Man from the East This album was recorded at Liu Ying Studio in Shenzhen. An improvised session on acoustic guitar from start to finish, it nonetheless demonstrates a highly original, coherent artistic conception: a distinct “Oriental” aesthetic redefined by Mamer’s own creative vision. In tracks like “Sleepless”, “Man from the East”, and “Backyard”, Mamer ingeniously deconstructs and deploys traditional Han Chinese music scales to serve his own purpose, adding artful ambivalence and rich subtleties to an unmistakable lingering ambience of ancient Chinese spirituality. Tracks like “Punk Long Johns” and “Bande”, on the other hand, are sonic and rhythmic experiments upon “Nearer East” musical traditions: techniques of strumming, typical to Central Asian plucked string instruments, are applied to an acoustic guitar with constantly changing tunings, sometimes by the help of drumsticks or a screwdriver. In the track “Tursun Matia”, Mamer plays his guitar as if it was possessed by the spirit of a Dolan Rawap—an emotional tribute to his lifelong friend Tursun Matia, the late master of Mekit Dolan Muqam. Uyⱪesez (or Sleepless) sees Mamer reimagines the “Orient” from a unique position as an other of the othered. A man from the East with pale fire snatched from the sun, with strings that transcend the boundaries of time.

Otomo Yoshihide（大友良英） is Japan’s most prominent experimental musician and composer. Over the years, Otomo’s music has spanned across Free Jazz, Noise, Free Improvisation, Sound Art, popular music, film scores, and compositions for large amateur ensembles. Carrying the lineage of the Japanese Free Jazz movement that developed in the 1960’s, Otomo has exploited the sonic possibilities of both the electric guitar and turntable. He is one of the key figures who defined a now internationally recognized genre of Japanoise. His band Ground Zero, which as active throughout the 1990’s, has become legendary for their extreme stylistic collages and hyper energetic live performances. In the late 1990’s, Otomo lead Tokyo’s Onkyo (音響) movement, which crossed between minimalistic improvisations and Sound Art. Parallel to these, he also lead his jazz big band Otomo New Jazz Quartet (ONJQ) and scored award winning sound tracks for independent films and documentaries. After the tragic earthquake and tsunami that hit North-Eastern Japan in 2011, he initiated Project Fukushima, an outdoor festival and community art project in areas of Fukushima where he grew up during his youth. Together with local residents and artists, every year they host events that aim to remind people that life still goes on there, even after such severe calamity and environmental destruction caused by the nuclear reactor meltdown. In 2013, Otomo won national recognition for his soundtrack for TV drama “Ama-chan” which aired every morning on the national public broadcasting network, NHK. Combining many musical styles from Jazz, Pop, Big Band, and hints of experimental music, the soundtrack became a household hit. Interestingly, during the early 90’s, Otomo spent much of his time in Hong Kong before extensively touring Europe and the U.S. On each visits to Hong Kong, he actively collaborated with local experimental musicians. This album is a live recording from 2014 when he performed in B10 Live.

Tracklisting: A. Part 1 - 22:44B. Part 2（Featuring ここ）- 16:33C. Part 3 - 25:42D. Part 4 - 22:37The Meaning of Blackness, More Decorous than DutyHaving become faster than everything A smile that was never birthed into the light (Live at the 3rd Tomorrow Festival 2016 @ B10 Live) This release from Shenzen's Old Heaven Books documents a blistering live performance, recorded in B10 as part of the 3rd Tomorrow Festival. Over the last fifty years few musicians or performers have created as monumental and uncompromising a body of work as that of Keiji Haino. Through a vast number of recordings and performances, Haino has staked out a ground all his own, creating a language of unparalleled intensity that defies any simple classification. Haino lets loose a 90 minute performance maelstrom, marrying the immersive echo-fields of kosmische music to the rough and ready hands-on feel of classic wall of noise intensity that he's known for. This is both an essential historical document and a classic performance in its own right. Keiji Haino considers this live album as an integral work that cannot be separated. Released by Old Heaven Books, Dec 5th 2019

