★ReR Megacorp

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.

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.

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…

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.

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...

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!

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…

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…

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.

"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 …

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…

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.

A long time coming, but as always, well worth the wait. Technically, this is the usual uncategorise-able mixture of primitive electronic, ethnic antique and conventional instruments, multilayered processing and meticulous construction. Aurally, vast, three dimensional sonic landscapes emerge in sharp Dalian detail, matched in the generous accompanying booklet with lapidary artworks from the visual component of the band. Extraordinary.

Out of print immediately after release, now re-issued. A test-bed of experimental arrangement and production ideas set in the context of songs that only just hold together - exquisitely realised. Extraordinary sounds, treatments and arrangements - in part because the whole project was made, so to say, in reverse - starting life in a body of existing material by Avant Garde Cellist Hiromichi Sakomoto, then reworked, with texts, vocals and other materials added (reversed vibraphone, and a…

The latest from Paulo on which he plays compositions by Fred Frith and Bjork - solo (though when you hear it, you definitely won't believe it) on his highly customised and extended, electrified, giant Sardinian guitar. A tour de force of technique and a musical pleasure. There is so much subtlety and so much attention to the minutiae of sound, and so much going on at any given time, that it is difficult to relate what you hear to just one person playing. Very concentrated, rewards listenin…

Extraordinary player - extraordinary instrument. Paulo plays a highly modified and treated Sardinian Guitar - in many styles, some of them apparently impossible. Innovative techniques, a deeply musical sensibility and a rich, occasionally baffling, palette of sounds. Inevitably, comparisons will be made with Fred Frith, though not by me, Paulo is his own man. A fine and original work.

This could hardly be more different from his first ReR CD- the extraordinary collection of solo prepared Sardinian Guitar pieces. Here, with a small orchestra of musicians (30 of Bologna's finest), is a programme of highly evolved, through composed pieces that cover half a planet of styles and influences. At one pole there are involved pieces that bring to mind Uncle Meat period Zappa, and contemporary experimental music - and at the other, the straightforward influence of traditional Sa…

This disc will play in stereo on a CD player and with film and 5.1 surround sound (or stereo) on a DVD player or computer. The music, as always, is prodigious, sounding like a small band, but played by one person in real time (as the film attests). In this format, you can also see the instrument close-to - a highly rebuilt and extended giant Sardinian guitar - with many sympathetic and extra strings, motor driven hurdy gurdy wheels, whirling strings, springs and other appendages, played, …

Second Installment from monster band 5UU's, featuring rock complexity, extraordinary production (by bassist and singer Bob Drake) and high energy precision mixed with eccentric song-writing. People that work this hard are becoming an endangered species. Extraordinary.

Collects together the re-mastered Duck and Cover (Tom Cora, Chris Cutler, Fred Frith, Heiner Goebbels, Alfred (23) Harth, Dagmar Krauze, Gerorge Lewis) and Cassix (Chris Cutler, Franco Fabbri, Umberto Fiori, Heiner Goebbels, Pino Martini) recordings, and the Cassiber/Otomo Yoshidide collaboration on one CD, the newly assembled live and out-take The Way it Was, plus a DVD of two concerts, one from the Frankfurt Jazz festival, the other from Brasil, with short documentary, made in the GDR, o…

Beauty and the Beast, the second LP by Cassiber, was released in 1984 simultaneously on the British label Recommended and the German Riskant with a small difference in contents -- the ReR Megacorp CD reissue includes all tracks from both LP versions. This album represents a giant leap from the group's 1982 debut, Man or Monkey. Yet, the same technique was used: No songs were written in advance. Drummer Chris Cutler had written lyrics to be used when considered suitable by singer Christoph A…

Cassiber's second album moves one step ahead in the refinement of the group's music. From Man or Monkey, the trio (Christoph Anders, Chris Cutler, and Heiner Goebbels; Alfred 23 Harth had bid farewell) retained clashes of noise, a taste for cheap synthesizers, and Anders' declamatory style. But this time the music is much more organized and arranged. Songs are short and focus on atmospheres and the alienating settings of Cutler's words. More political than before, they take their cue from t…

Man or Monkey was Cassiber's first album. It was released in 1982 on the German label Riskant as a set of two 45 rpm LPs -- a format that turned it into a pricy collector's item. For this first effort, Christoph Anders, Chris Cutler, Heiner Goebbels, and Alfred 23 Harth entered the studio with only a handful of the drummer's lyrics and a few melodic ideas. They improvised, letting structures and arrangements develop by themselves, so to speak, and singer Anders threw in a text when he fel…

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 (his first major project after News From Babel), Cassiber managed to fuse materials and attitudes drawn from experimental rock, fringe jazz, punk, pop, plunderphonics, improvisation, close structure and musique concrete into an energetic and complex form of studio (and then concert) composition uniqu…

 After This Heat broke up in 1982, Charles Hayward formed Camberwell Now. The new group included Trefor Goronwy, from the short-lived four-piece version of This Heat, on bass and guitar; and Steven Rickard, who is heard on Sub Rosa's Myths 1 compilation, on tape manipulation and field recordings; Charles Bullen from This Heat, who subsequently left to study music in India, is heard as a guest on the first 12" single "Meridian." The group, recording in This Heat's Cold Storage studio, onl…

The radio session was first broadcast 1/3/73, and is 20 minutes of pure Faustian hell. The Lurcher is a kind of electric period Miles Davis slouching drum rhythm, augmented by stabs of horn and electric guitar. Krautrock is a 12-minute post Velvet Underground riff, drone and noise-driven meditation, far superior to the version on the Virgin release Faust IV. The session ends with Do So, an outrageously corny slice of sixties pop. The remaining 30 minutes of the CD is prime Faust, culled f…

Compiled from "lost" and unreleased material released to us on the 10th Anniversary of their disbandment (inc.prophetic pre-dub mixing) as well as most of the unreleased "FAUST PARTY 3" LP.

