★ReR Megacorp
Sale Quanto Basta
Paolo Angeli’s latest is an extraordinary collection of pieces that explore the full range of his highly modified, extended and prepared Sardinian guitar; and although it’s just him and electricity, it seldom sounds like fewer than 3 people. Great compositions, each like a short novel, beautifully recorded. Paolo’s unique music defies genre or category - at once accessible, experimental, tuneful, tactile, ambient, with a folk root and a rock inflection and a contemporary outlook. And his instrum…
Bucato
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.
NITA. L'Angelo sul Trapezio
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…
Tibi
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, …
S'Û
An amazing record. It’s beautifully recorded and almost impossible to believe that such a layered and polyphonic music, with chords, percussion, lead lines, bass lines, harmonies, string sections and sometimes voice could all be produced by one person in real time, without overdubs or loops. But it is. The instrument, a specially designed and augmented Sardinian guitar (almost the size of a cello) is equipped with motors, pedals, individual string mic’ing, and extra appendages; and of course the…
Crashing Icons
Based in Miami, this is a very interesting American band, ploughing its own furrow - whose accent is what they call 'prog' over there, but whose language is more complex by far. Pip Pyle adds a seasoned sophistication - in fact I think this is a great environment for him, he shines - but the whole ensemble is way past the foothills and keeping the oxygen packs handy. An excellent first CD, in a style that, features densely composed, layered, slightly post 5UU-school music - with some sung…
Crisis In Clay
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.
Western Culture
"Remastered & repackaged with expansive notes and three extra tracks (Viva Pa Ubu, Slice and Look Back (alt). I'm biased of course but I believe this was a milestone recording, perhaps the closest we came to getting the music to sound the way we wanted on disc. "-Chris Cutler (ReR Megacorp)
Live 80/81
Limited numbers, now available as a single cd, shrinkwrapped.
Until recently the only official live This Heat release has been a long-deleted cassette version of a concert from Krefeld, Germany, from 1980. This CD corrects that vacuum by officially releasing private recordings from the band's live repertoire, circa 1980-1981, taken from concerts in Tilburg, Nijmegan, Arhus, Appledoorn, Vienna and Rheims. The trio rip through some highly-charged versions of classic pieces from both Blue & …
Repeat
Limited copies, shrinkwrapped.
Repeat is This Heat's fourth album proper, posthumously released in 1993. It harbours the most extreme musical side of This Heat's experimental tendencies on disk, and is assuredly the band's most radical offering. The title track is an oxymoron: An extended/edited version of the piece "24 Track Loop", which had been previously issued on the Recommended Records' double-disk sampler in 1981, heard here sans the harmonizer effect. The original tracks were produ…
Made Available
Now available as a single CD, shrinkwrapped. Limited quantity.
This Heat's earliest public recordings came from two sessions for John Peel's BBC radio show, in April and October of 1977. Peel was one of their greatest enthusiasts at the time, hearing excellence in the band's mixed repertoire of post-krautrock songs and uniquely approached improvisation. Of special merit here is the band's maverick use of real-time tape loops to augment their basic three-piece sound, as well as their choice…
Deceit
CD edition. Another essential reissue, This Heat’s classic Deceit completes an official trilogy of reissues from their seminal and hugely influential run of late ‘70s/early ‘80s recordings which set the template for so, so much avant-rock, noise and experimental music ever since. With their debut album and follow-up maxi single Health and Efficiency, This Heat sowed the seeds of post-punk, avant rock, noise rock and post-rock, placing the trio -- Charles Bullen, Charles Hayward and Gareth …
Collaborations
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
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…
Perfect World
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
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…
A Face We All Know
'A Face We All Know' breaks new ground altogether. This is a single work with texts by Chris Cutler, Rainald Geotz and Thomas Pynchon and documents the last days of a political nightmare. Start here with Cassiber.
The Way It Was
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…
All's Well
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…
BBC Sessions +
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…