Experimental / Free Improvisation

Sakada is: Mattin (computer feedback), Rosy Parlane (computers and radio) and Eddie Prevost (percussion). "Undistilled was recorded at live performances in London and Rotterdam in 2002. Components are a restricted range of percussion (Eddie Prevost), electronic sounds confected earlier for intuitive, tweaked release (Rosy Parlane), and nervous hyper-attention to every noise present, allowing spontaneous digital transfiguration of some (Mattin). The product is a formidably dense mesh of textures …

Australian Ross Bolleter's new disc features five compositions. Four of them are solo works: "Unfinished Business" for ruined piano; "Under Rookwood" for double bass; "Labyrinth Tango" for accordion; and "Piano Dreaming" for ruined pianola. "That Time (Simulplay II)" is for a duo of prepared piano and double bass. Of course, with Ross, this thumbnail description tells not much of the story. So we'll let Ross say a few words. Step on down. "During the drought that never ended at Nallan Sheep Stat…

2006 release ** Mattin: gnu-linux computer feedback. Radu Malfatti: trombone. Recorded in 2005. Going fragile is the latest collaboration between Radu Malfatti and Mattin, following 2004's critically lauded "Whitenoise". This album sees them refining their approach; they string incidents of sound along a long axis of time, creating distinct events against a stark backdrop. The cumulative effect is the creation of an enormous scale, small moments building to coherent wholes. This album is a vibra…

2003 ** "This collaboration hardly needs explanation - Mueller's gorgeous, eerie sound fields are a perfect playground for nmperign's irreverent cooperation.  Two extended trio tracks creep between beauty and menace and lend evidence to the rumor that nmperign can be real bullies.  Mueller accepts this behavior with aplomb and puts forth a solo track that is as eyebrow-raising as it is understated.  nmperign, refusing to be upstaged, finishes the CD with an ante-upping duo track."

The original MEV (Allan Bryant, Alvin Curran, Frederic Rzewski, Joh Phetteplace), recorded in the spring of 1968 in Rome. "Vault find recordings of a MEV concert from Spring of 1968, featuring the original lineup of Allan Bryant (synthesizers), Alvin Curran (percussion, trumpet), Frederic Rzewski (percussion), and Jon Phetteplace (cello, percussion). Booklet reprints prime Bryant rants on church/state separation ('TH' 10 GRAETST AMERICNZ WR AGENST ORGANYZD RLIJN (OR)'), questionable medical prac…

Matchless Recordings presents an historic recording. Eddie Prévost's Silver Pyramid performed by Music Now Ensemble directed by Keith Rowe in London in 1969. Includes Cornelius Cardew, Lou Gare, Keith Rowe and others. The music is continuous. Time codes have been inserted at intervals to assist retrieval. Pre-Scratch Orchestra Ensemble formed by / for the occasion of the four day 'Music Now' event at the Roundhouse, 1969. The motley crew perform Eddie Prévost's 'composition' 'Silver Pyramid'. En…

Mike Cooper: For the past 40 has been an international musical explorer, performing and recording, solo and in a number of inspired groupings and a variety of genres. Initially a folk-blues guitarist and singer songwriter his work has diversified to include improvised and electronic music, live music for silent films, radio art and sound installations. He is also a music journalist, writing features for magazines, particularly on Pacific music and musicians, a visual artist, film and video maker…

1997 release ** "Japanese bassist Tetsu Saitoh stands out as a new hope from across the ocean. He's the new ray in the sea of bodies that play the same standard fare. These two recordings, released on his own Scissors label, outline the here and now in his present body of work. On "M'uoaz", Tetsu is surrounded by an all-star cast, which includes saxophonist Michel Doneda and percussionist Alain Joule. [Vocalist Antonella Talamonti joins the trio on one track.] The music is rather sparse. Joule i…

