★Ni-Vu-Ni-Connu
Embrace 4: Orakelstücke / Aquin
On Embrace 4: Orakelstücke/Aquin, Polwechsel open their rigorously quiet universe to two singular composers, Peter Ablinger and Klaus Lang, yielding a diptych where struck objects, voices and long, glowing tones summon an almost liturgical sense of mystery from everyday sound.
Embrace 3: Magnetron / Quarz / Obsidian
On Embrace 3: Magnetron/Quarz/Obsidian, Polwechsel with Andrea Neumann turn acousmatic tape, simulated multitracks and graphic notation into an intricate laboratory of cause and effect, where elevator doors, room ghosts and painstakingly negotiated scores yield two of their most conceptually precise and sonically uncanny works.
Embrace 2: Chains and Grain
On Embrace 2: Chains and Grain, Polwechsel distil their chamber‑improv logic into a score grown from their own playing: a tense, breathing matrix of repeated figures, frayed textures and in‑the‑moment reactions that is rebuilt afresh every time it’s performed.
Embrace 1: Jupiter Storm / Partial Intersect
On Embrace 1: Jupiter Storm/Partial Intersect, Polwechsel with Magda Mayas and John Butcher fold fixed media, stopwatch scores and free low‑string improvisation into a dense, shifting topology of resonance and friction, pushing their chamber‑reductionist language into newly electronic and spatialised terrain.
Die Dritte Ebene
On Die Dritte Ebene, Emilio Gordoa and Sven‑Åke Johansson let vibraphone, drums and accordion run in seemingly parallel lines until a mysterious “third layer” appears - a ghost‑music of overtones, pulse and texture that neither player could summon alone.
Oui, Mais 68 ! Maybe 68 ?
Tip! Edition of 300 copies. François Tusques needs no introduction to serious listeners of European free jazz. His 1965 Free Jazz album - recorded with Bernard Vitet, Michel Portal, Beb Guérin, and François Jeanneau - helped establish Paris as a vital center for the transatlantic avant-garde, laying groundwork for the city's role as spiritual home to visiting American firebrands like Don Cherry, Sunny Murray, and Clifford Thornton. His subsequent work with Barney Wilen (Le Nouveau Jazz, 1967), h…
Aerodynamics
Tip! Welcome to the 20th Century: "My point of departure for the octet was to treat the ensemble as a flock of clarinets and develop swarm-like scenarios. At the same time, I thought of the 8 players as a kind of acoustic 8-channel-installation with the musicians surrounding the audience. This could be seen as an expansion of the stereo analogy we sometimes work with in The International Nothing. While The Nothin’ is all about developing a very personal language of new sounds with self-invented …
Tea Time
"If you think that the constellation of Nicholas Bussmann, Sven-Åke Johansson and Yan Jun is a sort of dream lineup, you are not far off the mark. The joint improvisations that you hear on tea time capture a sound that once came to Bussmann in a dream and that he made a reality with the help of his fellow musicians. The trio recorded the five pieces across two days at Johansson’s SÅJ studio with engineer Andrew Levine, working with Bussmann’s curious piano robot while Johansson was on percussion…
Meshes Of The Evening
"The beauty and power of Meshes of the Evening doesn’t come from isolated passages or specific exchanges, no matter how exciting and satisfying they may be. What has riveted me each time I’ve listened to the music is how Davies and Beins occupy a single space together, totally aligned and in a zone that makes time irrelevant. It would be wrong to say they’re in a shared trance because music that’s so detailed and subject to constant transformation requires a heightened awareness. Yet Davies and …
Eight Duos
Tip! *300 copies limited edition* Collaboration has always been at the core of Beins’s artistic practice. Reducing the line-up for the project at Morphine Raum to the duo format had pragmatic as well as creative reasons, allowing Beins more flexibility. ‘On a conceptual level, the idea was that I would play with different instruments or with a different set-up each time in order to present the breadth of my current work’, he explains. This notion also informed the selection of his partners, who …
Unlockings
John Butcher is interested in particular people and their personalities. He prefers not to work in a generic situation, where there's an agreement in advance to play a certain kind of thing, and the music cannot swerve in a sudden fresh direction.
