Music from United States

*In process of stocking* How do you welcome adventure? Longtime comrades, legendary Daniel Carter, Matthew Shipp, William Parker and Gerald Cleaver investigated this in their first album, Welcome Adventure, Vol. 1, resulting in 577 Records’ best-selling release in the 20 years we’ve been operating. Now, the group is trying the question again with their second astonishing volume, taken from the same historical recording session. Daniel Carter (Saxophone, Clarinet) has been collaborating with Will…

Originally from Kingsport, Tennessee, New York-based Zoh Amba is a notable rising star in the avant-garde music scene. Growing up in the Appalachian mountains, Amba practiced saxophone to the forest that surrounded her home before she later traveled to study with David Murray in New York, and also at the San Francisco Conservatory Of Music & New England Conservatory in Boston. Today, her music is full of folk melodies, mesmerizing refrains, repeated incantations and powerfully executed Free Jazz…

Elliott Sharps's release on Erototox Decodings is no different in terms of his ongoing homage to science, entitled 'Phlogiston', aptly named after a substance supposed by 18th-century chemists to exist in all combustible bodies, and to be released in combustion. It’s also his first purely electronic and synthesized record to date.

*2022 stock. In process of stocking* 'Recorded live during the “Women of New Music” festival in Chicago, [this] OkkaDisk set is marred — Crispell-wise — only by having the piano mixed down too low and occasionally swamped by saxophone and percussion. Otherwise it finds her in thoroughly sympathetic company. Anderson’s diction is Coltrane-influenced but generously... This seems like a relationship written in the stars, and it allows them to build up whole areas of interaction in which the exchang…

*2022 stock. In process of stocking* Fred Anderson & DKV Trio is an excellent jazz album that captures the high level of musicianship possessed by these top Chicago players. Heard here are saxophonist Fred Anderson (founding member of the AACM), percussionist Hamid Drake, bassist Kent Kessler, and reeds man Ken Vandermark. With this group, there is no "warming up"; they're hot from the opening notes. "Planet E" is the first cut, and within no time the fire is stoked and the musicians move, wail,…

Anthony Braxton's septet live at Victoriaville on 21 May 2011, performing Echo Echo Mirror House music, where each musician plays an iPod loaded with Braxton's recorded history alongside their instrument.

Richard Pinhas, Merzbow and Wolf Eyes together at Victoriaville on 20 May 2011: guitars, electronics, tapes, saxophone and voice in a spontaneous five-way noise session.

The great Malcolm Earl "Mal" Waldron makes his debut on Naked Lunch with a collection of his own compositions recorded in New York City during the early '60s in a trio formation with George Tucker on bass and Al Dreares on the drums. The composing skills of Waldron as a post-bop key figure are here on full display on both sides, although pieces like "Modal-Air," "Summerday," "Ollie's Caravan," and "Quiet Temple" really demonstrate the creativity of the trio's playing, with Tucker and Dreares lay…

*300 copies limited release* In 1963 Eric Dolphy recorded some sessions in New York with producer Alan Douglas, the fruits of which were issued on small labels as the LPs Conversations and Iron Man. They've been reissued a number of times on various labels, occasionally compiled together, but never with quite the treatment they deserve (which is perhaps why they're not as celebrated as they should be). In whatever form, though, it's classic, essential Dolphy that stands as some of his finest wor…

The American composer Christian Wolff (b. 1934) is the last living representative of the New York School (Rauschenberg, Rothko, etc.). Wolff was not even an adult when he studied with Grete Sultan and John Cage. Wolff’s music was much more politically motivated than that of Feldman and Cage, which is evident on this new Wergo album by Trio Accanto. The album features first recordings made in close collaboration with Wolff in the studios of Deutschlandfunk Cologne/Germany. Wolff's great “Trio IX …

'Morton Feldman has proved one of the 20th century’s most influential composers. Yet he remains one of its most enigmatic, and his late works retain an aura of mystery steeped with the grandeur, anxiety and quietly changing colour he adored in abstract expressionist painting and, latterly, Anatolian rug design. Patterns in a Chromatic Field (1981) is perhaps the most rhythmically active of these famously long, static pieces, which showed his increasing preoccupation with matters of form, scale a…

'The literal meaning of “amphibian” is “double life” and applies to animals living part of their lives in water and part of their lives on land. In the program note to his electroacoustic classic Music for the Double Life of Amphibians, Morton Subotnick states that “amphibian” is to be taken as a metaphor for the work’s structure and programmatic content, which follow a metamorphosis of being through the stages of amphibian to beast to angel. But it also applies to the musical material, the doub…

*2022 stock* Morton Subotnick achieved fame in the field of electronic music with Silver Apples of the Moon and The Wild Bull, his best-known tape works of the late 1960s. Since then, he has been active combining electronics with other media, notably employing gestural sketches on tape to alter sounds produced by voices and instrumentalists. The two works on this 2015 Wergo release are representative of Subotnick's methods, using a trumpet with a chamber ensemble in After the Butterfly, to reali…

*120 copies limited edition* Between the '60s and the '80s the production of pulp magazines in Italy was flourishing and incredibly varied: every month hundreds of paperbacks containing strange, adventurous or more often terrifying stories came out on the newsstands. Among the most popular italian pulp magazines was the horror series "I Racconti di Dracula" (Tales of Dracula) published by Baron Cantarella: each issue of "I Racconti di Dracula" contained a grim and disturbing story, inspired by I…

'Both bassists had made regular appearances in Victo over the past two decades, but no one in the audience could have guessed that it would be Kowald's last. The German improviser died in New York City four months later. The French-Canadian radio was not recording this concert, but the mixing desk engineer kept a tape rolling, just in case, and negotiations toward the release of this performance were already in progress when fate struck. There is magic on this record, especially in the last minu…

Cecil Taylor, Bill Dixon and Tony Oxley in concert at Victoriaville on 19 May 2002: piano, trumpet and percussion in an intimate, often delicate trio set.

'It was the unexpected event of the 2005 FIMAV festival: avant jazz legend Anthony Braxton joining noisy bad boys Wolf Eyes on-stage. But it did not come completely out of left field. A few months earlier at another festival, the 60-year-old saxophonist had attended a performance by the Michigan noise trio and was transformed, buying a copy of everything the band had to sell that night. The man had been hit in the face by noise music. At the 22nd FIMAV, Braxton was scheduled to play a duo concer…

** 2022 Repress, black vinyl** Flux is the 1981 debut solo outing of Robert Turman, an American multi-instrumentalist and avant-garde composer. Until recently, Turman was perhaps best known for his contributions to the ballistic NON project with Boyd Rice, as well as other obscured U.S. industrial acts such as Z.O. Voider. In the summer of 1981, Turman decided he would take a drastic turn from the noisy/electronic/industrial work of his compatriots, and began work on what is now the classic Flux…

Four double bassists, Barre Phillips, Joëlle Léandre, William Parker and Tetsu Saitoh, live at Victoriaville on 23 May 2003 in memory of Peter Kowald: bowed and plucked basses and voices in a shared farewell.

Anthony Braxton and Fred Frith each have about as close a relationship to the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville as just about any non-Canadians. The first release on Victo, the label run by the producers of the annual Canadian festival, was a guitar duo with Frith and Rene Lussier; the second was a duet between Braxton and Derek Bailey. Until this year, each had released three discs on the label. But 2005 was the Year of Braxton and the label has released three new Brax…