“Each tune covers such a wide and strong set of ideas with such clarity that it appears not as a painting might, a fixed space of articulation, but as a sculpture that reveals hundreds of aspects as you circle it. In some ways it’s a love letter not only to his friends and forebears but also to the instrument. Fell highlights the personal, the physical, the serene and the imaginative in a way all solo documents of this kind should be encouraged to do.” Ben Hall THE WIRE“The eight recordings on Frank & Max are initially striking for the considerable variation in the pieces, and that they all sound immediate and current, not like they were recorded over the course of a decade. Fell uses all manner of techniques here, from his gorgeous chord style, his disciplined arco playing, a high-wire pizzicato at the top of the neck, and more. All but one of these tunes are improvisations. The lone exception is Bill Evans' Turn Out The Stars; this nearly nine-minute reading of Evans' classic is so expressive and filled with emotion, it cannot help but stand out here. Other pieces that set themselves apart are For Barre Phillips, with its flashy pizzicato runs, deftly plucked chords, and lightning-quick shifts in timbral concentration, and closer For Charles Mingus, a noisy, droning, yet emotively warm piece played mostly arco. That said, everything here is played with great imagination and discipline, and is also recorded exceptionally well - despite the fact that it was cut in two different locations. If solo bass records are something you appreciate, this ranks among the very best, right up there with albums by Barre Phillips himself, and Dave Holland.” Thom Jurek ALL MUSIC GUIDE“A welcome return to the public arena by Simon H. Fell, the gifted English composer, improviser, musician and all-round good guy who we interviewed in an early issue of TSP magazine. Frank & Max is subtitled Bass Solos 2001-2011, and it showcases Fell rattling out some impressive improvisations on his chosen instrument, the upright double bass. Each piece is dedicated to people who have been important to Fell (such as his first bass teacher) but also to notable bass players from the history of jazz and improv, such as Barry Guy, Barre Phillips, Harry Miller, and my personal favourite Charles Mingus, the great enigma of American jazz who I’ve been listening to and collecting since 1978 and yet continue to find surprises in his catalogue. Indeed if you ever care to make the effort to delve into Fell’s back catalogue and hear some of his large-scale and complex big band compositions, you’d see why in my mind I liken Fell to Mingus. The recordings for this release were made by Fell and his long-time friend collaborator, the English improviser Graham Halliwell, and they certainly knew where to stick their microphones: the album has a room-vibrating presence that’ll shake off your lethargic outer layer as a snake sloughs its skin. Once denuded, you’ll be back in touch with your true inner core and can accomplish great things.” Ed Pinsent THE SOUND PROJECTOR“In 1991, double bassist Simon H. Fell released a solo bass cassette on his Bruce’s Fingers label, entitled Max. For 20 years it stood in splendid isolation as his only solo recording. Now, he’s followed it up with Frank & Max which, despite what the title might imply, does not include any of the material on Max. Instead, he offers eight bass solos recorded between 2001 and 2011. On any album of solo bass, two vital factors are the sound of the instrument itself and the quality of the recording. Here both factors are absolutely right. So we hear the full detail of every note as if we were standing right next to the bass, allowing Fell’s playing to be fully appreciated. Across the album, Fell employs a wide range of techniques that generate as wide a range of sounds. However, unlike solo bass albums by some others, this never becomes a mere technical exercise; Fell incorporates the sounds produced into music that is both varied and satisfying. The six-minute For Jo Fell & Patrick Charton is a particular highlight, a virtuoso display of Fell’s nimble-fingered technique and stamina as his fingers fly all over the fingerboard and strings, producing a cascade of rich, resonant music that listeners will feel as much as hear. In complete contrast, but just as impressive, is For Harry Miller, on which Fell uses his bow far more. He summons up long booming arco notes from the depths of his instrument, interspersing them with higher, lighter arco notes and plucked runs as contrast, in a pyrotechnic display of the versatility of the bass. Of the only cover on Frank & Max, Fell comments that “if you improvise upon a five-string bass with a low B string you will eventually end up playing Bill Evans’ Turn Out the Stars… look at the score.” He demonstrates the point by producing a fluid version of the piece, which flows smoothly out of the instrument as naturally as breathing — like the album, a delight from start to finish. Albums of solo bass are rare, good ones rarer, with little agreement among fans of the genre about the best ones — but Fell’s list of dedicatees is a good place to start, with Journal Violone by Barre Phillips, Symmetries by Barry Guy and Volume by John Edwards, as well as Peter Kowald’s Was Da Ist. One thing is certain: with the release of Frank & Max, Fell has earned the right to join such exalted company.” John Eyles DUSTED“Like any record of unaccompanied double bass music, Frank & Max is for specialized tastes, but if you’re already ready to go there, you’ll probably want to stay with this one a while. Fell is equally persuasive plucking a quietly buzzing abstraction from a Bill Evans tune, playing arco like a bull precisely goring an annoying runner, or wrenching complex, explosive tone clusters from a custom-built 5-stringed instrument because he has the right balance of chops, poise, and fearlessness to get the job done.” Bill Meyer TOKAFI“What's sometimes lost in discussion of free music and players of "extended technique" is the mastery of making the instrument sing – which Fell surely does, especially on his wonderful version of Bill Evans' Turn Out The Stars here, full of introspection and delicacy. But if the instrument can sing, then it can yell, too, and do all manner of unruly, damaged things. The closing For Charles Mingus is just that, moans and thwacks emerging from upper-register bowing and what sounds like a variety of rugged mutes and mean-ass preparations. This is the behemoth, pissed-off Mingus, but not without his sweaty sense of humor. A truly gorgeous solo bass recording.” Clifford Allen PARIS TRANSATLANTIC“The real standout of the (recent Bo’weavil) batch is Frank & Max. These eight improvisations are studies teeming with musical invention. There is an inspired musicality to how Fell threads his ideas together, and each piece stands as a fully realized statement. He also performs Bill Evans’ Turn Out The Stars, delivering a free interpretation that hums and buzzes with spontaneous lyrical refinement. Highlight abound, but the nuanced arco on For John Edwards, the darkly resonant For Harry Miller, and the oscillating timbres of For Charles Mingus are all worth mention. The recording quality is stellar throughout, picking up every detail.” Michael Rosenstein SIGNAL TO NOISE

