★Bocian Records
You Can Be Mine
* 200 copies. Black vinyl * Paal Nilssen-Love is at his powerful best on most of this record – showing that amazing command of the kit that's made him one of the most important drummers in free jazz over the past decade or so! And Fred Lonberg-Holm does plenty himself to keep up on both cello and electronics – working with an intensity that's quite a change from some of his more contemplative performances – surprisingly searing as Paal moves along like a nonstop locomotive!
A Duo(s)
In case you weren't there, Bocian present documentation of a pretty unhinged Cafe Oto session between gifted improvisers, Mats Gustafsson (reeds), John Russell (guitar) & Phil Minton (voice). Just imagine stumbling in on this one unprepared - a trio of blokes bleating, parping and yanking like Reeves & Mortimer after three days on the sauce. Of course, that description does a disservice to their well-honed extended technique and dexterity, but we'd defy anyone to keep a totally straight face at …
Bota Fogo
‘Bota Fogo’ was recorded live in concert at Audio Rebel’s Quintavant in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and is the new LP from Paal Nilssen-Love and co via Bocian Records, a label that claims to be for extreme fans of electronic and improvised music. Accompanying Nilssen here are his band Felipe Zenicola, Eduardo Manso, Arthur Lacerda and members of noise rock band Chinese Cookie Poets. The result is bass-heavy music with sporadic outbursts of raw trance and guitar feedback.
Blast Of Silence
Brand new David Maranha album, here with Gerard Lebik in a a sound performance held at Cave 211, Lisbon, January 2014 "An accumulation of resonances reinjected into an impressive granular continuum with a growing audio signal stretched to the limits of saturation. Music that leads to trance!
David Maranha His work encompasses sculpture, music and architecture. In 1986 he started to develop his work as a musician both as a solo artist and with several bands and has since released more than 30 a…
Anime Pezzentelle
Brand new David Maranha album, here with Gerard Lebik in a a sound performance held at Cave 211, Lisbon, January 2014 "An accumulation of resonances reinjected into an impressive granular continuum with a growing audio signal stretched to the limits of saturation. Music that leads to trance!
David Maranha His work encompasses sculpture, music and architecture. In 1986 he started to develop his work as a musician both as a solo artist and with several bands and has since released more than 30 a…
Daturas
Electroacoustic composition from Mexican composer Rogelio Sosa (1977). The electric guitar stays at the center of the work and provides all the noises that create this kind ofÊnightmarish and psychedelic journey. His previous album was published by Sub Rosa.
Everything was forever, until it was no more
The record is an attempt to document a sound installation by Konrad Smoleski presented in at the Polish Pavillion at the 55th Venice Biennale 2013. The sound sculpture is based primarily on the manipulation of the tolling of a bell. Through the process of transforming this familiar tone of traditional bells, Smole ski also changes its meaning: a sound that evokes a variety of associations is given an abstract frequency that seems devoid of connotations. Not only does the artist free the sound fr…
Conceptual nO!se
A great noise album made with analogue and digital sources "Proper brainfloss from indefatigable English noise demon Russell Haswell for the excellent Bocian Records. Following on from his cracking split with Pain Jerk and the outstanding '37 Minute Workout' for Diagonal, the five blizzards of 'Conceptual n0!se' also help to distinguish 2014 as a relatively prolific and vintage year for the venerable artist. It's full bore Haswell; an atonal, arrhythmic relish of blistering analogue and digital …
Phantom jerk
Here's a newie from notorious noise terrorist Kevin Drumm. The press release just says Kevin Drumm: modular analogue synth, while the sleeve isn't much more forthcoming, telling me the artist, title, label name and another snippet of information: 6 oscillators, recorded July 2013.Compared to some of his brutally distorted sonic assaults, this is a surprisingly tranquil serene album, with slow-drifting synth drones rubbing sonorously against one another in a ghostly shimmer that's part Deathpro…
Return from the centre of Earth
Recording during concerts in Chicago by Mikolaj Trzaska - saxophones, bass clarinet; Steve Swell - trombone; Per-Åke Holmlander - tuba; Tim Daisy - drums
Why is there something instead of nothing
