ReR and related : The INCREDIBLE sale!!

The second and final of the 'second wave' line-up of 5uus (basically Dave Kerman, Bob Drake and Sanjay Kumar + guests). This is considered by many people to be their best period and I would probably agree.

"Second installment from monster band 5UU's, featuring rock complexity, extraordinary production (by bassist and singer Bob Drake) and high energy precision mixed with eccentric song-writing. People that work this hard are becoming an endangered species. Extraordinary."-Chris Cutler

"Another extraordinary release by Sardinian virtuoso Paolo Angeli, this time featuring compositions by Fred Frith and Bjork – all played solo in real time (though when you hear it, it’s hard to believe it) on his highly customised and extended, electrified, giant Sardinian folk guitar. A tour de force of technique and at the same time highly musical; and there is so much going on here at any given time that it is difficult to relate what your ears tell you to just one Frankenstein instrument. Dense...

"This disc will play in stereo on a CD player and with film and 5.1 surround sound (or stereo) on a DVD player or computer. The music, as always, is prodigious, sounding like a small band, but played by one person in real time (as the film attests). In this format, you can also see the instrument close-to - a highly rebuilt and extended giant Sardinian guitar - with many sympathetic and extra strings, motor driven hurdy gurdy wheels, whirling strings, springs and other appendages, played, like a cello...

Dagmar Krause-vocals Chris Cutler-drums, electronics Fred Frith-guitars, keyboards, violin, etc.

This was the 3rd and final album by the successor band to Henry Cow. I'm not really sure why (short playing length? the press had gone onto other things to champion? it wasn't released stateside, unlike the first two?) but this one slipped under the radar of a lot of folks, compared to their 1st two.
It's a very bleak, but also a very solid work. And very clever and sly in its own way - who...

Dagmar Krause-vocals
Chris Cutler-drums, electronics
Fred Frith-guitars, keyboards, violin, etc.
This was the 2nd and possibly most successful of the three albums by this immediate offshoot of Henry Cow, as it was recorded AS an Art Bears album (their 1st had been recorded as a Henry Cow album, but half the band objected, so it came out as being by Art Bears).
It’s also their best known album as it was released in the States by The Residents' Ralph label, in the early 80's and at the

"This is the second release (editor's note: no, it isn't, it's their sixth release; it's their second on ReR after three on Cuneiform and a first that was self-released) after a long wait, from this unique ensemble. Equally at home with the discipline of composition and the tightrope of improvisation Blast have evolved a fluid, pointillistic, unfathomable but transparent musical language that seamlessly integrates - over very short durations - highly complex writing and very free ranging improvisation...

Long-time Waysiders will remember this Residents-influenced recording project who released two fun, primitive slabs of home-made vinyl. Nice to have them here again and done so nicely!

"Way back in 80’s, before the term “Alternative” was hijacked to correspond with Seattle “Grunge”, the genre was held in high-esteem for its “D.I.Y. / Low-Fi” ethic.
The Blitzoids - along with The Residents, R. Stevie Moore and Eugene Chadbourne - epitomized this school of thought in the USA. From the...

The Camberwell Now were led by Charles Hayward, the drumming/vocalist mastermind behind This Heat, and was the band that he formed immediately after This Heat broke up.
They were released an album and 2 EPs in their lifetime, and this includes all of them in complete, chronological form, plus a track from a sampler.
Their sound was very informed by the This Heat esthetic, with more creative usages of drones than before and some incredible basswork.
While they didn't always quite...

A very great collection of unreleased live and studio recordings from the very exciting post-Henry Cow band of Chris Cutler.

"Cassiber (phonetically: 'a message smuggled out of prison') crashed like a locomotive into the 'Deutsche Neue Welle.'
Founded by Heiner Goebbels, Alfred Harth, Christoph Anders, and Chris Cutler (his first major project after News From Babel), Cassiber managed to fuse materials and attitudes drawn from experimental rock, fringe jazz, punk, pop, plunderphonics...

“50 years of experimental songs, instrumental music and sonic innovation, including tracks by Henry Cow, Art Bears, Cassiber, News From Babel, Aqsak Mabou, Duck and Cover, Peter Blegvad, Rene Lussier, The Work, Les Quatre guitaristes de L'apocalypso bar, Pere Ubu, The (ec) Nudes, Domestic Stories, Songs Between, NORMA ,p53, The Science Group, Cutler/Frith, Cutler/Parkins, Cutler/Dimuzio, Cutler/MacLean, Vril, Brainville III and Yumi Hara. Mostly co-written, but also taking in Satie, Bach, Eisler, Handel...

