★ReR Megacorp
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…
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.