"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...

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...

"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...

"Three old hands out of Soft Machine, Gong and Henry Cow stretch already flexible musical material into one shape after another, then tie it in knots and generally have a fun with it. High quality recordings combined with seat-of-the-pants playing keep the tension high, underpinning a richly labile music, full of shape and colour that is constantly in motion. Compiled from recent concert recordings in Berlin, London and Tel Aviv, this clutch of extended songs should be to the taste of anyone familiar...

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...

''Digital recordings from the Nordlydd Contemporary Music Festival and Berlin's Tacheles from 1991. Plus the historic prescient noise-music 1978 analogue recording from Limoges as a bonus. All singing, all dancing, all hell let loose. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee...'' -Chris Cutler

"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...

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..

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...

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.

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...

"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...

“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 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...

"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...

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..

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...

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...

"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...

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

“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...

"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....

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...

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

Recorded at The Teatro Cilak, 1/23/1978, Milan, Italy.
Sun Ra: piano, organ, Moog, Crumar Mainman, vocals
John Gilmore: tenor sax, drums, vocals
Luqman Ali: drums, vocals
Michael Ray: trumpet, vocals

This is a particularly good and weird one, with Ra playing a keyboard that included a primitive electronic rhythm box; that's right - this is Sun Ra with 'beats'!

"In the winter of 1977-78, philosopher, pianist and bandleader Sun Ra was in Italy. The Italian tour..