This, Majkowski's third solo double bass release, is an album comprising of two pieces, which in their own way explore the relationship between stillness and momentum. The spectrum and resonance of particular sustained frequencies, and the atmosphere which they create is also at the core of this work. Majkowski captures these aspects via specific and highly detailed playing approaches, sustained over extended periods of time. We hear an inner pulse in slow melodies, and floating, almost frozen, …
Sin Gas
Wire Magazine's official King of All Skronk Mats Gustafsson is back with his partner in time Paal Nilssen-Love for a new duo record this week. I'm rather struck by the creepy skeleton on the front cover, and I'm also gleaning enjoyment from the textural bubble'n'squeak madness on the disc. There are quite a few droney periods on this one, with Gustafsson eking soft moans and primal howls and jagged rasps from his saxophone, with the drums often puttering around amorphously, but there are also mo…
Oslo Tapes
Mats Gustafsson, aka King Skronk, aka Skronkmeister General, aka The Skronk Controller, aka Squeaky Pete, aka Skronkmaster Flash, joins forces with another experimental giant Lasse Marhaug (aka The Ear Destroyer, aka Mr Skreee, aka Electro Crunch Bastard, aka Testicle Hazard) on this sanity-obliterating collaboration. Squeaky reeds go head to head against fluttering, hissing, rotting reels in a shrill, broken, fluttering noise experiment. It sounds horrible, of course, and if you're looking at t…
No New Age
Kapital is an encounter of two artists that usually penetrate different musical genres and ideas. It is an encounter of two musical worlds: psychoactive electro-acoustic music generated with electronic instruments and found objects and extreme psychedelia based on the sounds of processed guitar. Zio?ek and Iwan'ski worked together for the first time during recording sessions of improvisational group Innercity Ensemble formed in 2011. In August of 2013 they recorded in Bory Tucholskie their debut…
Both Ends
The title 'Both Ends' seems innocent enough until you read the back sleeve of this record and discover the circumstances behind this recording. The experienced free jazz trio of percussionist Paal Nilssen-Love with sax pest Dave Rempis tooting the reeds and Fred Lonberg Holm handling cello and electronics played a gig in Warsaw immediately after accidentally poisoning themselves with bad chicken and then dousing their insides with vodka in the hope of sterilising away any bacteria. I'm pretty su…
Humid Weather
Exceptional Polish imprint, Bocian Records presents a necessary vinyl edition of Kevin Drumm's super limited 2012 release for Hospital Productions, "Dedicated to my least favorite thing in the world, humidity." Over two sides breaking down to three pieces, Drumm expresses his irritation through a mixture of field recordings and microtonal drones made in july/august 2012 and transposed with intercepted voice recordings from summer 1995 at Mosquito Net Studio, Chicago, Il.
In 'Humid Weather' prope…
Jedwabnik
More music involving the seemingly always-at-work Wojciech Kucharczyk (does the man ever sleep?), this time in a quartet alongside B a ej Król, Jerzy Mazzoll and Radek Dziubek. The project's title Dwutysi czny translates as 'two thousand' - referring, according to a brief recent interview with Easterndaze, to the year when Król first came across the music of the other three players, a discovery that eventually led him to write to them to ask if they'd donate him some of their recorded sounds to …
Reverie
An amazing mix of spaced out electronics and improvisation, combined with analog/traditional instruments as usual but also taking it even further and into deeper realms! 400 only coloured vinyl, mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. "This Italian group, with the great CD 'Like little garrisons besieged' (2009) and two intriguing 7's made in collaboration with Oren Ambarchi and Steve Roden under their belt, are back with a new release on Bocian Records with even greater momentum. Their music could be l…
L'Origine / TEMA
Drawing inspiration from the "Action Direct" expanded guitar performances of Masayuki Takayanagi, Fusinato places the guitar at the centre of his work. A few crudely played strings provide the impetus for a long chain of electronics which obliterate the original signal and leaves us with a hyper-kinetic wall of full frequency spectrum noise. Like the piano in David Tudor early 1960's performances of Cage's Variations II, in Fusinato's work, the guitar is the object of a dialectic of simultaneous…
Con-gas
Of course we know Bocian since their earliest releases, which was all on 7". Now, an impressive catalogue further, they suddenly return to this format, and make two of them. On one hand Bocian is a label for strictly improvised music and on the other hand for radical experiments in electronic music. This 7" is clearly a product of the first interest. These four pieces were recorded earlier this year in Vienna and has Nilssen-Love on congas and Gustafsson on slide and brass saxophones. This is th…