"La Grima (Tears) was performed on August 14, 1971, at the Genyasai festival in Sanrizuka, Japan. The first six minutes or so of this performance can be heard on the omnibus LP Genya (released on CD in 2004). This CD presents the complete, unedited version of the performance.As if to slash through the audience's scornful, jeering reaction to Takayanagi's opening remarks, the group launched into a fiercely convulsive performance. Despite having a variety of objects thrown at them, Takayanagi and …

1998 release ** The Seasons: Vermont is a soundscape of Vermont as charted through the changes of its yearly soundings. It is a composition in four parts (Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring) for magnetic tape collage with an unspecified live instrumental/vocal ensemble. Though the actual composing of the music was completed between 1980 and 1982, it is the realization of a ten-year composition project. Goldstein listened closely and became attuned to what was the particular sound quality of each sea…

Matchless Recordings presents the first solo recordings from Lou Gare, founding member of AMM, recorded at Firefly Studios, Thowleigh, Devon, England on 13th and 20th April 2005. The album includes four tracks performed by Lou Gare - tenor saxophone. "Toward the end of his fine short essay for Laminal, AMM's 30th Anniversary set, Jim O'Rourke asks in relation to the experience of simultaneously hearing the record and viewing the accompanying photograph of AMM's The Crypt, "where was the saxophon…

"between", for me is about the tension and space between objects, and how we might occupy this area, to reside if you like between the conventions, to locate the flexibility that comes from de-theorizing the dogmas. It seemed to me as if Toshi and I were navigating a route through a familiar part of town, where each of the buildings stood for and represented expectations, styles, outcomes and histories. We wanted to resist entering the buildings and to stay between. The cover art and photo attem…

That said, "Weather Sky" is another thing altogether. Bruno Meillier invited Toshi to play a duo concert in St Etienne with AMM's no-concessions table guitar master Keith Rowe, and took them into the studio the day after to record for Erstwhile. Sensitivity to pitch is less important here (Rowe, remember, hasn't tuned his guitar since the early 1960s): the album's three tracks are real slow-burners. Rowe can be agile and aggressive when he wants to, but his preferred working method is to lay dow…

Two concerts of experimental improvisation from Eddie Prevost and Christian Wolff, two giants of conceptual improvisation and composition, recorded at Ikletick in London in 2015 and at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire in 2016; with superb pacing and brilliant execution, these dialogs between keyboard and percussive instruments explore unique sound worlds with depth, inquisitiveness, and a sense of wonder. "The set documents two concerts - 1, recorded at Iklectik in London in Septembe…

Recorded in May of 2002, almost a year after Fennesz' surprisingly successful (commercially) release, Endless Summer, one might have expected that this pairing would produce an intriguing collision of opposing forces. On the one hand you have all the pop-influenced, steamily melodic and erotic explorations that Fennesz had developed in the prior years. Countering that, one could readily imagine Keith Rowe as saboteur, finding rifts in the smooth mass to deviously penetrate and deflate. This does…

Matchless Recordings presents a live concert by Eddie Prévost and John Tilbury recorded at Gateway Studios, Kingston-upon-Thames, England on the 6th of January, 2004. The album includes eight tracks performed by John Tilbury - piano, prepared piano and organ and Eddie Prévost - stringled barrel, tam-tam, percussion. "Some of their music is delicate and pointillistic with wide spaces between sounds, but there are also rich, thick webs and, as indicated, Cage/Kleeube Goldberg thunkity-thunk machin…

Matchless Recordings presents a live concert by Evan Parker and John Tilbury recorded at Gateway Studios, Kingston-upon-Thames, England on Monday 3rd August 1998. The album includes three tracks performed by Evan Parker - tenor & soprano saxophones and John Tilbury - piano. "These musicians have chosen to eschew the given media of jazz, from whence Evan Parker received much of his initial inspiration, and the classical world from which John Tilbury received his early and formative training, in o…

