Jazz /
Sound Flower
*2025 stock* In essence, group improvisation is a conversation. It relates to a certain point in time, its current surroundings, personal expression and the stories each performer choses to tell from their musical paths. On Sound Flower three masters of improvised music from different generations meet for the first time as a trio and their world of sound (in Danish: klangverden) is immediately captivating. You can listen to each performer and they will tell you a story of their own, or you can t…
Groet
2025 stock In the ever-evolving landscape of European improvised music, Groet stands as a testament to the restless creativity and sly wit of pianist Guus Janssen and drummer Han Bennink. Released on the Dutch label Data in 2005, this album captures two of the Netherlands’ most idiosyncratic voices in a dialogue that is as unpredictable as it is deeply musical.
Janssen and Bennink, both veterans of the Dutch avant-garde, approach the piano-drum duo format with a sense of play that borders on the…
Elastic Jargon
2025 stock Elastic Jargon is an album by Dutch composer and violist Maurice Horsthuis, released in 2007 on the Data label. The project brings together a unique ensemble of string players, with Horsthuis as the sole composer, exploring the boundaries of what can be achieved with string instruments alone.
Slang
2025 stock In the shadowy interstices of contemporary jazz and free improvisation, Slang by Elastic Jargon emerges as a document of restless inquiry and coded communication. Released on the Dutch label Data in 2010, the album is a cryptic dispatch from the margins, where genre boundaries are not so much blurred as actively subverted
Elastic Jargon—true to their name—stretch the language of jazz until it snaps, then reassemble the fragments into something at once familiar and alien. The group’s a…
Astronotes
2025 stock In the ever-mutable landscape of Dutch jazz, Joost Buis’s Astronotes stands as a testament to the playful collision of composition and improvisation. Released on the Data label in 2004, the album finds Buis—trombonist, composer, and bandleader—at the helm of a vibrant ensemble drawn from the heart of Amsterdam’s creative music scene.
From the opening bars of “The Eggs,” it’s clear that Buis is less interested in adhering to tradition than in subverting it with wit and invention. The b…
The Ill-Tempered Piano
2008 release ** ""Nicola Cipani's "Ill-Tempered Piano" is a suprising and playful album of solo improvisations played on broken and untuned pianos. Cipani's accomplished melodic and rhythmic approach and his responsiveness to each instrument's raw potential set this project apart. The recordings were made over the span of two years in different New York City warehouses, on several keyboard instruments (among the pianos you hear also a clavichord), some of which are so damaged as to be hardly rec…
Breath in Definition
Ingrid Schmoliner and Alex Kranabetter are pillars of the improvised and experimental music scenes inAustria stretching back more than a decade. Although the former is known primarily as a pianist and vocalist and the latter as a trumpeter, they both possess seriously expansive sonic palettes. Schmolinger works rigorously with sound direction to generate vibrant psychoacoustic and spatialized effects, while Kranabetter routinely deploys electronics to radically transform and expand his sound wor…
Voyage À L'Intérieur D'Une Trompe
1992 release ** "Descriptive work comparable to film music or the story of Babar... First collective composition of the Compagnie d'Eustache by Jean-François Bovard, Pierre Cochard, Philippe Genevay, Jacques Henry, Philippe Krüttli, Jean Rochat."
The Trance of Seven Colors
Big tip! *2024 much needed repress* The Trance of Seven Colors by master Gnawa musician Maleem Mahmoud Ghania and free jazz legend Pharoah Sanders comes in a gatefold sleeve and also include download code. Produced by Bill Laswell and - according to The Attic - "one of the most important albums of Gnawa trance music released in the '90s", The Trance of Seven Colors was originally released in 1994 on Laswell's Axiom imprint and is the magic meeting of two true musical masters. Maleem Mahmoud Ghan…
Edge x Jim O'Rourke
*2024 stock* The cliffhanger collaboration by Masataka Fujikake and Takeharu Hayakawa, which has been going on since 2007, is now complete with a live performance of the May 2011 session with Jim O'Rourke as a guest. The trio's bold arrangements are a powerful work centered on a solitary guitar sound that only Jim O'Rourke could express.
