Sunday, December 17, 2017

Cuneiform's Year in Review: 2017


Cuneiform Records Wishes You A
Very Happy Holiday Season

The holidays are the time to open our hearts and show our appreciation for those who have touched our lives. Cuneiform would like to thank its amazing artists, and the music press, radio professionals, and fans who have supported our efforts worldwide over the years. Thanks to all of you, we've been able to release a wealth of uniquely wonderful music in 2017, including 11 jazz and rock albums and - a label landmark - our first ever multi-media Box Set!

Released November 24, 2017

For those of you who may have missed seeing what we released in 2017 and want to hear them now, you'll find all of this year's album listed below with links to the music so you can try them before you buy them!

Cuneiform's Year in Review 2017

JUMP TO:
Jazz & Beyond (New Recordings) | Rock & Beyond (New Recordings)

Jazz & Beyond: New Recordings

Raoul Björkenheim / eCsTaSy
Doors of Perception
Genre: Jazz / Improv
Format: CD / Digital
Release Date: 10/6/2017

Finnish-American guitarist Raoul Björkenheim and Ecstasy take a trip into the unknown with Doors of Perception, a session of kaleidoscopically inventive improvisation. The album captures an extraordinary working ensemble stretching into transfixing new spaces, settings defined as much by texture, vibe and sinuous melodic lines as by rhythmic and harmonic structures.

Ecstasy continues to expand its sonic palette. Over the course of seven years the musicians have forged a riveting communion. Capaciously inventive, rigorously gutsy and unapologetically Nordic, the music flows from the forbidding Finnish landscape and the hothouse Helsinki scene that gave birth to the band.

One sure sign of the quartet’s deep connection is the way they distill ideas. Sequenced as a stream of consciousness train of impressions, Doors of Perception features 10 tracks that all clock in under five minutes. Rather than exploring extended forms or expansive soundscapes the music is marked by pithy statements and compressed drama.
PROMOTIONAL TRACK:
"Ecstasy Dance" stream:

PRESS MATERIALS:

PURCHASE LINKS:

ARTIST SITES:
OFFICIAL (Bjorkenheim) - OFFICIAL (Ecstasy) 

The Ed Palermo Big Band
The Adventures of Zodd Zundgren
Format: CD / Digital
Release Date: 10/6/2017

The Ed Palermo Big Band combines two unlikely American masters with The Adventures of Zodd Zundgren, a dizzying and ingenious reinvention of music by Todd Rundgren and Frank Zappa, two much-loved but drastically different American rock composers.
PROMOTIONAL TRACK:
"Flamingo (Todd Rundgren)" stream:

PRESS MATERIALS:

PURCHASE LINKS:

ARTIST SITES:

The Great Harry Hillman
Tilt
Genre: Jazz / Post-Jazz
Format: CD / Digital
Release Date: 5/26/2017

Switzerland doesn’t produce many musical acts compared to other European countries, but the ones that do emerge are always of the highest quality. The Great Harry Hillman is a quartet from Lucerne, a lakeside city in the center of the country. About the name: Harry Hillman was an American athlete who won three gold medals at the 1904 Summer Olympics. That the hurdler Harry Hillman deserved his own band became apparent when exactly 105 years later The Great Harry Hillman came into being. Performing a sort of undefinable post-jazz which represents the jazz and creative music of today, we all feel quite that Harry Hillman would be pleased! The Great Harry Hillman’s music on Tilt combines jazz, rock, and improv into a subdued, layered, yet thrilling sound that will appeal to fans of bands like Radian or Tortoise, as well as modern jazz artists like Mary Halvorson.
PROMOTIONAL TRACK:
"The New Fragrance" stream:

MUSIC VIDEO:

PRESS MATERIALS:

PURCHASE LINKS:

ARTIST SITES:

Chicago / London Underground
A Night Walking Through Mirrors
Genre: Jazz / Experimental / Creative Music
Format: CD / Digital
Release Date: 2/24/2017