Matchless Recordings presents a live concert by Hubbub recorded on September 2002 at Le Grand Mix by Jean-Pierre Bouquet. The album includes two tracks performed by Jean-Luc Guionnet - alto & soprano saxophones, Edward Perraud - drums, percussion, Jean-Sébastien Mariage - guitar, Frédéric Blondy - piano, Bertrand Denzler - tenor saxophone. Hubbub works on the sound matter and creates an expanded space inhabited by stripes, interlaced designs, resonances, tanglings, points and strokes, at the bor…

Matchless Recordings presents a live concert by Hubbub recorded at Centre Culturel André Malraux, Vandoeuvre-les-Nancy, France on December 4th 2001. The album includes two tracks performed by Frédéric Blondy - piano, Edward Perraud -drums, Jean-Sébastien Mariage - guitar, Bertrand Denzler - saxophone, Jean-Luc Guionnet - saxophone.

Hiss is an improvisational quartet made up of one Englishman and three Norwegians with an instrumental line-up that is unremarkable enough, but with a sound that is fairly unique. Keyboardist/electronicist Pat Thomas is a veteran of the British free improv scene while guitarist Ivar Grydeland, bassist Tonny Kluften and percussionist Ingar Zach -- though the latter three are younger -- are mainstays of the Norwegian free jazz and improv cultures. The reasoning behind the Arabic-sounding track tit…

1999 release ** "Released in 1999 as a wave of electronic-based free improvisation was slowly overtaking the world of avant-garde music, Poire_Z appeared as the first such record by a supergroup of sorts. The duo Voice Crack (Andy Guhl and Norbert Möslang), Günter Müller, and ErikM's proposition was of a highly introspective, slowly building shroud of electronically derived sounds: the popping of M's vinyls, the clicks and crackles of Voice Crack's electrical devices, Müller's cheap electronics,…

It was a long wait, but, 12 years after the fact, Fred Frith put together a live album of his group Keep the Dog, which had previously gone undocumented. Comprised of sax/flute player Jean Derome, guitarist René Lussier, keyboardist/harpist Zeena Parkins, sampling artist Bob Ostertag, and drummer Charles Hayward, Keep the Dog was formed by Frith in 1989 to perform a best-of repertoire of his career and remained his last rock group. By the time of this 1991 European tour, the unit had grown beyon…

Eddie Prévost & Veryan Weston. Recorded in England, 5/98, mixed by Evan Parker. "'Beauty as an Ear Thing' is a meticulous exploration of texture, full of soft explosions, the reverberant ring of spinning metals, and overtones that glow like embers, dying into silence; this music wouldn't be misplaced on an AMM disc. 'Clustered' rebuilds something out of the emptiness. The dislocated rhythmic feel is like an abstraction of something Monk and Max Roach might have played together. 'Fingers and drum…

Recorded live 2000 at Berlin (1) and 2001 at Graz, Wien (Vienna) and Berlin.

Second ECM album by the improvising quartet Dans les arbres: Xavier Charles (clarinet, harmonica), Ivar Grydeland (electric guitar, banjo, sruti box), Christian Wallumrød (prepared piano, harmonium) and Ingar Zach (gran cassa, percussion). Recorded in Oslo, June 2010 and April 2011.

1994 release ** "All live improvisations should be this much fun! This live date between turntablist and electronic weirdmeister Christian Marclay and percussionist and electronics tinkerer Günter Müller is what the art of improvisation is supposed to be: fun, continually compelling textually, and inspired. While many intellectuals have made wild pronouncements about Marclay and his art -- and it is art, make no mistake -- writing all sorts of blather about how he strips the adult century bare b…

2004 release ** Matchless Recordings presents a live concert by Christian Wolff and Robin Schulkowsky recorded at Poggiolo fram, Pozzuolo, Umbria, Italy on April 22-24 2003. The album includes fifteen tracks performed by Christian Wolff - composition, melodica, Robin Schulkowsky - percussion. "Rooms talk to me. I send out a sound, the space answers. The first message I picked up from the old barn in Umbria was 'yes'.Christian Wolff and I had been thinking, speaking about, even planning a CD with…

Debut album of the Norwegian-French improvising quartet Dans les arbres: Xavier Charles (clarinet, harmonica), Ivar Grydeland (guitar, banjo, sruti box), Christian Wallumrød (piano), Ingar Zach (percussion). Recorded July 2006, Festiviteten, Eidsvoll.

