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Recorded in Tokyo in June 1978 after his stay in the United States, Midnight Sun captures the Tsuyoshi Yamamoto Trio in a format typical of the Three Blind Mice aesthetic: full, dynamic sound and natural breathing of the playing. Between standards (‘Autumn Leaves’, ‘Love Is Here To Stay’) and more personal themes, Yamamoto favours melodic narration, with a deep left hand and a very singing touch.
On Nafs At Peace, Jaubi turn a Lahore jam into a spiritual suite: North Indian raga, hip‑hop pulse and modal jazz woven into a journey from turmoil to stillness, as if Coltrane’s quest had been reimagined on tabla, sarangi and MPC‑haunted drums.
The rhythm team by Rashied Ali and Reggie Johnson (with former Sun Ra member Ronnie Boykins adding texture on "Capricorn Moon") establishes a solid foundation, complemented by Alan Shorter's sharp trumpet, while Benny Maupin's close expressions in monophonic form also support it. The fact that pianist Burt Green recorded an almost unnoticed ESP album (just a month later) with Brown as a sideman illustrates how fluid and negotiable musical activities were within this nascent community.
Although R…
The album "Spirits," released by a debut label based in Copenhagen, marked the first opportunity for Ayler to record his "free music" in February 1964 in New York. The musicians selected by him included notable figures such as Cecil Taylor (with drummer Sunny Murray), members from Sonny Rollins' band (bassist Henry Grimes), and musicians from his Cleveland period (trumpeter Norman Howard, bassist Earl Henderson). This work also represents his first focus on his own compositions, which includes H…
Hatka performed at Telakka Jazz on the first Friday night of January 2025. The following Sunday the trio visited the studio to record a session - music captured in the festival afterglow, fuelled by a shared commitment to free expression. The album is titled Quartet for a reason. A fourth voice, saxophonist Jone Takamäki, was originally meant to join the group for both the live performance and the studio recording. Quartet is what was planned and what remains. Jone couldn’t make it, so he never …
Huge Tip! Small repress. "I stood on top of the mountain and looked out over the landscape. It was so beautiful that my chest hurt. The light vibrated, time stood still, and the contours dissolved for a moment. Everything had changed; I felt it then. I took their little hands so as not to lose contact with the ground. Then we ran down the mountain, scraping our knees. Still, we didn't make it. You had already put away all the nautical charts, loosened the moorings and steered out among the skerr…
Paulownia by Merzbow is a 2025 full-length statement comprising two lengthy compositions that fuse intense electronic manipulation with Merzbow’s enduring fascination for natural phenomena. Across both pieces, the album merges organic inspiration and harsh digital process, producing a hypnotic yet confrontational experience.
Tip! Noton releases the Limited Edition CD Box Set of Alva Noto’s Xerrox series. Pioneering in his approach to digital sound and its materiality, Alva Noto (Carsten Nicolai) began his ongoing exploration of sampling, degradation and recontextualisation with the Xerrox series in 2007. Over the years, the project has evolved into one of the most distinctive bodies of work in contemporary electronic music, situated between minimalism, experimental sound art and digital abstraction.
Across five albu…
Pioneering, magisterial compilation, which turned many of us here onto Mustafa Ozkent, Fikret Kizilok, Erkin Koray, Temiz and co, a decade ago. Still dazzling, fresh, essential.
Tip! Noton releases the Limited Edition CD Box Set of Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto’s V.I.R.U.S. Pioneers in their own musical approaches, Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto, began their exploration of sound in the evocatively titled V.I.R.U.S. series in 2002. After more than a decade from the release of the collection’s final installment with Summvs in 2011, Noton reissued all the five albums between May and November 2022.
With its impressionistic atmosphere, in this collaborative project two genera…
Paysages Planétaires on Alga Marghen may be the great unrecognized masterpiece of ethno-electroacoustic music, a 3CD box that arrived in 2004 with almost no fanfare and has waited two decades for ears ready to hear it. Henri Pousseur and Michel Butor, collaborators across forty years and more than twenty works, here achieve something that resonates uncannily with Jon Hassell and Brian Eno's "Fourth World" concept. Yet Pousseur, the serialist pioneer who worked alongside Karlheinz Stockhausen and…
** original copy ** "...Of course, they are all just 'grains of sand' in the universe of world music - and yet, a grain of sand, a drop of water, can be a symbol of the entire universe. In this way, the title given to his composition by German composer and saxophone player Berndt Konrad - 'To Listen To The World In A Grain Of Sand' - so beautifully expresses what this concert stands for." (from the CD liner notes by Joachim-Ernst Berendt). Live Recorded at the Donaueschingen Musiktage (Contemp…
"There is only one Cyrille solo on this album - the last solo on the last tune - but he is there at every moment of this date. His timekeeping, his fills, his extraordinary cymbal work, his sense of space, are present in every nook and cranny of this date"
"Live At The Hammersmith Odeon 1982." is an electrifying concert, recorded on February 8, 1982, captures the raw energy and dynamic performance of the band during the second leg of their acclaimed La Folie British tour.
Originally recorded for the BBC radio series 'In Concert,' this performance remained in the vaults for nearly 16 years before seeing its first official release on CD. Fans can finally experience the unfiltered excitement and passion of The Stranglers, as they take the stage at on…
Mai Mai Mai’s artistic path has never rested on laurels, it’s been a constant evolution, a profound and poetic research, a dark and dusty journey through awareness and collaborations where the heart of the process has always been about building connections and understanding people and their rituals. Mai Mai Mai’s new album ‘Karakoz’ was mostly recorded in Palestine (Ramallah and Bethlehem) in 2024 during an ongoing genocide and follows his acclaimed Southern Gothic double-album ‘Rimorso’. The al…
New album by FLOCKS, the duo of drone specialist Werner Durand and percussionist Uli Hohmann. Musical landscapes that move between traditional as well as experimental sounds with influences from Krautrock and Jon Hassell's "fourth world" aesthetics.
*2024 Stock* Sounds Heard is not only a collection of writings intended for people who are interested or involved in contemporary music, especially those performers - including children - who lack a formal musical training. It also charts a wide cross-section of the activities of an intriguing musical personality. At different times in Hugh Davies' nearly 40-year career he has been variously described as "the world's leading electromusicologist", "the most informed person around on the general …
Dr. John Chowning (b. 1934) is a pioneering computer musician, composer and professor who, in 1967, discovered the FM synthesis algorithm. This breakthrough in electronic music allowed for simple, yet rich timbres described as sounding "real." With this discovery, Chowning composed singular, dramatic electronic music and changed the timbre of music forever.
Chowning utilized the potential of computers to synthesize sounds according to programmed instructions. The composer's use of his own FM al…
Recorded in a bedroom with classical guitar and 4-track tape, The Next From Field Commander is Australian folk of rare emotional density. Layered vocals, inhabited silences, a voice that lingers.
Killer! Reissue, originally released in 1969. An iconic French free jazz record recorded at Pathé Marconi Studios. On June 27th, 1969, Michel Portal pushed the door of the Pathé Marconi studios. With him were drummers Jacques Thollot and Aldo Romano, bassist Jean-François Jenny-Clark, and pianist Joachim Kühn. They hadn't rehearsed anything, as if entering the studio to record an album without any plan was something normal. The musicians were obviously very used to playing with each other, as th…