Experimental / Free Improvisation

Taku Sugimoto : metronomes, mandolin... Taku Unami: computer, mandolin... Recorded live by Taku Unami at Loop-Line on May 2 and October 16, 2008. Mastered by Taku Unami.

"Un biglietto del tram" is an historical album, featuring some of the most important, militant, political and proletarian fighting songs of the Seventies. Stormy Six sound is acoustic here, but it does not copy the anglo-american folk style; in fact it shows a very personal and original approach and a mediterrean influence. This CD is a milestone of the italian Seventies music scene!Available in the usual BTF deluxe papersleeve CD series with gatefold cover and detailed booklet with vintage phot…

They explore the indigenous urban music phenomenon on this, their debut collaborative release. NNBB are one of the most enigmatic, mysterious, & defiantly anti-commercial groups to emerge from the New York loft scene during the '90s. Incorporating elements of folk, drone, psychedelia, free jazz, noise, & just about everything else, they have nevertheless carved out a distinctive sound from complementary & disparate component elements. EMBRYO fused traditional ethnic music with their own jazzy sp…

Barcelona's Octante—Ruth Barberán (trumpet, speaker, microphones), Alfredo Costa Monteiro (accordion, objects), Ferran Fages (oscillators, pick-ups), and Margarida Garcia (electric bass)—create what one reviewer calls "a crackling and crunching kind of sound" that's "utterly condensed." The quartet has essentially become "one common music machine" where distinguishing individual instruments becomes nearly impossible. The two extended improvisations (each around 29 minutes) recorded in Barcelona …

Richard Bamford, drums, percussion. Stuart Brown, drums, percussion. John Burgess, bass clarinet. George Burt, acoustic guitar. Matthew Cairns, trumpet. Aileen Campbell, voice. Neil Davidson, electric guitar. Nick Fells, shakuhachi. Krzysztof Hladowski, bouzouki. George Lyle, double bass. Raymond MacDonald, soprano & alto saxophones. George Murray, trombone. Peter Nicholson, cello, voice. Emma Roche, flute, baroque flute. Ernesto Rodrigues, viola. Guilherme Rodrigues, cello. Matthew Studdert-Ken…

Sandy Bull may have been the first man in the '60s folk renaissance to foreground modal drones in his music and thereby forge a link between Scottish ballads, jazz, and sitar meditations. The results are seismic, and when seen in the light of the millennial freak-folk scene, they cast Bull as one of the genre's primary father figures. VANGUARD VISIONARIES seeks to introduce neophytes to Bull's finest noodlings, covering ground that's similar to the previous Vanguard best-of, RE-INVENTIONS. The d…

It's taken a long fucking time, and finally, a fully legit LP - only reissue of this amazing Helsinki monsterpiece from 1970. shh ! is highly collectable in it's original form on the band's own O Records imprint (home of 3rd erection, samsa trio, one point music, etc). In a non - dream state, I've seen 2 copies and both were in a condition slightly more well kempt than hammered ++. shh ! is primarily a document of Pekka Airaksinen's experimental compositions, consisting of primitive samples, gui…

CD audio + DVD video (NTSC / Region All).'This trio was formed by Imai Kazuo (guitar), Suzuki Manabu (handmade electronics), and Ito Atsuhiro (optron) in July, 2005. I'm using a controllable instrument along with uncontrollable electronic sound devices that may make the music somewhat difficult to remain stable, yet its context of where I am now is the one that is similar to jazz'. Imai Kazuo, from linernotes. Imai Kazuo is the one and only graduate of Takayanagi Masayuki's private guitar scho…

1976 was a year of flux and change. For the recording of the fifth Area album, the core membership of Stratos, Fariselli, Tofani and Tavolazzi were present, but drummer Capiozzo only appears on about half of the album, replaced on various tracks by either Walter Calloni or Paul Litton. Steve Lacy augments the band, as do several other studio musicians (including a string quartet). Perhaps it was the contributions of this eclectic group of guests that gives Maledetti its bi-directional feel. On o…

The album consists of live versions of the jazz tunes created by the legendary Steve Lacy. The tapes are from the Wellington Jazz Festival 2006, where Malcolm dresses Lacy's melodies in a free folk influenced suite of noise. Malcolm is known for playing three guitars at the same time: two with each foot And one in the conventional way (with his hAnds And arms), And this is how he performs also this songs. The outcome has recently been edited And mastered by Kai Mikalsen. Greg Malcolm has earlier…