Burner from Boneshaker (Mars Williams / Paal Nilssen-Love / Kent Kessler) on TROST Mars Williams : Reeds, Toy InstrumentsPaal Nilssen-Love : Drums & PercussionKent Kessler: Bass

"The 36-minute recording begins with Gal’s quiet sound of bells, extended breathing techniques of Butcher, and distant and sustained lap steel guitar lines, and soon these sparse sounds feel like melting into each’s other, sketching an imaginary, leisured and breezy scenery. Slowly, Butcher, Gal and Toop expand this delicate and suggestive sonic envelope in unpredictable ways and with imaginative sounds - subtle electronics and feedbacks, bubbling breaths, exotic flutes and resonating percussive objects, but maintain the collective trio sound. Gal acts like she was possessed by an enigmatic shamanic spell with her wordless vocalizations, processed voice and assorted bells, while Butcher’s brief and urgent blows on the sax and Toop’s noisy and distorted sounds build the tension.But even in the most abstract and almost silent segments, Butcher, Gal and Toop operated in mysterious and poetic ways, always attentive to every gesture but letting the sounds and their fragile dynamics lead them all. The interplay becomes more intense and fierce only in the last minutes of this improvisation when Gal’s processed shouts collide with the tortured breaths of Butcher and the distorted lap steel guitar sounds of Toop. But, surprisingly, Gal opted to conclude this arresting improvisation with an emotional, caressing touch, beautifully answered by Butcher and Toop." Free Jazz Blog - Eyal Hareuveni

From Bo'Weavil... Obliquity is a free jazz record, if you'll forgive the use of such a hoary, old fashioned phrase. Its scorching, heads-down momentum, rhythm and drive places it in direct line of descent from the fierce originators of the genre: Ayler, Sanders, Graves, Frank Wright. It also swings. At times it dances. >Obliquity is a free jazz record through the prism of the improvisational movement in Europe, though. This is no attempt at polite revivalism or looking back/up to the 1960s. Wilkinson/Edwards/Noble are producing new, vital music of and for now. You need form to work at this level of spontaneity and certainty and any frequenter of the outer limits of the European music scene could vouch for the jazz porridge these three have put away. Obliquity: advancing obliquely; deviating from the straight; freedom from the humdrum constraints of time and place.

