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:
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 Duo – Rob 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:
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
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