At a time when the world is mired in divisiveness, it takes visionaries to build bridges rather than tear them down. “This is protest music,” insists Rob Mazurek. “It always has been. That’s why it’s called ‘Underground’. For the last two decades the Chicago Underground DuoRob Mazurek and Chad Taylor – have created music meant to open minds and explore alien territory.  Now, on A Night Walking Through Mirrors, they’ve created a new Transatlantic partnership in the form of Chicago / London Underground, inviting a pair of renowned British improvisers – Alexander Hawkins and John Edwards – into the creative fold. The result is an expansive sonic adventure whose every unexpected note and alchemical reaction runs counter to the limited imaginations ruling social media name-calling and clannish provincialism.
PROMOTIONAL TRACK:
"Boss Redux" [excerpt] stream:

PRESS MATERIALS:

PURCHASE LINKS:

ARTIST SITES:
OFFICIAL (Mazurek) - CUNEIFORM

The Microscopic Septet
Been Up So Long It Looks Like Down to Me: 
The Micros Play the Blues
Genre: Jazz
Format: CD / Digital
Release Date: 2/10/2017

What happens when you put the blues under a microscope? When the lens is wielded by the incisive deconstructivists of the Microscopic Septet, the musical odyssey traverses territory that’s disarmingly strange, pleasingly familiar and consistently revelatory. It takes an unusual band to make news out of the blues, and The Microscopic Septet deliver a gripping investigation of the form on Been Up So Long It Looks Like Down to Me: The Micros Play the Blues, which continues the band’s brilliant resurgence. This new album builds on the band’s longstanding love of that most basic and profound musical form, bringing the same reverently irreverent and insistently playful approach to the blues that has marked the Micros music from the beginning.

PROMOTIONAL TRACK:
"Don’t Mind If I Do" stream:

PRESS MATERIALS:

PURCHASE LINKS:

ARTIST SITES:

The Ed Palermo Big Band
The Great Un-American Songbook:
Volumes I & II
Genre: Jazz
Format: 2xCD / Digital
Release Date: 2/24/2017

Crazy times call for outrageous music, and few jazz ensembles are better prepared to meet the surreality of this reality-TV-era than the antic and epically creative Ed Palermo Big Band. The New Jersey saxophonist, composer and arranger is best known for his celebrated performances interpreting the ingenious compositions of Frank Zappa. But his fifth project for Cuneiform, The Great Un-American Songbook Volumes 1 & 2, is a love letter to the rockers who ruled the AM and FM airwaves in the 1960s via successive waves of the British Invasion. The 18-piece EPBB lovingly reinvents songs famous and obscure, leaving them readily recognizable and utterly transformed. The first installments in what he hopes to be an ongoing project, these two volumes give a whole new meaning to 'swinging London'.
PROMOTIONAL TRACK:
"The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys (Traffic)" stream:

PRESS MATERIALS:

PURCHASE LINKS:

ARTIST SITES:
TWITTER - FACEBOOK

Schnellertollermeier
Rights
Genre: Rock / Experimental-Avant-Psych-Minimal Rock / Jazz / Post-Jazz
Format: LP / CD / Digital
Release Date: 10/6/2017

Clarity. Attitude. Skill. These really aren’t qualities that define our present time. All too often, our ephemeral reality finds itself reflected in a jittery retro-music that sucks its data from the Cloud – that atomised archive accessible to all. Schnellertollermeier’s fourth album is their reply to all this: Rights, and it offers ample demonstration of their own clarity and ability. Rights comprises four pieces, every one of them inscribed with radicalism. Each is built on just a few ideas and develops out of them until it sounds like a Cubist work of art that seems to gaze out from the most varied of perspectives, but always in the same direction. This is the key to the immense depth and beauty of this album. Apart from the fact that it simply blows you away.

You could say that Rights is the result of this process of consolidation. Schnellertollermeier has an immense presence – that’s the first thing you notice. Initially, you only hear concise, repetitive patterns, but you can already feel their powerful energy while performing, their will to play out and not to yield to any ceremonial, reductionist modes. The pressure is high, their concentration levels too, and their energy levels aren’t a sudden spasm but a prerequisite. This music is complex, but never so much so that the band couldn’t play it with something in reserve. That keeps their music open and free – for themselves, and also for those who hear it. Schnellertollermeier is never brash. They regulate the intensity of their sound with the highly controlled nuances of a precision engineer handling thumbscrews. They never discharge an impertinent punch – instead it’s outstretched, held out, and offered up.
PROMOTIONAL TRACK:
"Rights [Part 1]" stream:
SOUNDCLOUD - BANDCAMP - YOUTUBE

