ReR Megacorp and related

Totally wonderful round up of all the 7” and EP titles that Geoff Leigh (ex-Henry Cow) released in the late 70s and early 80s. Quite wonderful arty-art-damaged post punk whatever whoo-haa! Recommended.

“Zig-zagged music, the specialty of MCCB. Across a wide spectrum of sound comes minimal electronics, jilted avantpop, artpunx, and progressive music. Some folk in there as well, somehow. This is a very fine collection of Leigh's various musings, and with it his sharp humor and immense talent shines...

Tito Pueblo-vocals
Bill Gilonis-guitar (of The Work)
Ilja Komarov-bass
Trixa Arnold-drums

"Tito Pueblo, aka Rob Murphy (Orchestre Murphy), has been responsible for some terrible lapses of judgement & taste. Here he gives us an album of post-Beatles pop songs that deal with the key issues of our times - drinking, sex, love, melancholy, obsession, & drinking. Expect fake French accordion, ludicrous cowboy songs & Flamenco rip-offs."-Chris Cutler

Tito Pueblo-vocals
Bill Gilonis-guitar (of The Work)
Ilja Komarov-bass
Trixa Arnold-drums

"Tito Pueblo, aka Rob Murphy (Orchestre Murphy), has been responsible for some terrible lapses of judgement & taste. Here he gives us an album of post-Beatles pop songs that deal with the key issues of our times - drinking, sex, love, melancholy, obsession, & drinking. Expect fake French accordion, ludicrous cowboy songs & Flamenco rip-offs."-Chris Cutler

Phil Minton and Veryan Weston began their collaboration in 1987 when they were commissioned by the Le Mans Festival in 1989 to write and perform a composition for 22 voices based on the prison writings of Ho Chi Minh. Since then they have toured the wo...

"The Mnemonists were a legendary group of composers and artists from Fort Collins, Colorado, who went on to call themselves Biota. They created drifting hypnotic sound collages out of pre-industrial loops, processed ambient sound, rock 'n' roll guitar, and fragments of half forgotten memory. Their work was highly visual, and always accompanied by beautiful line drawings and painted art works; the total meaning is forged from the combination of sonic and visual information. Gyromancy stands as a classic...

The 3rd release by this acclaimed organized sound group from Colorado, & their first, classic, which is a high-water mark of churning sonic storms. This is some of their finest work.

"...reminiscent of peering through a mircoscope at a drop of pond water: There's a lot more going on than you'd ever suspect."-Option

"Mnemonists were the precursor to Biota, essentially the same band with a different name, and a slightly more alien quality to their stream of consciousness expression...

Kind of different from typical ReR fare, but then again, don't forget that the first Cuneiform release was a (very good, if I must say so myself) compilation of Stevie's work. His work is a precursor to things like lo-fi and indie pop, but it is really just R. Stevie Moore.

"Phonography was Stevie’s first LP release, and an out-of-the-blue masterpiece: terminally idiosyncratic but with all the compositional qualities of great pop. A gifted songwriter, R Stevie (son of Bob Moore, Elvis’ bassist)...

Excellent works by Robert Musci and Giovanni Venosta, two Italian composers. Using samplers, synths, tapes and more, they combine their music with ethnic recordings.
Their use of recorded ethnic voices and rhythms combined with their own work makes for a cross between Jon Hassell & Holger Czukay. This is 75 minutes of music from their two early ReR lp titles Water Messages On Desert Sand and Urban And Tribal Portraits. For me, Water Messages especially was their best work....

"In the late 1980s two globetrotting Milanese composers joined forces to produce an acclaimed and prescient record made in equal parts from their own performances and ethnic field recordings, a little in the manner of Eno/Byrne's "My Life in the Bush...

This ensemble was formed to perform live music to films. The score straddles genres, running the gamut between composed, improvised, graphic, atmospheric and avant garde movie soundtrack. The films were three silent black and white classics: Joris Iven...

Excellent works by two Italian composers. Using samplers, synths, tapes & more, they combine their music with ethnic recordings. Their use of recorded ethnic voices & rhythms combined with their own music makes for a cross between Jon Hassell & Holger Czukay.

“A Noise, A Sound, originally released in 1992. The third episode of the alchemical association between Roberto Musci and Giovanni Venosta, reprinted for the first time. This work seems to be even more enigmatic than the previous ones....