"Like its companion ‘Twice around the Earth', ‘There and Back Again’ is derived from a selection of the 365 location recordings made for Cutler’s daily Resonance FM radio programme ‘Out of the Blue Radio’ (2004-2005). It takes extracts from 44 of these environmental recordings to explore - amongst other things - the way memory works, and how the experience of passing time is constructed. That’s subtext. More important, it should make enjoyably complex listening: surprising, serendipitous, mundane but...

"A subtle, moody, rich and wide-ranging work, in which atmosphere, emotion and dramaturgy lead the ear far beyond music into a world of hints, evocations, anticipation and association and, in passing, reveal a complex metonymic language that, at a deep level, invokes that mostly unconscious lexicon of sound we have all absorbed collectively and subliminally in the course of a century of movie-going, television viewing, documentary recording and electroacoustic experimentation. Once sounds have been...

"Tod Dockstader and David Lee Myers are two pioneers of electronic music, but from very different epochs. Dockstader started working with optical sound in the 1950s, later working with vast Telefunken tape recorders that became so hot they had to be left overnight to cool down. His electronic soundscapes (Lunar Park and Apocalypse among them) are now being rediscovered and given the respect they deserve. Pond is his first new album-length piece since 1967.
David Lee Myers, on the other hand, made...

"The finest composer who ever worked in the medium of sounds assembled on tape"-OP

"The legendary collaboration between a leading American Musique Concrete composer and an instrumental ensemble directed by James Reichert where, for I think the first and to date only time, there was full integration of the written, played and manipulated sounds. The instrumental parts were derived from 'cells' of concrete sound and in turn were electronically transformed (in Robert Moog's then state of the art...

Bob's fifth album is another of his completely uncategorizable works. Bob performs on vocals, strings (guitars, bass, violin, etc.) keyboards & real drums, making these sound like a band effort.

"The latest collection of twisting, turning instrumentals and songs, and another instant classic. If you didn't venture down this way yet, now is a good time to start. In a category of one, Bob undermines musical, technical and production norms with a breathtaking amalgam of broken rules and unimaginable..

"52 songs of strange events, places and things. Includes 20 original paintings by Ray O'Bannon"-Bob Drake.

"The songs are brief, amusingly creepy or creepily amusing (takes your pick!) with really nice creepy/cool paintings to accompany the mood. Perhaps the scariest thing is that each of these miniatures is a fully formed, fully orchestrated and complete structure - no lazy snippets here - and Bob plays all the parts with his famously Paganini-esque virtuosity in spooky variable-tempo synchrony..

What Day Is It is Bob Drake’s first-ever solo album and was self-released by Bob in a hand-made package in 1993. He performed all the music with some assistance from Dave Kerman on drums. Odd songs with an almost folk or Cajun feel to them; folk music from another planet, perhaps. This is a great one for me if only simply because it was the first time that anyone heard Bob’s instantly recognizable solo sound! Recommended.

"Bob is already celebrated for his many ReR solo CDs, as well as for his...

Faust are a rightly legendary experimental German ensemble from the early 1970's. This is almost all of their two posthumous albums which feature the unreleased "Faust V/Faust Party 3" album and other lost recordings before they dissolved in the 70's.

When Wayside Music started, I bought something like 250 of these from an overstock dealer and was selling them for $2.00 each for years and years!
Nice to have this old friend from the past back once again at a bargain price (with the passage of 40 years, at the equivalent of the same price, actually!), and it’s also a little bit weird too!

Faust are a rightly legendary experimental German ensemble from the early 1970's. This was the last album to be released in their lifetime and the 1st to.

Janet is a great, great, classically trained guitarist who plays a unique, personal music, usually for solo and/or prepared solo guitar. She's been quietly working for a long time and this, her third release, recorded with the equally great, great (but better, better known) Fred Frith will bring her a lot more attention, which she fully deserves.
Having had a rare chance to see her perform in the East (she opened up for Boud Deun at one of their final shows in 1998), the fact that the public at...

A good performance of music for dance, all performed by Fred (via extensive overdubbing).

"Any new record from Fred Frith, one of the world's leading avant rock guitarists and composers, is a major event. Accidental was commissioned by a British choreographer who lives in Amsterdam, Paul Selwyn Norton, for a dance piece made with the Batsheva Company in Tel Aviv.
For Fred it's a return to basics, a series of deeply contrasting moods achieved with the simplest of means. Throughout the CD...

