★ReR Megacorp

Desperate Straights was the first result of the historical meeting between Slapp Happy, the German/English Avant-Pop band and the apparently incompatible Henry Cow. Recorded at Virgin Record's Manor Studios in 1974 and properly re-mastered by Bob Drake, Desperate Straights stands as a real piece of Art from another time. A full set of great songs, including gems like "Bad Alchemy" and "Apes in Capes", arranged and performed by an amazing collective featuring Dagmar Krause's unique voice, Peter B…

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…

* Remastered repress. Comes with printed inner sleeve. * Leg End is the debut of Henry Cow, recorded at Virgin's Manor studios in May and June 1973 and released that summer. The band had formed five years earlier around two Cambridge students, Fred Frith and Tim Hodgkinson, and had spent the intervening time building a reputation in London's experimental margins, running their own concert series under names like Cabaret Voltaire and Explorers' Club, sharing stages with Lol Coxhill and Derek Bail…

'A Face We All Know' breaks new ground altogether. This is a single work with texts by Chris Cutler, Rainald Geotz and Thomas Pynchon and documents the last days of a political nightmare. Start here with Cassiber.

A reissue of the brilliant second album by Art Bears, a band/project featuring Fred Frith, Chris Cutler and Dagmar Krause, formed in 1978 after disputes over the musical direction within Henry Cow. 'Winter Songs', originally released in 1979, placed Art Bears in the forefront of the Rock In Opposition Movement. Art Bears' intense and brutal avant-garde approach on the album comes across as primordial expression, which is nailed down by Krause's violently charismatic voice. As a piece of music re…

Picchio dal Pozzo is regarded as one of the most original, impressive and highly respected of all the experimental groups to have come out of Italy in the 1970s. They share their original label with Henry Cow's Concerts, and were early invitees to the canonical Recommended Sampler. Aldo De Scalzi, Andrea Beccari, Giorgio Karaghiosoff and Paulo Griguolo all met at infant school and began playing Teleman, Corelli, Bach and Mozart together in their school orchestra. In 1969, Aldo's brother, one of …

In this episode, a number of short recordings of household objects and curious instruments become the core thematic material for a range of exquisitely conceived and realised pieces in which the recordings are shaped, stretched, tuned, combined and otherwise manipulated before being folded into a variety of musical structures with additional elements or parts added. Much use is made of rhythms derived from gravity – that is, dropping and bouncing - embedded into microtonal, poly-rhythmic and dee…

Limited numbers, now available as a single cd, shrinkwrapped. Until recently the only official live This Heat release has been a long-deleted cassette version of a concert from Krefeld, Germany, from 1980. This CD corrects that vacuum by officially releasing private recordings from the band's live repertoire, circa 1980-1981, taken from concerts in Tilburg, Nijmegan, Arhus, Appledoorn, Vienna and Rheims. The trio rip through some highly-charged versions of classic pieces from both Blue & …

Limited copies, shrinkwrapped. Repeat is This Heat's fourth album proper, posthumously released in 1993. It harbours the most extreme musical side of This Heat's experimental tendencies on disk, and is assuredly the band's most radical offering. The title track is an oxymoron: An extended/edited version of the piece "24 Track Loop", which had been previously issued on the Recommended Records' double-disk sampler in 1981, heard here sans the harmonizer effect. The original tracks were produ…

Now available as a single CD, shrinkwrapped. Limited quantity. This Heat's earliest public recordings came from two sessions for John Peel's BBC radio show, in April and October of 1977. Peel was one of their greatest enthusiasts at the time, hearing excellence in the band's mixed repertoire of post-krautrock songs and uniquely approached improvisation. Of special merit here is the band's maverick use of real-time tape loops to augment their basic three-piece sound, as well as their choice…

CD edition. Another essential reissue, This Heat’s classic Deceit completes an official trilogy of reissues from their seminal and hugely influential run of late ‘70s/early ‘80s recordings which set the template for so, so much avant-rock, noise and experimental music ever since. With their debut album and follow-up maxi single Health and Efficiency, This Heat sowed the seeds of post-punk, avant rock, noise rock and post-rock, placing the trio -- Charles Bullen, Charles Hayward and Gareth …

The EP restored, with both tracks. Remastered. Now available alone. Long awaited reissue of Health and Efficiency (1980) -  the loosely driven, uplifting and abstract follow-up to This Heat’s seminal debut album, and a total classic in its own right. Where their self-titled first album took two years to make, Health and Efficiency was recorded in a fraction of that time, using a mobile 16-track recording studio spied in the backpage ads of Melody Maker to lay down an eight minute improvisation t…

8CD Box. A career-spanning box set dedicated to the Australian music icon..." One of the greatest bands in the world, said the New York Times; A post-jazz, post-rock, post-everything sonic experience that has few parallels or rivals, according to The Guardian; Fifty years after Kind of Blue, the new music I would find it hardest to do without is that produced by The Necks, circumlocutes Richard Williams. No one has so far even attempted to copy them since, what they do is so unique, anyone ventu…

