★ReR Megacorp
Radio Banana
Just when you think it's all over, along comes something completely unpredictable - in this case, a modest but uncompromisingly original confection that mixes latin brass arrangements (sort of), great drumming, medium wave radio and the many characters of the accordion. Simplicity, complexity, surprise, familiarity -and all without undue fuss but adding up to something exotic and new. Radio Banana is a record that wears its heart plainly on its sleeve. It doesn't play by genre rules, or fashion …
Phoenix: The Music Of Ernö Király
Kiraly's experimental music stems from two sources, the first of which is his country's traditional folk music, while the second is Edgard Varese, whose '+'"'+'Poeme Electronique'+'"'+' had an incredible impact on Kiraly when he first heard it. Thus the high pitched gypsy violin, the energetically strummed guitar and the eerie rumble of electronic music come together to create a marriage of sounds that are both ancient and modern. Kiraly (like Partch) is also an inventor of musical instruments, …
Variety Orchestra
Followers of our Quarterly will recall, about 6 years back, Woodbury's inspired arrangement of 'Shenandoah', which managed to embrace the whole of America history in under 10 minutes. Since then he has been working on completing this collection, his first full ensemble instrumental CD. The interest starts with the ensemble itself, half as expected for Latin, Jazz and Big band arrangements and half traditional American: pedal steel, banjo, accordion and fiddles. One thinks of Van Dyke Parks', and…
Tuba Intim
Contemporary music for tuba and a revelation of an under-utilised musical voice. For stretched and traditional techniques. Includes works by Lutz Glandien (Tuba and Tape), Morton Feldman, Igor Stravinsky and Michael himself. Excellent collection; and unusual.
The Wind Rises (Electropleinair Sound Diary)
First released in Hungary in 1987, this is an extraordinary work combining ensemble playing, documentary recording, studio manipulation, electronics and some stunning compositional conception. Featuring Marta Sebastjen, the Amaninda group, WYXOMPHONIC group, Mandel Quartet and a star gallery of other instrumentalists of all kinds. A unique work we worked years to acquire - a masterwork in every sense.
Zgamoniums
File under early Russian industrial rock/art; Harry Partch, incorporating primitive analogue electronics. A legend in art and industrial music circles, ZGA was formed under the old regime in Riga, Lavia, in 1984, by Nick Sudnik and Valery Dudkhin. Unable to rehearse acoustically because of the neighbours, they invented their own instruments from scrap and springs and shaped metal fitted with contact microphones; these were not just noise instruments, but ways of accessing complex pitches, strang…
Argonautika
A sound drama for tuba and electronics that constructs its own rich, twilit, rather alien, world. Only the sound of the tuba (sometimes), a few waves and a little thunder sound familiar, everything else is a mysterious presence; the electronics are not at all conventional and though much of the sound is clearly derived somehow from the tuba, it offers no foothold in a familiar place. If landscape were ever an appropriate metaphor for the product of a congeries of sounds, it would be applicable h…
Black White And Grey
A complete new work plus 'Death In The Blue Lake'. Combines playing and through-composition with manipulated and environmental sound in dramatic, narrative, psychological constructions. Quite unique. 'Death' based on a novel; texts in new works by Chris Cutler.
Brain Weather (The Story Of The Rosenbergs)
1992 release ** "The psychotic world of The Rosenberg family with violin music from the dentist, the shrink, the surgeon and other split personalities. A funny, typically nutty release by this internationally known troublemaker, instrument maker and violinist (not necessarily in that order). This is billed as `an opera perverse,' and includes Shelly Hirsch & Phil Minton."
The People's Music
With string orchestras, percussion, a motivating red guard and the severed embalmed arm of the great helmsman himself (maybe), Jon Pits the ethos of Mao's China - and in particular the mass production of the violin and it's use in life against the 'reductive cultural practice of our globalised world'. Well, that's what it says here and by golly I agree. Apart from that, this a large scale work that features fine and extensive writing for string orchestras, juxtaposed with (more or less) controll…
Silo
Sound artist Lauren Weinger documents and reworks one of her large scale installation events in giant grain silos in America. The massive sounds of gargantuan hoppers pouring grain, documentary moments of dialogue, local, archive and composed musics, mysterious traces of a country, a culture, an event where 2 Americas meet. Beautiful packing. Plus extra Video track (& software, if required, to play it). A unique document and powerful listening.
