★ReR Megacorp
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.
Invisible Map
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.
Ash in the Rainbow
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…
Hopes And Fears
The first Art Bears LP, mostly made by the band formerly known as Henry Cow and completed by Fred Frith, Chris Cutler and Dagmar Krause who went on, as '[Art Bears', to investigate this short song format further over the next two years, once Henry Cow had ceased to exist. Experimenting with the song form and the productive possibilities of the recording studio, this was hailed in its time (1978) as a landmark recording, and has been constantly in demand ever since. Therefore this new versi…
Winter Songs
A reissue of the brilliant second album by Art Bears, a band/project featuring Fred Frith, Chris Cutler and Dagmar Krause, formed in 1978 after disputes over the musical direction within Henry Cow. 'Winter Songs', originally released in 1979, placed Art Bears in the forefront of the Rock In Opposition Movement. Art Bears' intense and brutal avant-garde approach on the album comes across as primordial expression, which is nailed down by Krause's violently charismatic voice. As a piece of music re…
The World As It Is Today
The third classic Art Bears record, and the most austere. Remastered and repackaged.
If you thought Henry Cow was a pretty political band to start with, you may be even more taken aback by the Art Bears, which was put together following Henry Cow's demise by former Cows Chris Cutler (percussion), Fred Frith (guitar, violin), and Dagmar Krause (voice). On The World as it is Today and its predecessor, Winter Songs, the Art Bears move away from the long-form art rock of Henry Cow and get much, much…
Tessuti
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…
Itsunomanika
Paolo Angeli and ex-After Dinner/Volapuk violinist/singer Takumi Fukushima present an integrated, complex and largely composed programme of deft, focused pieces that make the most of their not inconsiderable individual talents and instruments; mostly sounding like a much larger ensemble. The sonorities of Paolo’s extended, customised, prepared giant Sardinian guitar doing extraordinary, and sometimes chameleonic, work as bass, chord accompaniment, melody instrument, viola/cello, and even percuss…