Cereal Music
LP – strictly limited one-time edition / 500. Jacket printed on reverse board, includes insert with full credits & liner notes by William, Ellen, and Steven. A beauty. Includes full-res download card/code of the total work (w/ 3 bonus tracks). Cereal Music is indeed William Parker’s first spoken word album – poetry and observations from a profound life devoted to the path of finding truth in beauty and speaking truth to power. Hard to believe this hasn't happened before! Parker’s words are furth…
Lullabies And Other Stories
CD edition. Solo album by Walter Prati, here back on his cello driving us through an illuminating and sublimative journey. Walter Prati’s composition for cello seems to interpret this range of facets, these transparent and elusive angles. Contemplative music, to a certain extent, but also ready to express fragments lyrically, and their rushing to compose a mosaic. For reasons I cannot explain, I catch a glimpse of several iridescent colours, between turquoise and hard blue with odd crimson strip…
Next
Souffle Continu Records present the first vinyl reissue of Cohelmec Ensemble's Next. The Cohelmec Ensemble celebrate, above all, the pleasure of collective music-making. A group without a designated leader, they base their approach on reciprocal listening and equal responsibilities. This is reflected in their name, created from the first syllables of the founding member's names, which would remain unchanged in spite of the subsequent personnel changes: COH as in Jean Cohen (saxophones), EL as in…
Busy Butterflies
*2023 stock* "To watch two butterflies in flight is to see a complex intertwining of zigs and zags, dips and weaves, as each—seemingly erratically--rides the turbulence its wings create to carry it along. Together they trace an unchoreographed but nevertheless coherent set of variations on the line as they move with, against and through each other’s paths.
The intricate pattern of two butterflies’ interwoven flight paths stands as a fitting analogue for the nuanced complexity of Busy Butterflie…
Transient
"Second album for Clairvoyance, a trio that sublimates improvisation through a blessed chemistry, delivering a perfectly balanced music where elements coming from different derivations and attitudes find grace and essentiality, freshness and solidity. Narrative spots and timbral consciousness inform this classy band and make this record unmissable!!
Clairvoyance's fundamental orientation--an orientation that, collectively and individually, represents a compositional stance toward improvisation. …
Wells
"Amirani Records, the label founded and run by Milanese soprano saxophonist Gianni Mimmo, ends its eighteen-year run with three final releases. The last of the three, a recording of the Sestetto Internazionale, was reviewed here earlier; preceding it a duet for Mimmo and Finnish soprano and sopranino saxophonist Harri Sjöström, and a solo recording by Milanese cellist Walter Prati.
Mimmo and Sjöström are frequent collaborators, whether in the Sestetto Internazionale or as duet partners, and on W…
Due Mutabili
[…] There is something slightly daunting about the notion of an improvising sextet. Do the casual math of instrumental permutations from six soloists to one sextet, adding in duos, trios, quartets and quintets, and you have something like 55 possible combinations. Literally anything might surface, but among the least likely is the superb music achieved here by Sestetto Internazionale, music that dances between the ideal poles of inevitability and unpredictability, inviting a sense of wonder. Lis…
The Complete Recording Vol. 1 - Velocities
*2023 stock* Andrea Centazzo, LaDonna Smith and Davey Williams met for the first time in December 1978. They recorded the first part of this album in 1979 and the second in 2010. An exquisite and celebrated example of improvised music.
The Complete Recording Vol. 3 - Rituals
*2023 stock* Violinist LaDonna Smith and Guitarist Davey Williams teams up with Andrea Centazzo in this third release of their complete recording collection. Recorded in NYC at the Stone during the Ictus Nights Festival celebrating 35 years of Ictus, this CD is a must for improvised music lovers.
Variations (LP)
* 250 copies, hand numbered * On Nils Vermeulen’s first solo album, the sound of the double bass is the main variable. Recorded at the empty Ghent Opera, where every note, attack and vibration comes through, including the creaking of the wooden floor. There is no hiding in reverb, nor in easy playing. The strings Vermeulen uses on this recording (‘Tempera’ strings by Gerold Genssler), are inspired by traditional gut strings, and have lower tension to let the instrument resonate freely. The pie…