★ReR Megacorp
Automat Highlife
Canada's most extreme noise-music exponents caught here in a project built around short, diverse sound experiments..31 bites - which you are encouraged to programme for random order select (shuffle).
Dead Tongues
Atmospheric, evolving, intricate and layered; a suite of fine compositions and carefully crafted sounds. Consistent creation of another place, another time.
Where is the Green Parrot?
Welcome release from this subtle but complex composer-performer-instrument designer. More than musical, these are dramatic constructions with environmental sound, birdsong, conversation, narrative... the guitar shop section of "two small boys go shopping" is a masterpiece.. A record hard to describe since it deftly side-steps all the usual categories.
Three Pieces Suite
Studio recordings seven years in the honing. Plus music for a film by Jacques Leduc, with guest Tom Cora.Plus part of a live performance at Sound Symposium, Newfoundland.
Shark!
From the much lauded Queen Elizabeth Hall concert and club Link in Bologna, two very different knife-edge tours through sound and structure landscapes; from rollercoaster to glider. 'Indescribeable but wonderful. Quite superb. I would have been happy listening for ten times as long' Gibralter.
There and Back Again
A companion to 'Twice around the Earth, 'There and Back Again' uses 44 environmental recordings to explore - amongst other things - the way memory works, and how the experience of passing time is constructed. Mainly it's just meant to be good to listen to: surprising, serendipitous, mundane - but alien, the commonplace transfigured - an agglomeration of inadvertent sounds made haphazardly by the world and some of its inhabitants that were never meant to survive, and certainly not to be l…
Live in Moscow, Prague & Washington
72 minutes consisting of the whole of a 1978 Prague concert, a cause celebre at the time, (audibly) dividing the 3500 public and provoking controversy for some years after; a snippet from Washington, and the whole of a Moscow concert 10 years later (May '89).This is improvised music that refuses to fit into the usual categories of improvisation, as well as being technically and formally provocative.
Live in Trondheim, Berlin & Limoges
Digital recordings from the Nordlydd Contemporary Music Festival and Berlin's Tacheles from 1991. Plus the historic prescient noise-music 1978 analogue recording from Limoges as a bonus. All singing, all dancing, all hell let loose. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee...
Two Gentlemen in Verona
An almost complete concert from Verona, 1999, slightly edited for listening logic with an impeccably clear and transparent sound. Very different from CCFFs 1 and 2, this documents a more upfront, intense performance, full of history, rock, post rock, tunes, rhythms, even melodies - all transformed into a contemporary and compressed musical language. With a surprising encore!
Rags/The Golddiggers
Consists of the whole of the LP previously issued as Re/arc and most of "The Golddiggers". Featuring Lindsay Cooper, Sally Potter, Phil Minton, Georgie Born, Fred Frith, Chris Cutler, Marilyn Mazur, Kate Westbrook, Collette Lafont, Eleanor Sloan, Lol Coxhill and Dave Holland. Explores the song form as so many of the early post Henry Cow records by ex alumni did. With a full book of texts and pictures (74+ minutes).
CMCD (Six Classic Concrete, Electroacoustic And Electronic Works 1970-1990)
This essential piece of history at last reissued, redesigned and repackaged. Keystone works from the various streams of musique concrete, electronic music, soundscape, electroacoustics and plunderphonics - including two masterworks from Eastern Europe, a territory traditionally overlooked in collections of this medium. It comprises: John Oswald's 'Parade', a complex work drawn and extended from Satie's celebrated ballet composition of 1917; Georg Katzer's monumental 'Aide Memoire' ('7 nig…
The Shunned Country
A collection of 52 very short songs on uncanny themes, illustrated in the exquisite 24p full-colour booklet with a set of 20 commissioned paintings by Ray O'Bannon. Perhaps the scariest thing is that each of these miniatures is a fully formed, fully orchestrated and complete structure - no lazy snippets here - and Bob Drake plays all the parts with his famously Paganini-esque virtuosity in spooky variable tempo synchrony, packing more ideas and material into 50 seconds than many manage on an ent…
Lawn Ornaments
After Bob Drake's Drive-In, which, in terms of production was quite restrained and minimal, Ornaments sets off in the opposite direction, piling up great car-crashes of overlapping fragments in a production that makes rococo look like shaker minimalism. Playing only drums, guitars, bass, banjo, fiddle, organ, trumpet and piano Bob herds tamed cataclysms of musical debris into the shapes of coherent - if episodic – songs, en route skipping through half a century of recording history. As to method…
13 Songs and a Thing
The latest collection of twisting, turning instrumentals and songs, and another instant classic. If you didn't venture down this way yet, now is a good time to start. In a category of one, Bob Drake undermines musical, technical and production norms with a breathtaking amalgam of broken rules and unimaginable musical logic.
Downtime
The first release by the Blegvad Trio (Peter Blegvad, John Greaves, Chris Cutler). Compiled over two years without the pressure of Peter's major label releases, giving time for the songs and for Peter's singing to speak for themselves. Widely diverse in style, with many songs that have since become classics, this is a more personal and less marketable collection that Peter's Virgin releases, with the playing and production dedicated to the song, rather than its surface. Great songs, eccen…
Hangman's Hill
13 New songs from the master of witty, cynical but wistful songs, Peter Blegvad. With John Greaves and Chris Cutler.Follow up to the masterly Just Woke Up, sporting great new songs and guests including B.J.Cole, Geraint Watkins, Adam X, Chris Stamey, Bob Drake, Stoffer Blegvad.
Sift
"Blast's second release on the Recommended label after a long wait from this unique ensemble. Equally at home with the discipline of composition and the tightrope of improvisation Blast have evolved a fluid, pointillistic, unfathomable but transparent musical language that seamlessly integrates - over very short durations - highly complex writing and very free ranging improvisation, allowing the two languages to merge and combine into a new kind of logical exposition that makes sense but …
Funnel to a Thread
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…
Cape Flyaway
After 5 years of extensive and careful work, the new and much anticipated CD by this extraordinary collective, who have no parallels, no rivals and no peers, is at last complete. It’s a dense and indescribable orchestration of electric and acoustic guitars, clavioline, trumpet, Hammond organ, micromoog, biolmellodrone, electric and acoustic violins, bass, mandolin, accordion, piano, rubab, kit percussion and sometimes voice, layered and radically processed in the unique Biota manner. Ther…
Object Holder
Stunning work that breaks new ground; an extraordinary achievement that was 3 years in the making and rewrote lot of rules in passing. With texts and singing by the inimitable Susanne Lewis, the CD also features contributions from Charles Vrtacek (Piano), Andy Kredt (Guitar) and Chris Cutler (percussion, electrics, and some texts).
A Dense, profound field of sound, music and silence. Currently out of print.