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We Know How To Hate - The Opus De Society story (Book)
Before the internet collapsed distances and democratized distribution, the international noise underground operated through an intricate web of mail-order catalogs, hand-dubbed cassettes, and photocopied fanzines. Labels emerged from bedrooms and basements, their catalogs circulating through postal networks that connected isolated outposts of extreme sound across continents. Few figures navigated this world as actively as Frans de Waard, and few labels embodied its uncompromising spirit as purel…
America's Greatest Noise (Book)
The next book on Korm Plastics contains no photographs of the artists, no list of released records, no pictures of record sleeves, and no footnotes. It is not a hardcover, not on glossy paper and is not expensive. It’s… ‘America’s Greatest Noise’ tells the story of Ron Lessard, owner of RRRecords, a record store in Lowell, Massachusetts and, from 1986 to 2009, a record label, releasing the albums of Blackhouse, F/i, PGR, the first Merzbow LP outside Japan and many more, regional compilations, th…
BBC Jazz Club Session April 1965
On BBC Jazz Club Session April 1965, Don Rendell and Ian Carr capture a historic broadcast moment where British modern jazz finds its new voice. The debut of pianist Michael Garrick within the quintet injects modal colour and compositional bite into a set that pushes club‑band swing toward something more questing and contemporary.
The Blue Yusef Lateef
** High Quality reissue. Remastered using pure analogue components only, from the master tapes through to the cutting head ** On The Blue Yusef Lateef (1968), listeners get an amazing chapter from the late '60s, an amazing period when everything in the world of Jazz was changing. Yuseef Lateef was big on concept recordings. This album examines all the different ranges of emotion contained within the blues genre. With a band that included Detroit Jazz gods Roy Brooks on drums and Kenny Burrell on…
Ode To Birds
"Hideto Kanai's first album is fairly hit-or-miss free jazz, but here he's in full-blown Black Saint and the Sinner Lady mode. There are twenty three musicians on this album (twenty three!), and while the undercurrent of free jazz is still running through, it's much closer to experimental big band or avant-garde jazz. And it's extremely compelling. Two side-long pieces, both of which go in and out of being quite elaborate and being complete chaos. There's some unusual and dissonant guitar and sy…
Sonnet
"Tee" in Tee and Company is the nickname of Three Blind Mice's founder and producer Takeshi Fujii, who formed the all-star group of eight top Japanese jazz musicians in 1977 for a series of concerts and seven days of studio recording that produced three separate albums. This supergroup included who's who of the Japanese jazz scene: Kenji Mori and Takao Uematsu on saxophones, Masaru Imada on piano, Masayuki Takayanagi on guitar, Hideto Kanai on bass, Nobuyoshi Ino on electric bass, Hiroshi Muraka…
Standards
2026 Repress. Sublime release from Masaru Imada Trio. Imada's got a way of letting a tune really find its way organically – almost as if the songs here are little flowers opening up in his fingers on the keyboard of the piano – although never in a style that's "flowery" at all, because Imada's a master of finding just the right notes at the right moment – never embellishing things just to show off. Instead, his imagination finds all the best paths forwards, especially on his original tunes on th…
Orang-Utan
Bassist Isao Suzuki's popularity shot up to stratosphere with the release of Blow Up from the Three Blind Mice label. By the time he recorded this, fourth album for the label, he was actually the winner of the Swing Journal Readers' Poll. And this rather strangely titled album doesn't disappoint.Suzuki had a knack for surrounding himself with superb musicians and playing brilliant, groovy music that is firmly rooted in the jazz tradition. This time, he picked as the all-important horn player Ken…
Alone Together
A piano-bass duo session cut in a single day at Tokyo's Onkio Haus on 24 October 1977, during one of the bassist George Mraz's rare passages through Japan. The format leaves nowhere to hide and the two players treat that exposure as the point of the exercise: Masaru Imada's voicings opened up to admit Mraz's lines as full equal voices, the Czech-American bassist drawing on the resonant, singing tone he had developed through his work with Tommy Flanagan and Stan Getz.
