Music from United Kingdom

Volume 2 of the definitive collection of unreleased recordings, unrecorded compositions, one-off events, radio and concert recordings. These four CDs and one DVD cover the period from 1976 to 1978 and include the legendary Stockholm and Bremen radio concerts, many otherwise unrecorded late compositions, and the only known video ever made of the band (a complete 75 minute concert from 1976). With a substantial 60-page book of information, unpublished photographs, documents, recollections and subs…

Finally arrived back, this is the 40th Anniversary Box Set, Volume 3featuring The complete re-mastered Henry Cow studio recordings in the third matching box: Legend, Unrest, Desperate Straights, In Praise of Learning and Western Culture. Formed in 1968 and disbanded in 1978, HENRY COW's influences included rock, blues, classical, opera, jazz and of course, the avant-garde. Their compositions are complex, challenging and extremely original, but they are also dedicated improvisors who would som…

The classic restored. No extra tracks, just this legendary release as it was originally conceived. Kew Rhone was made soon after Peter and John left Henry Cow, at Carla Bley and Mike Mantler’s Grog Kill studio in New York (they both appear on the CD). Fellow conspirators included singer Lisa Herman and drummer Andrew Cyrille. It’s one of those records which sums up a moment; a creative moment in which ideas have come into clear focus, and just need to be got down; an historical moment at which a…

**Strictly Limited White 7" flexi disc with bonus 18 minute track download redeemable from the label - 30 minutes total** Northumberland's Alt.vinyl serve a spectral flexidisc spin-off from :zoviet*france: and Fossil Aerosol Mining Project's 'Patina Pooling' (2014) album. Presented on the perfect, malleable format for their rusted ambient ruminations, 'Flexible Pooling' embraces the flexi disc's infidelities, using its proneness to erosion to convey an ever-changing meaning to the music …

New album from Mike Cooper recorded live on Radio Lebanon in Beirut. Cooper plays electric lap steel and sings several of his 'Spirit Songs' - a body of vocal works that he has been presenting live over the past few years. These 'songs' are constructed by chopping up - (William Burroughs /Brion Gysin/Tom Phillips style) - Gravity's Rainbow and V - two novels by Thomas Pynchon. No chords, melodies or harmonic patterns for each song are planned prior to them being performed. Both accompanime…

John Butcher and Andy Moor have shared a stage many times since their first collaboration in the trio Thermal with Thomas Lehn. Even though they hail from very different corners of improvised music, their musical horizons have meshed through the time into the distinctive duo that it is now.“Experiments with a Leaf” is a live recording from October 2013 in Berne, Switzerland, where the duo was playing in a cathedral. The large natural echo in the great space somehow glued the sounds togethe…

Limited dition of 250 on 180gm black vinyl. An essential document of this endlessly creative improvisational pairing...Californian Gino Robair and Londoner John Butcher first played together on a 1997 recording session in Oakland, California. Since then they have worked extensively as a duo, periodically expanding to form trios with Matthew Sperry (bass), Miya Masaoka (koto), Derek Bailey (guitar), Thomas Lehn (synth) and, most recently, The Apophonics with John Edwards (bass). Robair also …

A reissue of the first LP by the exceptionally fine improvising trio of John Russell (guitar), Phil Durrant (violin and trombone) and John Butcher (saxophones). This group came into being in 1984 after Russell and Durrant had spent the previous two years performing in private with another saxophonist. For this debut LP, made in 1987, they performed eleven short pieces. This CD has been expanded by the inclusion of a previously unissued extended concert performance made a few years later. The str…

Milestone reissue! Evan Parker's monolithic 1978 solo record Monoceros was originally released on Incus in 1978, and distinguishes itself in several respects: first, because it was recorded by the direct-cut process, whereby the sound pathway went directly from the microphone to a vinyl master. By virtue of eliminating the tape intermediate, the hope was to reduce noise and limit the need for processing and filters. The important functional consequence of this technology was that the musician (…

The provenance of bonus tracks can often be tangential or suspicious; in this case, it's more like a homecoming. WhenBryn Jones turned in the master for what would become 1994's Drugsherpa mini-CD, Staalplaat selected the 20-minute title-track, truly one of Muslimgauze's most distinct and awe-inspiring tracks, to fill the release. The sinuous, doom-haunted "Drugsherpa" still sounds fresh today, but in 1994 it was so far ahead of its time, that the rest of us wouldn't catch up until a decade or m…

