Jazz /
L'homme à la Caméra / La Glace à Trois Faces
"Un Drame Musical Instantané were founded in 1976, featuring Jean-Jacques Birgé, Bernard Vitet and Francis Gorgé. Their aim was to promote collective musical creation, co-signing their albums, which they consider as artworks in themselves, or their live shows which they tried to renew every time they played. Their sound was created with many influences: they borrowed their sources from rock (synthesizer player Birgé and guitarist Gorgé, both authors of the album, Défense de); jazz (trumpeter Vit…
Laboratorio Della Quercia
In the summer of 1978, an ambitious twelve-day experimental jazz project was undertaken at the ancient amphitheatre, Tasso della Quercia, on the slopes of Rome’s Gianicolo hill. The idea was to assemble the leading players from Italy’s avante-garde jazz scene, revolving around members of Grande Elenco Musicisti (or GEM), such as saxophonists Tommaso Vittorini, Eugenio Colombo and Maurizio Giammarco, trumpeter Alberto Corvini and trombonist/composer Danilo Terenzi, together with visiting American…
Earth Rot Instrumental
**Comes packaged in a gatefold jacket with a 28-page booklet.** Earth Rot is visionary composer / arranger / producer David Axelrod's third album, and the last of his Capitol trilogy. Recorded as a concept album about the decrepit state of the environment in 1970 Los Angeles, and scheduled for release on the first Earth Day, it features choral vocals and marks a departure for Axelrod's signature sound, which would take on a jazzier feel in the 1970s. The instrumental version of Earth Rot was fir…
Earth Rot
**Comes packaged in a gatefold jacket with a 28-page booklet.** Earth Rot is visionary composer / arranger / producer David Axelrod's third album, and the last of his Capitol trilogy. Recorded as a concept album about the decrepit state of the environment in 1970 Los Angeles, and scheduled for release on the first Earth Day, it features choral vocals and marks a departure for Axelrod's signature sound, which would take on a jazzier feel in the 1970s. This definitive version of Earth Rot, oversee…
Aerials and Antennas
**500 copies** "This first vinyl offering by a sporadically 20-something years unit, still extant, originally assembled under the name Cinema Soloriens by filmmaker / musician James Harrar in 1993, to play accompaniment to his films. The line-up usually includes legendary Sun Ra alto master (and current Arkestra leader) Marshall Allen with Harrar (who is also known for his work with Arthur Doyle and Daevid Allen), plus whoever else is tapped. For this date, recorded in Nashville back in 2016, th…
Volume 1
**500 copies** The debut release from the long-running Chicago based collaboration of Quin Kirchner, Daniel Van Duerm and Matthew Lux aka KVL. Also featuring super special guest Jaimie Branch on Peaceable. KVL sits nicely in the same headspace as recent modern improv that eschews a more traditional "jazz" label. Think Matthew Lux's Contra/Fact, Jaimie Branch's Fly or Die, Shabaka Hutching's Sons of Kemet or The Comet Is Coming, Ben Lamar Gaye, Rob Mazurek and others. Of course, many folks will p…
Invitation to a Dream
**CD version** First release from the first time trio of legends Susan Alcorn, Joe McPhee and Ken Vandermark. Invitation to a Dream is not only the first recorded statement, it is also a document of the very first meeting of the trio. Back in 2016 we asked Alcorn and McPhee to play a duo set at our favorite festival Cropped Out in Louisville, KY, and after getting our minds blown we knew we had to get the duo into a studio to record an album. After a few failed attempts due to schedules and bad …
Segment Tones
**300 copies** "Tonus is a group that always contains Dirk Serries and his wife Martina Verhoeven, but otherwise seems to be an open membership group. Today, on Segment Tones, it is a trio. Serries plays accordion and soprano melodica (the latter I would believe for the first time), Verhoven is on concertina and cello and Colin Webster on clarinet and alto saxophone. Whatever the line-up of Tonus might be, I do believe they play slow and quiet music; music that is not in any way, shape or form, …
Impetus
**300 copies** "Dirk Serries (acoustic guitars), Kris Vanderstraeten (percussion) and Martina Verhoeven (piano) – these are three featured figures of international avant-garde jazz scene. Musicians are playing and collaborating with dozens of other famous jazz masters. Their music is played with expression, drive, creativity and energy. All three musicians have their own style of improvising, sparkling virtuosity and the will to create new, exciting and modern sound. All their music is usually b…
Boskage
**300 copies** "The modus operandi of more than a few of the recent New Wave of Jazz releases is sparse free improvisation using extended techniques. These albums, often disjointed with abrupt transitions and long minimalistic passages, exhibit a surprisingly consistent approach despite their aleatoric nature – a commitment to the unpredictable. Enter acoustic guitarist Daniel Thompson and saxophonist Colin Webster, both experienced improvisers who team up on the three tracks of Boskage. This pa…
Close | Quarters