MUSIC VIDEOS:
"Rights" (Official Live Video)

PRESS MATERIALS:
PRESS RELEASE (PDF)
COVER IMAGE

PURCHASE LINKS:
ITUNES - AMAZON
BANDCAMP [HD 96khz/24 bit]
WAYSIDE MUSIC [LP]

ARTIST SITES:
OFFICIAL - CUNEIFORM

FACEBOOK

Art Zoyd
44 1/2: Live and Unreleased Works
[Box Set]
Genre: Rock / Post-Rock / Avant-Progressive / Rock In Opposition / Electronic / Classical / Avant-Classical / New Music / Art Music
Format: Box Set (12xCD + 2xDVD + 2xBOOK + 2xPOSTER) / Digital Download
Release Date: 11/24/2017

Trying to make France's Art Zoyd fit into a single neat description is an exercise in futility. Sometimes they're fiendish sonic saboteurs bent on destroying listener's preconceptions about the way music works. Sometimes they're musical sorcerers conjuring strange but bewitching moments of lyrical beauty.

You could call them the original post-rock band, moving on from the dark, stormy sounds of prog legends like Magma and King Crimson to something that makes even those fearless explorers sound conventional by comparison. You'd be equally accurate in dubbing them avant-classical composers, whose experimental visions are influenced by Stravinsky and Schoenberg.

They were members of the notorious Rock In Opposition (RIO) movement alongside the likes of Henry Cow and Univers Zero. They're impressionistic soundtrack composers. They're a band. They're a multimedia collective. Ultimately they're simply Art Zoyd. And it takes a document as massive and monumental as the 12-CD/2-DVD/2-Book set 44 1/2 to even come close to offering a comprehensive picture of what they're all about.

Containing hours of live and unreleased material from the vast Art Zoyd archives, 44 1/2 delves into the dense jungle of wildly diverse periods in a story that goes all the way back to the '70s. But it also provides many of the missing links in their long, knotty discography, filling in the gaps between their official releases and weaving together all of Art Zoyd's disparate stylistic strands into a majestic, multicolored, even imposing tapestry.
PROMOTIONAL TRACK:
"Tone Reverse" stream:
SOUNDCLOUD - BANDCAMP - YOUTUBE

PRESS MATERIALS:
PRESS RELEASE (PDF)
COVER IMAGE

PURCHASE LINKS:
ITUNES - AMAZON
BANDCAMP - WAYSIDE MUSIC

ARTIST SITES:
OFFICIAL - CUNEIFORM
TWITTER - FACEBOOK

Bubblemath
Edit Peptide
Genre: Rock / Eclectic Prog / Avant-Pop / Technical Metal
Format: CD / Digital
Release Date: 5/26/2017

Fifteen years in the making, Minnesota eclectic prog / avant-pop / art-math quintet Bubblemath's sophmore sequence, Edit Peptide, provides a worthwhile wait with it's non-formulaic formula of lively textures, wacky and virtuosic musicianship, hypnotically robust vocals and charmingly astute attitude. Blending in-your-face intricacy with eccentric experimentation, dense and poppy harmonies, symphonic vibrancy and tongue-in-cheek foundation, Bubblemath are clever and musically intricate, but despite their loyal adherence to high information-density compositional constructs, they make serious and seriously quirky music that doesn't take itself too seriously and allows the fun to shine through. 

It's not often that a band releases a new album after such a long hiatus, let alone something that exceeds expectations beyond fans’ wildest dreams. Somehow, though, Bubblemath has done just that with Edit Peptide. By conducting so many divergent styles, refining their songwriting and compositional skills, and most of all, sticking to their guns when it comes to crafting highly challenging and adventurous, but also quite hypnotic and welcoming, tunes, the quintet proves just how perfectly a band can fuse the familiar and the fresh.
PROMOTIONAL TRACK:
"The Sensual Con" stream:
SOUNDCLOUD - BANDCAMP - YOUTUBE

PRESS MATERIALS:
PRESS RELEASE (PDF)
COVER IMAGE

PURCHASE LINKS:
ITUNES - AMAZON
BANDCAMP - WAYSIDE MUSIC

ARTIST SITES:
OFFICIAL - CUNEIFORM

TWITTER - FACEBOOK

Miriodor
Signal 9
Genre: Rock / Avant-Progressive
Format: CD / Digital
Release Date: 5/12/2017