Three GREAT albums (one never before heard or even known to have existed!) plus an amazing book that sets the scene for the Catalonian progressive scene just after Franco. Chris / ReR have really done a great job on this. Hugely recommended, even if you have two of the CDs already, because the unreleased disc and the booklet are both amazing!

“This box collects and restores two legendary and totally great mid-70s releases, met at the time with extravagant critical acclaim but few sales outside of..

N.O.R.M.A. are a Bologna, Italy based experimental septet. They are joined on this record by Chris Cutler as well as guest Phil Minton. The musicians joyfully help themselves from the vast storage of music's history. They complement pieces by Satie wit...

The Necks are an improvising post-jazz trio from Australia, whose music is about as far from New Orleans as you could imagine. It's jazz that has been stripped of all its excess, and been re-forged out of the belly of minimal trance club culture. Hangi...

"This is the 13th release from Australian maverick trio The Necks, now approaching their 20th Anniversary, and still occupying a genre-group of one. Their slow, gripping, development of a single idea over the length of a whole CD, while somehow obvious, has proved un-copyable, mostly because it so much depends on the unique musical personalities and extreme virtuosity of these three, profoundly different, musicians.
Having established their theme, The Necks, with Chemist, break the habit of a...

“Hypnotic, sensuous, dream-like, enveloping, funky, seductive, subtle, credible. The Australian trio of drummer Tony Buck, double bassist Lloyd Swanton and pianist Chris Abrahams have broken all the rules. They've transformed their (mostly) acoustic jazz piano trio into an outfit whose music sounds more like ambient electronic dance music, than any conventional notion of jazz. There are huge influences from R&B, Kraut Rock, The Doors, ethnic musics, Miles Davis and John Coltrane. With this persuasive...

The Necks have many fine albums, but this remains their single greatest work, imo.

This is a single full hour piece that, like Manuel Gottsching's E2-E4, sets up what seems to be a simple groove, and then dances around within that simple....

"Now in their twenty-fourth year, the Necks' new release, Mindset, their sixteenth album features two starkly contrasting tracks: the pulsating, raw, 'Rum Jungle' and the slower building, rather hypnotic 'Daylights.' Polyrhythms imbue both pieces with powerful forward motion, embroiled with which ethereal piano patterns interweave with bass, drums, electronics, churning Hammonds and noise-guitars. Drummer and percussionist Tony Buck writes: Mindset shares some elements in common with our previous album...

"Another scorching, hypnotic, ground breaking, concept-expanding release from outstanding Australian trio The Necks. This new double CD re-writes the rules yet again. Mosquito begins with the scrunching sound of a hand drum with hanging rattles being draped over percussion, while a fragmentary high piano melody tinkles in the distance. These two elements persist for the entire hour of the CD, providing a supporting texture for the most gorgeous piano chord sequence youve ever heard, gently coaxed by a...

"Their first studio CD for three years - named after an industrial suburb in Sydney - famous mainly for its correctional facility - Silverwater ranges further and wider than the Necks' former releases, exploring a more sectional structure that counterposes extremes and contrasts, and possesses a greater sense of forward motion than we are accustomed to with this most economical of bands - though it still retains the long, hypnotic single-track iterative form for which they have been praised. Layers and...

The latest release by the extraordinary Australian improvising ambient/jazz trio, The Necks, is drawn from a soundtrack the group composed for the prize-winning Australian movie (recorded in 1997), The Boys. For the Necks this is a revolutionary move;...

"Formed in Australia the late 1980s by Chris Abrahams, Tony Buck and Lloyd Swanton, the NECKS have been hailed by the New York Times as 'one of the greatest bands in the world.

"Entirely new and entirely now...They produce a post-jazz, post...

"A concert recording from Townsville, Thuringowa, Northern Queensland, Australia from February 15, 2007. For over two decades the Necks have been stepping onto stages with absolutely nothing in mind, waiting for the first sound to happen and then following it through – with glacial inevitability, and never any sudden shift of gear - or introduction of new material – for an hour or so. Never mechanical minimalism - since each moment is invested with an intense presence – this is more a dense liquefaction...

“Dark and majestic, News from Babel remains ahead of their time.”-Michael Draine

“The second record by this group (Lindsay Cooper, Zeena Parkins and Chris Cutler) with invitees Robert Wyatt, Sally Potter, Phil Minton and Dagmar Krause who sing, and Bill Gilonis (of The Work) who plays occasional guitar and bass, and who also produced the recording.
These are extended songs, unusually orchestrated and arranged and not much like anything else recorded before or since. Re-mastered and...