After many years percolating, this third release by Ossatura documents a quite dramatic aesthetic shift – including more acoustic instruments alongside the electronic; more settled, cyclic rhythms; more harmonic concord - even a song. On occasion reminiscent of the Necks in abstract mood, these pieces offer pools of complex, grounded, shifting textures, interpenetrated by atmospheric field recordings. Immersive. Ossatura are an Italian trio (Elio Martusciello on guitar and sampler, Fabrizio Spe…

14 pieces originally written for dance and other practical situations, here reassigned and reconstructed for choreographer Amanda Miller and the Nederland Dans Theater. These are loop-based, textural, mood pieces, and invocations of spaces and landscapes, with some fine steel guitar playing. Mostly this is Fred multi-instrumenting, with pianist Daan Vanderwalle, percussionist Willie Wynant, the Arte Sax quartet and Lotte Anker, the Arditti Quartet, Kiku Day, occasional shakuhachi, and vio…

2015 Restock. There are bands whose finest work allows its roots full exposure while burying them. Henry Cow was one of these, emerging at a time of widespread upheaval and making bold new statements and fashioning order of the resultant chaos. The label has a history of producing similarly fine compendiums, most notably from groups such as Faust, Art Bears and This Heat, but the Cow set is a more ambitious project, befitting the band’s complex style and legacy. With roots deep in the mult…

Volume 2 of the definitive collection of unreleased recordings, unrecorded compositions, one-off events, radio and concert recordings. These four CDs and one DVD cover the period from 1976 to 1978 and include the legendary Stockholm and Bremen radio concerts, many otherwise unrecorded late compositions, and the only known video ever made of the band (a complete 75 minute concert from 1976). With a substantial 60-page book of information, unpublished photographs, documents, recollections and subs…

Finally arrived back, this is the 40th Anniversary Box Set, Volume 3featuring The complete re-mastered Henry Cow studio recordings in the third matching box: Legend, Unrest, Desperate Straights, In Praise of Learning and Western Culture. Formed in 1968 and disbanded in 1978, HENRY COW's influences included rock, blues, classical, opera, jazz and of course, the avant-garde. Their compositions are complex, challenging and extremely original, but they are also dedicated improvisors who would som…

The classic restored. No extra tracks, just this legendary release as it was originally conceived. Kew Rhone was made soon after Peter and John left Henry Cow, at Carla Bley and Mike Mantler’s Grog Kill studio in New York (they both appear on the CD). Fellow conspirators included singer Lisa Herman and drummer Andrew Cyrille. It’s one of those records which sums up a moment; a creative moment in which ideas have come into clear focus, and just need to be got down; an historical moment at which a…

Allen Ravenstine, erstwhile eminence grise of classic-era Pere Ubu, was one of the best-integrated and least predictable pioneers of analogue synthesis in rock until, in the late 1980’s, he quit both the public and the musical arena to pursue entirely different interests. But he never lost his interest in, or his feel for, analogue electronics. A few years ago, with Pere Ubu’s current synthesist, Robert Wheeler, he recorded ‘Farm Report and City Desk - in the context of a documentary about modul…

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…

An amazing record. It’s beautifully recorded and almost impossible to believe that such a layered and polyphonic music, with chords, percussion, lead lines, bass lines, harmonies, string sections and sometimes voice could all be produced by one person in real time, without overdubs or loops. But it is. The instrument, a specially designed and augmented Sardinian guitar (almost the size of a cello) is equipped with motors, pedals, individual string mic’ing, and extra appendages; and of course the…

Lindsay Cooper was a rare and extraordinary woman; at home in rock bands (Henry Cow, National Health), Jazz ensembles (Mike Westbrook Orchestra, Maarten Altena Octet) Concert Halls (Concerto for Sopranino Saxophone and Orchestra, Songs for bassoon and Orchestra); she also founded the Feminist Improvising Group, scored feature films and wrote for television, dance, radio, theatre, contemporary ensembles and orchestras - as well as being highly respected as a virtuoso performer on several instrume…

Since the late 1970s Biota has ploughed its own furrow, producing a body of work that resembles nothing anyone else has done or is yet doing. Their compositions evolve in long, constantly shifting timbral blocks filled with fragments and echoes of quasi-familiar musical languages and sounds – or none - and use instrumental resources that span half a millennium and two thirds of the planet to create unique combinations of timbral colour in constant motion; this is a music in which everything is i…

This CD of songs, grittily arranged and produced is noticeably more straight-ahead than ReR’s usual releases though it sits comfortably within the broad range of Steve’s tirelessly experimental output. This is a project with a long history: Steve and his main collaborator Todd Dadaleares have been writing, recording and performing together for longer than MeRCy’s 20+ year existence and David Fields (drums) and Tim Inman (keyboards) are also long servers. New, for this phase of recordings …

Milestone reissue! In 1982 Cassiber (phonetically: ‘a message smuggled out of prison’) crashed like a locomotive into the Deutsche Neue Welle. Founded by Heiner Goebbels, Alfred Harth, Christoph Anders and Chris Cutler, Cassiber managed to fuse materials and attitudes drawn from experimental rock, fringe jazz, punk, pop, plunderphonics, improvisation, close structure and musique concrete with an energetic and complex form of studio (and then concert) composition that was unique in its comb…

This companion to our Messiaen et Autours de Messiaen collects together another classic group of works for Onde Martenot and piano, this time by Darius Milhaud, Andre Jolivet, Arvo Part, Kazuo Fukushima and Francisco Semprun, collected together here for the first time: an essential chapter in the history of a remarkable instrument. The performances are immaculate and the sound transparent. A pleasure from beginning to end. Historic.