"Metaphorically, we could say that Miriodor is a planet, with aliens communicating in their mysterious ways with planet Earth," says Miriodor's keyboardist, Pascal Globensky. In that sense, the long-lived Montreal band's ninth album, entitled Signal 9, could simply be considered the ninth set of musical messages from that exotic heavenly body. The Miriodor discography has been building strength upon strength with each successive album. The band combines jazz, classical, rock, and international influences for an arresting, idiosyncratic sound that eludes description but remains immediately identifiable as Miriodor. Once you return to your everyday life after emerging from the alternative universe of Signal 9, the whole album seems like some kind of fever dream you've just emerged from. But the big difference is that it's a dream you're eager to leap right back into again.
PROMOTIONAL TRACK:
"Venin" stream:
SOUNDCLOUD - BANDCAMP - YOUTUBE

PRESS MATERIALS:
PRESS RELEASE (PDF)
COVER IMAGE

PURCHASE LINKS:
ITUNES - AMAZON
BANDCAMP - WAYSIDE MUSIC

ARTIST SITES:
OFFICIAL - CUNEIFORM
TWITTER - FACEBOOK

CHEER-ACCIDENT
Putting Off Death
Genre: Rock / Avant-Progressive
Format: LP / CD / Digital
Release Date: 5/12/2017

Bands, like the human beings that comprise them, are mortal. Against all the odds, in the face of an unstable record industry that never embraced their restless experimentation, Chicago avant-rock pioneers CHEER-ACCIDENT have survived to release their 18th album, Putting Off Death. More than 30 years after first joining forces, fellow eclecticists Thymme Jones and Jeff Libersher have faced down the inevitable and returned with a new set of songs that’s as unpredictable, exploratory and viscerally compelling as anything they’ve released over the course of their erratically evolving career. The music is action packed and filled to the brim with living, breathing humanity. The band’s continuing hunger bleeds through in the music’s immediacy. As Jones says, "There's still something to prove."
PROMOTIONAL TRACK:
"Immanence" stream:
SOUNDCLOUD - BANDCAMP - YOUTUBE

PRESS MATERIALS:
PRESS RELEASE (PDF)
COVER IMAGE

PURCHASE LINKS:
ITUNES - AMAZON
BANDCAMP - WAYSIDE MUSIC

ARTIST SITES:
OFFICIAL - CUNEIFORM

TWITTER - FACEBOOK

Thinking Plague
Hoping Against Hope
Genre: Rock / Avant-Progressive / Art-Rock / Post-Rock / Post-Classical
Format: CD / Digital
Release Date: 2/10/2017

Clouds scud across a storm-wracked sky, but while briefly exposing rare shards of blue, most often, blacker, gloomier grays lurk behind the mists. Sometimes a work of art enables us to articulate our thoughts and feelings in times of upheaval and chaos. In an era when the world has seemingly come off its hinges, an album like Hoping Against Hope offers listeners the consolation that they are not alone. But more than that, this intellectually complex work offers tools to help us make sense, affectively at least, of the whole sorry mess. Thinking Plague is a storied band, whose thirty-five year history has seen it cleave consistently to the extreme limits of what is possible to do within rock music–influenced by folk, chamber music, and particularly, the avant-garde tradition of twentieth-century classical music.
PROMOTIONAL TRACK:
"The Echoes of Their Cries" stream:
SOUNDCLOUD - BANDCAMP - YOUTUBE

PRESS MATERIALS:
PRESS RELEASE (PDF)
COVER IMAGE

PURCHASE LINKS:
ITUNES - AMAZON
BANDCAMP - WAYSIDE MUSIC

ARTIST SITES:
OFFICIAL - CUNEIFORM

FACEBOOK


www.cuneiformrecords.com
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www.facebook.com/cuneiformrecords
www.soundcloud.com/cuneiformrecords
www.youtube.com/CuneiformRecords

Saturday, December 16, 2017

This Weekend's $5 Album is...

