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

This is a collection of most of the 1984 album “Glass Tube”, which was After Dinner’s first album + some other stuff, plus 30’ of live material by this Japanese new music rock band, who predated the current huge interest in all things "Japan".
Characterized by leader Haco's vocals, this is subtly detailed, almost pastel, progressive Japanese music; they don’t sound like ANYBODY else!

“Can't say I've heard anything quite like this. Truly awesome in its presentation, it's hard not to want to...

"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. It’s probably my favorite of their albums

"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...

'Tumble' is a 74 minute commissioned for CD work, using the maximum available parameters offered by the medium. More recognisable organisation of materials here. Comes with a booklet of colour prints.
Tumble combines two distinct Biota projects recorded between Autumn 1988 & Spring 1989."

"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...

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 "Just Woke Up" was a big critical success; Hangman's...

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...

“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...

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...

"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...

''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

“There must have been something special going on in Verona last April; neither of these old sparring partners from Henry Cow and Art Bears can remember anything about this concert! By far the most aggressive of their duo albums, it leads us via howling fuzz guitar and machine gun percussion into walls of post-rock improvisation, obsessive industrial rhythms, and levels of excitement rarely generated by two people on a stage. The album is remarkable for Chris and Fred's rediscovery of melody and time...

“Single work song cycle written by Cutler (words) and Glandien (music), with performances by Fred Frith, Dagmar Krause and Alfred Harth.
Full book of texts and pictures. Following on from Art Bears and News From Babel. Cover by Peter Blegvad.”

“Alternately harrowing and slyly humorous, this collaboration between Chris Cutler and Lutz Glandien plays more like an Art Bears reunion featuring, Fred Frith on guitar and the irrepressible Dagmar Krause on vocals. What Glandien brings to these...

"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...

Compositions for the Hyperion ensemble by Dumitrescu, Avram, Hodgkinson and Cutler recorded at the Nancy-Vanoeuvre festival. Contents:

New Meteors and Pulsars (Dumitrescu, 1982) : For Tape and Percussion : Tape by Iancu Dumitrescu, Soloist, Chris Cutler

Nouvelle Axe (Avram, 1988) : Hyperion Ensemble

Life On Earth (Cutler, 1998) : Hyperion Ensemble with Ana Maria Avram, Prepared Piano and Tim Hodgkinson, Clarinet and Bass Clarinet, Chris Cutler, Percussion

Black Death...

We did a deep dig into the lost warehouse to come up with these; they are new and unplayed, but they’ve been sitting for over 30 years and there may be small corner dings, seam splits from travel, etc etc.
These are the original issues on Points East, which was ReR’s pre-CD vinyl label ‘dedicated solely to new music from Central Europe’.

“Der Expander des Fortschritts was founded in 1986. The “risk group” described itself as “pop musique concrète” or “abstract pop”. Der Expander des...

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...

"Although following The 5th Elephant in its musical organisation - around grids of pulses and highly crafted, rich sonorities - this work is more evolved, more focussed and more internally economic. Following a narrative thread this time, the whole is bound into a complex and ramifying exposition of repetition, transformation and evolution, where a return is no return and where perceiver and perceived are lost to time.
Tightly bounded by speech-derived (but massively re-formed) sonic materials, as...

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

"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...

Note: These copies are the original issue of this CD on the ESD label at a special price. Very few available.

The final Henry Cow album, & along with their first, this is my favorite of their many great works.
This stuff is the ultimate in humanly impossible to play works, but there they are playing it!
One side of Tim Hodgkinson's composerly insanity (no wonder he gave up composed music for the improvised life! How does one top this?) and one side of Lindsay Cooper's fine works....

“Some will remember his two great small ensemble compositions from an earlier quarterly. This collection concentrates more on his (prize-winning) tape works and includes the great Hong Kong changeover cityscape 'In Between', extracts from works about Israeli whistleblower Mordecai Vanunu and Edwin Armstrong (inventor of FM modulation) as well as other radio works and three chamber pieces based on African rhythms. Enormous variety.”-Chris Cutler

“One of the strangest CDs ever to come your way...

"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....

South Africa's Warrick Sony, working under the name The Kalahari Surfers, created an important body of political and socially charged songs on albums like Bigger than Jesus," "Own Afffairs" and "Sleep Armed", the albums from which this compilation is drawn. This is the second volume in the reissue series of his work. The music, while being ostensibly influenced by Henry Cow, Canterbury, punk etc. is pop with an attitude, and spoke out loudly against conditions in his country at the time.
From his...

We did a deep dig into the lost warehouse to come up with these; they are new and unplayed, but they’ve been sitting for over 30 years and there may be small corner dings, seam splits from travel, etc etc.
These are the original issues on Points East, which was ReR’s pre-CD vinyl label ‘dedicated solely to new music from Central Europe’.

“New work from this unusual song group, whose highly individual and musical style is developed further on this LP. Some will know them from our Quarterly

We did a deep dig into the lost warehouse to come up with these; they are new and unplayed, but they’ve been sitting for over 30 years and there may be small corner dings, seam splits from travel, etc etc.
These are the original issues on Points East, which was ReR’s pre-CD vinyl label ‘dedicated solely to new music from Central Europe’.

“Deep, eternally haunted compositions, rising like ghosts from the decaying earth, circulating like brittle leaves in the contaminated air.”-rym

“Boris Kovacs was born in Vojvodina, the multi-ethnic region of what was then Yugoslavia. He studied accordion and saxophone, going on to teach himself many other instruments. On this record he plays mainly soprano saxophone, leaving Jasna Jovisevic to take alto and bassclarinet. Like pianist Slobodank Stevic, she was classically trained, as was bassist Sinisa Mazalica. The drummer, Boris' son Lav Kovac, is celebrated for his very different playing in Howling Owl and with a variety of eastern bands...

Mario Marolt: sax #3, #5, #10, #12
Nino De Gleria: bass #4
Hugo Sekoranja: piano #11
Mire Lovric: vocal #14
Borut Krzisnik: guitar, piano, sampler, rhythm machine, tape, noise
Anton Kovac: bass #13, rhythm machine #15

“Borut Krzisnik is a Slovenian composer of contemporary music, based in Ljubljana. With his unique way of composing, he integrates live playing and music software on computer platform, and breaks free from confines of specific methodology.
Currents

Tim Hodgkinson-Steel Guitar [Lap], Clarinet, Bass Clarinet, Clarinet [Klarnet], Alto Saxophone, Sounds [Sound Manipulation], Voice, Tüngür [Dungur], Percussion, Ocarina
Ken Hyder-Percussion, Percussion [Drum Kit], Tüngür [Dungur], Voice, Ektare [Ektara, Bass Ektara], Sounds [Sound Manipulation]
Gendos Chamzyryn-Voice, Tüngür [Dungur], Percussion, Doshpuluur, Cello, Performer [Chadagan, Khomous], Ocarina

“The one album, I'd say, that deserves a perfect score on concept alone.
Why..