June '21
The score for June '21 was made in early summer of 2021, in a dialogical process of close live collaboration. Everything we talked about — music, time, politics, and place — was treated as a kind of material with the possibility of being brought into the piece. We didn’t aim to use sound to express such concepts directly, but rather created music with attention to the circumstances: when it was written, where, to whom and by whom it would be played. There was a mutual understanding that we were …
Spalona Ziemia
The trio is a perfect composition for broadly understood improvised music, sufficient in terms of minimum and generally reflecting to the maximum what the musicians want to convey to the listener. In the case of the Wrocław-based trio Marek Otwinowski, Michał Sikorski and Marcin Witkowski, this "width" of understanding improvisation is particularly visible. This is not a classic free-jazz band or even free-improv, because the musicians go far beyond these frames, touching noise, avant-garde, ind…
Enz
"After two and a half years of refining, calibrating, and reconceptualising their approach, pianist Darius Heid, cellist Emily Wittbrodt, and double bassist Jonas Gerigk are now releasing their debut CD. With great enthusiasm, the trio met frequently for playful and dedicated rehearsals, improvising freely then observing and discussing the resulting phenomena, delving further into the depths of their music. A long and involved process - creating trialogues that weave through constant re-examinat…
Kuden
"Kuden is a method of communicating information verbally in Japan. The word also refers to the knowledge of secret techniques traditionally passed on orally, be it from martial arts or from music and the performing arts. An apt title for this exceptional, non-arranged meeting of three musical experts who tell each other about the rich vault of their sound treasures in order to enrich it with something new through this musical dialogue, which is immediately passed on to the spellbound, amazed aud…
The Tape
*60 copies limited edition* Live in concert at A New Wave Of Jazz festival, Hundred Years Gallery (London, UK) on February 8th, 2020.Graham Dunning : turntable, dubplates & spring reverbs, Benedict Taylor : viola, Daniel Thompson : acoustic guitar.
Black Tape, Clear Box With Pins, Sealed. Design By Rutger Zuydervelt
Fluid To The Influence
Restock 2023. CD version. Chris Abrahams returns with Fluid To The Influence. Building upon the foundation of his previous three editions for Room40, Abrahams charts out a divergent course through lilting piano flows, distended organ passages, thunderous electronic eruptions, and focused concrète explorations. Fluid To The Influence spans a huge spectrum of sound, each movement calling forward to the next in a flowing motion that demonstrates Abrahams's commitment to and interest in the album as…
Pangrams
"Pangrams" evokes a wide range of emotional moods, sketched in a chamber atmosphere. The four pieces stress the immediate and deep understanding of Di Domenico and Moberg.’ - Eyal Hareuveni
A Constellation of Anomaly
Following his Acoustic Masks, the new record Constellation of Anomaly is Vasco Trilla's 6th solo album, bringing a new palette of sounds with a vast array of percussion instruments played in numerous creative and unconventional ways. Russian Flat bells bowed and played with vibrating objects, a timpani full of wind-up music boxes and spiced up by a transducer speaker, an old zither hit as a drum with two snare drums as resonators, Iranian round bells mixed with gamelan strips, styrofoam and tria…
String Dialogues
String Dialogues is a collection of six duo recordings initiated by the renowned musician, composer, and improviser Peter Soderberg. Here, he investigates different tuning systems and the idea of hybrid instruments. Within various instrumental settings and informed by his musical co-partners and fellow improvisors Katt Hernandez, Stina Hellberg Agback, Mats Persson, Sten Sandell, My Hellgren and Vilhelm Bromander, he has sculpted an album highlighting complex timbres and intimate interplay.The a…
Detour Tunnels of Light
"In my experience listening to the music of both Martin Küchen and Sophie Agnel, I’ve often detected what I perceive to be a (sometimes hidden) strain of romanticism, a deep and dark vaguely lyrical content that one doesn’t routinely identify with free improvisers. With Küchen, this could be heard most prominently in his solo recordings such as ‘The Lie and the Orphanage’ (Mathka, 2010) or ‘Hellstorm’ (Mathka, 2012). I had also heard Agnel give a memorable solo piano recital in Västerås, Sweden …
Monte Carlo Fallacy
