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Near Death Experience (LP)
* 2021 stock * The bastard son of William S. Burroughs, Antonin Artaud and Crispin Glover. Hilarious, awful, heartbreaking and brutally honest, his Stand Up Tragedy is some of the best shit I’ve heard in a decade” - Lydia Lunch. Bryan Lewis Saunders is a multi-media artist, poet, videographer, and performance artist from Tennessee mostly known for his disturbing monologues and somniloquies, a master of an outlandish universe of his spoken word. In 2006 he started his own label, Stand-Up Tragedy …
Dawn & Dusk
*2024 stock* The Wind (music by Scott Clark, lyrics by Laura Ann Singh/Scott Clark)Dawn & Dusk (music by Scott Clark, lyrics by Laura Ann Singh)Silent Singing (music and lyrics by Scott Clark)Above The Gray (music by Scott Clark)
Tracks 1-4 recorded August 16, 2021 and mixed at Minimum Wage Recording by Lance Koehler.Tracks 5-8 recorded live March 28, 2022 and mixed at Spacebomb Studio by Curtis Fye.Tracks 1-8 mastered at Minimum Wage Recording by Lance Koehler.Album art + design by TJ Huff (huf…
Spree Coast Jazz
This is the first presentation of a lost jazz concert from the Helmut Brandt estate, recorded March 1963 at SFB Sendesaal/ Haus des Rundfunks in West Berlin. That evening the Helmut Brandt Orchestra consisted of eleven soloists from the Berlin radio orchestras of RIAS and SFB, including Benny Bailey, Herb Geller, Nat Peck and Ack van Rooyen. They played a one-off concert of mostly unknown compositions, taped by producer Hans Gertberg for inclusion in the huge archive of NDR Jazz Workshop recor…
Harsh 70's Reality
Originally seeing the light of day in April of 1992, "Harsh '70s Reality" was not just a high water mark for that year, but for the ages. Technically this was the band’s fourth long-play outing, and as a double-album, it followed two formidable dual juggernauts of the early 90's: "Twin Infinitives" and "Lake". But it was "Harsh '70s Reality" that left the decade stronger and more resonant than it came in. A 2012 anniversary edition-replete w/gatefold jacket-came & went fairly quickly, so in 2023…
Seven reasons for tears
Reissue of classic and long hard to find Purge/Sound League album from 1987 by Borbetomagus. Quartet session with the power-bass addition of Adam Nodelman. 1993 CD release “Seven Reasons for Tears beautifully documents the most simultaneously fierce and accessible periods of the band’s history. Converts and heathens can both bathe luxuriously in the radioactive improv-beauty-stream that lights up a room when the record is played at ‘special’ volume. Tears is the living spirit of Borbetomagus’ nu…
Songs Our Mother Taught Us
*2022 stock* The work of upstate New York noise-jazz trio Borbetomagus is frequently described in terms of overwhelming power and aggression. In a live context, that's absolutely the dominant impression one is likely to get. On record, though, it's possible to have some control over the volume, and thus to listen closely and carefully and discern real technique at work, not to mention a subtlety that's not really surprising, given that saxophonists Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich, and guitarist Dona…
Live at de Tanker
*Edition of 300 glass-mastered CDs in wallet with spine.* "Keefe Jackson on tenor & bass clarinets, Raoul Van Der Weide on bass & cracklebox, and Frank Rosaly on drums are heard in this 2022 live performance at De Roze Tanker in Amsterdam, reuniting the Chicago reedist with Rosaly, who is now based in Amsterdam, for six free jazz tunes: two Jackson compositions and four superb collective dialogs." - squidco.comKettle Hole Records is a Chicago-based independent record label, which specializes in …
Writing In Water
Reissue, originally released in 1985. Gentle, incisive solo music for violin and electronics by one of the unsung giants of free improvisation. Philipp Wachsmann emerged in the fertile mid '70s underground free music scene in London, playing with everyone from Simon Mayo to Barry Guy to Derek Bailey to Evan Parker, starting a band called Chamberpot, making albums for the collective artist-run label he managed: Bead Records. These LPs, 26 of them in total, were made in tiny batches and are now ra…
New Movements
*In process of stocking. Limited edition of 500 copies.* German pianist Georg Gräwe, one of the most impeccable and imaginative improvisers in contemporary free music, made his debut recording, New Movements, in 1976, under the auspices of Free Music Production, the legendary Berlin-based organization run by Jost Gebers. At FMP’s Jazz Now festival, in April of that year, Gräwe presented his working band, a classic hard-bop configuration with trumpet, saxophone and rhythm section. Indeed, some ve…
Variations On A Blue Line / 'Round Midnight