The Obliquity Trio return to Bo Weavil for a blistering live set, incorporating elements of pure, old-school swing, extreme, dissonant free-music and plain old weirdness. Alan Wilkinson, John Edwards and Steve Noble are on fire here, throwing everything they've got into a relatively short, sub-forty-minute set, which despite passages of rampant intensity never gets out of hand - there's a thread of warmth and humour running through these exchanges, with the eight-minute coda 'Recoil' being an especially enjoyable (and very approachable) sequence of the recording, sure to satisfy the broadest range of improv fans.

New band from three UK masters of contemporary improvised music – they released a trio cd under this title on Relativ Pitch (NYC) in 2017, now choosing it for their bandname for continuing activities.  Crucial Anatomy is their follow-up album which was recorded live at Cafe OTO in 2018. "With players of this calibre - all working at the very pinnacle of European improv -- it hardly matters: the level of rapport and collective virtuosity is astonishing." - Jazzwise "A lucid exposition of how the concept of musical chiefs and leaders becomes an irrelevance to this trio, so much are they as one with a sonic unity, a metaphor for a different kind of society expressed with so much clarity in the realms of free jazz." – Morning Star" --- John Butcher / tenor and soprano saxophones John Edwards / double bass Mark Sanders / percussion. --- Recorded by Shaun Crook, live at Cafe Oto, London on August 8, 2018. Mixed and Mastered by John Butcher.

recorded 67 years ago,reisued in Shirley's 90th year in this universe. 'Sweet England' along with its sister album 'False True Lovers', was recorded in the spring of 1958 when I was twenty-two years old. I had been living for the previous two years in London with Alan Lomax, the American folklorist, working for him as editorial assistant on his book The Folk Songs of North America and on his field recordings from America, Great Britain, Italy and Spain. The tracks that make up these two albums were recorded by Peter Kennedy and Alan in two days at Peter's home 'studio' in Belsize Park. English traditional music, at its best, expresses and provides everything in song that I need and feel, both musically and emotionally. Sweet England represents the first shaky steps of a journey that I have been on all my life, and that, happily, I still am." (shirley collins)

Digital will become available 31st OctoberSLIP is Paul Abbott’s response to his 3 day residency at OTO in 2023. It’s a continued exploration of the acoustic-digital hybrid drum setup Abbott has been developing for some time, which involves drum kit and synthetic sounds combined closely—through an entanglement of limbs and cables—in an intimate but strange relationship with each other. Paul Abbott hasn’t had any formal musical training, but has a long history of making music, having collaborated for years with Seymour Wright, Pat Thomas, Michael Speers, Cara Tolmie, Anne Gillis and many others. Eventually, led by a profound suspicion of what is fixed or limited, Abbott began finding other ways to organise sound - or what he calls ‘material’: “I wanted a way to 'persuade' or guide the possibility of something happening - my activity or the events of an algorithmic composition - for example, but without certainty or formalism. It felt to me, during playing, that certain ideas had a particular sort of shape, but more than the form of a line. I began to write alongside (before/after) playing the drums, and ‘characters’ began to enter the scene as a more wobbly, and therefore appropriate option [to notation]. Working with these characters allowed me to simultaneously approach body, imagination, language and music: without dividing things up or separating these aspects from each other. It allowed me to leave things messy and entangled, whilst trying to deal with form and specificity: wanting to have some things feel or respond differently to other things at other times.”  In approaching his residency, Abbott developed a fixed cast of characters - crystal, lleaf, reiy.F, reiy.C, strike, nee, qosel, sphu and aahn. They each communicate using different kinds of movement and drum kit/s, and Abbott choreographed them as ‘dances’ based on different feelings, or outlines of behaviours suggestive of ways of moving (body, drums, sounds). He then arranged these characters into ‘compositions’: one for each performance day, with each composition featuring multi-layered activity - options for behaviours, ways to move around the rooms, play drums, develop synthetic sounds, change the lights or re-distribute the sound in the space. After the performances, Abbott took home 9 hours of recordings split into up to 28 multitrack channels for each day, and re-organised his cast once more into a performance for 2LP, CD and digital. It’s an enormous amount of work - but Abbott is activated by the process. For him, the pleasure of unstable edges, possibilities, slippages, is the vital attraction. Like all living organisms, Abbott’s characters have malleability and responsivity.  They stimulate a bundle of possible behaviours, a tendency to act a certain way, a temperament, a boundary of respective limits or affordances. It’s an affective way of working, inclusive of Roscoe Mitchell, Sun Ra, Nathaniel Mackey and Milford Graves. In ‘Pulseology’(2022), Milford Graves reminds us, ‘Breath varies, so cardiac rhythm never has that (metronomic) tempo. It’s always changing. All the alignments of the heart are determined based on the needs of the cells, specifically tissues and organs. The heart knows if it needs to speed up.’ In SLIP, to slip, in a heartbeat, is to descend not into the grid of the even metre accorded to the heartbeat, but into a play of mutability and modality. To change is the condition of the heart.