In the lockdown of early 2020, Berlin fell silent. As reflects Nicholas Bussmann, “it felt like the early 90s in East Berlin”, the place where he grew up and experienced social change and uncertainty, and presumably a lot of empty, silent space. Here, on this duo with his long-term accomplice Werner Dafeldecker, we hear the sound of two instrumental practitioners as they explore the nature of their respective instruments with a paced and thoughtful guidance, with little intervention or overt de…
Chris Cutler in a Box
These 10 CDs (and DVD) collect together solo work, compositions and collaborations made between 1972 and 2022 by percussionist and lyricist Chris Cutler and include as well as three previously released solo CDs ('solo', 'twice around the earth' and 'there and back again'), more than five hours of unreleased materials, as well as a double CD collection of tracks culled from official recordings featuring Henry Cow, Art Bears, Cassiber, News From Babel, Aqsak Mabou, Duck and Cover, Peter Blegvad, R…
Songs From An Obscure Matriarchal Tribe
*100 copies limited edition* "Utsnobi Matriarkaluri Tomis Simgherebi" is an improvisational cycle recorded by musicians Darja Kazimira and Zura Makharadze during the filming of the experimental, analogue film "Rue de la Lune" by the Irish director Juana Robles, dedicated to the comprehension of one matriarchal generation, embraced by the tendency to painful transformation and self-absorption, striving throughout the performance to get out of these boundaries, heal and to reborn. In this act, the…
Calisthenics
Calisthenics is the first album by Institute for Certified Nomadic Illicit Sonic Practices (ICNISP), the Berlin-based duo of Brazilian musicians Marina Cyrino (flute) and Matthias Koole (el.guitar). With a mixture of electronic and acoustic sound sources, objects and preparations, inside amplification and no-input mixing, the duo leads guitar and flute towards a common hybrid terrain. Partly inspired by drawings of the Handbook of Calisthenics and Gymnastics: A Complete Drill-book with Music to …
MetaMorph
Other:M:other is a trio from Austria, consisting of Judith Schwarz (extended drums), Jul Dillier (prepared piano) and Arthur Fussy (modular synthesizer). Judith is a drummer and composer and internationally well known with bands like Chuffdrone, Little Rosies Kindergarten or the duo Hofmaninger/Schwarz. Arthur is a sound designer, composer and engineer. He also works for theatre productions in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Jul describes himself as a sound poet. He works as a solo artist, per…
Animals
"Radical playing techniques, curiosity and the exploration of sound possibilities create constant tension. Their first trio release Animals brings together 13 tracks full of twists and turns, creative lightness and complex virtuosity."
Dancing Like Dust
Núria Andorrà is a percussionist, improviser and composer from a classical and contemporary music background but always drawing from other sources of inspiration. Núria proposes a universe where images, sound and the body come together to create and transmit from an interdisciplinary perspective. She has performed with Agustín Fernández, Fred Frith, Lê Quan Nihn, Joëlle Léandre, Mats Gustafsson, Nate Wooley, and Joe Morris, as well as collaborating with Carles Santos, Hector Parra, Matmos and ot…
Retrato Años Después
Uruguayan guitarist Santiago Bogacz is a genre-bending virtuoso with a strong penchant for improvised music. Over the years he has released many solo and duo recordings, some under the stage name Matador. On the stimulating and poignant Retrato Años Despues he joins forces with his compatriot Emiliano Aires for nine spontaneously created pieces.Aires sticks to the infrequently heard soprano clarinet, the twittering tones of which, with their hints of vibrato, complement Bogacz's resonant strings…
Al Saher
Calamita = Karkhana members Tony Elieh, Sharif Sehnaoui and Lebanese drummer Malek Rizkallah join forces with the Egyptian singer Aya Metwalli - the result is the improbable meeting between free jazz / improv, punk rock & Oum Kalthoum!
Calamita is the "rock project" of Sharif Sehnaoui and Tony Elieh, two of the most active musicians on the Lebanese experimental scene (among others projects, both are members of the "free Middle Eastern music" collective Karkhana). Sehnaoui comes from a jazz and i…
Ta Yu Ta I
"I listened to the demo recordings for the “Ta Yu Ta I” CD. The track begins with the sound of a stone, and, for a moment I doubted my ears, thinking that it was the iwafue stone flute that I had lost overseas in 2005. The flute actually used on this recording was a replica on an ancient flute, one of three that have been handed down within my family. But until that moment when I heard the sound of it echoing inside my skull, I had completely forgotten about it. It was my living flesh that breat…