Fred Frith summarizes the release on his website as "early 80s weirdness with John Zorn." To expand a bit, perhaps "idiosyncratic improvisation with a strange set of tools from two master musicians" would help place the form and ability of the music of Frith and Zorn, who have travelled and performed sporadically as a duo over several decades. These are five fascinating recordings from the blossoming downtown NY scene, originally from two NYC performances recorded on cassette in 1983 a…

Written for theatre in 1987 using a host of avian and mammalian voices, snippets of unidentified musical material and electroacoustic noise- sculpting, as well as invented and real instruments played by Fred Frith. This was a hard time and the mood is intense, lean and not cheerful, though there are some gruesomely cheery inserts. There's no fat but a lot of meat here.

Frith's Music for Dance Volume 5 - two works for small ensembles, which were performed for each of Amanda Miller's dances created for The Pretty Ugly Dance Company. The first is based on Stravinsky's Firebird Suite, and the other a deliberately Western look at Japanes culture. According to Chris Cutler: 'Happy End' presents two, related, small-ensemble works for 6 and 7 musicians respectively - mostly strings of one sort or another, with percussion, flute, clarinet and electronics. Fred, v…

"In 1996, at the end of a two year residency, Fred organised an event at L'Ecole Nationale de Musique de Villeurbanne in France. He roped in as many of the students as he could, grouped according to their departments (early music, rock, African drumming, classical &c), and set them up in all the rooms in the building. The public wandered around creating their own mix, or sat in the courtyard listening to the sound drifting out through the open windows. For their part, each group of musici…

Essentially a pretty great concert by a large 19 strong ensemble with Fred conducting as well as playing. Lots of rhythm, harmony, rock noise, exotic instrumentation, power, complexity and melodic writing, with stretches of chaos, eccentricity and theatre. Totally different, then, from Impur Part I which was a deconstructed, spatialised simultaneity of musical events heard through open windows or by wandering through rooms; Impur Part II was an unannounced performance upon which audience …

Concert recordings made at various venues in Japan in 1981 and released by Recommended Records Japan in 1982 in an edition of 1000. Out of print since, though highly sought after, it has now been transferred and remastered by Tom Dimuzio for this official reissue. Fred was just starting out on his long career as a solo improviser when he made this double LP, and still using the now long retired Charles Fletcher custom double-neck guitar (one fretted, one fretless) and the Burns Black Biso…

This is Frith's sixth CD of music for dance, featuring three commissions by three different choreographers each sharing, as Fred says ' a certain obsession with melodic deconstruction.' Two of them feature - and were especially written for - the remarkable violinist Carla Kihlstedt. Fred and Carla perform one of them (Fred playing a huge array of instruments here as on all pieces), are joined by Fred Guiliano, (samples) and Gail Brand (trombone) on another, while the third features Fred, …

For an artist known for incredible prolificacy and the seeming instantaneousness of his work, Fred Frith's ballet score Allies has managed to acquire a long and checkered history. Created in 1989 for the post-modernist Bebe Miller Dance Company, Allies appears near the start of a period where Frith began to separate his efforts in multi-movement works designed for dance, theater productions, and film from the short, improvised guitar pieces and work within rock styled ensembles that he had…

Although it was originally recorded in 1974, there are pieces on Fred Frith's landmark Guitar Solos album that are probably still making guitar players scratch their heads wondering "How did he do that?" Don't expect any kind of Yngwie Malmsteen-style wankage; Frith instead uses a volume pedal, tapping, and other extended techniques to produce everything from chiming, bell-like notes to unearthly howls. It almost never sounds like standard guitar-with-plectrum playing, but the pieces have a …

Frith's last album for Ralph Records stepped back from the progressions of Speechless to a concoction of pop-like ditties and instrumentals recorded at home on a four track. And for the first time, Frith sings, in a strange high-pitched tone. A little more production and sound manipulation and this could almost be a Residents album, circa 1978. As a pop-song writer, Frith is okay; he shrouds socialist discussion in lyrics about dogs and insects while keeping the song structure simple and r…

"Sadness, Its Bleached Bones Behind Us," and "You Are What You Eat" are unrelenting slices of hard-edged sounds over a pulse. "The Palace of Laughter, The Technology of Tears" is an imaginative, intense, varied suite comparing music which represents the past "frozen tears" of sadness -- displayed as images before us by the media, etc. -- with the "hot tears" of the moment that cannot be absorbed by technology. "Jigsaw" and "Jigsaw Coda" (1986) creates patterns with constantly shifting acc…

Although this is technically the soundtrack to a film of the same name by Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel, Step Across the Border actually serves as an excellent overview of Fred Frith\'s groundbreaking work as a soloist, bandleader, and collaborator. There\'s an example of his \"guitars on the table\" approach (\"Romanisches Cafe\"), and a couple of excellent duos with tape manipulation whiz Bob Ostertag (\"Voice of America, Pt. 3,\" from the lost and lamented Voice of America album they m…