tempted to see Yves Klein’s work as a precedent for the avant-garde formulations of the ’60s. A great deal of what he introduced would have a later evolution, although much was developing synchronously.” – Valerian Maly “During this period of concentration, I created, around 1947–1948, a monotone symphony whose theme expresses what I wished my life to be. This symphony of forty minutes duration (although that is of no importance, as one will see) consisted of one unique continuous sound, drawn out and deprived of its beginning and of its end, creating a feeling of vertigo and of aspiration outside of time. Thus even in its presence, this symphony does not exist. It exists outside of the phenomenology of time because it is neither born nor will it die, after existence. However, in the world of our possibilities of conscious perception, it is silence – audible presence.” – Yves Klein “Overcoming the problematics of Art”, 1959 “Silence … This is really my symphony and not the sounds during its performance. This silence is so marvelous because it grants happenstance and even sometimes the possibility of true happiness, if only for only a moment, for a moment whose duration is immeasurable.” – Yves Klein “Truth becomes Reality”, 1960

Instruments: Bass guitar, bodhran, cello, clarinet, classical guitar, cowbell, cymbal, electric guitar, hosepipe, mattress, prepared piano, rain sound, shakers, spoons, violin, voice, watering can, wind chimes Improvised-composed and recorded 1st-4th September 2020. credits released September 18, 2020 All instruments by Luke Cowan, except: cello tracks one and four, by Rebecca Burden, and violin tracks three and four: Imogen Wood. Improvised-composed, recorded and mixed by Luke Cowan, and mastered by Rhys Copeland.

Since the 1970s Mario De Leo works as a musician and visual artist. His mechanical paintings are hybrid works that reveal the cosmic spiritualism hidden in the meanders of electronics. With Riccardo Sinigaglia (Futuro Antico, Correnti Magnetiche, Doubling Riders) De Leo consolidates an artistic and human partnership with Lettera Cosmica, a work unpublished to date, produced and recorded in 1981. In a wacky electronic vision of the succession of time, the tracks trace the four seasons in a fine process of analog loops, prepared tapes of strings and piano, time and pitch shifts, filtering with Synthi Ems and Teac 3340 4-track recorder. On this seemingly cold palette, De Leo deploys his own personal Mediterranean fingerpicking, with vocal timbres peculiar to the music of the South of Italy, but no longer circumscribed to the origins of his Pugliese regionalism, as much as to an expressive range seasoned also with irony and avant-garde.The sound writing harmonizes with the evocative cover, in which emerges a warmest human note of "technological peasant”.

Totally beautiful and rare piano performance from Loren Connors, joined on guitar by long time collaborator Alan Licht.  Celebrating thirty years of collaboration, Loren Connors and Alan Licht performed for two nights at OTO on May 5 and 6th, 2023. On the second night, with the stage lit in blue, Connors took up a seat on the piano stool whilst Licht picked up the guitar. What followed was the duo’s first ever set with Connors on piano - one of only a few times Connors has played piano live at all - here captured and issued as The Blue Hour. Its spacious warmth came as a total surprise live, but makes complete sense for a duo whose dedicated expressionism takes inspiration from a vast spectrum of emotion. Both opening with single notes to start, it doesn't take long before a surface rises and begins to shimmer. A run up the keys, the drop of a feedback layer on a sustained and bent note. The two begin to exchange notes in tandem and brief touches of melody and chord hover. After a while, Connors picks up the guitar, stands it in his lap and sweeps a wash of colour across Licht’s guitar. Sharp, glassy edges begin to form, open strings and barred frets darkening the space. When his two pedals begin to merge, Licht finds a dramatic organ-like feedback and it’s hard not to imagine Rothko’s Chapel, its varying shades of blue black ascending and descending in the room. When Connors goes back to the piano for the second side, the pair quickly lock into a refrain and light pours in. It’s a kind of sound that Licht says reminds him of what he and Connors would do when the duo first started playing together 30 years ago. It’s certainly more melodic than some of their more recent shows, and the atonal shards of At The Top of the Stairs seem to totally dissolve. What is always remarkable about Licht is that his enormous frame of reference doesn't seem to weigh him down, and instead here he is able to delicately place fractures of a Jackson C Frank song (“Just Like Anything”,) amongst the vast sea of Connors’ blues. Perhaps it's the pleasure of playing two nights in a row together, or the nature of Connor’s piano playing combined with Licht’s careful listening, but the improvisation on The Blue Hour feels remarkably calm and unafraid. There’s nothing to prove and no agenda except the joy of sounding colour together. Totally beautiful.  --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO on Saturday 6th May 2023 by Billy SteigerMixed by Oli BarrettMastered by Sean McCannArtwork by Loren Connors Layout by Oli BarrettScreenprint by Tartaruga Manufactured in the UK by Vinyl Press.  Edition of 300 standard LPs, 100 LPs with screenprinted artwork by Loren Connors printed as inserts. Also available on a limted run of 200 CDs. 

