Third solo album for this musician / composer and apparently a major departure from previous work which was a mix of electro-acoustic instrumentation and power electronics, “Hypnos” is a wonderfully delirious and immersive work done entirely with electric guitars and synthesisers. This could very well end up on many people’s Top Ten Lists for 2012 and be regarded as one of Diaz de Leon’s best recordings. I find it hard to categorise this recording as it seems to be a mix of so many different influences and inspirations: there are many looped rhythms, a noisy hard edge, heavy distorted guitar tones, creepy synth sound effects, repetitive trance melodies and an epic doomy ambience running throughout all seven tracks. If there’s any act that comes close to what Diaz de Leon is doing here, it’d be Nadja when at its most inspired and original.

The album begins powerfully with “Oneirogen” which is at once bright, beautiful, shimmery and ethereal yet intense, unfolding like a giant flower that comes into bloom once every ten years to spread a heavy fragrance that quickly overpowers you and then disperses just as fast and teasingly. “Consumed” borrows from the sonic vocabulary of death metal to put on a heavy distorted, grinding act, a bit bombastic at times, but always menacing and slightly on the hysterical side, like a heavier, grimmer and more disciplined version of Gnaw Their Tongues. “Hypnocaust” takes the menace to another level, one more deranged as pulsing UFOs start taking off and landing, and space-ships spurt glowing radioactive gloops of hot light while a processed guitar burps and erupts with rumble.

“Cinerum” is a subdued piece, murky and mysterious, soothing sometimes but not all that serene in spite of the presence of what sounds like warm orchestral strings and a deep reassuring bass. “Faithless” stutters along with a heavy electronic rhythm while all around shimmer washes in and out and high-pitched drones scream overhead. The track pauses briefly and all of a sudden ghostly voices that might have come from an Njiqahdda album invade the ravaged music landscape and briefly turn the space inside your head into an utterly wrecked wasteland.

“Kukulcan” appears much influenced by black metal with sheets of ambient tremolo guitar haze falling over a grinding bass drone. Somehow I’m reminded of Wolves of the Throne Room though their music probably isn’t that much like the track here; it must be a feeling of majesty here that brings that Cascadian band to mind. By way of conclusion, “Dissolution” revisits “Oneirogen” as though Diaz de Leon has reined in his naughty children and is resetting his course to take us away on another amazing music journey; yet the track seems darker and subdued, as if in realisation that amazing music journeys can be perilous and can put your sanity on the line.

Well here’s one listener who’s prepared to put her sanity on the line again and again and again … this CD has barely left my player since I got it. It will be hard for Diaz de Leon to top this one and maybe he shouldn’t even try. This recording is one exhilarating voyage through some very heavy and mesmerising soundscapes.

Contact: Shinkoyo

Featuring the kind of bleak, dark noisy psychedelic blues that I usually expect from the PSF Records guy, Miminokoto’s “Hitoyogiri” maintains Japanese psych-guitar rock’s strangle-hold on my fragile psyche. Generally the music on this CD is melancholy and wistful, or at the very least has a dark, inward ambience with steady low-key vocals that rarely become very emotional plus a blues-tinged guitar that may have a darkly sparkling tone and drumming that starts off quiet and steady and eventually erupts into virtuosic playing. A couple of  tracks feature cloudbursts of searing distorted lead guitar and these songs will be the highlights of the album for many listeners including me.

The title track sets the pattern or template if you like for the songs to follow: the start of the song is just barely there and what develops is a repetitive rhythm that more or less continues for the duration of the track with some variations, usually those that turn on a change of key. Vocals begin quietly and are almost inaudible but become louder, a bit more emphatic, as the music progresses. The song becomes more free-form and near the end, it’s become chaotic with blurry, distorted lead guitar tones and quite complex, improvised drumming. “Midsummer’s End” follows the pattern but with a sparkling blues guitar melody.