Spoors
Some changes from Volume One. These are Instrumental pieces, and the band is now a quartet. Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer, Bob Drake and Chris Cutler are joined by guitarist Mike Johnson of Thinking Plague. The music remains somewhere between intense contemporary complexity and rock - passing most points between. Tickmayer's compositional language is....unique and complex and extremely broad - no influence is seemingly outlawed, and this makes for a genuinely unclassifiable form that resembles nothing…
Vampyr and Other Stories
In the late 1980s two globetrotting Milanese composers joined forces to produce an acclaimed and prescient record made in equal parts from their own performances and ethnic field recordings, a little in the manner of Eno/Byrne's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts - but rather more evolved. This 30th anniversary release includes some early pieces, not already available on CD made this way but, mainly, features the entirety of their score for Theodore Carl Dreyer's legendary silent film, Vampyr - perfo…
Waiting For The Bomb
2024 stock. LP version. Eccentricity in music is tricky in that it's difficult to embrace it in moderation. There's risk of having it come off as either overly (and gratingly) deliberate, or teetering over the precipice into full-blown novelty. Pere Ubu co-founder Allen Ravenstine's Waiting For The Bomb is one of these rare exceptions where peculiarity, nuance and genuine warmth align in such a way that it's perched right on that edge and all the more evocative because of it. One of the album's …
Historia
This box collects and restores two legendary Música Urbana mid-70s releases, both met at the time with extravagant critical acclaim but with few sales outside of Spain, and presents for the first time a set of previously unknown studio recordings by the otherwise undocumented Trio Altisent – which features members of both other projects - alongside a substantial and comprehensive book of background materials, newly conducted interviews, rare unpublished photographs and a general overview of the …
Níjar
Less than a year after the release of the album Rade, Paolo Angeli surprises with the sounds of his orchestral guitar, putting them at the service of a classic of Spanish literature: Bodas de Sangre, by Federico García Lorca. Níjar - recorded for the most part in the same studio session as the previous album and completed in February 2023 - goes back to the roots, that is, to the chronicle event that inspired the poet to write the work and that, in fact, took place in Níjar, in Andalusia. The Sa…
Talea
Recorded in Australia, Brasil, Italy, Japan, Turkey and America on his 2015/16 world tour, these excellent recordings offer an astonishing range of styles and sounds – all somehow emanating from Angeli’s fingers and feet – and his highly modified, prepared, extended and amplified giant Sardinian guitar which – like Angeli himself – is routinely able do several very different things at once. You have to keep reminding yourself as you listen that this is just one person with one instrument, workin…
File Under Popular: Theoretical and Critical Writings on Music (Book)
This substantial book was written in 1984/85, soon after the band broke up and while memories were still fresh. It was written very much from the perspective of the time – that’s more important than it may sound in such a project: hindsight has its own value, but it loses the essence of the moment, the context, the freshness; the feel of unfamiliarity. Originally written as a master’s degree thesis, it was updated and published in book form in 2000 by the Norwegian University of Science and Tech…
Henry Cow : an Analysis of Avant Garde Rock (Book)
Theoretical and critical writings on Music. 200pp. Illustrated with woodcuts and Photographs. Chapters on Sun Ra, The Residents, Phil Ochs and Elvis Presley, What Is Popular Music?, Progressive Music in the UK, Necessity and Choice in Musical Forms, Henry Cow, Rock in Opposition etc.L
Chris Cutler in a Box
These 10 CDs (and DVD) collect together solo work, compositions and collaborations made between 1972 and 2022 by percussionist and lyricist Chris Cutler and include as well as three previously released solo CDs ('solo', 'twice around the earth' and 'there and back again'), more than five hours of unreleased materials, as well as a double CD collection of tracks culled from official recordings featuring Henry Cow, Art Bears, Cassiber, News From Babel, Aqsak Mabou, Duck and Cover, Peter Blegvad, R…