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

The first release on ReR by this quite amazing guitarist and how most of us first heard of him. Even with all his other releases, this one is still amazing and is recommended!
This is an album of solo guitar music performed on the 'Giant" Sardinian guitar, which is sized somewhere between a conventional guitar and a cello and is tuned lower than a standard guitar. Paolo has taken this folk instrument and has completely rebuilt it. There is a large mechanical claw stuck onto the side of the body which..

"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...

Takumi Fukushima – violin, voice
Paolo Angeli – prepared Sardinian guitar, voice
Excellent album of duos; some a bit wild, others, very intimate and - dare I say - beautiful? Remember, Monk wrote a song called "Ugly Beauty"... After the demise of Volapük, I was wondering when I would hear Takumi again and I am happy to hear her here with Paolo who makes an excellent musical partner for her.

"This is Paulo Angeli’s fifth release, this time with ex-After Dinner, ex Volupuk violinist and....

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

"Six years in the making, this is the sixth CD released by ReR from the visual/sonic art group Biota. Unique in their history and method, Biota painstakingly construct complex, organic structures that mix extensive studio processing and musique concréte techniques, with a highly eclectic orchestra of acoustic and electronic resources - from kit drums, through mediaeval winds, strings and barrel organs, to early experimental electronic instruments. Their works are always performance driven and interleaved...

New songs from the master of witty, cynical but wistful song. With John Greaves and Chris Cutler. Follow up to the masterly Just Woke Up, sporting great new songs and guests including B.J.Cole, Geraint Watkins, Adam X, Chris Stamey, Bob Drake, Stoffer Blegvad.

“Described as a "fusion of Lou Reed and Bob Dylan, cross bred with English humorist Jon Hegley", Peter Blegvad has carved out a unique position as performer, songwriter and cartoonist. This is his third solo album on ReR. The 1996 release...

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...

"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...

For a number of years in the late 90s, Chris traveled the the world, giving solo performances on his specially made electric kit and various acoutrements.
I’m biased because I saw several of these concerts (and even put on at least one), but they were very different, very entertaining and very much completely NOT what you would expect a ‘solo drum concert’ to sound like, probably because it wasn’t a ‘solo drum concert’. Conditionally recommended!!

"Here at last, a solo electronic drum...

''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

"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...

"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...

Part 1: Bob Drake-all instruments and voices
Part 2: Live a La Borde Basse
Bob Drake-guitar & lead vocals
Kavus Torabi-guitar and vocals
David Campbell-bass and vocals
David Kerman-drums and vocals

What a great concept! Multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Bob records an album as he always does; he plays all the parts himself. But he's got this nifty band he assembled. A VERY nifty band, actually! What a shame to waste them!
So...he sends them the most basic elements of

"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..

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.

"At last, a well made film that captures the intensity, caprice, craziness and visionary beauty of Faust’s late ’90s performances, when, for a moment the core members of the original band were temporarily reconciled. Professionally filmed at the...

Jonas Åström (guitar, keyboards, percussion, piano, vocals)
Jan Nilsson (bass guitar, flute, percussion, piano, [homemade] instruments, vocals)
Michael Hellström (drums, keyboards, percussion, vocals)
Lars ‘Lach’n’ Jonsson (violin)

This sat and sat for years and years until Udi Koomran and Dave Kerman posted on a music board about how much they liked this and then, zip, they were gone.
Thanks, guys; the check is in the mail!
Fortrangt Hushallsarbete is a 2002 release on..

Gravity is one of Fred's most enduring & endearing works. It was his first post-Henry Cow solo album, and he recorded it with the backing of The Muffins on one side of the original album and Samla Mammas Manna on the other + Marc Hollander.
It's the closest thing to a progressive rock disc that Fred has ever released and it's a tuneful yet still avant progressive rock work. This is a classic and is highly recommended!

“1980's GRAVITY represented guitarist Fred Frith's first major break from.

Long time Waysiders will remember the limited edition box that we sold with the two albums of this concert a very long time ago. They may also remember the many concerts that Fred performed with this set up in that style in the late 70s/early 80s all over the world. I do.

“Concert recordings made at various venues in Japan in 1981 and released by Recommended Records Japan in 1982 in an edition of 1000. Out of print since, though highly sought after, it has now been transferred and remastered...

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..

"An instant Fred classic, ‘Happy End’ presents two, related, small-ensemble works for 6 and 7 musicians respectively - mostly strings of one sort or another, with percussion, flute, clarinet and electronics. Fred, violinist Carla Kilsteht and percussionist Willie Wynant play throughout providing continuity across the pieces, as the music constantly unfolds into new textures and dialects. Melody, harmony and rhythm are omnipresent, though not always obviously colluding, and the music moves with a...

“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..

"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 should be scrapped.
A year later Glandien decided to re-look at the...