Wendy Gondeln - violin, electronic treatments, and more
Mats Gustafsson - piano mate, saxophones, and live electronics
Wolfgang Voigt - editing and mix (track 3 and 8)
Martin Siewert - guitar and lap top guitar (track 1 and 7)

“In 2018, Mats Gustafsson provided raw saxophonic material for the elusive Wendy Gondeln, who sometimes applied a scalpel, sometimes a pneumatic drill, to rework, remix, reimagine all the Swede's squeaks, pops, blats, and tones. In some places, Gondeln adds....

“Never-before-issued music from three very different settings in upstate New York, all recorded in the period running up to Poughkeepsie multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee's Nation Time.
From a year before that landmark LP, in the same hall at Vassar College, McPhee led a band with soulful vibraphonist Ernie Bostic and voluble rhythm section of Tyrone Crabb and Bruce Thompson, both of Nation Time fame, performing a John Coltrane-oriented set that included versions of Mongo Santamaria's "Afro Blue"...

Peter Kowald, bass, tuba, alphorn
Paul Rutherford, trombone
Günter Christmann, trombone
Peter van de Locht, alto saxophone
Paul Lovens, drums

Recorded January 19, 1972 Akademie Der Künste Berlin by Eberhard Sengpiel.

“The only LP featuring a band under Peter Kowald's name, Peter Kowald Quintet comes from a vital moment in the German bassist's career. A close colleague of Peter Brötzmann's in their formative years, including the saxophonist's debut For Adolphe Sax and th

“Gentle, incisive solo music for violin and electronics by one of the unsung giants of free improvisation.
Philipp Wachsmann emerged in the fertile mid '70s underground free music scene in London, playing with everyone from Simon Mayo to Barry Guy to Derek Bailey to Evan Parker, starting a band called Chamberpot, and making albums for the collective artist-run label he managed: Bead Records.
These LPs, 26 of them in total, were made in tiny batches and are now rare as hen's teeth. Writing...

“The untold early history of Amsterdam's seminal collective. Founded in 1967 by three of European free music's leading lights -- pianist Misha Mengelberg, drummer Han Bennink, and saxophonist and clarinetist Willem Breuker -- the Instant Composers Pool (ICP) was simply one of the most important vehicles for experimentation and improvisation in the history of creative music.
Culling ideas and materials from jazz, modern and contemporary classical music, Fluxus, traditional music from the Balkans and...

“Artist and musician Rosa Barba paired up with drummer Chad Taylor for their first duo record, In a Perpetual Now of Instantaneous Visibility. Documenting a September 2019 performance and installation at New York's Park Avenue Armory, part of an invitation by pianist Jason Moran, the CD's two mesmerizing tracks clock in at over 30-minutes each. Patiently built as collaborative soundscapes, they feature Barba's unorthodox conjoining of cello and film projector in which she uses the celluloid as an...

“The duo of saxophonist Larry Stabbins and percussionist Roy Ashbury was a mainstay of the London improvised music scene in the early 1970s. They recorded their lone LP, Fire Without Bricks, in 1976, and issued it in a tiny edition on the cooperatively run Bead label.
Stabbins has toggled between more pop-oriented projects like Working Week and Jerry Dammers Spatial AKA Orchestra and adventurous free music in bands led by Peter Brötzmann and Tony Oxley.
Born in Wolverhampton and based initially.

Günter Christmann - cello, trombone
Alexander Frangenheim, double bass
Mats Gustafsson - soprano saxophone
Thomas Lehn, live-electronics
Paul Lovens – percussion

“Since its first iteration in 1979, Vario has appeared in some fifty different versions, with a great variety of musicians, also actors, dancers, and filmmakers. It's the brainchild of Günter Christmann, a powerhouse of improvised music in Germany whose influence is out of scale with his acclaim. Since his emergence on.

“With his riveting performance in the inaugural Sequesterfest online festival in April 2020, Ken Vandermark inspired the Black Cross Solo Sessions. Already in the early days of lockdown, making good on the promise -- or threat -- of protracted off-road time, Vandermark had dedicated himself to the creation of a new book of works for solo reed instruments, which he debuted that day. The result of this watershed moment for the Chicago-based improvisor and composer was a body of works that reassert his...