AFJ-Series is short for Actions For Free Jazz. This was the slogan for Smalltown Superjazzz, borrowed at the time from Don Cherry & Penderek's The New Eternal Rhythm Orchestra track “Actions For Free Jazz Orchestra” from the 1971 album “Actions”. AFJ Series will be a series and a subsidiary label within the Smalltown Supersound label. The inspiration for the label is BYG Actuel, Incus, Freedom and ESP-Disk.

A unique dialogue between the electronic textures of Saint Abdullah with the live drums of Jason Nazary (Anteloper).Saint Abdullah consists of Tehran-born brothers Mohammad and Mehdi Mehrabani-Yeganeh, who have been exploring a diverse palette of sounds over their releases to date, including collaborations with Eomac on Nicolas Jaar’s Other People label, and Model Home on Purple Tape Pedigree, as well as their own duo album on Important Records.Jason Nazary is a drummer and composer from Atlanta and based in Brooklyn. Fascinated by the intersection of acoustic and electronic music, Jason has been a force in New York's creative music scene for over a decade. As well as his own solo work he also co-leads a number of ensembles, among them the dystopian electro noise duo Clebs with singer Emilie Weibel, and until recently Anteloper (International Anthem), an improvising modular beat shredding duo with the much-missed Jaimie Branch.

A feverish essay of transcendent drumming: Chris’ solo approach, rooted in the exploration of elements of extended technique, sought another level, via possibilities facilitated by a self-made string drum! The Key (Became The Important Thing [& Then Just Faded Away]) brings his encompassing focus on free improvisation and noise into a granular fusion with acoustic experiments and hot-wired ideations of hard rock riffing and the post-punk sound.

A sequence of piano and tenor saxophone free improvisations recorded in concert at the Appleby Jazz Festival in 2004.