The next couple of tracks see the Miminokoto men hit their stride: “Hands of the Night” features some really wistful, beautiful romantic melodies with the bassline following a different inspiration from the rest of the music. There’s a flubby wah-wah sound inter-twined with the pleasant bass-guitar melody. Rhythm guitar tones can be very resonant. “For Garbanzo” has a plodding riff but the lead guitar breaks are what really make this album stand out: streams and streams of fuzzed-up guitar noise pour out of the speakers and fill up the space in your head until your eyes see colourful bright day-glo pin-pricks twinkling and dancing up and down in revolving concentric circles that themselves perform their own little square dance routines and form all kinds of strange geometric optical illusions that are usually featured only on Japanese psychologist and optical illusions buff Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s website.

“Milky Light” is a faithful cover of the Kousokuya song, right down to the anguished vocals. Only the blurry lead guitar break-outs indicate that this is Miminokoto and not that doomy band whose leader Jutok Kaneko is, alas, no longer on this sad plane of existence. After this song, Miminokoto return to their familiar territory of minimal-sounding, bluesy psych-rock for a final hurrah but “Trembling Tongue” seems strangely inadequate after what we’ve just heard – proof if needed that nothing, not even the M guys, can quite match Kousokuya in the Department of Dark Despair.

Good if perhaps not very inspired with strong blues influences, some fired-up noise guitar and a great sparkling, bewitching sound, Miminokoto serves up almost (but not quite) easy-listening psych-rock. I can certainly recommend this album as a beginner’s guide to this particular Japanese-owned genre.

Francisco López is one who has famously used processed field recordings of urban areas and arrived at results that are totally different to Gill Arno’s impressionistic pictures. On Untitled #275 (UNSOUNDS 26U), which we received in November 2011, López turns his craft in a more musical direction, applying a live multi-channel recording system to the prepared piano of Reinier van Houdt. On the first movement, Houdt’s piano is to the fore, and that instrument pounds out a series of quite alarming percussive minimal strokes that sonically sit halfway between machine-gun fire and the keys of an old-fashioned typewriter, said device being operated by a loopy Dadaist poet composing a vitriolic message against the petit bourgeoisie. About mid-point the piece enters a mood of dangerous seething calm, before gradually building up the tension again with carefully-orchestrated keystrokes, each one a bundle of constrained emotion – isolated notes, dissonant chord combinations, and a relentless metronome-like patter characterise this section. It’s almost a relief when this neurotic torture ends, and the remaining half of this 22-minute opus drifts away on a sea of near-silence and suffused slow chords that resemble the ghost of Satie paying a fleeting visit to the salon. If there is indeed a mechanism involved somewhere in this prepared piano set-up, it’s as though the clockwork device had run out of steam halfway through, leaving us to confront a void.

This torment is positively benign compared to the horrors of ‘Movement 2′, where López takes the above recording away in a tumbrel cart and subjects it to what he describes as “evolutionary studio treatments”. There’s a euphemism if ever there was. It’s more like a radical reconstruction of sound, occupying a nether world between composition, field recording and electro-acoustic music, and in this rather nightmarish zone each percussive bleat of the prepared piano is transformed into the clankings and groanings of an infernal machine. Even the smallest of Van Houdt’s keyboard-playing gestures has been fiendishly detoured, such that he is now pressing the buttons that operate a factory of doom, a winch of death, or a murderous metal robot. Thankfully, the violent and dramatic opening does subside eventually, and the piece mutates into a bleak, desolate world of abstract cloudery where the horizon starts to fade away and we lose our footing. Occasional forlorn piano notes, by now heavily disguised and muffled, attempt to peek through the canopy of gloom and provide some warmth, but it’s a desperate, futile action. There’s a strange beauty to be found in contemplating this washed-out environment, an activity with which we can occupy ourselves before the mechanical watch-grinding effect start to reassert itself after 20 minutes. Thereafter, it’s merely like being mashed in the gears of a gigantic clock for ten minutes, praying that we can somehow avoid being clubbed into a pulp by the chiming hammers when midnight finally strikes. López has indeed created a very “immersive” record here, it just depends if you can face being immersed in its bittersweet combinations of machine-like violence and baleful gloom.