Violinist/vocalist C Spencer Yeh & unrivaled saxophone elder-titan Paul Flaherty team up without the assistance of acclaimed drummer Chris Corsano for the first time.Along for the jamz is bonkers Boston trumpeteer Greg Kelley. After performing numerous times and honing a distinct group dynamic as a trio over many years with celebrated percussionist Chris Corsano, Yeh and Flaherty decided to try it out one-on-one. The record comprises of the best from two live sets from a short duo tour in the No…

Though each member of the 13th Assembly is acclaimed in their own right this group is very much a singular musical experience. A planned NPR piece should help raise exposure for this sublime recording. The Thirteenth Assembly began as a touring collective made up of four musicians and four musically distinct small ensembles: Tomas and Taylor's duo; Mary and Jessica's duo; Taylor's trio with Mary and Tomas; and the collaborative quartet featured on this recording. The group is a microcosm of an e…

Korm Plastics is proud to present the eleventh release in the Brombron series. Originally a co-production between Staalplaat and Extrapool, it is now hosted by co-curator Frans de Waard. In the year 2000 Frans de Waard and Extrapool started the Brombron project. Two or more musicians become artists in residence in Extrapool, an arts initiative in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, with a fully equipped sound recording studio. These artists can work in a certain amount of time on a collaborative project;…

Udo SCHINDLER, soprano saxophone, bassclarinet. Margarita HOLZBAUER, cello. Harald LILLMEYER, electric guitar. Udo SCHINDLER, soprano saxophone, bassclarinet. Margarita HOLZBAUER, cello. Harald LILLMEYER, electric guitar. Udo Schindler studied flute on conservatory and architecture on university. starting as guitarist + saxplayer with rock and rockjazz. after moving to munich, performing free jazz, experimental and improvised music, Neue Musik, compositions for stage- and radio-play, lyric-publi…

Utterly fantastic and indispensable overview on 4 CDs. "Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV) was begun one evening in the spring of 1966 by Allan Bryant, Alvin Curran, Jon Phetteplace, Carol Plantamura, Frederic Rzweski, Richard Teitelbaum and Ivan Vandor in a room in Rome overlooking the Pantheon. MEV’s music right from the start was also totally open, allowing all and everything to come in and seeking in every way to get out beyond the heartless conventions of contemporary music. Taking its cue from …

Entering their twentieth year of existence, the GOL orchestra, together with the label Planam, celebrates and starts a new program of collaborations: the Gollaboration series.Volume 1, hence the title "Musique Directe",  shows the band facing the leaders of Roumenian spectralism Ana-Maria Avaram and Iancu Dumitrescu. Electric and intense spontaneous experiments, on the edge of electroacoustic music and primitive avant-garde. Live recordings in Marseille and Paris with the participation of Ansamb…

Yes, by God, here's another one. Rock root punch left in bloody piles of nutmeg dirt circus. Fuck the bleat. Fuck the beat. Fuck the entire fucking fleet. A return to the magnificence of spell-over-form. An end to spiel-necessity. Destructive formatting vanishes in a pfff of steam. Welcome to one future. For information on NNCK consult your local oracle.

For their second official CD release (after a handful of cassettes and CD-Rs) this Helsinki quintet of horns, guitars, drums, and vocals forsake any sense of live atmosphere by mashing four years of recordings into a disorienting, rude collage of over the top takes on multiple forms of extreme music. More early 90s, Bad Vugum-damaged rock than 00s Fonal psych-folk, Hasardi is a tangent of the punk/hardcore continuum that veers wildly and often into free jazz, noise and just general weirdness. Ha…

Andre Sider Af Sonic Youth is an album by Sonic Youth with Mats Gustafsson and Merzbow. It is the eighth release in the SYR series. It was released on July 28, 2008. It will not be released on vinyl. The album is recorded the first July 2005 on the Roskilde Festival. The album title is in Danish and means "Other sides of Sonic Youth".

