"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...

"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...

“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.

“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.”

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...

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...

“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.”

"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...

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...

'''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]

''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...

''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...

"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...

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

In the early 1980's, after disbanding the great trio Massacre, Fred Frith formed Skeleton Crew as a sort of a three person 1-man band, with Tom Cora (Curlew) and Dave Newhouse (The Muffins). Dave left pretty soon after, and for the next few years, the two man Skeleton Crew toured all over everywhere, bringing their unique blend of high musicianship (Fred on violin, guitar, half a drumset, vocals and Tom on cello, guitar, bass, the other half of the drumset and vocals) and low-tech protest song and...

“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...

Recorded live in 1984 at one of Sun Ra's many US concerts, this captures the Arkhestra in full big band mode, blowing up a storm that could probably be heard on Venus. This is a good, solid, representative mid 80's show with very good sonics (by Ra standards) by the Arkestra.

“This is a stunning late period Ra album. Beautiful space-chants and atonal keyboard freakouts plus a mix of Ellingtonian Ra-jazz as only the Arkestra could do it.
Maybe not the album to start with if you are unfamiliar..

"Originally released by Saturn in 1979, this is a studio recording by a large ensemble (including, unusually, electric guitar and bass). These are the first recordings of the titles included (though they were played live a few months earlier on German radio). Springtime Again is a floating, sonically open composition, with a distant sung ostinato, interestingly mixed. The door of the Cosmos, which features June Tyson, is a relaxed groove-driven piece in which electric piano, guitar and bass function as...

"This is an extraordinary and important work, breathtaking in its apparent simplicity but raised on a lifetime of study, thought and contrariness. All 41 tracks are, in one way or another, built around transcriptions or recordings of the Australian pied butcherbird - mining every possible variation.
Each composition pairs a bird, or other environmental sounds, with one or several instruments: standard, soprano, bass and contrabass recorders, violin, vibraphone, bassoon, viola, flute, cello, bass...

"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...

For my money, this is something of a dissapointment. The recorded sound is not particularly good and there were much better sounding documents to choose from. Why the band chose these particular recordings is beyond me...

"Repeat is This Heat’s fourth album proper, posthumously released in 1993. It harbours the most extreme musical side of This Heat’s experimental tendencies on disc, and is assuredly the band’s most radical offering. The title track is an oxymoron: An extended/edited version of the piece “24 Track Loop”, which had been previously issued on the Recommended Records’ double lp sampler in 1981, heard here sans the harmonizer effect. The original tracks were produced by David Cunningham (Flying Lizards)...

This Heat's amazingly good first album, first released in 1979, and consisting of several years worth of creative and hard work, distilled down into 40-some minutes of gripping music. At a time when, except for punk, there wasn't much happening in creative music, This Heat showed that there was another path. Remastered by the group in 2005.

"This Heat, the band, emerged in early 1976 on the leading edge of what became the new wave, but they were always apart, more scary and more subtle....