“Okkyung Lee's is perhaps the most harrowing of the Black Cross Solo Sessions stories. At the onset of COVID, the cellist was called to travel to Korea to be with her dying father. The trip was sudden and didn't allow her to bring her instrument, but once there she was unable to return to New York because of the stringent lockdown. For months she was stranded without her cello, unable to practice or make any music. This intense alienation took a long time to lift. Indeed, even after she made it back to...

“Chicago-based saxophonist and clarinetist Ken Vandermark was invited to arrange a set of seventies music for a concert in 2019, and among the pieces he chose were tracks by funk legends Parliament and post-punk iconoclasts DNA.
On this 12-inch 45rpm EP, Vandermark's band Marker presents a unique take on "Night of the Thumpasorus Peoples," drawn from Parliament's 1975 LP Mothership Connection, and DNA's "Egomaniac's Kiss," which first appeared on the classic 1978 Brian Eno-produced collection No...

“Two masters of wind instruments blowing in from the Windy City. In 2003, as part of the seventh annual Empty Bottle Festival of Jazz & Improvised Music, Joe McPhee and Evan Parker squared off for a round of intimate dialogues. The resulting recording is just the second time they had played as a duet, the previous also being in Chicago, at a studio in 1998, where the limited their instrumentarium to tenor saxophones, resulting in the Okka Disc classic Chicago Tenor Duets (2002).
In this case, they...

Active from the early 70s until about 2010, Hans Reichel was a guitarist and instrument builder who built a number of very wonderful and unique guitars during his lifetime.
He has a relatively small number of solo albums (which is where I think he shines the brightest) and this one, from 1981, is probably his masterpiece. Impossible to describe (NOTHING else sounds like Hans’ guitars) and noisily beautiful. Highly recommended.

“Subtitled some more guitar solos, Bonobo Beach was German....

“German pianist Georg Gräwe, one of the most impeccable and imaginative improvisers in contemporary free music, made his debut recording, New Movements, in 1976, under the auspices of Free Music Production, the legendary Berlin-based organization run by Jost Gebers. At FMP's Jazz Now festival, in April of that year, Gräwe presented his working band, a classic hard-bop configuration with trumpet, saxophone, and rhythm section. Indeed, some vestiges of that hard-bop feel permeate the music, however it's...

“In 1966, pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach assembled his first large ensemble to play his compositions “Globe Unity” and “Sun.” This 14-piece band, which brought together some of the leading figures in European improvised music, would eventually expand – incorporating not only Europeans but also American and Asian musicians – and assume its rightful name: Globe Unity Orchestra.
In this, its nascent outing, beautifully recorded at Ariola Studio in Cologne, Schlippenbach’s band was already

“In the year that Juneteenth was finally declared a national US holiday, 2021, Joe McPhee and Tomeka Reid united for a live concert in celebration. Multi-instrumentalist McPhee was deeply moved by the historical nature of the circumstances, the incredible freight of that history of oppression and liberation represented in the legislation, both the insanity of its overdue-ness and the joy of its institutionalization. As a preamble to the music, McPhee led off with two poems, read with trembling, vehement...

“Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson might have a separate discography for his solo records. He's investigated the possibilities of unaccompanied reed music from almost every angle.
Presented with the opportunity to make a new solo record under the isolation of the pandemic, Gustafsson returned to a project he'd conceptualized but never realized: the playing-card pieces of Peter Brötzmann. Although these Fluxus-like prompts are better known through the two card sets the German saxophonist created...

“Every day over the course of a year starting in June, 2020, in something she refers to as a "domestic ritual," Zeena Parkins recorded solo electric harp performances in her home studio. The brilliant improvisor and composer had, like most of her peers, been sidelined by the pandemic; unable to tour, she spent the end of each day at the harp, playing until sunlight waned, inventing and discovering new soundscapes, keeping her musical self together while the world seemed poised to crumble.
Parkins's...