The programme alternates two…
Blow Up
A fantastic electric album from one of the most unique bassists of the 70s – Blow Up is one of the most sough-after titles from the acclaimed Three Blind Mice catalog. Isao Suzuki's Blow-Up is virtuosity and class all rolled up into one. A great combination of upbeat blues and mellow grooves! The album was awarded "Jazz of Japan" Award and the Jazz Disc Award of "Swing Journal" in 1973."This adventurous set finds Suzuki and his band mates (drummer George Otsuka, pianist Kunihiko Sugano, and bass…
Cool Jojo
2026 Repress. Recorded over three December days in 1979 at Epicurus Studio in Tokyo and issued the following year, Cool Jojo documents a side of Masayuki "Jojo" Takayanagi that sits at considerable remove from the noise-as-method work he was simultaneously pursuing with the New Direction Unit. The guitarist's Second Concept was his vehicle for an explicit return to the Tristano school — the lineage he had absorbed as a young player in postwar Tokyo and never fully set aside — and the programme m…
Poppy
Imada's second outing for Three Blind Mice, recorded across two January days in 1973 at Tokyo's Aoi Studio under Takeshi "Tee" Fujii's production. The record's structure follows from a negotiation between artist and producer: Masaru Imada had proposed a straight solo ballad recital; Fujii agreed to the conception but pressed him to balance the standards programme with a working-trio half devoted to his own writing. The LP that resulted is deliberately split — four solo readings on side one (Mist…
Yokohama Concert
Stunning duo comprised of two of the most important musicians of the Japanese underground/avant-garde, Otomo Yoshihide in a duo with the great Japanese drummer, Hiroshi Yamazaki – who has Kaoru Abe among his extensive list of past collaborators, and was also a member of Masayuki Takayanagi’s pioneering New Directions group. This album is dedicated to Masayuki Takayanagi.Otomo Yoshihide moves between free jazz, noise, improvisation, composition and the unclassifiable with a generosity that opens …
Feelings
Feelings marks Jake Henry’s long-awaited return as a leader, more than a decade after his debut with Sweet Talk Glitterbomb. This album is a deeply personal exploration of the intricate harmonic language and angular counterpoint Henry developed during his formative years as a guitarist. Drawing on the frenetic energy of math rock, raw intensity of metal, and chaotic textures of noise, Henry recontextualizes common song form into a bold, genre-defying soundscape.
The quartet—featuring Brian Krock…
Cinépalace
**300 copies, 2019 stock** "Dirk Serries and his wife, double bass player Martina Verhoeven, meet British tenor sax player Colin Webster, who also participated in the Dead Neanderthals’ Endless Voids, for a live improvisation, recorded at the DIY club Cinépalace in Kortrijk, Belgium in May 2015. A month earlier Serries performed with Webster in a quartet that was recorded as Live at Cafe Oto, and released on Webster’s Raw Tonk label. This recording, titled after the club name, highlights the hig…
Mama Too Tight
Originally released in 1967, Mama Too Tight stands as one of the most daring and structurally innovative albums from Archie Shepp, a pivotal figure in the free jazz movement and African-American cultural protest of the 1960s. Distinct from his more explosive works, this album showcases a refined compositional complexity, featuring avant-garde marching-band-style arrangements, masterful horn orchestrations, and a unique blend of humor and improvisational tension.
The title track, Mama Too Tight, …
Štiri Dela
"The CD surprised me because it could be listened to with many ears. At first I felt I could not separate it from contemporary composed music, soon after that I could still place it in the context of contemporary improvised music, and finally the fantasticness of a journey that takes the best both worlds have to offer revealed itself to me. Much of the merit can be attributed to the sensible arrangement of the four movements, which, despite being at least superficially similar procedures - mixin…
Vesper Sparrow
The work of JJJJJerome Ellis lives comfortably in the gaps between silence and possibility. The Black disabled Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist creates atmospheric soundscapes with saxophone, organ, hammered dulcimer, electronics, and their voice. Improvisation is at the core of their artistry – often chipping away at large slabs of recordings to reveal the piece like a marble sculptor. It’s an expansive and interdisciplinary practice that allows JJJJJerome to adapt to any medium or form, incl…
Scratching Fork II
On a perfectly smooth surface of silence, three hurled stones create their patterns of waves. The lines intersect, unite, cancel out, or reinforce each other. Sometimes, they form together a harmonious pattern. At other times, they express the beauty of chaos and entropy. But they always remain in relation to each other - no movement goes unanswered. No energy escapes into nothingness. These three stones are Scratching Fork. Three musicians with different characters, histories, and registers. Ma…
A Vol D'Oiseau
"There are many illusive or ephemeral descriptions that are often part of how words seek to elucidate the listening experience. In the music we have on this recording from Florestan and the trio he has formed to venture his musical initiatives, words such as space, transparency, suspension, stasis, momentum, tension, multiplicity, flow, cohesion, dimension, release are some of the ingredients that come to mind to articulate the musical experience this recording offers. To me, Florestan’s musical…