A Blanket In My Muesli

Here’s some unusual acoustic experimental music made by the German foursome of Quadrat:sch, deliberately emulating the traditional instrumentation of 18th century Alpine chamber folk with their set-up on Stubenmusic (COL LEGNO WWE 2CD 20305). Using hammered dulcimer, zither, guitar and double bass, the quartet turn in 12 short-to-medium pieces on the first CD of this double-disc set, all of them composed by the zither player Christof Dienz, and they are lively, taut renditions of pieces which follow song-like structures with their winning and bright melodies, complex time signatures, and brilliant inventive interplay of instruments. These tunes probably aren’t directly inspired by folk tunes as such, but some of them refer to dances, and the title of the opening track ‘This Way or That Way or the Other’ feels like a simple homespun philosophy that could easily apply to the gentler life of 200 years ago as much as it does to the strategies of a post-modernist musician. Apart from a couple of slow “pastoral” pieces, the mood of this disc is upbeat and cheerful, and you’ll soon be ordering a pair of britches and leather buskins so that you can join in this merry dance on the slopes of the Finsteraarhorn. On the second disc, the set-up is “extended” by the arrival of the great Zeena Parkins with her harp under one arm and a bushel of alpine fruits under the other. The percussionist Herbert Pirker also joins the team, and the six players use plucks, drones, groans, swoops, zangles and many other pleasing effects in very abstracted ways. These open-ended semi-atonal and non-rhythmic instrumentals (which are also composed rather than improvised) are intended to explore sonic structures, and while the set may not be a direct “answer record” to its more danceable brother, it is very indicative of the way that short, compressed compositions can be “opened out” into these labyrinthine buildings, full of twisting corridors and pathways. Oswald Egger supplies an interpretative text to this fine package of interesting music.

The Man with X-Ray Ears

The lovely Felix Kubin has released TXRF (IT’S ITS008) as a double LP, albeit not an excessively long one – some sides are just 11 minutes in length. It’s a fine set of irresistible and enjoyable electronic music made with such tools as the Sherman 2 filterbank and the Electrix Repeater, which is a loop sampler device – in short, a combination of analogue and digital devices to create patterns and processed sounds. As ever, Kubin manages to draw convincing lines of convergence between Kraftwerk, techno club music, and the more extreme modes of academic experimental electronic music of the 1960s, compacting his ingenious thniking in short and portable statements that remain somewhat enigmatic yet also very accessible. He also retains his very droll sense of humour, and I sense an undercurrent of hilarity which informs even the most austere of these cuts, which Kubin performs completely deadpan. According to the press release, of which I don’t have a physical copy, there’s also a scientific dimension to the set, involving the action of firing X-Rays at solid matter in order to determine something about their surface properties. This feels like a throwback to a certain time in the 1990s when Disinformation, John Duncan and others were exploring ways to make electronic music using scientific devices like particle colliders and shortwave signals. We’re not told exactly how Kubin managed to process X-rays into sound, and the plausibility factor is pretty low to say the least, but through the power of suggestion (a strategy also picked up by the cover image) it does pre-determine how we as listeners will approach the music to some degree. As a double LP, it’s structured in four connected sections titled ‘Total’, ‘Reflection’, ‘X-Ray’ and ‘Fluorescence’, suggestive of a process that might lead the listener through an experiment to its successful conclusion. In case any of this makes Kubin’s work sound pretentious, let me reassure you it’s quite the opposite; when you listen you’ll be won over instantly by the clarity of his thinking and the straightforward way he presents his ideas.

We Imply, He Infers

Another German composer is the excellent Marcus Schmickler, usually known for his extreme electronic music pieces. Rule Of Inference (A-MUSIK A-37) however showcases his compositional skills, with three substantial suites scored for percussion, orchestra, and chamber ensemble. The title piece is in four movements and allows the Cologne Schlagquartett to exercise their upper body muscles producing the strident, explosive portions of the first section, and the more approachable gamelan-like passages of the second part; we also hear bone-like rattling effects, brooding rumbles like thunder, and even some quasi-African polyrhythmic passages. Apparently all this percussion music was derived from complex ideas about logic, mathematics, and astronomy, and we’re advised to look for parallels in the music of Xenakis, Grisey and Stockhausen. It’s enough to restore your faith in systems-based music when it achieves such powerful results.