John McCowen - Solo Contra (INTERNATIONAL ANTHEM 2017)



Grime punk haven Carbondale, lllinois native John McCowen got his musical start in the middle aughts doing vocals for hardcore bands in local basements. Tired of the toll that took on his throat, he eventually picked up a saxophone, and applying it where he could landed him a gig with his high school friends Ashton and Caleb Bird in their stoner rock band Tweak Bird. After several years doing saxes and flutes for Tweak Bird (which culminated in a 2 month tour opening for TOOL in 2009) McCowen returned home to pursue Bb soprano, bass and contrabass clarinet studies with Eric P. Mandat at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. In that time he produced three releases – Humana/Mundana (DAAANG, 2014), Clarinet Quartets ½ (Cairn Desk, 2015) and OBF_14 (DAAANG, 2015) – before moving on to Mills College in Oakland, California to study under a major influence of his, Roscoe Mitchell. Between 2014 and 2017 in Oakland, McCowen learned from and played with Mitchell regularly, while simultaneously touring the American DIY gamut with New Music hybridizing, Rob Jacobs-led art punk project Wei Zhongle, and, among other works for woodwind based ensembles, developed the sonic concepts and contrabass clarinet compositions materialized in Solo Contra. 

An apex of his work to-date on the bottom clef clarinet, and a punctuation of his graduate studies under Roscoe Mitchell, Solo Contra hears McCowen inhaling the musics of Eliane Radique, Maryanne Amacher & Pauline Oliveros, and exhaling, with incredible force, depth & clarity, an utterly new slate of tones & sonic textures he calls “post electronic acoustic music.” The album’s 26 minutes contain three densely-hued polyphonic movements produced entirely acoustically, recorded by engineers Úlfur Hansson & Michael Coleman using 13 microphones set to fully capture the broad vibrational spectrum of the instrument and its activation by McCowen’s seemingly infinite breath. After that session, in July of 2017, he brought the recordings to IARC cofounder David Allen’s home studio, where together the two mixed and mastered an array of almost superhuman, entirely supernatural frequencies into a singularly vivid timbric persona. Solo Contra is John McCowen’s larger than life rendering of contrabass clarinet in its most definitive, but most undefinable projection.

1. Fur Korv 05:01
2. Chopper HD 05:29
3. Berths 1-3 16:35

John McCowen is also heard on IARC0004 Rob Jacobs - s/t


Recorded by Michael Coleman & Úlfur Hansson
October 2016 @ Figure Eight Recording, Brooklyn, NY
Mixed & Mastered by David Allen

All music composed by John McCowen

Marek Napiórkowski - WAW-NYC (2017)


WAW-NYC project is a unique fusion of various personalities, which links two distant cities with the power of music of their jazz representatives. Compositions are created specially on this occasion and give experienced improvisers an opportunity to interact while playing music together, where European harmonic concept mixes with the culture of rhythm from the birthplace of jazz and Cuban zeal. WAW-NYC is a premiere project of Marek Napiórkowski, in which, through music, dynamically developing Warsaw encounters New York - vibrant capital of jazz and modern art.


1 Cloud Illusions
2 The Way
3 Petriolo
4 Quantum Walk
5 Therese Dreaming
6 Joyful Souls
7 Letting Go


Marek Napiórkowski, Acoustic Guitar, Classical Guitar, Electric Guitar 
Robert Kubiszyn, Bass Guitar, Bass
Clarence Penn, Drums
Manuel Valera, Piano (3)
Chris Potter, Tenor Saxophone, Bass Clarinet (2)



Makaya McCraven - Highly Rare (INTERNATIONAL ANTHEM 2017)



It’s titled Highly Rare not only for the format of its initial release (a limited-edition run of cassettes packaged in screen-printed, string-sealed, firecracker red envelopes), but foremost for the context of the source material’s capture. 

The sounds were recorded to four track cassette tape at a DIY show packed into the confines of Chicago dive Danny's Tavern, a place definitely not known for having live bands, let alone live recordings. It's a place known to vinyl heads both locally and globally as a legendary hub in the crate digger diaspora. It's the place where Jeff Parker learned how to DJ. It's the place where Dante Carfagna held down a rare soul party for over a decade, where he first dropped public needles on 45s that would eventually make compilations he curated for Numero Group and Chocolate Industries. It's the place where DJ Shadow still does sets on the low when he rolls through town. 

