New Arrivals
Tide
Reissue of the 6th studio album by Brazilian jazz legend Antônio Carlos Jobim. Released in 1970 this instrumental Bossa Jazz masterpiece was produced by Creed Taylor and engineered by Rudy Van Gelder. It features the arrangements of Eumir Deodato (who also conducted the band), and includes a plethora of sidemen from the U.S. jazz scene, such as Joe Farrell, Hubert Laws and Ron Carter, as well as Brazilian stars like Hermeto Pascoal, Airto Moreira and João Palma.
Jorge Ben
The sixth studio album of the Brazilian artist Jorge Ben. Released in 1969, it was Jorge Ben’s first album with Trio Mocotó, a group that would be backing him along the 70’s on many other seminal albums, such as Força Bruta (1970), Negro É Lindo (1971) and A Tábua de Esmeralda (1974). The present album is said to have influenced the “Tropicália” movement, as three tracks from this set, “Que pena”, “País tropical” and “Charles, anjo 45” were immediately covered by Gal Costa (the former two), and …
A Jug Of Love
Originally released in 1971, Mighty Baby's second and, for nearly a quarter of a century, final release is a deft, understated, and often magical synthesis of any number of musical strains. Stepping further away from the group's louder roots in the Action and taking in everything from an embrace of Sufism to further explorations ranging from Gram Parsons and the Band's country-rock to jazz and obscure folk, A Jug of Love is all the more remarkable for being a rushed effort, recorded in barely a …
Invisible Cities
The 2014 debut solo collection by French wind-walker Baptiste Martin aka Les Halles remains a masterpiece of soft light and subdued yearning, woven from grainy panpipe samples, tape hiss, and spectral delay. Recorded late at night in a tiny room in Montpellier, Invisible Cities quivers like a candle by the sea, its fragile illumination flickering against an expanse of sky, silence, and sorrow.
The pieces feel both ancient and immediate, glimpsing currents behind the veil, at the threshold of pre…
Island On The Moon
Dirk Serries (worldwide renowned for his ambient alter-ego Vidna Obmana from 1984 till 2007) returns to this expansive sound universe with a new collaborative album that redefines the genre. Together with alto saxophonist Trösta the duo delivers a breathtaking album just in time to comfort, soothe and challenge in these darker times. Island On The Moon is a symphony of harmony, depth and nuance. A solace drenched in melancholy and light, made without the aid of computers but by the hands of two …
Live at OZO Land
After a long hiatus due to obvious reasons, Goncalo Almeida & Dirk Serries played an exclusive duo performance at Jazzblazzt in The Netherlands. Open air at the lovely Ozo Land location. Recorded live on June 5, 2021.
Microphonics XXVI-XXX Resolution Heart
"The final instalment in Dirk Serries‘ long-running series of releases, Resolution Heart sets a fittingly uplifting mood for the end of a process that started with the first Microphonics CD in 2008. Presented on heavyweight vinyl (with a limited boxed art edition available too), the LP bids farewell to Serries’ eight-year exploration of the dynamics of tone, texture and timbre, the music delivered with a distinctly different atmosphere than when in his alternate drone guise of Fear Falls Burning…
Intermediate Obscurities III (Live At Spontaneous Music Festival October 5th 2019)
**200 copies limited edition** Live recording from Dirk Serries’ Tonus project, which explores long-form, minimal, graphic score pieces.