As he told me a few years back: "What got me so interested in the type of improvising I ended up really spending time on was, at least at a personal level, there was a feeling you could start from scratch. Now you might well be mistaken, and rediscover…
Lower Marsh
The record can be considered a sort of farewell note to one of London’s most crucial venues for improvised music and sound art after its unexpected closure in late 2023 due to gentrification. John Butcher had previously collaborated with these three musicians in different contexts, but Unlockings documents a first-of-its-kind quartet line-up.
"I wanted a new combination, but made of players I’d worked with over the years" says Butcher. "Choosing is probably 75 % about the player and 25 % about t…
Graveyard Processions
Graveyard Processions is the first joint recording by Kai Fagaschinski and Yan Jun. The Berlin-based clarinettist and the sound artist and vocalist from Beijing blur the lines between improvisation on the one hand and record production as well as composition-after-the-fact on the other. The four pieces on »Graveyard Processions« work primarily with Jun’s voice and Fagaschinski’s playing and also add a plethora of other sounds to dizzying effect. This is the sound of two prolific artists—the form…
Cinnte le Dia
It all started with a crashed computer and it certainly didn’t end there. »Cinnte le Dia« is the third collaborative album by Hanno Leichtmann and Valerio Tricoli, their first entry into Ni Vu Ni Connu’s duo series that focuses on Berlin’s Echtzeitmusik scene and beyond. Having already released two joint records on the now-defunct Entr'acte label, the two musicians wanted to document a 2018 concert in Berlin, but technology failed them. Undeterred, the sound artist and percussionist and the elec…
Embrace
Mega tip! *300 copies limited edition* ‘This celebration of the group’s 30th anniversary is composed entirely of recent works, but each will move around in time as well as in form, in ways that belong to traditions of both improvised and composed music, but also in ways that belong distinctively to this group. It demonstrates breadth and depth that suggest great temporal reach, embracing musical values that touch the art’s ritual origins and offering a sense of ongoing relevance and renewal. Tru…
Bengt "Frippe" Nordström
Second edition. 300 copies, all parts identical to the first edition For the past decade, Mats Gustafsson has fastidiously produced and compiled the most thorough and comprehensive collection of archival solo recordings of the late legendary Swedish saxophonist and eccentric archivist of free music activity in Sweden, Bengt “Frippe” Nordström (1936–2000). Bringing together rare and unreleased recordings taken from an extensive collection of home-recorded solo sax improvisations, it documents his…
Monte Carlo Fallacy
In the lockdown of early 2020, Berlin fell silent. As reflects Nicholas Bussmann, “it felt like the early 90s in East Berlin”, the place where he grew up and experienced social change and uncertainty, and presumably a lot of empty, silent space. Here, on this duo with his long-term accomplice Werner Dafeldecker, we hear the sound of two instrumental practitioners as they explore the nature of their respective instruments with a paced and thoughtful guidance, with little intervention or overt de…
Fläche & Figur (14 Duos Für Akkordeon Und Drumsets)
Rüdiger Carl and Sven-Åke Johansson are two fellow travelers on the path of experimental music who have worked together since the late 1960s in many formations, most notably as the wild-card Fluxus pranksters on Peter Brötzmann’s legendary 1969 recording Machine Gun, and on many more recordings and stagings of sonic interventions over the decades. In the words of Peter Margasak writing in the Chicago Reader in 2012: “Where to begin with percussionist and polymath Sven-Åke Johansson: Is he a beb…
Stumps
* 75 copies limited edition * In times of vinyl shortage and production backlog, resourcefulness is key. In keeping with his well-established practice of replacing original materials with surrogates to generate new sonic experiences, Sven-Åke Johansson has devised a digital reinterpretation of the historic flexidisc in the shape of a 10inch rubber disc with engraved QR codes that let buyers access the music online.
About the music: "The six compositions titled ‘stumps’ are based on a potential f…