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Playing The Room
*2024 stock* Playing The Room bears testimony to the long musical friendship of Avishai Cohen and Yonathan Avishai. They began to explore jazz as teenagers in Tel Aviv, and have continued to play together over many years, with Yonathan making important contributions to Avishai’s group albums Into The Silence and Cross My Palm With Silver on ECM. Their first duo album begins with music composed by the trumpeter and by the pianist and concludes with a touching interpretation of Israeli composer Al…
Ted Lucas
Ted Lucas' self-titled album, pressed in Detroit at Third Man Pressing. This self-titled work published album by singer-songwriter and master guitarist Ted Lucas has achieved an almost mystical reputation among aficionados and collectors. Ted Lucas is a seamless marriage of moody odes and raga style instrumentals regarded by many to be, simply put, the greatest private press folk/psych album ever recorded. Lucas was a fixture in the Detroit rock scene of the sixties and seventies. In 1972, the d…
Varder 1
Big Tip! Varder is a new LP-series dedicated to unearthing early Norwegian electronic music. When this new form of music began to spread in the 1950s, it required large studios with expensive equipment, and the outcome was often considered not commercial enough for record labels to venture into. But despite the meagre means, Norwegian composers threw themselves into new sonic adventures such as electroacoustics, musique concrète and computer music, travelling to studios in Norway, Sweden, Poland…
Where The River Goes
*2024 stock* Where The River Goes carries the story forward from Wolfgang Muthspiel’s highly-acclaimed Rising Grace recording of 2016, reuniting the Austrian guitarist with Brad Mehldau, Ambrose Akinmusire and Larry Grenadier, heavy talents all, and bringing in the great Eric Harland on drums. Much more than an “all-star” gathering, the group plays as an ensemble with its own distinct identity, evident both in the interpretation of Muthspiel’s pieces and in the collective playing. The album, re…
Darklight
2017 release ** "Music by: Nils Frahm, Clint Mansell, DJ Tiësto, Max Richter, Roberto Cacciapaglia, Joe Hisaishi, Vladimir Martynov, Ólafur Arnalds and Floraleda Sacchi. Already renowned for her interpretations of John Cage and Philip Glass, on #Darklight Italian harpist Floraleda Sacchi working solo with acoustic and electric harps, electronic devices and ambient recordings, her compelling interpretations expose the enigmatic quality of the compositions. "People often ask me why I play the har…
O Comme Icare
1992 release ** "Eric La Casa and Sylvie Larouche's first album of lush, cinematic ambience and unsettling atmosphere from 1992. La Casa's sense of drama and timing might sound familiar to those who know his (entirely excellent) later work with field recordings."
The art of buzzing (Excuse the delay vol.1)
2001 release ** "A terrific drone album here, on this first solo-release, Werner Durand presents six works all dealing with the buzzing phenomena. This phenomena is found in many musical cultures around the world as an integral part of the sound, eg. with chinese and korean flutes, ethiopian and basque string instruments and also the Indian tanpura. The results are stunning: dense drones with pulsing, buzzing, dizzying movements swarm with an intoxicating cadence. Recorded in multi-track, the so…
Unyt
2016 release ** "With its unique cinematic downtempo aesthetics, Unyt leads us into a perpetually expanding travel through soundscapes while playing with our centers of attention, loss of focus and a certain sense of dispersion. The album redefines Scann-Tec’s approach to musical composition and introduces multi-form field recordings vaporised in an array of analog and digital tools to create surreal and behind the veil atmospheres ; wide etheral pads floating high above his distinctive, dynami…
Pong
2010 release ** "The main instrument on this CD is the organ, which sounds in fast mechanical sequences a bit unusual for our ears and more typical for the Berlin school of electronic music. Simple compositional structure meets vivid expression, liturgical atmosphere and a sublime metaphysical line running through the whole concept of the project. Some parallels can be drawn with the CD of the Sphere Rex project, released in 2009 by the same community of labels. And it is no coincidence, as bot…
Falling Down Fearless Of Bruises
1999 release ** "Zonk't comes from Paris and is led by Laurent Perrier who used to be in Nox, Cape Fear and ran the Odd Size label and store. He is now recording under this pseudonym, and also uses the alias Heal."