Staring Into The Sun is the latest ethno-folk cinema classic from Sublime Frequencies. Ethiopia is known to be one of the oldest areas inhabited by humans and presently has over 80 diverse ethnic groups. In 2009, photographer/filmmaker Olivia Wyatt explored 13 different tribes throughout Ethiopia in this visually stunning film on DVD with accompanying 136-page book of Polaroid photographs and audio CD of field recordings. Traveling from the northern highlands to the lower Omo Valley via bush taxi, Isuzu cargo trucks, and by any means possible, Wyatt brings together the worlds of Zar spirit possession, Hamer tribal wedding ceremonies, Borena water well polyphonic singing, wild hyena feedings and bizarre Ethiopian TV segments, presenting an enchanting look at these otherworldly images, stark landscapes and captivating sounds from the horn of Africa. The featured tribes are captured with an unflinching sense of realism and poetic admiration resulting in a visual and aural feast of the senses. 136-page hardcover photography book with one music CD and one film on DVD. 5 1/2 x 5 1/4 inches, landscape format. 117 color photographs and liner notes by Olivia Wyatt. Sublime Frequencies' most elaborate package yet. One-time limited edition pressing of 1,000 copies.

Absolutely stunning new full-length by the all-star duo of by John Butcher & Angharad Davies. Super essential!  Angharad Davies - violinJohn Butcher - saxophonesAngharad Davies and John Butcher’s musical paths have been crossing since the early 2000s, most often in the large group Common Objects (with Lee Patterson, Pat Thomas, Rhodri Davies and Lina Lapelyte).Their duo has only played 4 concerts, but has recently been brought into focus through working on material for this new record.In her liner notes, Louise Gray writes: “Both bring their virtuosity to entwine together two quite different sonic fields. The balance Butcher and Davies achieve is one of space-describing elegance. Butcher’s breathy sax explorations move from a richly tonal line to a searching, ragged edginess that lick the contours of the room. Davies is similarly expansive in her approach: a tiny spangle of sound will suddenly curve the unfolding piece into new territory.Lyric lines and pulses from each musician testify to an electric state of listening and response. These are all fluid conversations, not necessarily ever closed, that speak to the necessity of sitting in the present (and the presence) and working outwards.”

