★Relative Pitch Records
Remember Still
“Looking back I remember still” is a graffito I saw on an electrical box near my house and as I prepared for this recording I reflected on my time living in New York and my involvement in the improvised music scene there. My decision to include the standard tune Just Friends is part of looking forward with the hope of highlighting the connections between the practice of free improvisation and the creative tradition of “Great Black Music” sometimes called jazz.
Open Space
I recorded Open Space with in a single continuous take: my cello, an amp, and a distortion pedal. I was watching a film that was a static shot across a very large canyon, the light slowly shifting. I hope it offers the listener room to breathe and dream.
Exhaust
The music of Exhaust unfolds through real-time exploration, where quick reflexes and deep listening shape each performance. Nebbia’s powerful saxophone voice drives the ensemble with intensity, while Downes reveals a side of his playing that leans into raw immediacy and unrestrained expression. Lisle acts as both a catalyst and anchor, crafting fluid rhythmic structures that support and propel the trio’s intricate interplay. Their album moves through a vast spectrum of sound, shifting between me…
Shamanism
This is free improvised music with two saxophones and two drum sets. The theme of the music is about identity that is linked to the region and culture, especially a specific folksy and indigenous characteristic in the Korean peninsula from long ago. The whole album describes a ceremony and its atmosphere and each track follows each step that is named by an ideogram.
See You When I Get There
See You When I Get There is Amy Cimini’s first solo viola album. While playing in noise bands and experimental projects for over 25 years, she has developed a sonic palette for the amplified viola that combines overtone-rich distortion with percussive techniques nestled in reverb and delay effects meant to fill large acoustical spaces. Overall, this record embraces noise abstraction as much as a tuneful directness, that evokes Cimini’s fellow experimental string players, historical protest musi…
Hyperboreal Trio
Hyperboreal Trio’s debut album unites the distinct voices of Signe Emmeluth, Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, and Axel Filip—three seasoned improvisers bridging the musical extremes of the north and south through raw, yet meticulously crafted pieces.
Against Proper Objects
On their debut release, Foster shifts fluidly between tongue slaps, overblown tones, and powerful tenor saxophone screams, while Crawford alternates between non-idiomatic splatter, frenzied banjo maneuvers, and dense, elusive bursts of tangled noise. Meanwhile, Sullivan crafts a metallic clatter that establishes its own expansive sonic territory.
Arteria
Over the past decade, saxophonist Makoto Kawashima has consistently established himself as one of the most compelling improvisers in contemporary music. His unique approach to solo performance aligns him with the tradition of groundbreaking Japanese saxophonists like Kaoru Abe, Tamio Shiraishi, and Masayushi Urabe. Operating at the fringes of improvised music, Kawashima's artistry unveils a delicate essence, placing equal focus on silence and minute detail alongside intense expressions of tone a…
To Hit A Pressure Point
Lao Dan's innovative approach to music seamlessly intertwines elements of rock, free jazz, and noise with textures of Chinese folk music, creating a unique tapestry characterized by improvisational and aesthetic tension. His fearless transgression of genres, infusing Chinese folk-tinged free jazz with the raw energy of punk, results in a compelling and dynamic listening experience.
Pressure Sensitive
Paula Sanchez is a musician working with sound in the intersection of experimental music, improvisation and performance art. Putting the body and materials to the limit, in the destruction, composition/decomposition of a mutable sound space. In the pure presence, of an embodied sound that invents relations as it makes its way into nothingness.
This album is the result of performative experimentations with cello and cellophane, and erotic encounters of transparent asphyxiation.
Vagabondage
Vagabondage comes from my idle wandering through the city and my inner relationship with it - where the unexpected takes me – I take it - desire driven. Assuming the discourse between the ruins of my memory and my present idleness, I seek to let the events influence my choices in a way they unfold from this relation between my personal history and reflected in my music through my interaction with the city.
This album was recorded in three different places of Lisbon: SMUP, Desterro and Casa do Co…
Réimsí Géara
Listening closely to the duo of Elliott Sharp and Scott Fields one can hear a compact history of modern composition and improvisation. Although the duo has a sound all its own, under the surface you can sense traces of “New Music,” minimalism, free jazz, and blues.
Poiēsis
In a spontaneous studio session, alto saxophonist Tim Berne met fellow saxophonist Masayo Koketsu and percussionist Nava Dunkelman for the first time, setting the stage for an improvisational encounter full of contrasts and surprising cohesion. Berne’s rich, dynamic tone, provided a grounded foundation, while Koketsu's innovative use of extended techniques and breathy, ethereal sounds—challenged the space with a more experimental edge.
Dunkelman, with her textural percussion, wove between the tw…
A Willing Passenger
Saxophonist Paul Flaherty is New England's purveyor of the ecstatic jazz pulse. Through the years, Flaherty remained unshakable in the pursuit of soul healing and demon dashing through freedom music. Six pieces of alto and tenor saxophone steeped in the theme of loss and channeled through blasting improvisations that showcase his fabulous wailing and inferno of sound to stark bluesy melodies.
"January 20, 2005 was a cold night in Washington D.C. A dozen bands would perform at the Black Cat venue…
Vents
Vents is seemingly a musical wind trio - humans playing with flutes, airdrums, bubbles… Although, in each set-up, material has its own vitality.
As If Anything Could Be The Same
2014 release ** "As if anything could be the same is a duet album by the father and son team of saxophonist Jack Wright and contrabassist Ben Wright . In the world of improvised music, or non-idiomatic improvised music if one must, Jack Wright is a seminal figure. A self-taught bluegrass and folk musician as a youth, and later a history professor at Temple University, Wright's trajectory out of "normal" life coincided with his burgeoning political activism during the early 1970s. His subsequent…
FATHM
*100 copies limited edition* "Fathm isn’t so much an album as it is a question—a pause in the middle of a conversation no one’s having, but everyone’s pretending to understand. It asks nothing of you, but demands your presence, your ear, your breath. The flute, a tender and fragile instrument, becomes almost otherworldly—like a butterfly in another dimension with teeth, or a marsh wren that screams only in windings. It speaks in fragmented thoughts, tracing edges of longing, absence, and memory.…
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At the crossroad of different worlds, Hubbub comprises five musicians with activities in various fields. Together, they work on the sound matter to create a moving electro-acoustic space inhabited by layers, distensions, imbrications, pulsations, dots and lines. Thanks to the longevity of the group, Hubbub has developed its own universe, which is more than just the sum of its parts.
The Depression Tapes
Jim Hobbs and Timo Shanko were founding members of the Fully Celebrated Orchestra in 1989. This is their first duo record. Their decades of playing together can be heard in these pieces.
Nada Sagrada
Brandon Lopez leads his septet through an electrifying set recorded live at the Vision Festival. Mixed and mastered by David Torn and polished into a gem.