Experimental / Free Improvisation

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.

Two electro acoustic compositions from Alessandro Bosetti from 2000 and 2002 and a recent text sound composition of Antje Vowinckel. It is very fine composed abstract music that starting from microscopic sound details develops organic and highly dynamic although very reduced structures. All the pieces make an extended use of silence, space and very small, carefully shaped, sound particles creating a feeling of natural “breath” and flow. Although this music shares some techniques with the “musiqu…