When words trail off at the beginning of claire rousay’s “everything perfect is already here,” ornate instrumentation is waiting to fill a void left by the breakdown of language. Yet it becomes clear as we trace rousay’s collaged sonic pathway that breakdown, of meaning and also of melody, is also a place to rest. everything perfect… is made up of two extended compositions that cycle between familiarity and unknowing. There are seemingly infinite ways to feel in response to these pieces of music, which shift tone across their languid duration, earnest like a familiar song but unbound from the emotional didacticisms of lyrical voice and pop form.rousay builds a fluid landscape around the acoustic contributions of Alex Cunningham (violin), Mari Maurice (electronics and violin), Marilu Donovan (harp), and Theodore Cale Schafer (piano), whose respective melodies weave gently in and out, sometimes steady, sometimes aching, sometimes receding altogether in deference to less overtly musical sounds. That is, percussive texture in the form of unvarnished samples and field recordings: the rattle and rustle and the stops and starts of life unfurling, voices sharing memories nearly out of reach, doors closing, wind against a microphone. Everything comes from somewhere in particular, possessing the veneer of the diaristic, but sound’s provenance is secondary here and so these details become tangled and fused. On this release I hear such details not as individual ornaments or stories but the collective architecture of the greater composition. It’s an architecture that is not quite formed and thus full of openings out to the world unfolding. “The world unfolding,” that’s a kind way of saying change, movement, loss, transformation. Things rousay here indexes, not without shards of desire or pain, still somehow what I hear is coarse peace in the in-between. These two pieces sweep you away and then bring you to earth, but which is which, anyway? Where am I now? What is different outside of me? What is different inside of me? Um. I think. everything is perfect is already here, like the answers to these questions, is loose and beautiful in surprising ways.The music guides a certain experience of the world around. In claire’s music there is this marriage—not just a pairing or juxtaposition but an interrelationship, an eventual confusion—of song/texture, narrative/abstraction, figure/ground. Everything comes from somewhere in particular but not just the voices, the field recordings, the what is being said or meant, what matters is “the where you are now.” There are so many ways of anchoring oneself in the present, some have to do with fantasy or storytelling and some with accepting what is.These two compositions find peace between these modes. They sweep you away and then bring you to earth, but which is which, anyway? Their mode of feeling is inquisitive. Where am I now? What has changed outside of me? What has changed inside of me? The music, like the answers to these questions, is loose and beautiful in surprising ways.