Through The Gates Of Deeper Slumber
1997 release ** "2nd full-length by our favourite outfit from the Southern coast of Norway. They shifted their musical direction forward to structures in the vein of early 70's progressive mellotronic space rock while still keeping their "traditional" psychedelic influences. On side 1 TSOI take us into a floral fairyland: a 25-min. long conceptual suite in 5 parts where the music ranges from meditative raga rock bliss with sitar to percussive trance rock elements to a meadow symphony and electro…
Audible: New Frontiers
2003 release ** "The Physics Room and National Radio’s ‘revolutions per minute’ show have joined with curator Sally McIntyre to bring six of New Zealand’s emerging and acclaimed audio artists into the physical space of the gallery and headspace of radio broadcast. New audio works have been developed for the project by six artists: Philharmonic / Richard Francis / John McCallum / Radioqualia / Rachel Shearer / Wendyhouse. Each sound work is installed in the gallery space (with individual listenin…
Shadow of events
2011 release ** "Shadow Of Events is the third album by Oslo, Norway sound artist, producer and musician Alexander Rishaug, following his Asphodel CD Possible Landscape (2004) and 2001's Panorama on the Smalltown Supersound label. The album was recorded over a five year period and mixed in Berlin last year. Not unlike his previous albums but apparently more refined Shadow Of Events combines a warm and organic haunting quality blended with both abstract and concrete tones and subtle digital noise…
Thinking About
2004 release ** "It is easier to say what it doesn’t mean: Intuitive means not controlled by reason, not planned, not calculating, not superficial, not egomaniacal. It may mean: Creative, organic, alive, spiritual. All this at least is the music of the duo and it even possesses this astonishing quality when it has been thus announced. It magically appears to draw directly on the inward, as well as on a system of sounds that seems to exist beyond our involvement. The trumpet player Markus Stockh…
Taking Off
1995 release ** "Taking Off was first released as an LP in 1982 and re-issued as a CD by Bleu Regard in France in 1995. Wallenstein increases the size of his jazz accompaniment/collaboration, featuring Bill Chelf on piano, Charles Tyler on saxophones, Jeremy Steig on flute, and Jeff Meyer on percussion. The opening poem "Careful Bump," begins with a jolting kick and cymbal crash leading into a bop-jazz drum beat. "The Short Life of the Five Minute Dancer," which describes action in the face of f…
Jacana
LP version. The best improvisers are the ones that seem to invent and uninvent their instruments right in front of your eyes and ears. Swedish pianist Sten Sandell and Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love are two musical champions with a long experience of doing exactly that. Jacana, the latest in Rune Grammofon's occasional series of unusual duo combinations, features the pair's sparkly improvised set captured at the 2013 Kongsberg Jazz Festival in southern Norway. Sten and Paal have been …
Azimuth
Recorded in 1977 and now reissued in ECM’s audiophile Luminessence vinyl series, the debut album of the Azimuth trio was truly ahead of its time. Formed by adding Canadian-born trumpeter Kenny Wheeler to the British duo of pianist John Taylor and vocalist Norma Winstone, the group’s futuristic musical palette embraced hypnotic, minimalistic pulse patterns, otherworldly synthesizer sounds, songs, collective improvisation and solo flights. In recent seasons, the number of listeners under Azimuth’s…
Characters On A Wall
*2024 stock* Louis Sclavis’s 13th ECM recording finds the French clarinetist drawing inspiration from two sources – the street art of Ernest Pignon-Ernest, and the interpretive originality of a splendid new quartet. Pignon-Ernest’s works were previously the subject of Sclavis’s highly acclaimed 2002 recording Napoli’s Walls. This time Sclavis looks at a broader range of the artist’s in situ collages from Ramallah to Rome, in search of “a dynamic, a movement that will give birth to a rhythm, a…
M.R.C.S.
Original 1991 LP edition. Singer, harmonica virtuoso, and keyboardist Karen Mantler has inherited her father, Michael Mantler's sense of whimsy and her mother, Carla Bley's musical fearlessness -- not to mention her electric-shredded-wheat hairstyle. Although Mantler's debut album was produced by Bley and new husband Steve Swallow and features fellow avant-jazz offspring Eric Mingus as co-lead vocalist and Jonathan Sanborn on bass, 1989's My Cat Arnold isn't quite jazz, but it's not exactly pop …
Bayou
*2024 stock* A fresh and open music, delicate and space-conscious, is shaped as drummer Thomas Strønen and Ayumi Tanaka, previously heard in the ensemble Time Is A Blind Guide on Lucus, resurface in a new trio with clarinettist/singer/percussionist Marthe Lea. The group first came together at Oslo’s Royal Academy of Music, where for two years the players would meet each week for exploratory music making. Strønen: “We always played freely- drifting between elements of contemporary classical music…