“Dark and majestic, News from Babel remains ahead of their time.”-Michael Draine

“The second record by this group (Lindsay Cooper, Zeena Parkins and Chris Cutler) with invitees Robert Wyatt, Sally Potter, Phil Minton and Dagmar Krause who sing, and Bill Gilonis (of The Work) who plays occasional guitar and bass, and who also produced the recording.
These are extended songs, unusually orchestrated and arranged and not much like anything else recorded before or since.”-Chris Cutler...

“Dark and majestic, News from Babel remains ahead of their time.”-Michael Draine

“News from Babel was the song project inaugurated by Chris Cutler with fellow ex Henry Cow composer Lindsay Cooper. The pieces for this first LP were written for a band that also included Zeena Parkins (harp - her first recording with the instrument) and the incomparable Dagmar Krause (another ex-band member) singing.
Using the studio as an instrument and experimenting with unusual instrumentation and techniques.

"Roscoe Mitchell (Art Ensemble of Chicago), John Tilbury (AMM), Pauline Oliveros (electronics innovator, Deep Listening Band), Wadada Leo Smith (U.S. avant garde).
Pointillistic improvisations by the experts. A conservative but beautifully recorded live concert performance from the Angelica Festival, 2011."

“After many years percolating, this 3rd release by Ossatura documents a quite dramatic aesthetic shift - including more acoustic instruments alongside the electronic; more settled, cyclic rhythms; more harmonic concord - even a song. On occasion reminiscent of the Necks in abstract mood, these pieces offer pools of complex, grounded, shifting textures, interpenetrated by atmospheric field recordings. Immersive. compositions by Elio Martusciello, Luca Venitucci, Fabrizio Spera.”

“The second release from this abstract trio who mingle hard electronics with acoustic and processed percussion. A more focused, subtle aesthetic here, I think, than on their last also excellent - CD. These are finely tuned and seamlessly integrated sounds that have been crafted and, importantly, performed; this is essentially played music that had been painstakingly reworked, and bears still the deep qualities of interactivity and immediacy that created it.”-Chris Cutler

"Improvisation is the...

Ossatura are an Italian quartet consisting of guitars, piano/synthesizers, drums, electro-acoustic objects, amplified objects, electronics, tapes, etc. and this record features the participation of Tim Hodgkinson on reeds & Hawaiian guitar. [ReR]

Pretty heavily left-field album of music mostly for brass and reeds, bass, drums and accordion, with medium wave radio broadcasts somehow filtered in on 3 of the five tracks. I don't know what to say and what do you say about a release as quietly and defiantly outside of today’s mainstream as this?; this sounds like my parent's Xavier Cugat album broadcast to Mars and back again. Meant completely in a good way.

"Just when you think it’s all over, along comes something completely unpredictable...

Pretty heavily left-field album of music mostly for brass and reeds, bass, drums and accordion, with medium wave radio broadcasts somehow filtered in on 3 of the five tracks. I don't know what to say and what do you say about a release as quietly and defiantly outside of today’s mainstream as this?; this sounds like my parent's Xavier Cugat album broadcast to Mars and back again. Meant completely in a good way.

"Just when you think it’s all over, along comes something completely unpredictable...

Great performances and excellent, rockin' live sound.

"A great live recording of the sadly short-lived version of the band that existed between the arrival of Eric Drew Feldman and the departure of Chris Cutler. By far the best recording of the Scott, Cutler, Maimone rhythm section, I think, and the whole band is on intense concert form: David racked up to 11, Eric working equally on foundations and fine details as to the out-there manner born and Jim Jones somewhere in the stratosphere...

This is the first recording of the seventeenth-century masterpiece, TheBook of Perrine. It comprises some of the most beautiful piecesexclusively written for baroque lute by Ennemond Gaultier, professor to the Queen of France, and his equally notable c...

Picchio dal Pozzo are considered to be one of the very few "Canterbury" inspired bands that emerged from Italy's fertile 1970's progressive rock musical scene. They released two highly regarded - and highly sought after - albums during their lifetime...

“Lesego Rampolokeng (born 7 July 1965) is a South African writer, playwright and performance poet. He came to prominence in the 1980s, a very turbulent time in South Africa. His poetry often criticises the establishment. His first instalment of poetry was Horns for Hondo (1991) and this was followed by End Beginnings (1993).
Lesego collaborates with musicians. He has performed in many countries and with musicians such as Julian Bahula, Soulemane Toure, Louis Mhlanga and Gunther 'Baby' Sommer.”