Some might say that the continued stream of releases fromBryn Jones aka Muslimgauze is beginning to beggar belief. But Jones was always prolific, creating not just song after song but variant version after version of his existing work. And so Muslimgauze continues to reach out from the last century into this one. Although an intensely dedicated and creative producer and composer, Jones could be a little cryptic when it came to keeping his massive body of work organized. The recently unearthed Tu…

"We do not work on a release, a piece is done at a time. A CD is drawn from various tracks which can span a few days, weeks or a month, or a day, each release is different." --Bryn Jones, Grinding Into Emptiness interview, 1998Not only has Muslimgauze's work survived the death of Bryn Jones, so have his working methods; with so much worthwhile material still in the vaults and much of it having little in the way of information or context left by the artist upon his untimely passing, recent reissu…

The original 2CD Deceiver from 1996 is a seminal release in Bryn Jones' sprawling discography, one of the first major ones to really pivot into the noisier/more abrasive side of Jones' sound as Muslimgauze. From its epic, vinyl-side-long title-track down to terse, rhythmic snippets like "A Parsee View," Deceiver set out many of the avenues that Muslimgauze would continue to explore before Jones' death in 1999. Since then, Staalplaat has continued to release the massive back-log of Jones' work,…

While the human voice has often been an element in Bryn Jones\' WORK as Muslimgauze, rarely did he highlight it as much as in Minaret Speaker, the latest in the Muslimgauze Archive SERIES, and its concurrent release, Feel the Hiss(ARCHIVE 030CD). While elements of Minaret Speakerappeared on the 7\" of the same name released by Staalplaat in 1996, much of the strongest material here is previously unheard. Jones\' normal practice was to send in tapes to the label with only a title for each tape as…

Some of the tracks on Feel the Hiss, a release Bryn Jonesrecorded LIVE to cassette in early 1995 but never had the chance to remix and polish before he DIED, use the same kinds of devotional voices found on much of Minaret Speaker(ARCHIVE 029CD), but here other voices are present too. Conversational or angry, male or female, English or French or Arabic, almost inaudible or forcing their way to the front of the MUSIC, these "Zilver Tracks" (the name based on a note Jones wrote on the tape) engage…

The brilliant sax player John Butcher continues to expand the boundaries of free improvisation. This is his latest solo release. An inexhaustible outpouring of ideas blends with phantasmagoric, wondrous technique to create a richly colored, dynamic world of sound. Not only is this John Butcher's greatest masterpiece, but as a solo saxophone album it is a valuable document that can even be said to rank alongside Evan Parker's 'Monoceros''. The 3 pieces were performed at Shimanouchi Church …

Totally essential LP re-release for the first collaboration between Robert Fripp and Brian Eno in over 30 years, that nearly equals the effuse beauty of their celebrated 70s works. "Ambient is a spacious, electronic music that is concerned with sonic texture, not songwriting or composing," says the All-Music Guide. That seems reasonable, although I suspect Brian Eno might take issue with the notion that his music is somehow unconcerned with composition. As with most musical definitions (and …

Recorded at Bishopsgate Institute, London 14/11/2012 "John Tilbury solo using two pianos-one prepared,the other not, the former being the famous old piano which once belonged to to Myra Hess. Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith solo accompanied by the spectral sound of sympathetic strings from John Tilbury's prepared piano,followed by a long and utterly absorbing duo from these two masterful musicians.

Recent digipack CD reissue "This collective of jazz improv weirdoes banded together for a one-off in 1986 to riff on the deep vibe of all things French and cinematic. Backing vocalist Toni Marshall, Zorn, Beresford, and Toop created a virtual and highly experimental film noir soundtrack to a movie that perhaps existed in the mind of Jean-Luc Godard in the 1950s, but was never made. David Toop is clearly the sonic architect here, haunting the proceedings with his deep use of effects, subdued perc…

A seminal text (and introduction to some 25000 pages of drawings, collages, autobiographical writings and compositions by Adolf Wölfli), this “short autobiography” of a major figure in the history of Art Brut is accompanied by a mini-CD containing the two interpretations of Wölfli's graphic scores by Nurse With Wound (Steven Stapleton, Diana Rogerson, and David Tibet), first published in 1986 in the legendary “Necropolis, Amphibians & Reptiles” LP, for the first time on a seperate release.