New Arrivals / Last 2 weeks
Live At Elastic Arts
* Edition of 100 copies * Two kits, facing each other, one night. On 10 April 2025 Lily Finnegan put a quintet on stage at Elastic Arts in Chicago with a second drummer sitting opposite her, and Bill Harris ran tape on it. Forty minutes, released here as three continuous parts, nothing reshaped after the fact. The second drummer is Vincent Davis, and the choice tells you a good deal. Davis is an AACM member with a Chicago pedigree that runs back through Roscoe Mitchell and Jodie Christian, along…
Sumptuous Branching
* Edition of 100 copies * Chant is the starting point. Not chant as decoration or as a mood, but late medieval chant as a compositional problem, taken up by someone working alone with a bass clarinet, a piccolo, her own voice and a rack of analogue electronics. Emily Rach Beisel has described what drew her to it: music from before the rules hardened, with a wild freedom and density that later codification would take away. Multiple voices, as she puts it, "both intertwined and independent." Which…
All I Know In the City
* Edition of 100 copies * Two people in a room, and not one moment of merging. That is what makes All I Know In The City remarkable, and it is not a small thing. Potliquor is the duo of pianist Sharon Udoh and turntablist Allen Moore, caught live at Elastic Arts in Chicago on 18 January 2026 and issued by Amalgam, the artist-run Chicago collective and label founded in 2015 by drummer and engineer Bill Harris, who also recorded, mixed and mastered the session. Amalgam has spent a decade documenti…
Burn the Plastic, Sell the Copper
* Edition of 100 copies * Two years of sessions went into this record, spread between 2023 and 2025 at Marmalade, the West Loop studio Ishmael Ali co-founded and works in as an engineer. Nobody was watching the clock. You can hear that in the shape of the thing: ten pieces that were never meant to add up to a single argument, solo cello miniatures wedged between full band tracks, a couple of them actual songs with words and a singer. The solo pieces may be the strangest part of it. Ali amplifies…
Goin’ Home
Albert Ayler did it once, and only once. On February 24, 1964, in New York, on the same day as the session that would become Spirits, he recorded a program of spirituals and standards with no screaming, no glossolalia, no demolition of form: "Goin' Home", "Ol' Man River", "Down By The Riverside", "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot", "Deep River", "When The Saints Go Marchin' In", "Nobody Knows The Trouble I've Seen". Songs of suffering and salvation, played with a devotional restraint that hits harder th…