Hampus Lindwall is a musical artist active in many fields ranging from contemporary music to experimental and electronic sound / music. He has released many albums, as a soloist and in collaboration and is the titular organist in Saint-Esprit, Paris, since 2005.::::::​​As 2024 came to a close, in New York and Paris chords rang out from thirty-two-foot pipes for the first time in half a decade. Following twin fires in 2019, the grand organs at the cathedrals of St John the Divine and Notre-Dame, amongst the largest instruments in their respective countries, had finally been restored. The news was justly celebrated in the international press, but the incidents were far from isolated. In England, the city of Norwich hailed the return of its cathedral’s five manual organ in 2023 and just two years earlier York Minster heralded a “once-in-a-century” refurbishment of its own 5,000-plus pipe instrument. Meanwhile, further organ restoration projects are ongoing at churches in Liverpool, Bradford, Bristol, Winchester, and Washington DC. Significant as they are to their respective communities, they’re also emblematic of a wider rebirth for one of humanity’s oldest musical instruments. The organ is having a moment. Over the last few years, albums by the likes of Kali Malone, Ellen Arkbro, Anna von Hausswolff, FUJI|||||||||||TA, and Áine O’Dwyer, as well as projects in the visual arts by Sollmann Sprenger, Cory Arcangel, Massimo Bartolini and many other talented artists, have given a new prominence to the old ecclesiastical stalwart. The pipe organ bears historical traces which stretch back to the third century BC. But that doesn't mean it can't speak to a contemporary moment haunted by algorithms and networked culture. Hampus Lindwall’s Brace for Impact is an album of organ music for today.Things nearly turned out very differently for Lindwall. Were it not for a simple twist of fate, the guy now occupying the organist’s chair at the church of Saint-Esprit in Paris, occasional collaborator with Phill Niblock, Leif Elggren and Susana Santos Silva among many others, might well have wound up in the world of pop music. In the 1990s, as the Stockholm club scene started taking off, Lindwall found himself moving in the same circles as the electronic music artists connected to the city’s legendary Cheiron studios. The aesthetics of 90s rave remains an important part of his musical DNA to this day. Born in the Swedish capital in 1976, Lindwall learned his chops copying the solos on Steve Vai records. It was only later, towards the end of his teens, that he even started playing keyboard instruments. When seeking to enter Stockholm’s prestigious Royal College of Music, Lindwall tendered two applications: to the jazz department, as a guitarist, and to the classical music department, as an organist. He was sure he would be accepted with the guitar. In the end, he was rejected from the jazz department for spurious reasons, inadvertently setting Lindwall on a path to becoming a classical organist.Brace for Impact sees Lindwall returning to the scene of his adolescent obsessions. It’s an album of five recent contemporary classical compositions, all performed by the composer himself on the seventy-eight stop organ at St. Antonius church in Düsseldorf. It’s also a highly visceral forty-five minutes of music with undeniable elemental power.The title track proposes a historical counterfactual equal and opposite to its author’s own youthful fortuity: what if fate had somehow barred Iannis Xenakis from becoming the pioneering architect and composer remembered by history and instead led him to join a metal band? Inspired by the searing glissando that opens the Greek musician’s seminal (1953–4) work Metastaseis, the piece pairs a series of rip-roaring slides on a highly saturated and distorted electric guitar (performed by collaborator and SUNN O))) founding member, Stephen O’Malley) with the halting attempt of Lindwall’s instrument to follow it, in spite of the discrete nature of the individual keys on its manuals. It’s an electrifying piece of music, slapping the listener round the face straight out of the gate at the start of the record. But it’s also a deft study on the uneasy relation between analogue curves and digital steps.Brace for Impact might just be the first album of post-internet organ music. Like a performance by Dutch artists JODI, it is a record weaned on networked processes and algorithmic thinking, a suite of tracks which build their own systems then push them to the point of collapse. Lindwall is not a programmer, but he will wield whatever technology is ready to hand much as Chopin made use of the richer, fuller sound of an Erard piano. From the software subtly weirding the interior textures of ‘Swerve’ and ‘Piping’ to the juddering, kernel panic of ‘AFK’ and ‘À bruit secret’, these are works of music unthinkable without the ubiquitous experience of life lived online. Imparting that hypermodern aesthetic sensibility through the austere sound of a baroque organ only heightens the anachronistic sense of temporal disjuncture characteristic of days spent rabbit-holing through ever-multiplying stacks of browser windows. The vernacular of Web 2.0 is here re-transcribed in the ornate script of a medieval illuminated manuscript.Artist and blogger Brad Troemel (aka The Jogging) once compared the practices of his own cohort of digital natives to the non-retinal strategies of Marcel Duchamp a century earlier. “Duchamp’s readymade came at a time of transition when consumers were first buying mass-produced goods,” he notes. “During Duchamp’s era, the word ‘readymade’ referred to the objects in one’s home that were not handmade. And for the generation of artists coming of age today, it is the high-volume, fast-paced endeavour of social media’s attention economy that mimics the digital economy of stock-trading, a market increasingly dominated by computer-automated algorithmic trades.” Lindwall, equally, regards the elements comprising the material for his music like so many pre-given readymades ripe to be appropriated. ‘À bruit secret’ feeds the whole fifty-six note run of the organ keyboard into a random number generator before being variously manipulated like a Schoenbergian tone row built from the standardised limits of the instrument. The use of commercial software even spurred Lindwall to name the track after Duchamp’s (1916) sculpture with an unknown rattling object inside. Starting the album with the jagged crunch of an E major guitar chord followed by an interval leap of a minor sixth up to C felt, to Lindwall, like a sort of citation – whether from Chopin or Yngwie Mamlsteen (possibly both).As a conservatoire student, Lindwall felt he had to leave his passion for guitar behind, as if there were no room for those ideas within the formality of the music establishment. Only later did he come to see it as a resource he could draw on, a deep well of subcultural knowledge to be mined, just as Bartók once excavated the folk songs of his native Hungary. Lindwall cites Jeff Koons, who once claimed he only found his voice as an artist when he started looking to the kitschy objects sold in his father’s antique shop while he was growing up. In this sense, at least, Brace for Impact may represent the organist’s oeuvre at its most arch and conceptual – but it also finds him at his most personal. This is an album borne of obsessions, with an obsessive’s attention to the details of sound and structure. It is also an absolute blast: a record of ferocious immediacy with one foot in the distant past and eyes firmly fixed upon the future.