And on one highly rare night in November 2016 Danny's was the place where we invited an "International Anthem All Stars" type of improvising ensemble (Makaya McCraven, Junius Paul, Nick Mazzarella and Ben Lamar Gay) to play in support of DJ sets by LeFtO, who was in transit from Belgium, hitting local spots under the direction of Chicago scene sage King Hippo. Damn-near 0 degrees and just days after the death sentence of the American presidential election, the sounds the musicians conjured were thick with the bitter cold darkness that hung heavy in the air, punctuated with moments of joyful determination – the kind that can only be accessed when such impending doom triggers passionate adrenalized bursts by creators in survival mode. 

Cogent as the cultural context of that November night at Danny's is the compositional prowess that Makaya exercised in post to make Highly Rare the impressive final piece it is. Demonstrating a deeply attuned development of the production approach he forayed in the creation of his 2015 breakout In The Moment, Makaya again took stereo mixes of the full band improvisations into his lab to edit, loop, layer and arrange the tracks, tediously constructing a vivid new slate of sounds that tell an infinitely more colorful tale than the straight takes ever could. The rough and raw edges of low fidelity cassette recording combine with the elegance and wit of Makaya McCraven's production touch to make Highly Rare a highly relevant artifact in the ever-unfolding history of Chicago style creative music.


1. Danny's Intro 01:59
2. The Locator 04:10
3. Above & Beyond 03:50
4. Venus Rising 07:04
5. Icy Lightning 01:52
6. Left Fields 11:28
7. R.F.J. III 07:00
8. Early Bird Once Again 03:46

Makaya McCraven – drums, producer & arranger
Junius Paul – bass guitar
Nick Mazzarella – alto saxophone
Ben Lamar Gay – cornet, diddley bow, voice

with cameos by
Gira Dahnee – background voice
LeFtO - turntables

Jeff Herr Corporation - Manifesto (IGLOO RECORDS 2017)



Jeff Herr's new Corporation surprises with a new setting and dexterity,
presenting itself now a s a linear trio, without the need for a harmonical
instrument. Maxime Bender on Saxophone and Laurent Payfert on Bass
complete this new highly skilled and energetic trio which relies on
compositional abilities from each of the 3 members. Well arranged and
structured songs as well as wild and free improvisations cover the band's
large repertoire, filled with some surprising cover songs from well known
Pop artists such as David Bowie or Jimi Hendrix. The strength and tightness
of the band emerge from a strong rhythmical impact and emphasize the
origins of music: the groove.


The highly acclaimed album "Layer Cake" (distributed and licensed by IGLOO Records/Editions SOWAREX) has been released on the 30 november 2014 @ Centre Culturel de Rencontre Abbaye de Neumünster and is being distributed all over Europe as well as in Japan.

Entitled “Manifesto”, the new album of the Luxembourgisch contemporary jazz trio  consists of 7 original songs and a surprising cover version of Randy Newman's 'Same girl'. It ensures the continuity of the previous album “Layer Cake”, of the oscillation between structured compositions and free improvisations as well as of the contrast between the acoustic sound and the contemporary interpretation.

This time, however, the trio is joined on several songs by the american guitarist Adam Rogers, known for his work in the modern jazz idiom and his numerous collaborations with musicians such as Norah Jones, Ravi Coltrane or Marcus Miller. His guitar play, rooted in the acoustic jazz music and influenced by Pat Martino, George Benson and Wes Montgomery, provides the Jeff Herr Corporation with a unique aspect and a new, intriguing sound.


Steam Driven 7:34
On my Own (feat. Adam Rogers) 12:07
Resistance 5:50
Merry-go-round 2:07
Love Charlatan 6:04
Same Girl 4:20
Moon Glow (feat. Adam Rogers) 10:56
Manifesto (feat. Adam Rogers) 7:27

Adam Rogers Guitare
Maxime Bender Saxophone
Laurent Payfert Contrebasse


Evan Parker / John Edwards / John Russell - Walthamstow Moon (ByrdOut 2017)


By Paul Acquaro / freejazzblog.org

An homage of sorts ... in November 1961, John Coltrane played at the Granada Theatre in Walthamstow, North East London, on A Jazz at the Philharmonic tour. A young Evan Parker was in the audience that night, and the event obviously left an indelible impression. 55 years later, Parker returned to the scene of the 'crime' (a cinema located at 186 Hoe Street E17) with guitarist John Russell and bassist John Edwards and commenced on a recording inspired by the memory.