Quite different to the above is the 10-minute ‘Symposion’, an orchestral work which presents an eerie series of very mixed chords to create an effect like a slow-moving Ligeti or Penderecki piece. Though no stranger to micro-tonal compositional ideas, Schmickler here is in fact exploring something about the history of equal temperament, about which I know less than zero other than it’s a tuning system. ‘Symposion’ contains enough dissonances to curdle your internal organs, yet unlike Ligeti or Penderecki’s music it refuses any sort of narrative, religious, or philosophical associations and remains largely an exploratory, “process” experiment.

The album finishes with four short chamber-instrumentals which are intended as direct tributes to Carlo Gesualdo, the madrigal composer whose colourful life was about as bizarre as the music he composed; it seems Gesualdo broke all the rules in this very rarefied medium, but being the murderous nobleman he was, he could afford to do so and the audience for madrigal music was in any case incredibly limited (I like to think the Renaissance was a simpler more innocent time before globalisation, lucrative TV deals and instant internet coverage was the order of the day). One of the rules he broke was using far too many chromatic effects per square inch. Chromatics is another musicological term which I don’t really understand, but I’ve heard not a few records by Gesualdo and his scores make singers jump through hoops to produce musical clashes and dissonances that can jar the fillings loose from your teeth. Schmickler’s approach has been to eliminate the vocal elements completely and attempt, through his arrangements, to compress all those delicious chromatics into handy bite-size pieces. I’m no expert as I hope I’ve made clear, but I feel Schmickler has somehow missed the exquisite jarring factor that is to me the essence of Gesualdo. Even so, these four succeed nicely as modernist takes on Renaissance music. If this CD appeals, may I recommend you rewind to 2006 and hear a copy of Demos by this composer, also released by A-Musik, for a fascinating mix of orchestra, choir and electronic music.

1. Swell Maps, ‘Dresden Style’ (1980)
   From Train Out Of It, UK THE GREY AREA CD MAPS 3 (1991)
2. Dr Mix & The Remix, ‘No Fun’ (1979)
   From 1979-1982, FRANCE BONDAGE RECORDS ABCD 041 CD (1989)
3. 1/2 Japanese, ‘Tangled Up In Blue’
   From 1/2 Gentlemen / Not Beasts, UK ARMAGEDDON RECORDS A BOX 1 (1980)
4. The Adverts, ‘Television’s Over’ (1977)
   From The Punk Singles Collection, UK ANAGRAM CD PUNK 95 (1997)
5. Red Transistor, ‘Not Bite’ (1977)
   From New York Noise Vol 2, UK SOUL JAZZ RECORDS SJR CD 16 (2006)
6. Buzzcocks, ‘You Tear Me Up’ (1978)
   From Another Music in A Different Kitchen / Love Bites, UK EMI RECORDS 5099909529021 2 x CD (2001)
7. Demon Preacher, ‘Royal Northern’
   From Messthetics #107: D.I.Y. ’78-81 London III, USA HYPED 2 DEATH CD (2009)
8. Devo, ‘Be Stiff’
   From Hardcore Devo Vol. 2, USA RYKODISC RCD 20208 (1991)
9. Gang of Four, ‘Damaged Goods’ (1978)
   From Entertainment, UK EMI RECORDS 7243 8 32146 2 CD (1995)
10. The Slits, ‘FM’ (1979)
    From Cut, UK ISLAND REMASTERS IMCD 275 (2000)
11. Discharge, ‘A Hell On Earth’ (1981)
    From Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing, UK CASTLE MUSIC CMRCD709 (2003)
12. Y Pants, ‘Favourite Sweater’ (1980)
    From New York Noise Vol 2, op cit.
13. The Twizzlers, ‘We Are The Twizzlers + Motorbike’
    From Messthetics Greatest Hiss, USA HYPED 2 DEATH CD (2008)
14. Metal Boys, ‘Carbone 14′ (1980)
    From Tokio Airport, FRANCE SEVENTEEN ST004 2 x CD (2004)
15. Fire Engines, ‘Meat Whiplash’ (1981)
    From Codex Teenage Premonition, USA DOMINO DNO 068 CD (2005)
16. Glenn Branca, ‘Jill’ (1977)
    From Songs ’77-’79, USA ATAVISTIC ALP43 CD (1996)
17. Dog Faced Hermans, ‘Cactus’ (1988)
    From Humans Fly / Every Day Timebomb, NETHERLANDS KONKURREL K133 CD (1991)
18. The Fall, ‘Slates, Slags, Etc’ (1981)
    From Slates, UK CASTLE MUSIC CMRCD1006 CD (2004)
19. Instant Automatons, ‘Gillian Is Normal’
    From Messthetics Greatest Hiss, op cit.
20. Stolen Power, ‘Little White Lies’
    From Messthetics #107, op cit.
21. The Stranglers, ‘Walk On By’
    From UK UNITED ARTISTS UP 36429 7″ SINGLE (1978)