Loput
**200 copies limited edition** "Stopping to pull one’s pockets inside out and dusting them. The residue sparkles in the wind. It takes this to enter the next room. And then continuing to spin blue light and petals into yarn."- Olli Aarni
Summer
**300 copies limited edition. White vinyl** "Summer was conceived as an entry point for Sonae to access and wrestle with difficult themes, to engage with them authentically, artfully, personally. It was also the starting point for a collaborative audio-visual project with video artist Jennifer Trees (the confronting multimedia installation that premiers in September 2021 at Stadtgarten, Cologne). Summer articulates these ideas using the unique musical and sonic language that Sonae has been dev…
Eden's Island - Extended
Now here we go with a project that can easily be labeled a mammoth. Who remembers Eden Ahbez actually, except for a couple of born too late retro hippies? Well, here we go with the story: It is 1960, Rock’n’Roll has just lost a couple of its protagonists during this and the previous year, the time of the great balladeers has just begun, but soon will run out due to the new and exciting beat invasion. In the US mainstream the tiki culture has reached a certain peak and is about to collapse, but s…
Safe Crash
**Limited to 100 copies** "Evidence hints at the event. Parts of broken drumsticks, a sound recording, a photograph and a written approach. Traces, relics. The work „Safe Crash“ by visual artist Florian Bräunlich consists of porcelain drumsticks, plastic buckets, a wooden platform, varnish, cymbals, cymbal stands, a floor tom and a spotlight on which the second release of „dispari“ is based.A sound recording witnesses Sven-Åke Johansson’s performance of Florian Bräunlich’s “Safe Crash” at HFBK, …
Tracers
** 2021 stock ** In the early years of 21st century, vidnaObmana teamed up with US experimentalist David Lee Myers, of Arcane Device fame, for a collaborative album that showcases their shared fascination for processing and recycling sound. “Tracers” is the audio evidence of this meeting. A few years later this material was mastered by Dirk Serries and got the new design based on Martina Verhoeven’s artwork.
The Trilogy
** 2021 stock ** A rare treat much-anticipated by out-of-the-loop Obmana fans, The Trilogy collects a trio of full-length recordings self-released by Vidna's Dirk Serries, featuring hands down the composer's finest, most accomplished textural works to date. While three discs might seem excessive for a compositional style relying heavily on looping and repetition, the pieces never seem indulgent or overlong (indeed, they occasionally seem almost too short), with each disc sketching out an emotion…
The Other Lies
“”The Other Lies is a collection of six improvised duets performed by Tom Jackson on clarinet Colin Webster on alto and baritone saxophones. Tom Jackson is very accomplished in the fields of contemporary classical music and free improvisation. He also holds a Ph.D from Canterbury Christ Church University. Colin Webster is a musician whose works I’ve reviewed here before. When one of his releases comes up on my Bandcamp feed I always take notice. He’s a prolific and under appreciated figure in th…
Melancholia
“‘Melancholia’ is, perhaps, a somewhat misleading title for the duet of John Edward (double bass) and label boss Dirk Serries (acoustic guitar). One might expect some sad music, a soft thud on the bass, a few strums on the acoustic guitar, but it is clear that these men deal with a different kind of melancholia right from the start. In the two pieces (forty-four minutes), I think there is a mutual agreement between the two to work along dynamic lines. They cut out the middle ground, it seems. Th…
Cure And Mound
“Thanks to Anton Mobin and his ‘prepared chamber’, a wooden box with strings, objects, and amplification. An instrument not unlike Tore H. Boe’s ‘acoustic laptop’. It is also an instrument for which we don’t know what it will sound like, unlike the piano, played by Martina Verhoeven, even when she plays the piano less traditionally; techniques that go back to John Cage and his prepared piano. Verhoeven divides her attention to both the keys and the inside of the piano. In the prepared chamber of…
Pieces Of Apparatus
“Pieces Of Apparatus severs up five examples of extremely sparse and often spaced-out improv for guitar- with all the tracks unfolding in both a jaggedly wondering, dartingly inventive, and largely rewarding manner. Here on the New Wave Of Jazz label is CD release, presented in the labels house style packaging of a white and grey box gatefold, that features a worthy write-up about both Gérard work in general and the pieces offered up here.
Pierre Gérard is based in Liège, Belgium- and has been …
Solo Acoustic Guitar Improvisations I
**Limited edition of 100 copies** “Following some forty CD releases on his imprint New Wave Of Jazz, Dirk Serries thinks the time is right to expand to the world of vinyl. Here he plays a 1957 Hoffner archtop guitar, and recorded with a single microphone, some 50 centimetres from the guitar and there has been no other audio processing. The liner notes, as always by Guy Peters, are on the front cover, and he uses the extra space the format allows him, to talk some more on the history of free jazz…
Mental Detentions
Robert Rental was a British pioneer of the post-punk DIY industrial electronic music scene in the United Kingdom. Originally from Port Glasgow, Scotland, he moved to the south of England with Thomas Leer in the late 1970s, and became involved with the local music scene. Robert Rental however released very little of his solo music, preferring to collaborate with Thomas Leer, as well as with Daniel Miller. The only solo recording from The 1970s is the 7" single "Paralysis" first released on the ho…