LP reissue of Collective Calls, the first duo LP from Evan Parker and percussionist Paul Lytton. Mythically alluded to as ‘An Improvised Urban Psychodrama In Eight Parts”, Collective Calls utilises electronics, pre-records and homemade instruments to wryly in/act self investigation. Having just recorded the cliff jumping Music Improvisation Company with Derek Bailey, Christine Jeffrey, Hugh Davies and Jamie Muir, Parker was at the point where [he] was thinking, ‘what’s the next thing?’ On Collective Calls, only the 5th release to appear on the newly minted Incus label, percussionist Paul Lytton arrives with an arsenal of sound making sources to push Parker into ever new territory. Recorded in the loft of The Standard Essenco Co on Southwark Street by Bob Woolford (Topography of the Lungs, AMM The Crypt), Collective Calls has more in common with noise or music concrete than with jazz; sitting comfortably alongside Italian messrs Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza or the husband-wife duo of Anima Sound. According to Martin Davidson, it was a Folkways record called Sounds of the Junkyard that Lytton was obsessed with around the time of this release - its track titles like “Steel Saw Cutting Channel Iron in Two Places” working to give you a good idea of the atmosphere of Collective Calls. Paul Lytton had encountered the use of electronics in music in 1968 when he was invited to play drums on the recording of An Electric Storm by White Noise (along with David Vorhaus, Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson). He had seen Hugh Davies using contact mics in the Music Improvisation Company, and soon set about assembling a Dexion frame akin to drummer John Stevens’, except that his own was armed with several single-coil electric guitar pickups, long wires and strings with connected foot-pedals to modulate pitch. Influenced as much by Stockhausen, Cage and David Tudor as he was by Max Roach and Milford Graves, Lytton’s percussion is abstract, expressionist and at times totally mutant. Sometimes rolling extremely fast, then screeching almost backwards over feedback, Lytton gives Parker room to play some of his weirdest work. Parker is listed as performing both saxophones, his own homemade contraptions, and cassette recorder - regularly thickening the already murky brew by playing back previous recordings of the duo. Imagining their set up in a 70s loft, it’s an assemblage more akin to what today's free ears might see at a Sholto Dobie show, spread out on the floor of the Hundred Years Gallery, the shadow of Penultimate Press lurking in a corner. It’s a testament to Parker’s shape shifting sound - the ever present link to birdsong being at its most warped here - terrifically free and unfussy, wild and loose from any of the dogma that might come in later Brit-prov years.

OTOROKU is proud to reissue Evan Parker's first solo LP "Saxophone Solos". Recorded by Martin Davidson in 1975 at the Unity Theatre in London, at that time the preferred concert venue of the Musicians' Co-operative, Parker's densely woven and often cyclical style has yet to form; instead throaty murmurs appear under rough hewn whistles and calls - the wildly energetic beginnings of an extraordinary career.  Reissued with liner notes from Seymour Wright in an edition of 500.  --- "The four pieces across the two sides of Saxophone Solos – Aerobatics 1 to 4 – are testing, pressured, bronchial spectaculars of innovation and invention and determination. Evan tells four stories of exploration and imagination without much obvious precedent. Abstract Beckettian cliff-hanging detection/logic/magic/mystery. The conic vessel of the soprano saxophone here recorded contains the ur-protagonists: seeds, characters, settings, forces, conflicts, motions, for new ideas, to delve, to tap and to draw from it story after story as he has on solo record after record for 45 years. ‘Aerobatics 1-3’ were recorded on 17 June 1975, by Martin Davidson at Parker’s first solo performance. This took place at London’s Unity Theatre in Camden. ‘Aerobatics 4’ was recorded on 9 September the same year, by Jost Gebers in the then FMP studio in Charlottenburg, Berlin. Music of balance and gravity, fulcra, effort, poise and enquiry. Sounds thrown and shaken into and out of air, metal and wood. It is – as the titles suggest – spectacular." - Seymour Wright, 2020.

2023 repress of the OTOROKU re-issue of the legendary English free improvisation LP 'The Topography of The Lungs' by Evan Parker, Derek Bailey and Han Bennink. This was Evan Parker’s first recording as a "leader" and was the first release on Incus, the label Parker founded with guitarist Derek Bailey and drummer Tony Oxley. This re-issue has been produced from an original vinyl pressing from Evan's archives - carefully transcribed and restored by Andreas [LUPO] Lubich at Calyx in Berlin and features the original liner notes from Parker along with updated notes penned in 2014. "To talk further of the music we play is difficult. It’s criteria for success exist, but are elusive and indefinable beyond the intuitive level. We operate without rules (pre-composed material) or well-defined code of behaviour (fixed tempi, tonalities, serial structures etc.), and yet are able to distinguish success from failure." - From Evan Parker’s original liner notes (1970) This pressing of The Topography of The Lungs comes in a limited edition of 500 copies.  