Extraordinary homage to pioneering instrument-builder and improviser Hugh Davies (1943-2005), recorded in January 2008. Adam Bohman (prepared balalaika & amplified objects), Lee Patterson (amplified objects) and Mark Wastell (cello) - three improvisers heavily influenced by Davies's work - improvising alongside solo recordings Davies made in the 1970s. A virtual quartet where one voice is fixed, unable to respond. Davies - who worked as Karlheinz Stockhausen's assistant in Cologne in the mid-60s…

Trio improvisations recorded at the Church of St. James the Great, Friern Barnet, north London, November 2007. Matt Davis (trumpet & field recordings), Matt Milton (violin) and Bechir Saade (bass clarinet & flute) - three improvisers following that strain of British improv interested in amplifying the quiet and concentrating on minute gestural nuance. An entirely acoustic affair meets electronics in reverberant sacred space. The music opens with "a spectrum of Saade's bass clarinet multiphon…

Paolo Angeli (Sardinian guitar & electronics), Evan Parker (soprano & tenor saxophones), Ned Rothenberg (alto saxophone, clarinet, bass clarinet). The Freezone in 2007 was played by just three. The smaller than usual line up allowed for a more intense investigation of the relationships between the players. For the first time an entire set was played by all three musicians and this set was so successful that it is presented unedited, along with two duos. There will be no Appleby Festival in 2008,…

Over the many years of their existence, Australia's Machine For Making Sense have had many members. They play hurdy gurdy, vocals and electronics and wind instruments and electronics. Here they are together with Amanda Stewart (voice and text) and Rik Rue (analog and digital manipulation). As a 'band they explore relations between linguistics, poetry, speech, music, notions of sound, science and politics.' To that end the conversation is important - be it the conversation between instruments, th…

The stable Quartetto that pianist Davide Mosconi, saxophonist Enzo Gardenghi, percussionist Marco Cristofolini, and cellist and violinist Gustavo Bonora brought to life beginning in the late '60s constituted the core of what would, in the early years of the next decade, become the larger improvising ensemble NADMA. The group was also an elegant and accomplished expression of the musical objectives of its members. This music expresses the rich yields that Davide Mosconi cultivated from his explor…

Originally released in 2001. In the fall of 1966 a group of composers that included Frederic Rzewski, Alvin Curran, Allen Bryant, Jon Phetteplace, Giuseppe Chiari and Richard Teitelbaum organized "Avanguardia Musicale I," a festival of several consecutive nights at the Accademia Filarmonica Romana. The program included tape music, Fluxus performance art pieces, and live electronic works. It was also the beginning of the group MEV. One year later, the group was in Rome, Italy, but also involved i…

Brand new re-release of this MEV masterpiece. For the realization of "Friday", recorded in London in May 1969, MEV were Frederic Rzewski (piano, electronics, etc.), Alvin Curran (flugelhorn, etc.), Richard Teitelbaum (moog synthesizer), Franco Cataldi (trombone, etc.), Gunther Carius (saxophone, etc.). The main theme around this MEV piece is communication. Communication by means of music can be a very efficient means of reaching quick agreement among large numbers of people, because when you cal…

With Robert Ashley, George Cacioppo, Gordon Mumma, Roger Reynolds, Donald Scavarda, David Behrman, George Crevoshay, Philip Krumm, Pauline Oliveros, Robert Sheff, Bruce Wise. Ann Arbor, Michigan, seems an unlikely site for the establishment of a major avant-garde festival that would shake the new-music community. Tucked away in America's heartland, the city is equally removed from the Eastern metropolises whose artists pride themselves on sensing the pulse of the times, and from the nonconformis…

Third archival MEV release on Allan Bryant's label. The first track, 'Quadrupl Play', is a piece for rubberbands recorded in 1966 by Allen Bryant. It can be described as 'variations on melody' and was played at the first MEV concerts in St. Paul du Vence, France and at Teatro Argentina in Rome. The second track, 'Pich Out' (or 'Rocket Take Off)', for 4 guitars, is loud and thundering, played by 4 musicians through 4 speakers at Sala Beloch, Rome in March 1967. Features Rzewski, Phetteplace, Curr…

A previously unreleased document of MEV -- four sections of an improvisation recorded in London, 1968, spread out over 43 minutes. The line up was Bryant (synthesizer), Alvin Curran (trumpet, percussion), Frederick Rzewski (amplified percussion, singing), Jon Phetteplace (amplified cello). Powerful, historic noise and the first easily available MEV music on CD. Also comes with a Bryant solo synth wig-out piece at the end. Both of these IRML CDs come in regular jewel cases, and endearingly primit…

Simply one of the most seminal band in italian underground rock in the last 10 years. Don't miss them.

