★Confront Recordings
A More Attractive Way
** Edition of 500 + 20 pages booklet ** A More Attractive Way is a comprehensive study of live performances made by IST between 1996 and 2000. This set begins at the very outset of the group's career and features their debut concert at Club Orange in London and charts its way through further gigs in London, Billericay, Norwich and Cambridge. “A completely different intensity, but an intensity nonetheless,” Jo Fell reflects in notes accompanying A More Attractive Way. Her husband Simon, to whose …
Spinneret
Mandhira de Saram and Benoît Delbecq met in 2016 in Paris and soon discovered that they loved playing together. They recorded Spinneret a year later, over a day of quiet and meditative composing, at curious distance from the animated playing they are both usually drawn to in their own projects. With a natural flair for exploring the possibilities of their instruments, they weave together a delicate tapestry of sound and texture, which hangs as though stretched and suspended in the air. Spinneret…
Refraction
I first met Mark sometime in the early 90’s when we were both working in Chelmsford. He was running Soundworld Records above the musical instrument shop of the same name, I was over the other side of town in an insurance brokers. I’d played quite a bit of free improvisation at that point, mostly at the old LMC in a quartet called Make Shift together with Peter Urpeth, Stuart Wilding and long-time colleague and playing partner Geoff Collins. But had been away from it for a few years and wa…
Goethe
"Across a dozen years, the duo of Jerman and Barnes has offered powerful, minimal music rooted in a shared dedication to the creative act of listening. Jerman is a veteran of the creative music scenes in Denver and Seattle, and in more recent years has been thoroughly investigating the sonic possibilities of the desert Southwest where he lives and works. Tim Barnes's resume as a percussionist, engineer, and curator is studded with all-star collaborators including Tony Conrad, Sonic Youth, Ken Va…
Bagpipes and blackberries
Adam Bohman : unamplified objects. Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg : voice.Recorded at Oxo Studio by Adrian Northover on 18th July 2014. Edited and mastered by Adrian Northover. A senses stimulating meeting, recorded in central London's former slaughter house, Oxo Tower. Piching Adam Bohman's scraped and scrunched clutter with the hum and bubble of Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg's voice. Unimagined pitches and timbres collide and oscillate, drawing the listener into an ever deepening, real-time sound scu…
Social Insects II
Social Insects are the bass clarinet player Hans Koch and the electronic musician Gaudenz Badrutt. They have collaborated on various musical projects for years and in 2011 founded the duo. Hans Koch is mainly known as a member of the Hardcore Chambermusic Trio Koch-Schütz-Studer, but also as a soloist as well as for his collaborations with Phil Minton, Fred Frith, Paul Lovens etc. As a bass clarinet player he has developed a very personal style. The electronic musician Gaudenz Badrutt is m…
Sunday afternoon (live at the Hundred Years Galley)
Live recording of Steve Noble, percussion with Daniel Thompson, acoustic guitar. Recorded in London in 2014. Repetitive accidents share space with manicured gestures and punctuation shocks to produce a pure abstract matter from the instrumental virtuosity.
Prepresence
Recorded live in concert at iDEALFEST, Fylkingen, Stockholm on February 28th 2011. Heavy, lo-fi, monster drone set, featuring two of Sweden's most engaging performers. Sounds generated from the combination of electric hair clippers and analogue synthesiser are amplified, smashed and ground to a pulp, reformed and catapulted into the stars.
Derby 11.05.2002 / Liverpool 10.05.2002
A blast from the past! Or, rather, a whisper from those long ago days when reductionism (that hated term) held reign and only the merest sounds were often discerned during the course of a concert. A welcome return, in this case.Previously available in exceedingly minimal quantity (like 50), Confront has generously allowed these two sets to once again see the light of day. Davis was often heard on trumpet and Wastell on cello or percussion, but here it seems (no instrumentation is listed) that bo…
Live at Cafe Oto
a rich, layered mesh of droning sound leaning towards the lower end of the scale that hangs together in a somewhat fragile manner. In many ways there can be detected some of the dynamics and stimuli present in modern noise music in what Oceans of Silver and Blood are doing. Indeed Nordwall has a partial background in this area, and both musicians took part in a very noisy conclusion to the Eight Hour Drone People concert I saw at Oto last winter, alongside the likes of Lasse Marhaug, thirty minu…