Matchless Recordings presents a live concert by Yann Charaoui, John Lely and Seymour Wright recorded at Gateway Studios, Kingston-upon-Thames on 2nd August 2000. The album includes four tracks performed by Yann Charaoui - cymbals and table top samplers, John Lely - piano and prepared bal-bal tarang, Seymour Wright - alto saxophone. "The new austerity on the first CD from the young exponents of the growing art of improvisation...in the year 2000, this approach in which traditional musical instrum…

2003 release **

Reissue of classic and long hard to find Purge/Sound League album from 1987 by Borbetomagus. Quartet session with the power-bass addition of Adam Nodelman. 1993 CD release “Seven Reasons for Tears beautifully documents the most simultaneously fierce and accessible periods of the band’s history. Converts and heathens can both bathe luxuriously in the radioactive improv-beauty-stream that lights up a room when the record is played at ‘special’ volume. Tears is the living spirit of Borbetomagus’ nu…

Nate Wooley: trumpet, voice. Steve Swell: trombone, voice. Tatsuya Nakatani: percussion._________ is an apparition. marks the first release for the New York based blue collar featuring Nate Wooley on trumpet, Steve Swell on trombone, and Tatsuya Nakatani on percussion. The group, informed equally by the free jazz tradition of the 60s in America and Europe and the lowercase reductionist innovations now revolutionizing improvised music, has found a way to deal with silence, sound, tension, and rel…

Burkhard Beins: percussion & string instruments. Dirk Marwedel: extended saxophone. Michael Vorfeld: percussion & string instruments.

Barricade, already known as the roots of ZNR, were a radical French commune formed in 1969 by over thirty musicians / non-musicians around François Billard (saxophone, voices, harmonica) and Gérard Lapeyre (violin) in Marseilles. They had wandered from place to place, changed their members one after another, and gigged on various stages in France around 1970.In 1973, they were split into two Barricades - one is a radically political & anarchic music outfit around François named Barricade Crève-V…

Matchless Recordings presents a live concert by Bark! recorded at LMC Sound, London, England on 10th April and 18th of September 1999. The album includes nine tracks performed by Rex Casswell - electric guitar, Phillip Marks - percussion, Paul Obermayer - electronics. "A wonderful album of crunch ‘n’ roll, as Manchester drumming -legend Phillip Marks leads Rex Casswell (electric guitar), best known for his tenure in Stock,Hausen & Walkman, and Paul Obermayer (sampler) through some entertaining a…

Awesome set with a sense of suspended time that marks out their musical world. Combined with the quality of attention and the virtuosic command that is evident in each stroke, it is almost hallucinatory in effect - Keith Rowe, John Tilbury, Eddie Prévost. Concert in Houston, Texas. 1996. "A stupendous continuation of the 90's AMM sound, ala previous documents such as Newfoundland, Live In Allentown and From A Strange Place. Shifting patterns consistently emerge; via Prévost's bowed percussion; v…

The International Carnival of Experimental Sound, or ICES '72 for short, was an ambitious festival sprung from the mind of Harvey 'Job' Matusow (1926-2002). Jumping off from his associations with the influential Source magazine, Harvey brought together over 300 artists from more than 21 countries to perform in London, England over the course of two weeks in August of 1972. Based on the theme of Myth, Magic Madness and Mysticism, he assembled an amazing diversity of performers working in diverse …

Carried like a feather by the wind, crushed by the pressure unmistakably present, this soprano saxophone trio, sculptors of air columns, explorers of fullness, tamers of emptyness, plunges us in the complex relationship of three poets of the breath. It is recorded with a great attention by POB in a warehouse in Toulouse.