Environmental field recording expert Francisco López teams up with Xabier Erkizia to go a-sailing down the Bidasoa river in the Basque country to capture the sounds of hydroelectric power plants and then independently convert these recordings into two sets of abstract experimental musique concrète / drone ambience. López quests for a detached approach in which noise textures gradually change and evolve into something almost organic though very machine-like and Erkizia converts his sounds into a more lively pair of noisescapes.

As with many of his recordings, López’s two contributions are merely numbered and they are very cool and calm in delivery. Grainy noise patterns pass smoothly, one into another, while rhythm-like structures are provided by machines at work within the plants, marking out time perhaps or the various processes involved in channeling water past humming turbines. It seems that even the silence between tracks is very significant; here, it is very suggestive of going underwater deep down, as far down as the river-bed goes. The machines take on an alien life of their own, mysterious, clinical and inaccessible to humans; it’s serene and steady though of course unemotional and in that, quite creepy and intimidating. The last few minutes of “Untitled #267″ are perhaps the most sinister for they are at sub-audible levels and are characterised by twitchy clicks and hisses that stalk the blackness.

Erkizia’s contributions are much, much more dramatic and startling: he includes flowing turbulent water as well as near-silent hisses and unsettling ambience in his two works. There is much more tension in the series of sounds as it flips from water sluicing through channels to more steady crumbly noise mini-showers to periods of quiet hum and the odd whisk of grit and electronic twitch. Probably the most dynamic part of the whole disc comes at the start of “Bidasoa, presak” where several layers of noise texture proceed and you could almost swear that there are voices in there somewhere: the piece at this point might have come from an black metal / noise ambient fusion recording.

It would have been a more interesting recording if the two artists had included a track where their separate recordings are combined and perhaps remixed by a third person who could add his/her own touches and distortions to the found sounds. As it is, “Elektra Bidasoa” suggests López hasn’t changed his approach much since I last heard him nearly a decade ago and Erkizia’s own work is too choppy and can’t quite make up for short-comings in the other’s tracks. Very little of the awesome power of the hydroelectric power plants is conveyed and there’s no sense of the huge volumes of water that must rush through them each day.

Contact: Ferns Recordings, Francisco Lopez, Xabier Erkizia

This is a very beguiling double set of psychedelic electroacoustic folk by Budapest-based multi-instrumentalist Zsolt Sores Ahad and his band. In the manner of gypsies the musicians wander high and low through different soundscapes of varying atmosphere: sometimes intimate, friendly yet airy, a little sinister and ambiguous even. As the album’s title indicates, this is indeed soundtrack music for movies, plays and other dramas yet to be made: each track is its own self-referential world and evokes particular visual associations, sounds and even smells.