Pure core music, laically spiritual, in constant tension between order & chaos, law & anarchy, silence and loudness, modernism and tradition. Tense border music.

2005 release ** "The music contained in this awesome CD could be defined as an  outsider's version of electro-acoustic composition, using improvisation & field recordings as the main material to build the pieces with. The point of departure for making the whole song cycle was the conscious misunderstanding of language; coming from the idea that you can never say exactly the same thing in a different language (so 'i love you' means something else then 'je t'aime').  'Stots' and all the song title…

This is Otomo Yoshihide's second guitar solo release on doubtmusic. The concept of this work, however, is complely different from that of the first. Here, feedback sound issues from two amplifiers, each connected to one of two guitars placed on a tabletop. Due to this stereo effect, the feedback mutually interferes, producing beatlike fluctuations, creating black holes into which the sound suddenly disappears, sounding completely different depending on the position of the ears, creating the illu…

Finally we can present this longawaited treat of a concert film. The sold out concert took place in Oslo in August last year and was beautifully captured by Kim Hiorthøy and friends to 16 mm black and white film, and later edited by Hiorthøy. The sound was recorded by Athletic Sound and mixed by Helge Sten. Needless to say, it looks and sounds fantastic. The concert itself was rewarded a six out of six review at the time in Norway´s major national paper Aftenposten. You get the complete concert,…

Bob Downes is most often thought of as a jazz flautist, composer and group leader, but throughout his varied career that has included such diverse musical activity as working with the John Barry Seven and playing on Egg's second LP, he also had his own fluid conceptual group Open Music with principle bass player Barry Guy and drummer Denis Smith. Other players that passed through Open Music include Chris Spedding, Kenny Wheeler, Ray Russell, Ian Carr, Henry Lowther, Harry Beckett, Harry Miller, …

** CD Box. The white industrial cardboard box includes an audio CD, a 12-page booklet, five folded posters with graphical scores, plus “Roulette”, a clock-like gadget originally used as the score of the aleatory composition with the same title.** Insieme Musica Diversa, which can be translated in different ways (as diverse music toghether, or different collective music ecc.) truly is a source of endless enchantment. Merging elements of DIY electronica, psychedelia, noise, progressive and free-fo…

Matchless Recordings presents a double selection CD of recordings from "Freedom of the City - festival of radical improvised musics", London, England on 7th May 2001.  CD 1 features: Bark! with Rex Caswell - electric guitar, Phillip Marks - drums and Paul Obermayer -electronics. Eddie Prévost - perussion solo. Seymour Wright - alto saxophone, Yann Charaoui - snare drum, vocals, John Lely - piano, electronics. CD 2 features: Eddie Prévost Trio with Tom Chant - soprano saxophone and John Edwards -…

2003 release ** Featuring: Thomas Lehn, Toshimaru Nakamura, Tetuzi Akiyama, Günter Müller, Christof Kurzmann, Taku Sugimoto, Keith Rowe, Marcus Schmickler, Otomo Yoshihide, Burkhard Stangl, Sachiko M, Cosmos. "A document of the 2002 Amplify festival in Tokyo curated by Erstwhile's Jon Abbey. Disc 1 and 7 are smaller club shows that took place outside the Festival proper, disc 2 is a studio session that took place around the time of the festival and discs 3-6 feature eight of the twelve sets that…

Limited edition of 300 copies. Heavy Vinyl. Schnack is the Live-Duo of improvising musicians Paul Hubweber (Cologne) and Uli Böttcher (Wiesbaden). The play a fascinating and restless mix of trombone noises and real time sampling and electronics.Paul Hubweber began with trombone studies in 1971 mainly concentrating on improvised music.He has developed his own special "trombone voice" and his musical focus. It is the special affinity for the balladic and the noisy, i. e. the non-separable combinat…

2006 release ** "Sparse mandolin music (very slow & deliberate plucking reminiscent of Derek Bailey), with a couple spurts of electronic noise throughout the duration."