And how could this show not have impressed? It was after all John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, McCoy Tuner, Reggie Workman, and Elvin Jones belting out the now classics 'My Favorite Things', 'Naima', 'Impressions' ... 

However, what Parker and company do in the same physical space inhabits a much different musical one. This is certainly not a note-for-note remake, rather it's a deep dive into the musical vocabulary that grew from the musical experimentations that took hold in London in the mid-1960s with groups like Spontaneous Music Ensemble. A direct link, of course, Parker, whose melodic bursts and expressive inflections guide this music. Russell, on acoustic guitar, channels the influence of Derek Bailey in his use of jarring chord tones and rhythmically abstract slashing. Edwards' contribution on bass is endlessly fascinating in how he connects everyone at key moments with a well placed pluck or bowed passage, propelling the songs in unexpected ways.

This is a rich treat. For example, on just one track, like 'Mirth', there is so much to unpack that it really can serve as an abstract for the whole recording. The syncopated phrases from Russell's guitar feels natural but there is no easily discernible pattern, Edwards' bass work provides depth and texture that thrusts the group forward with no obvious pulse. Most of all what you feel is the dedication to the musical whole emanating from Parker's saxophone. From each squiggle of sound to rapid runs through scales and other elliptical patterns, it is utterly mesmerizing.

1. Mirth 6:18
2. Leonine Aspect 4:32
3. Marvel 6:45
4. Saturnine Aspect 6:39
5. Maud 7:09
6. Walthamstow Moon 4:49

Evan Parker saxophones
John Russell guitar
John Edwards double bass

Brandon Seabrook - Die Trommel Fatale (NEW ATLANTIS RECORDS 2017)



For its 50th release, New Atlantis Records is proud to present guitar wizard Brandon Seabrook's new large ensemble recording, Die Trommel Fatale. Conceived as a poly-rhythmic exploration of the dark side of the drum, Die Trommel Fatale layers dichotomous drummers against cello, bass, electronics, voice and guitar. By dispensing with cymbals, the band highlights the primal propulsion of the drums, contrasting the body and resonance of the dual kits with dizzying ensemble passages and transcendent solo experimentation. Cinematic textures emerge from the bone-shaking collision of drums, strings and guttural shrieks under the command of Seabrook's prodigiously dynamic guitar. 

With Sylphid Vitalizers, Brandon Seabrook's 2014 solo debut for New Atlantis, Brandon conjured "dissonant guitar army textures and explosions and mind-blowing prog-rock complexities—all at mind-numbing breakneck speed" (Vice), layering "a mind-altering wall of ecstatic riffage and textures backed by the head hammering death blows of a vintage drum machine" (Spin). By overdubbing bowed guitars, banjo, and electric guitar, the work marked a new level of orchestralesque dissonant guitar work, generating a tension which "resembles that of string ensembles stretched to the absolute snapping point" (Tiny Mix Tapes). 

In the context of his previous work, Die Trommel Fatale finds Seabrook bringing his singular compositional and instrumental vernacular and his fetish for electronic timbres and stagger-stepped rhythms to bear on a group of wildly capable players who augment rather than dilute his vision and dissonant charisma. Marika Hughes (cello), Chuck Bettis (vocals/electronics), Eivind Opsvik (bass), and drummers Sam Ospovat and Dave Treut represent a fantastic new alignment in dissonance and resonance, realizing a group sound in total congruency with Seabrook's manically progressive vision.

1. Clangorous Vistas 2:30
2. Emotional Cleavage 5:58
3. Abccessed Pettifogger 3:18
4. Shamans Never R.S.V.P. 6:56
5. Litany of Turncoats 0:55
6. The Greatest Bile Pt. 1 4:48
7. The Greatest Bile Pt. 2 5:38
8. Rhizomatic 3:54
9. Quickstep Grotesquerie 3:49
10. Beautiful Flowers 2:41

Chuck Bettis throat, electronics
Dave Treut drums
Sam Ospovat drums
Markia Hughes cello
Eivind Opsvik bass