"Allen Ravenstine, erstwhile eminence grise of classic-era Pere Ubu, was one of the best-integrated and least predictable pioneers of analogue synthesis in rock until, in the late 1980’s, he quit both the public and the musical arena to pursue entirely different interests. But he never lost his interest in, or his feel for, analogue electronics. A few years ago, with Pere Ubu’s current synthesist, Robert Wheeler, he recorded ‘Farm Report and City Desk - in the context of a documentary about modular...

"Eccentricity in music is tricky in that it's difficult to embrace it in moderation. There's risk of having it come off as either overly (and gratingly) deliberate, or teetering over the precipice into full-blown novelty. Pere Ubu co-founder Allen Ravenstine's Waiting For The Bomb is one of these rare exceptions where peculiarity, nuance and genuine warmth align in such a way that it's perched right on that edge and all the more evocative because of it. One of the album's most striking and disorienting...

Fourth album for this band. They manage to sound rough-hewn in an attractive way, while executing some pretty interesting/complex musical maneuvers in a way similar to The Work, although they don't sound like them. I found parts of this reminiscent of...

This is one of those recordings that arrived unannounced in the mail. I knew Lesli Dalaba, of course, but the others were new to me. The project is Eric Glick Reiman's and I found it immediately intriguing. There seemed to be something quite subtle goi...

''New work from JR to listen to or to not listen to; 'environmental' but very much present, this is an impossible work to categorise, but an evocative and innovative one; and to my taste a keystone of a new form.'' [ReR]

'''Brain' is a CD musi-drama (opera pervers) with El Maestro JR luimeme, Shelley Hirsch, Phil Minton, a Nietschean dentist and thousands of Rosenbergs. Plus The Weatherman. Full texts and notes. Cover by Peter Blegvad.'' [ReR]

"Jon Rose is one of the most productive, original and focused people I know; he’s also an extraordinary musician and an inspired composer. To mark his 60th birthday we are releasing this 3 CD box of previously unreleased works ranging from radio...

''Yes, we're still shopping - this is an unexpurgated copy of the Victoriaville concert (Radio recording) with group: Lauren Newton, Joelle Leandre, Otomo Yoshihide and Chris Cutler. In my opinion the wildest and most dizzying version on record. Unfolding chaos with luminous performances - viz, Lauren's hair-raising interpretations and vocal event, Joelle's oscar-winning bag lady performance, THE CAST for maintaining an atmosphere of knife-edge confusion. All human life and a whole lot of other stuff too...

''2 excellent pieces - The Fence, about borders and fences all over the world, using very long amplified strings and documentary voices; a serious and substantial work. Bagni di Dolabella, ''a violinists guide to the treatments and political intrigues ...

''Subtitle: The dynamic of rogue counterpoint. Jon, alone, with some of his interactive, midified, altered and invented instruments (eg the whipolin, a disembowelled cello, fitted with a variety of not exactly centred hurdy gurdy type wheels made of va...

Recorded live in the Australian outback, world famous avante garde composer Jon Rose's The People's Music" is a symphonic cut and paste compendium representing an innovative amalgamation of violins, samples, vocal insertions, and percussion. A musical ...

"The spirit of enquiry and experiment is still alive and kicking - in Portugal anyway. On this double CD, Vitor looks twice at the same material.
On CD one we get his unique take on guitar improvisation, which is electric, songlike and mixes genres in an unusual way. Then he takes all the pieces on that CD and orchestrates them with drums, bass, piano, guitar, clarinet and trumpet, to make a duplicate CD on which the same pieces appear as quite different pieces. You can choose one or the other...

Chris Cutler-drums, low-grade electronics
Amy Denio-vocals
Bob Drake-bass, vocals, guitar, drums, percussion
Fred Frith-guitars
Claudio Puntin-bass clarinet
Stevan Tickmayer-keyboards, electronics.

Compositions by Stevan & lyrics by Chris.
This is the latest 'art song' work from Chris and assorted musicians & is in the tradition of News From Babel, Art Bears, etc.

Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer-keyboards & sampler
Bob Drake-bass, occasional guitar & organ
Chris Cutler-drums & electrified kit
Mike Johnson-guitars

Muchly awaited and anticipated 'instrumental complex rock deluxe' album. Mike Johnson is a great guitarist, and one of the aspects of his greatness is the fact that he doesn't show off, but only uses his talents as needed to put whatever he plays on in the best light. Well, the best light here includes some hellacious playing from him and fro