Site recordings from Berlin by audio explorer Peter Cusack, documenting evocative locations throughout the city based on an inquiry into Berlin resident's favorite sounds, with a booklet detailing the 31 recordings and the scope of the project. A beautifully realised sound homage to the city of Berlin, presenting its signature sounds, exquisitely recorded, in a carefully documented and evocatively designed package. There’s not a lot more to say; This does exactly what it says on the cover.

A 200 page book of photographs, texts and documents, including three CDs, drawn from the soundworks but recomposed as three related but internally coherent compositions. A contemporary of Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy, Menter is one of a handful of sound artists with strong links to the land art movement. Now best known for installations that explore the untransformed sounds of natural materials, wood, slate, water, ceramics, stone and air, he also collaborates regularly on cross-platform pr…

"Following on from their two track LP release, Mindset (2011), Open sees legendary artists-in-resonance The Necks return to the territory they are best known for, a single piece running for over an hour. The piece emanates a calm, immersive stillness throughout. Already The Wire has said that Open "(displays The Necks') astute handling of pacing and momentum, finely honed collective sense of timing, (and) their shared ability to balance at length a group equilibrium". Here the band returns…

Deluxe LP Gatefold. Edition of 250 copies ** Welcome to Paolo Angeli's sixth release for ReR Megacorp (2013) now in Vinyl deluxe edition! It's an extraordinary collection of pieces that explore the full range of his highly modified, extended and prepared Sardinian guitar. And although it's just him and electricity, it seldom sounds like fewer than three people playing. There are twelve fine compositions, each as crafted as a short novel, and beautifully recorded. Paolo's is a music that pretty m…

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…

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

Two CDs and a 90 page hardback book with photos, info and interviews from audio documenter and experimenter Peter Cusak, recording in Chernobyl, The Caspian Oilfields, and various dangerous locations in the UK. The Chernobyl disaster of 26th April 1986, was the realization of all our fears of the nuclear industry, leading many countries to suspend their nuclear power programmes. Two and a half decades later, nuclear power is again reasserting itself, presented by governments and the industry as …

Those looking for a comprehensive overview of Sun Ra’s celestial magic could do far worse than acquire a copy of ‘Artyard in a Box’, a collection of nine classic long players from the Sun Ra archive set across seven CDs. ‘Disco 3000’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘On Jupiter’, ‘Beyond the Purple Star Zone’, ‘Oblique Parallax’, ‘Horizon’, ‘Nidhamu’, ‘Dark Myth Equation Visitation’ and ‘The Antique Blacks’ all appear, spanning the more soulful and spiritual manifestations of his work such as on ‘The Antique…

As this four-disc retrospective shows, Australian violinist Jon Rose has done more than any musician to revolutionise the approach to his instrument, with technical developments and radical performance strategies. Jon Rose is one of the most productive, original and focused people I know; he's also an extraordinary musician and an inspired composer. To mark his 60th anniversary we are releasing this three CD box of previously unreleased works ranging from radio documentary and radio fiction to v…

2011 limited audiophile re-issue in an edition of 1000 copies on 180g virgin vinyl on ReR Megacorp of the third album, in collaboration with Slapp Happy, by the quintesential British art-rock/RIO band, originally released in 1975. NWW list.

Paolo Angeli and ex-After Dinner/Volapuk violinist/singer Takumi Fukushima present an integrated, complex and largely composed programme of deft, focused pieces that make the most of their not inconsiderable individual talents and instruments; mostly sounding like a much larger ensemble. The sonorities of Paolo’s extended, customised, prepared giant Sardinian guitar doing extraordinary, and sometimes chameleonic, work as bass, chord accompaniment, melody instrument, viola/cello, and even percuss…

CD edition: now in their twenty-fourth year, the Necks' new release, Mindset, their sixteenth album, and first LP - features two starkly contrasting tracks: the pulsating, raw, 'Rum Jungle' and the slower building, rather hypnotic 'Daylights.' Polyrhythms imbue both pieces with powerful forward motion, embroiled with which ethereal piano patterns interweave with bass, drums, electronics, churning Hammonds and noise-guitars. Drummer and percussionist Tony Buck writes: Mindset shares some …

The third classic Art Bears record, and the most austere. Remastered and repackaged. If you thought Henry Cow was a pretty political band to start with, you may be even more taken aback by the Art Bears, which was put together following Henry Cow's demise by former Cows Chris Cutler (percussion), Fred Frith (guitar, violin), and Dagmar Krause (voice). On The World as it is Today and its predecessor, Winter Songs, the Art Bears move away from the long-form art rock of Henry Cow and get much, much…