2012 release. A reissue of Joe McPhee's Variations On A Blue Line / 'Round Midnight, originally released on Hat Hut Records in 1979. Variations On A Blue Line / 'Round Midnight was recorded in October, 1977, during a highly significant period in Poughkeespie, New York, multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee's work, as he was pioneering the transatlantic, collaborative spirit that has helped to define the last three decades of his career. Blue Line comes from a concert in Rouen, France, when McPhee pla…
Red Chrysanthemums: Solos 1977
2015 release. On the occasion of improviser and composer Wadada Leo Smith's exhibition Ankhrasmation: The Language Scores, 1967-2015 at Chicago's Renaissance Society, Corbett Vs. Dempsey present Red Chrysanthemums, a previously unreleased live recording of solo performances by Smith, documented in Los Angeles in December of 1977. Three adventurous, spacious tracks that feature Smith's unique and innovative trumpet, as well as percussion, tuned percussion, and flute, all captured as Smith was in …
Fire Without Bricks
The duo of saxophonist Larry Stabbins and percussionist Roy Ashbury was a mainstay of the London improvised music scene in the early 1970s. They recorded their lone LP, Fire Without Bricks, in 1976, and issued it in a tiny edition on the cooperatively run Bead label. Stabbins has toggled between more pop-oriented projects like Working Week and Jerry Dammers Spatial AKA Orchestra and adventurous free music in bands led by Peter Brötzmann and Tony Oxley. Born in Wolverhampton and based initially i…
Berkeley Lecture, 1971
One for the ages here. Unearthed from the ESS archives and officially released for the first time ever, a previously unknown half-hour from cosmic mythologist and sound scientist Sun Ra's 1971 U.C. Berkeley course "The Black Man in the Cosmos." Ra's soft-spoken intensity is underscored by the sound of chalk on the board as he ambles effortlessly through his potent and prescient ideas. The class session closes with two musical tracks, a piano version of "Love In Outer Space" and a blistering Moo…
Insisting
Two hardcore proponents of free improvisations from different generations meet for a granular explosion.
Four Spheres
On this maiden recording, Chicago-based bassist Jason Roebke leads a new quartet, featuring his original compositions and a stellar lineup. The music, which was brilliantly recorded at Steve Albini's legendary Electrical Audio and expertly mixed and mastered by Alex Inglizian at Experimental Sound Studio, is performed by veteran reed player Edward Wilkerson Jr., whose own bands Eight Bold Souls and Shadow Vignettes were among the great ensembles of eighties/nineties Chicago, extending the AACM t…
Superstition
Corbett Vs. Dempsey presents the second release in an ongoing series that will reconstruct the legacy known and the legacy damned of the most overlooked and under-documented American free rock unit, Dredd Foole and the Din.
Centrifuga
Danish pianist Tom Prehn was one of the first Europeans to deeply explore free music. With his quartet featuring Fritz Krogh on tenor saxophone, Poul Ehlers on bass, and Finn Slumstrup on drums, Prehn recorded Axiom in October, 1963, for Sonet, though it went unreleased until 2015 because the band felt that their music had moved beyond it already. To hear the music they were talking about, one could only turn to two privately-made reel-to-reel tapes, Centrifuga and Sohlverv, recorded in August, …
Chirps
Limited edition of 500 copies.* What could possibly happen when two ultimate masters of soprano saxophone square off for their only recording of duets? Chirps is the only place to find out. Steve Lacy – the one who planted the flag for soprano saxophone in the ground of modern jazz, who established its iconic status, who devoted himself to the axe with monkish devotion, who brought shakuhachi breath and stairstep melody into its upper-register antics. Evan Parker – arguably the one who pushed th…
To Dusk
Every day over the course of a year starting in June, 2020, in something she refers to as a "domestic ritual," Zeena Parkins recorded solo electric harp performances in her home studio. The brilliant improvisor and composer had, like most of her peers, been sidelined by the pandemic; unable to tour, she spent the end of each day at the harp, playing until sunlight waned, inventing and discovering new soundscapes, keeping her musical self together while the world seemed poised to crumble. Parkins…
Sweet Nothings (for Milford Graves)
*In process of stocking.* Two masters of wind instruments blowing in from the Windy City. In 2003, as part of the seventh annual Empty Bottle Festival of Jazz & Improvised Music, Joe McPhee and Evan Parker squared off for a round of intimate dialogues. The resulting recording is just the second time they had played as a duet, the previous also being in Chicago, at a studio in 1998, where the limited their instrumentarium to tenor saxophones, resulting in the Okka Disc classic Chicago Tenor Duets…