An early highlight is “On the Top of the Darwin Tillite – Climb the Aztec Siltstone”, an arduous climb up a mysterious pyramid dominated by a long drone that alternately urges us on and warns us of the curse that might await us at the top for disturbing the Aztec gods’ rest. Perhaps we might be sacrificed and our hearts offered to the sun god to ensure his continued travels through the sky. “In the Dry Valleys” offers up searingly hot desert landscapes in which a Cormac McCarthy western might play out. “The Sands are Running Out” features very distorted sounds that sound like they might be coming from an electric guitar, a very lethargic saxophone and unusual percussion that reminds me of a large floating hollow container in a tub of water.

“Potlatch on the Beach of the Dirty Little Hoare Pond – The Heart of a Poet” might be a spiritual quest as suggested by the sitar and an expectant mood early in the piece. The piece develops slowly and seemingly in a disorganised way but the whole thing is held together by the large spaces within and the questing mood.

The second disc is taken up by one track “Lessness (Meeting with Godot)” which is a highly abstract piece featuring very long tones and spoken-word Hungarian-language recordings of Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame”. The track was composed for a theatre performance of this play. For such a long and sparing piece that’s not very immersive and lacks much atmosphere, the music holds very well and generates on-going tension. It does get better in its last five minutes when proceedings turn very hysterical.

The whole set is perhaps best heard as two separate discs: trying to hear both CDs can tax the endurance and the long track does take its time to build up to the climax.

Contact: Fourth Dimension, Zsolt Sores Ahad

A very pleasant psych-pop amble through his home town of Cambridge in the UK this recording seems to be for The Doozer, to judge by descriptions on the Pickled Egg Records’ website. The doozy one sings and plays all instruments (guitars, keyboards, percussion) save for three tracks where someone else takes over on drums. Gentle surf music of The Beach Boys’ sort and a slightly dark and melancholy ambience meet exotic foreign, even tribalistic, influences to create a subtly rich sound tapestry that, however modest and small-scale its aims are, suggests it is capable of scaling great Himalayan heights.

An early highlight is “Hornbill”, boasting rhythms that might be based on gamelan orchestra and bamboo instrument rhythms and sounds and featuring a voice-over that might have been sourced from an old recording made by Edgar Lustgarten (died 1978) as the voice sounds so much like that writer’s. Spoken-voice recordings are also a feature of “Semut 1″ along with a gentle blurry electronic drone. Most of the time the CD lopes along at an easy pace, quite relaxed with sometimes unusual rhythms that come to be anticipated rather than surprise. The title track starts off as a fairly ordinary piece but expands into a quaint folksy jaunt with strange electronic connections. Imagine a bunch of hillbillies in the Ozark hills building their own spaceship from scrap metal using instructions left behind by aliens that last visited Earth a thousand years ago and you get some idea of the song. “Decisive Mind” gives us a deranged and twisted lead guitar melody.

The album does feel as though The Doozer is holding back something, perhaps because this is his second album and he’s not yet confident enough to tackle larger-scaled themes and ideas that could expand his music’s scope and take him into more ambiguous territories. At times the recording sounds as if it’s retracing parts of itself and is in danger of falling into a rut. The bland vocal does start to grate after a while and you start to wish Dooz would try some actual singing instead of pretend-singing, even if very out of tune and with a breaking tone.

