★ReR Megacorp

This soundtrack contains many silences... Don't turn up the volume: it should be set so that the music and ambient sounds blend together. Better: open the windows and listen to it all. This is a four parts work, with an additional optional piece. To program this musical interlude in the listening sequence, call for the number 5. If your cd player doesn't allow sequence programming, just wait a few minutes after the fourth part: it is there somewhere.

The short story: Prints is Fred Frith's first album of songs in 20 years. The long story: it is actually a collection of compilation tracks and unreleased studio sessions recorded between 1987 and 2001. No matter if you already own a few of these, a pop album by this man is a rarity -- and that is truly a shame. Of course, as a respected improviser, serious composer, and educator, anything lighter from this pillar of modern music will meet with severe criticism from people who take themse…

Commissioned project from Chris Cutler for the 25th Frankfurt Jazz Festival 1994, featuring Marie Goyette, Zygmunt Krauze, Otomo Yoshihide, Lutz Glandien and Chris Cutler (score contemporary composers: 2, Sound debris organisers: 2, virtuoso pianists: 2, Virtual instruments: 2, Rythmn, Melody, Chaos: 2,2,2, more of the same: nil). His first without sung text. Instruments: Two Grand Pianos, Turntables, Random-tuned Guitar, Drums/Electronics, Computer and real-time processing. A single, com…

An experiment in listening. These compositions are an offshoot of the daily soundscape programme I ran for Resonance FM radio between July 2001-2002, which consisted of commissioned real-time recordings made all around the world between 23.30 and midnight GMT (the time of the broadcast). This CD begins with material from these broadcasts confecting, as it were, two composites of the Earth and a few of its inhabitants, somewhat analogous to what an impossible satellite ear with pinpoint ac…

It took long enough. The electric kit finally gets a chance to speak for itself. I won't try to describe it, but it's been pretty much my main work of the last three years. I can't say it reminds me of anything else but, naturally, I suggest you buy it.

Our third collection featuring the ondes Martenot and the most experimental, in part because the Spectralist composer Tristan Murail, to whom this CD is dedicated, was himself a student of - and performer on - the ondes and, in these pieces, he explores some of its less conventional byways. These works are united here for the first time, performed by a new generation of musicians more attuned to the raw, less academic approach to sound that Murail himself favoured. Works for solo Onde, tw…

Classic work. Overlays and constructs rhythmic and harmonic vignettes of transparent sound (at once complex and simple) from electronic, acoustic and documentary sources, taking ethnic field recordings as it's thematic centre. In the realm of 'My life in the Bush of Ghosts' but far more accomplished and developed.

A signature collection of exquisite works for onde Martenot and piano by Olivier Messiaen, N'Guyen Thien Dao, Jacques Charpentier and Tristan Murail, exploring the many voices of this extraordinary instrument. The onde (or ondes musicales or le Martenot) was first demonstrated at the Paris Conservatoire in 1928 and immediately attracted the attention of Varese, Milhaud, Koechlin, Jolivet, Honegger and Messiaen, who all wrote for it - cumulatively ensuring its survival. Seven years younge…

In 1988, I received a tape from David Myers consisting of music made purely from the internal conflicts of machines; sounds made from no sound - no input, only output emerging from the unstoppable flow of electrons within and across machines plugged into one another the 'wrong' way; these outputs then being controlled by David in real time using a mixing desk. The sounds were exquisite: ethereal, glassy, powerful, gritty, rich and strange by turns - and surprisingly varied. Clearly too, …

Steve's fourth CD for us is a remarkable set of pieces for mediated acoustic piano that operates in the shadowy territory between what is playable and what is programmable; between narrative simplicity and performative complexity; between hopeful intentionality and flawless execution. Unusually, Steve has put our ear right inside the piano, sans artificial reverberations and blurring tools and, over the course of the CD, various musical dialects are explored and extended - from the plausi…

These recordings collect together works spanning two decades of composition and experimentation that balance traditional musical resources (the band, compositional skills, instrumental techniques, acoustic and amplified instruments) and the new technologies (computers, software, processing). The first CD showcases polyrhythmic, careful compositions (like those on his last ReR CD, Opposite of War), which still no-one has tried to emulate. The second is more meditative, abstract and electro…

Steve is back with a truly original and unusual CD; very different from his other work - featuring, as the title proclaims, frogs and insects - recorded in the field - and guitar -, all subtly and intelligently processed (which is where the computer comes in); not to alter the sounds so much as to lock them together into complex rhythm and pitch relationships. The result sounds somehow 'natural' but yet spookily integrated. Then MacLean treats each track, or episode, differently, coming a…

A collection of 5 songs and 4 instrumental pieces that explore equally - and simultaneously - spontaneous performance values, close compositional detail and extensive processing. Made out on the rocky coast of Maine with just a TV eye keeping tabs on a world skidding to hell in a handcart, all the basic work was done by MacLean and Cutler with Julie Thompson (voice) added later – alongside additional parts played by Frank Gross (bassoon), Michael Bierylo (laptop, samples, circuits) and Ti…

This is one of those recordings that arrived unannounced in the mail. I knew Lesli Dalaba, of course, but the others were new to me. The project is Eric Glick Rieman's and I found it immediately intriguing. There seemed to be something quite subtle going on; minimal, microtonal, economical and eccentric; it plays subtly with timbre, pitch and structure and never quite does what you expect. At first blush it seemed as it would be another interesting but conventional improvising trio, but …

11 pieces beautifully played by flamenco guitarist Alfredo Lagos, and then put through an electro acoustic obstacle course by Venosta and Mariani. The raw guitar is reversed, inverted, cut up, re-played, propelled by processed handclaps and swathed in delayed vocals. The large-scale hypnotic structures contrast strangely with the pristine simplicity of the original guitar pieces, and the album works as a profound meditation on culture, technology, art and authorship. Unusual, genre-bendin…

An exquisite and subtle new composition by Macedonian composer Nikola Kodjbashaia exquisitely realised by a broad and mixed ensemble of exemplary - and mostly Macedonian - instrumentalists: a suite of highly imaginative variations on a theme that meanders purposively through an unusual - I'd say unique - musical landscape in which reflections of everything from lounge music, Macedonian folk instrumentals, Byzantine church liturgy, contemporary orchestra composition and exotica rub should…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

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.

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 …

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…

Second Hail CD, with guest appearances from Chris Cutler, David Kerman and Bill Gilonis.

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.

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...

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…

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…

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.

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…

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).

Atmospheric, evolving, intricate and layered; a suite of fine compositions and carefully crafted sounds. Consistent creation of another place, another time.

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.