★ReR Megacorp
Explosion Of A Memory (A Literary Canvas For Orchestra)
An extended iterative, cycling, dissipating cloud of fragments, constantly shifting focus, which throws up detail, evolves, returns, settles and re-dissolves; it's a four-dimensional explosion in which stretches of baroque, folk themes and Byzantine liturgy exist contemporaneously alongside modern and (arguably) post-modern materials and techniques, all shaken loose out of the same experiential block, much as strata emerge as tectonic plates fold one time over another. Long, beautiful, to…
Solitary Walker
Macedonian composer (tutors: Anatol Vieru, Tomislav Zografski, Sir Harrison Birtwistle and the Gyorgiâs Ligeti and Kurtag) with a unique voice, moving easily here between tape manipulation, ensemble and choral composition both contemporary and soaked in national folk influences to form a complex minimal, tangled music that answers to no genre but short-circuits straight to the 21st century ear combining the best qualities of melodic and developmental writing with ear-centred composition…
Gaps, Absences
A beautifully recorded and produced cycle of pieces that combine complexity and precision with rich and unfamiliar timbres. The ensemble pieces amplify and enrich a core piano with various combinations of harmonium, double bass, violin, percussion, Hungarian zither, citara bassa, bowed cymbals, alto clarinet, melodica, sampler and field recordings, all sparsely but powerfully deployed. This is a deep and powerful music with both crystalline clarity and cinematic low frequency power. And no fat o…
Cold Peace Counterpoints
A suite of fiendishly complex compositions for mixed real and virtual resources. Bob Drake, Djorge Delibasic, Pegja Milosavljevic and Chris Cutler make appearances - playing electric guitar, bass, drums and virtuoso violin between them, but mainly it is Stevan who plays all kinds of keyboards, strings, double bass, zither, samples and software. Three thoroughly through-composed and finely articulated pieces make up this very concentrated suite: Concerto Grosso (for keyboards, string instr…
Repetitive selective removal of one protecting group
After a long absence Stevan roars back with this dense and complex work - a rare example of a truly uncategoriseable music: neither electronic nor acoustic but somewhere in between - or outside. Taken often at impossible Nancarrow/late Zappa/Ligeti tempi, a cascade of material constantly forms and reforms into different kinds of order: fragments of New Complexity performed with a kind of rock, dance, jazz undercurrent; shards of popular musics dressed in contemporary classical and electro…
Coal Tattoo
Contemporaries of Pere Ubu and best known for their work with the Numbers Band, Bob and Jack Kidney were also essential to David Thomas’ Mirror Man project. These are stripped down, guitar based songs/stories with deep roots - the deep, dark, bluesy kind of roots. Robert has a voice and a gravitas that commands immediate respect.
From Ritual Nova I & II
Boris produced these careful and extended works over 14 years. RN 1, was only released in Jugoslavia (as was) and has long been only a collectors item. RN II was released on our POINTS EAST label. Now 70 minutes from both LP's have been assembled and remastered on one CD. This is unique and wonderful music; timely when so much insanity and horror stains the lands of its origins.
Times of Day
What Boris does is without parallel or precedent, and he’s been doing it for over 40 years, perfecting a language that is uniquely his own: not chamber music, not world music, not jazz – but demanding performance skills vital to all three. What do you call a music that is fully scored, played only by acoustic instruments and demands not only extremely high technical standards from its performers but - if they are to imbue what is written with its proper ritual body - shared histories and …
Hello Debris
After a break of almost 15 years Susanne Lewis and Bob Drake have reconvened their classic partnership. In the meantime rock and post rock has mainly moved away from the song and its classic shapes, leaving commercial pop to straighten them out and endlessly repeat the same tropes and tricks. Hail is rare amongst bands in its adherence to the notion that what makes a song interesting is the application of imagination and skill to its arrangement, performance and recording. The plan is not…
Kirk
Second Hail CD, with guest appearances from Chris Cutler, David Kerman and Bill Gilonis.
Happiness Proof
Haco and many guests (including Otomo Yoshihide, Peter Hollinger, Uchihashi Kasuhisa, Pierre Bastien and Ichiraku Yoshimitsu with a new collection of songs, in inimitable Haco style. Nothing to explain.
Consume red
First Volume of a three CD project. Ground Zero makes a monster structure that starts screaming and gets more and more intense and massive until you don't imagine there is anywhere else to go. Then it gets bigger. A classic.
Revolutionary Peking Opera
Otomo Yoshihide and frightening band deconstruct and rebuild the already sampled and reconstructed 'Peking Opera' of Heiner Goebbels and Alfred Harth. In conception, execution and in plain terms of aural excitement and intelligence, this is hard to beat. Stunning recording - with a drum sound to gasp at...
Plays Standards
Just when you thought it would be safe... Ground Zero are back with a CD of extraordinary covers, some are massive, others strange, all add something to their originals and were selected because of their importance to founder Otomo Yoshihide's personal musical biography - all explained in his excellent accompanying notes. Just the version of Shed a Little Tear is worth the whole CD.
Hommage/Vier Fauste fur Hanns Eisler + Vom Sprengen des Gartens
This long and extraordinarily fruitful partnership started here - continuing though the Sogennantes Linksradikales Blasorchester - where they picked up Christoph Anders with whom they went on to co-found Cassiber with your humble reviewer. These are jazz inflected, punk inflected but mainly spirited and imaginative renderings of Eisler material, with more pieces by the duo who, between them, cover a lot of instruments and combinations of instruments and - ah youth - are never less than hu…
Lost in Rooms
Although following The 5th Elephant in its musical organisation - around grids of pulses and highly crafted, rich sonorities - this work is more evolved, more focussed and more internally economic. Following a narrative thread this time, the whole is bound into a complex and ramifying exposition of repetition, transformation and evolution, where a return is no return and where perceiver and perceived are lost to time. Tightly bounded by speech-derived (but massively re-formed) sonic mate…
The 5th Elephant
Between electroacoustic procedural precision and more recent pulse driven electronica slips this placeless new work from composer Lutz Glandien, 2 years in the making, employing material collectively generated by Lutz himself, Chris Cutler and Tuba virtuoso Michael Vogt - heavily reorganised, processed, stretched and re-assembled to make extraordinary pieces that demand - and reward - concentrated listening.
Speak Puppet
Prepared guitars and dobro, for the most part composed and all very much in Janet's own unique style - somewhere between classical, experimental and folk-picking with attitude. Which doesn’t tell you much about how listenable and strange these pieces are, but then there's no one to refer to or to compare with since Janet is really in a class of one. On some tracks she is joined, variously, by Thinking Plague guitarist Mike Johnson, Margot Krimmel (prepared harp), Mark Weber (voice) and Mi…