"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

“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..

"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...

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....

The early 1980s seemingly weren't a great time for creative music. Punk had come, swept away all the old (both good and bad - they didn't care!) and had mostly self-destructed by then, leaving the generally less interesting 'new wave' and all its subsets, all of which seemed to be made to get people to dress up 'creatively' and go out, snort cocaine and dance ('punk disco', my wife called it then). While there *were* a few exciting signs if you knew where to look for it, for the most part the collision...

Nice record by an instrumental trio of Lukas Simonis-guitar, Bob Drake-bass, Chris Cutler-drums, playing music very much in the vein of The Ventures and of twangy guitar / instrumental music of the sixties. The main goal was to:" return to the old work method, rarer today, where the band sits around with instruments, plays the pieces in real time, and works out the arrangements together, and then records them while they are still fresh." The ‘twangy guitar / instrumental rock sound’ definitely brings...

Woof was Tim Hodgkinson's label. This release is a pretty big deal, if only for the inclusion of the really, really great "I Do, I Do...I Don’t, I Don’t" EP by Tim and Bill Gilonis, which has been unavailable for over 20 years, was a miserable grotty pressing to begin with, and was Tim's very first post-Cow recordings and the roots of The Work. Not to mention the inclusion of Houdini, one of The Work's greatest...uh...works!

"This CD comprises all four 7” releases by the British underground....

Here's something I *never* thought I would see; an album of 'new' (new as in unheard) material by The Work! If you don’t know The Work, they were formed by Tim Hodgkinson after Henry Cow and they are one of the greatest ‘difficult rock music’ bands of the 80s and one of the least heralded.

"The 4th World is the band's long-lost, never before issued, very last album, from 1994. Succeeding See by some two years, it shares that album's aesthetics and approach -- an economy of means, and superior...

Long out of print second ReR release by this Rigan electro-acoustic ensemble. “Stonery industrial with noise pop hints. Great and psychedelic.”