The first vocal album by beloved Ethiopian nun, composer, and pianist Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru - profound and deeply moving home cassette recordings made amidst political upheaval and turmoil. These are songs of wisdom, loss, mourning, and exile, sung directly into a boombox and accompanied by Emahoy’s unmistakable piano. Though written and recorded while still living at her family’s home in Addis Ababa, Emahoy sings of the heartache of leaving her beloved Ethiopia, a reflection on the 1974 revolution and ensuing Red Terror in her homeland, and a presentiment of her future exile in Jerusalem. In the 21st century, Emahoy has become known worldwide for her utterly unique melodic and rhythmic style. Commonly misinterpreted as “jazzy” or “honky tonk,” Emahoy’s music actually comes from a deep engagement with the Western classical tradition, mixed with her background in Ethiopian traditional and Orthodox music. These songs, recorded between 1977-1985, are different from anything previously released by the artist. Rich with the sound of birds outside the window, the creak of the piano bench, the thump of Emahoy’s finger on the record button, they create a sense of place, of being near the artist while she records. Emahoy’s lyrics, sung in Amharic, are poetic and heavy with the weight of exile. “When I looked out / past the clouds / I couldn’t see my country’s sky / Have I really gone so far?” she asks in “Is It Sunny or Cloudy in the Land You Live?” Her vocals are delicate and heartfelt, tracing the melodic contours of her piano on songs like “Where Is the Highway of Thought?” “Tenkou! Why Feel Sorry?,” a career highlight that closes out her self-titled Mississippi album (MRP-099), is revisited here with vocals. Originally composed for her niece, Tenkou, the lyrics clarify the song title we’ve wondered about for so many years. “Don’t cry / Childhood won’t come back / Let it go with love Emahoy dreamt of releasing this music to a larger audience before her passing in March of 2023. We are proud to release this music, in collaboration with her family, now, in what would have been her 100th year. LP comes with a 16-page booklet full-color booklet. Gold cover first edition, pressed in both black and gold vinyl editions.  All songs composed and recorded by Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, Addis Ababa, 1977–1985

Unreleased material composed by Bernard Parmegiani in 1992.Lac Noir - La Serpente is part of Emmanuel Raquin-Lorenzi's Lac Noir, a composite work inspired by a serpentine female creature or 'snake woman' that he saw in Transylvania in 1976, with a total of 33 pieces using various media, 24 by himself and 9 by other artists. All the materials used in Lac Noir were gathered on the land of the snake-woman between 1990 and 1992. The first coordinated broadcast ran from June to October 2019, like a theatrical display of media.At the end of May 1992, in Provence, in his Summer studio not far from the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, Bernard Parmegiani played me the first musical moments he had worked on from the sounds he and Christian Zanési had collected in Negreni in October 1990. A few days after this listening session, on 4th June, I wrote him a letter. I didn't mean to take control of what was to become the ninth movement of his composition, but to share with him some of the resonances I had heard in what he had composed, which mingled with my dreams and memories of the Transylvanian snake-woman, and outlined possible concordances with the other pieces underway for Lac Noir.In the midst of the garish chaos of the fair and its spectacular stunts, there could spread out - still, silent eye of the cyclone - the long waters of a lake. Calm waters. Patches cool but sensitive as skin. Between the waters there flows and ripples, there shows up and dives again a snake-woman born of the still waters. A sweet, good serpent whose song - strange and melodious, sensual, yet already tinged, as if bitten by the black depths, with bitterness; that of prescience, shading it with melancholy - is her very undulation, the rings of which appear, together or in turn, the way translucent veins overlap, slither over one another in a moving braid of metamorphoses.(extracts from notes by E. Raquin-Lorenzi)