"In 1996, at the end of a two year residency, Fred organised an event at L'Ecole Nationale de Musique de Villeurbanne in France involving as many of the students as possible, grouped according to their departments - early music, rock, African drumming...

"This is a retrospective compendium of Fred's work over the last 17 years, with a lot of new material, perfectly put together and exceptionally listenable start to finish- an enlightening journey. It's my favourite of Fred's works in recent times. Close composition for electric and acoustic resources, tapework, concrete constructions, songs, sound effects and noise-art improvisations."
Guests included:
Iva Bittova, Tom Cora, Jean Derome, Haco, Tim Hodgkinson, Lars Hollmer, Rene Lussier...

This is the soundtrack to the film which followed Fred touring & playing in the late 80's, when he was actively on the road all the time. This functions as a sort of a 'best of' sampler, featuring many aspects of his work, some of which can be found on other albums, but most of which is only available here.
This includes many great players: Tom Cora, Haco, Zeena Parkins, John Zorn, Rene Lussier, Bob Ostertag, Lars Hollmer, Eino Haapala, Iva Bittova, Hans Bruniusson, Joey Barron, and many many others..

“With an all-star line-up that features Tenko, John Zorn and Christian Marclay (with guest Jim Staley on trombone), Technology of Tears started life in New York in 1986 as a dance commission by Rosalind Newman.
Fred took this opportunity to experiment with Henry Kaiser's brand new synclavier (the absolute state-of-the-art sampling and processing technology of the time - Henry had to take out a second mortgage on his house to buy it). It was the sophisticated sampling that fascinated Fred, and the...

“The long-awaited follow up to their first release on Derek Bailey's Incus label and a kind of prequel, going back to the time when Fred was playing home-made instruments and John was using mouthpieces and duck-calls as much or more than alto sax; this was back in the New York glory days when 100 new ideas popped up somewhere every day, and these performances lie right at the fringe of what most people would accept as "music".
Anyone wanting to get back to one of the roots of what later became known..

“The first from Bill for a long time, this is an abstract aural collage recorded between 2003 and 2006, over long distances by mail, that operates somewhere between soundscape and radio art, assembling environmental recordings, bits of broadcasts and other modified found sound into a very personal sound diary or imaginary journey.”-Chris Cutler

"Bill Gilonis (of the great post Henry Cow band, The Work) and Chantale Laplante worked on Zürich-Bamberg intermittently for three years. The CD comprises...

Booklets have "teeth marks" from the jewel case, otherwise all good."This album was born out of studio improvisations by Glandien with drummer Chris Cutler (Pere Ubu, Henry Cow, Cassiber), and avant tuba player Michael Vogt (Berlin Symphony Orchestra). Listening back to the tapes, the group agreed that the results were a failure. This did not stop them from ripping through a storming live set at Berlin's Anorak club the day after the studio session, but the general mood was that the recordings...

"This album is gorgeous. I picked it up expecting some crazy experimental thing because it's a Haco project, but what I ended up hearing was an achingly beautiful collaboration of slow, climaxing songs, inventive string technique, and head-bobbing goodness. This is a really, really good disc."-Eon Fontes May

"Charismatic singer, lyricist and performer Haco came to the fore in the early 80s with the group After Dinner, a sublime incarnation of surreal, direct, and offbeat Japanese/European pop...

"Susanne Lewis and Bob Drake met in 1980 at a Denver recording studio where Bob was working as an engineer. They immediately discovered a musical kinship and have continued to play and record in various projects since, notably Hail, but also Denver legends Thinking Plague and 5UUs.
Their first LP (Venus Handcuffs, 1986) was recorded in an abandoned yoghurt factory, the second (Gypsy cat and Gypsy Bird, 1983) followed soon after. At about this time Bob got a job as a sound-effects engineer for a horror

Second and final Hail album. Songs by Suzanne Lewis and Bob Drake, both ex-Thinking Plague - a punky cross between Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd and early Jefferson Airplane. This time, Bob Drake and Susanne Lewis are joined by some guests: Dave Kerman, Chris Cutler, Bill Gilonis.

“There's very little information available on this band but the Internet suggests they are part of the late-80s Rock in Opposition and avant-prog scene -- in fact, other albums by Hail are tagged as avant-prog on this site..

"Ad Hoc Records' new, four-panel digipack reissue of The Hat Shoes debut album will be especially welcomed by lovers of intelligent and thoughtful progressive music, with a hint of Romanticism.
Originally released in 1991, Differently Desperate is a studio offering of diverse avant-pop songs by a 'super-group' comprised of members Bill Gilonis (The Work), Catherine Jauniaux (Fluvial), Charles Hayward (This Heat, Camberwell Now) and Tom Cora (Skeleton Crew, Curlew). There's also a slew of well-known...