Evan Parker's monumental LP of solo soprano saxophone improvisations, recorded direct-cut and issued by Incus in 1978. Lovingly reissued by Treader — the CD is from PSI — using the original stampers, in a gorgeous hand-assembled sleeve, with glossy front and matt back, flaps out. Unmissable. ‘Parker uses rapid tonguing techniques and circular breathing to create a sound all his own, marked by the simultaneous intonation of multiple notes. One hears a note as well as all the residual tones around it; each breath ends up sounding like a battle between the different registers of the horn. At various times, Parker’s saxophone sounds like dolphin speech, electronic tape squeals, or human murmurs; namely, anything but what it actually is. His language on the instrument is essential listening for anyone interested in acoustic experimental music’ (AllMusic). ‘Eight years after Topography Of The Lungs, and two years after his Saxophone Solos, Monoceros was the most muscular statement of Evan Parker’s solo saxophone muse. Superbly recorded, it seemed to place the listener within the chaotic air flows of the saxophone’s own tubing. Philip Clark said: ‘Parker’s dialogue with the saxophone throws up so much that is unexpected, and indeed unknowable, that the problem he faces is how to keep pace with his own invention’’ (The Wire, Best Albums Of The Year).

Blood Blood is a connective tissue. It nourishes. Cleanses. Regulates. Only a living being can create it. Attempts to engineer synthetic blood have not been successful, to date. Thus, either we "produce" it ourselves, or there will be none... Blood is always in motion. It travels throughout our bodies. In each of us, there are an estimated 96,000 kilometers of blood vessels, that pump our blood. If blood is not in motion, it clots within a few minutes. It begins to die... od is not in mi Every minute someone needs blood. One in ten patients is a recipient. One unit (450ml) is capable of saving three lives. On the other hand, in cases of severe burns, up to twenty units are needed for one patient. In Poland, 2.4% of the population donates blood, while in European Union countries the average is about 8%. "For the life of the flesh is in the blood." (Leviticus 17:11). For centuries, in all cultures, religions and beliefs, blood has held the same significance. It has been synonymous with life. In ancient Mesopotamia it was believed that the first humans were created from the blood of a slain deity. In Egypt, blood was removed from the body before mummification, to prepare it for eternal life. In the Old Testament, consuming blood was forbidden. This is still the case in Judaic teachings. It contains the life force. Upon death, this force should return to God. Blood saves. "And they shall take the blood of the lamb, and sprinkle it on the doorframes and on the thresholds of the house where they shall eat it. [....] The blood shall serve you to mark the houses, in which you shall dwell. When I see the blood, I will pass by, and there shall not be a destructive plague, among you when I punish the land of Egypt." (Exodus 12:7-13). The God of the Old Covenant will spare the lives of those, whose house is marked with the blood of the Passover lamb. By doing so, a person will make the passage (pesach - literally to pass over, leap over) and be free, just as the Chosen People were liberated from the rule of Egypt. Blood cleanses and justifies. "Then one of the elders addressed me: 'These in white robes,' he asked, 'who are they, and where have they come from?' And I said to him: 'Lord, you know! And he said to me: 'These are those who come, from the great tribulation, and have rinsed their robes, and in the blood of the Lamb have whitened them. Therefore they are before the throne of God, and in His temple they worship Him day and night. And the One seated on the throne shall spread a tent over them." (Revelation 7:13-15) What does blood mean to you? Blood is life and holiness. In the Christian tradition, it is a symbol of eternal life. Blood of Christ gives life and is life, because it is Christ's body. In art, blood is a symbol of emotions. A blood brotherhood, blood pact, or a document signed in blood, are eternally binding. Blood is a bond, a fellowship - this is why in Polish we say related-by-blood and blood-relatives. If you donate blood - someone becomes your relative… The concept for this record began in February, 2023. It is an audio-portrait of the Regional Centre of Blood Donation and Treatment the name of prof. dr hab. Tadeusz Dorobisz in Wroclaw, enriched by the music of Piotr Damasiewicz and Jakub Wójcik. It is not background music. It is music that requires attention and focus. Detachment and meditation. An immersion into its depths. "Blood" is an invitation to experience a journey. A journey of living fully, through stopping, to rebirth and a new existence. "Blood" is YOU and your interpretation of the world and its hues.