**300 copies** "Close | Quarters is a seven-track slice of often compacted and angular improv for viola and prepared chamber. The two players here are Benedict Taylor and Anton Mobin. Taylor is a British improviser / avant musician who has been active in the scene since the early 2000s releasing a good body of work, as well as becoming a respected name, and Frenchman Mobin has once again been active since the early 2000’s making a name for himself as both an improviser and sound artists.The albu…
Ear Duration
**300 copies** "Overall, especially on the over 35-minute Set 1, which perversely in placed last on the CD, the improvisations’ mooring is supplied by the brief, repetative but distinctive patterning of Belgian pianist Martina Verhoeven. Much like John Tilbury’s program with AMM, these continuous motifs are the reassuring signposts for the puffs, scratches, strums and plops contributed by Britons, flutist / alto saxophonist Colin Webster, violist Benedict Taylor and Graham Dunning using a snare …
Zeitweise Leitcher Schneefall
**300 copies** "One aim of improvised music is to create unprecedented sounds. And by specializing in the textures that can be extracted from the spinet, the piano’s 18th Century ancestor, keyboardist Christoph Schiller, who now divides his time between Basel and Weil am Rhein is firmly involved in this trope. On this hushed, microtonal CD, Schiller applies his tweaking of the traditional keyboard to responsive sounds from an instrument as venerable as his, Anouck Genthon’s violin on Zeitweise L…
Puncture Cycle
**300 copies** "Spreading their intuitive playing over nine, randomly sequenced improvisation titled with numbers, Benedict Taylor and Dirk Serries many variations on fiddle string twists and slurred guitar fingering produce tunes that are manually constructed, deconstructed and put back together again. Tracks often posit and resolve singular experiments. For instance, the hard dry swagger of IV opens up into a tremolo and spiccato bowed narrative. Swift, repetative slithers from Taylor enliven …
Cagean Morphology
**300 copies, 2019 stock** "The Serries-Verhoeven acoustic, chamber duo – Serries on the acoustic guitar and Verhoeven on the piano – is actually the last one to be recorded in the Tonus series but the duo distills the very essence of the series serves as a fitting introduction to this series. Cagean Morphology was recorded, mixed and mastered at the Sunny Side Studio at Anderlecht, Belgium on March 10th 2018. The minimalist layout of the Tonus series, was designed by Rutger Zuydervelt, aka Mach…
Texture Point
**300 copies, 2019 stock** "Minimal art is often presented as an act of simplification, a field in which nothing much happens and lesser (or even lazy) artists can have a field day. However, it is both in the visual arts and in music, perhaps one of the most misunderstood movements. Minimal artists not only sought out a certain core essence, but leading artists and theorists, such as Donald Judd, also offered a reaction against the extravagant focus on the subjective by the abstract expressionis…
Intermediate Obscurities I+IV
**300 copies, 2019 stock** What self-taught musicians lack in education and (sometimes) technical prowess, many make up for with the need to carve out a space for themselves. Their trajectory is often like a perpetual motion of restless movements. Even among those musicians, Dirk Serries is a special case. Loyal to whoever he comes across, but a solitary seeker at the same time. An eternal outcast whose discography expands at a swift and steady pace, building an island entirely of his own, despi…
Innocent as Virgin Wood
**300 copies, 2019 stock** "In its essence, free improvisation is a leap into the unknown. A question mark. And while it is possible to reproduce previously used ideas, in its purest sense it takes balls to accept its challenges, for the simple fact that the performer is out there alone, even when playing with others. Free Improvisation is being naked on a stage. The unavailability of form and reassurance about what is happening next cannot be underestimated. In improvised music, the musician is…
Quartet & Quintet - Double Vortex
**300 copies, 2019 stock** "Understated, tightly controlled, minimalist music always gets the better deal. There is something mature and cultured about an artist who distills and reaches for the essence instead of provoking and dabbling in exuberance, volume and a cluster of diverging ideas. In a world that is nearly driven to total chaos by a maddening abundance of impulses, Goethe’s worn out adage - that it is in self-limitation that a master first shows himself - has become the ultimate compl…
I
**300 copies, 2019 stock** "(...) Lisle, Serries and Webster reconvened again in October 2015 for another studio recording at the same studio in London, now calling themselves the Kodian Trio. This trio is supposed to be a working group and is already touring the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.The interplay on their debut release is much more energetic and experimental than the one explored on Apparitions. Serries and Webster alternate the leading roles, both sounding aggressive and assertiv…