Charles Hayward is, of course, best known for his drumming and vocalizing feats with This Heat, Camberwell Now and Quiet Sun, but in addition to doing some improvising work, he has released a number of solo albums contsructed out of his excellent drumming, distinctive voice and single drones made from keyboards, melodica, etc. I saw him perform at RIO in 2009 and it was a real treat to finally see the great man behind the kit and in full voice. This is his first in quite some time and is a good one...

The last of the Henry Cow albums on Virgin, this includes their amazing final BBC session; 25' of Henry Cow perfection, a small taste of the famous shows that they performed with Robert Wyatt and a lot of purely free improvisation or prepared free improvisation, which is what they were doing live at this time.
This has been out of print for a bit now and is always in demand, and it has been remastered by Bob Drake and sounds significantly better to my ears!

"Originally released in 197

This is high quality live Swedish radio recordings from Goteborg (1975 - with John Greaves) and Stockholm (1977 - with Georgie Born). The sound is great here; Bob Drake worked from the original 8 track and stereo 2 track masters and you can finally hear Tim's follow-up masterpiece to "Living in the Heart of the Beast", entitled "Erk Gah". There's also some nice improvisations and other tunes and Fred's never otherwise released "The March", which is a really great one as well. Highly recommended...

"This is the first digital issue of Belgian songsmith Catherine Jauniaux’s classic recording from 1983. Her main co-conspirator is Tim Hodgkinson (Henry Cow, The Work), himself a mainstay in the world of modern, experimental music.
Together they perform a work which defies both categorization and genre labeling, offering up almost as many different styles of music as the instruments that played them. Besides capturing what could arguably be Catherine’s most unique and auspicious vocal work, this....

"Maksymenko plays drums with the force and power of a thousand supercomputers, he composes with the originality of a team of duck billed platypuses writing a sequel to Gravity's Rainbow, and he's more fun to listen to than Disneyland."-Henry Kaiser.

This is a collection of some of the very small but very great work by drummer/composer Michael Maksymenko, best known - if at all - for the amazing album and EP he did with the trio Kraldjuranstalten.
It collects eight tracks by Kraldjursanstan...

“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 through each track, along with the incredible work of musicians such as Chris Cutler, Fred Frith, and Colin McClure. Also comes with as close as you can get to a comprehensive guide to the bands featured...

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

"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...

“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

“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.

"Tired of hearing music designed for teenagers? Bored with all that revisionist jazz and self-indulgent art-noise? Here's something completely unexpected, from veterans of Motor Totemist Guild, Thinking Plague, 5UU's, and Giant Ant Farm. The result of this detour from their usual avant-gardism is a splendid recording, made mostly live in a barn in the south of France, of a 21st Century song-cycle representing a tongue-in-cheek manifesto for middle age in crisis. But this is not a collection of songs so....

“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...

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...

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.
This was their second and in my opinion the greatest release during the band's life and came very near the end of the band's existence. Using guitar, keyboards, saxes, bass, drums and vocals, despite the band's Canterbury-ish roots and their more...

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

“Slapp Happy meanwhile was planning its second record for Virgin. One night the trio showed up at the quartet's door and proposed that the two groups make the second Slapphappy LP together...Henry Cow jumped at the chance and Desperate Straights was the result. It's still a gem to my ears, and now at last it's possible to release it, properly re-mastered (by Bob Drake), its sound closer to the original tapes even than our earlier Nimbus vinyl pressing. Great songs, great arrangements, great performances...

"A big band studio recording made a month before Sleeping Beauty and released by Saturn in 1979 consisting of three quite different pieces: On Jupiter, which is a vocalised, relaxed, swing trance piece, UFO - Sun Ra's unashamed approach to disco, layering big band events over a funky beat and chunky chants -, and Seductive Fantasy, which lurches along in classic Ra fashion, very easygoing and with a good high-definition recording quality. It's nice to hear the oboe and bassoon, often lost in live...

"Between “Blue & Yellow” and “Deceit” came the EP, “Health & Efficiency”. It bridges a gap between the mostly improvisational former, and the highly composed latter, showing great diversity in the band’s sound in general, as well as nicely documenting their two extreme directions.
The title track is This Heat’s single most high-energy piece ever, and is a tour de force of singing, ensemble playing and sound texture; It is propelled along by Charles Bullen’s signature guitar strumming & ratcheting...