"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

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’.

"The musicians do not bear any responsibility for publishing these tapes"

“Strannye Igry (Russian: Странные игры, Strange Games) was a Soviet...

"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)...

The ReR Quarterly was a series run by Chris Cutler and ReR in the middle / late 80s that included a vinyl lp and large magazine bundled together. It featured interesting articles - some quite in depth - about music and sound and art and music that 'related'.
Basically it was the sort of thing that was really fun and really handsome and that the internet killed off completely
This CD features some of the things featured on the first volume (4 issues) of the quarterly.
Included are...

Bob Drake: drums, bass, backing vocals, tapes, viola
Susanne Lewis: vocals, guitar, viola, accordion, synths

Venus Handcuffs is an early, pre-Hail project by Bob Drake and Susanne Lewis, both of whom were working in Thinking Plague at the time they were also simultaneously doing this duo work.

"Referred to as "a cross between Throbbing Gristle and Nick Cave" during the band's lifetime, Venus Handcuffs got their start in the ranks of Colorado's most far-reaching band, Thinking...

When Is Norwegian multi-instrumentalist Lars Pedersen. His music here is complex sound collages and dramatic narative (with words by Chris Cutler) mixed with music.

“When is the one-man project of Norwegian multi-instrumentalist Lars Pedersen, a musician who has also spent time in some punk outfits as well as the Beatlesesque retro band The Last James. This is the only When album I've heard, but it is a hard-core Avant/RIO album collaboration with Henry Cow's Chris Cutler, released on Cutler's...

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...