Contact: Pickled Egg Records

One already senses that Piermattei is a self-taught maverick with ideas so potent that only he can express them, notwithstanding the contribution of Napo Camassa. I click forward to ‘Hex-Exercises in Stalinism’ to endure a shape-shifting bed of rattling china plates for percussion, on top of which eerie unnatural horn or electronic voices make their plaintive moan. Again, we have the sense of a framework that is barely hanging together, a fragile sculpture or mobile built of spindly wire which is somehow defying gravity as it spins and rotates its beautiful colours and planes in mid-air. In the time it’s taken to write that sentence we’ve already shifted into a halting acoustic guitar tape-loop that stutters and clops, having emerged from the warp of a Terry Riley-styled organ figure. Now come half-hearted ghostly voices whispering what might be two stanzas from a lost 1960s pop song about lost romance. There’s also ‘Hey, Rube!’ which applies tape delay to scattered woodwind notes, combined with a bass guitar that has clearly wandered into the wrong building, a spooky cheap organ drone, and other foreign effects. Five minutes later we hear a sneering pop singer chanting from behind a distorting sheet of glass, then fragments of atonal free playing electric-guitar mayhem. Scattered liberally with precious moments of heavy-duty psychotic weirdness within beguiling open-ended structures, this record is just too good to be true. Piermattei may be using his own personal version of the bricolage method (although frankly, I have no clear idea what he’s doing), but it’s done with imagination and skill, and he’s not simply another prankster with a sampling device and a computer. This record is a hand-made work of skewed mutant genius, its fragmentary nature in a direct line with such important records as The Faust Tapes. CD in jewel case is decorated with puzzling texts and collage images. You need this record!

From 16 December last year, we received Not Far From Here (PFMENTUM CD065), a set of impressive jazz-based improvisations by the Los Angeles musician Dick Wood, who composed and led the sessions as well as playing the flute and alto. He’s built a strong small combo with the cornet player Dan Clucas, the trombonist Dan Ostermann who sometimes adds a “space mute” to his trombone, the drummer Marty Mansour, bassist Hal Onserud who joined by way of Cecil Taylor, tenorman Chuck Manning, plus live electronics from Mark Trayle. Together, these energised and expert players harness mucho free jazz energy while also managing to negotiate all the wild twists and turns of Wood’s freaky, pretzel-shaped compositions; some startling dynamics on offer throughout all six tracks, showcasing instruments in highly imaginative and unconventional ways, all of which makes for a very satisfying listen. More often than not with this set I bethought me of a 21st-century update on Art Ensemble of Chicago with the added hookery-pamookery of digital whoops from the Supercollider electronics section, but it seems Wood has a very large range of musical ambitions in mind which feed into his elaborate mind-circuits, not all of them from the jazz world either. Blues, avant-garde composition, and Zen philosophy are all strong forces which Wood intends to marshall in his private army. In fine, a glorious listening experience of jazzy brass toots, percussion, bowed and scraped bass sounds, and generally mutated loopiness managed with the sparing use of electronic treatments and breathy growling effects. I like the lively stop-start angularity of ‘Cook The Books’, but if in need of something more “out there” you might enjoy the electronics-heavy diablery of ‘No Known Knowns’, which samples the voice of US defense secretary Rumsfeld and combines it with the octokoto instrument (a hand-made modified zither) of Dan Clucas. In the semi-shady mystery world of this cut, the rhythm section manage to sound positively cynical and blasé at the same time with their ramshackle percussion and resigned bass sighs. The record also boasts an exciting, bright sound, for which we must give due credit to Scott Fraser, the technician who recorded it at Architecture in LA in just two separate sessions. The mangos are in!

The English trio of power-jazz players Hession Wilkinson and Fell opened many ears to what the English could really do with the free jazz mode, particularly in 1992 when Foom! Foom! was first released and even veteran jazz writer Byron Coley waxed lyrical at that time about the raw blastage coming from Alan Wilkinson’s bell. Now here they are again on 2010 date released as Two Falls & A Submission (BO’WEAVIL RECORDINGS WEAVIL44CD), and the passage of 18 years has done absolutely nothing to dim the fire nor crack the binding of these three, as the opening cut ‘First Fall’ bears witness – over 32 minutes of uninterrupted sustained jazz-improv energy which is as welcome as a roaring bonfire in the middle of a cold and damp May Day field. The album and track titles are derived from the metaphor devised by drummer Paul Hession, who sometimes likens the act of improvising to a wrestling match. By his reckoning, the trio of Hession Wilkinson and Fell have a “playful, grappling style”, and it’s this very physicality which asserts its unignorable presence on almost every minute of this disk…you can almost feel the three players interlocking their very bodies, if that isn’t too indelicate an image. There’s something about Hession’s drum rolls in particular that seem to suggest acrobatic back-flips and rope-bounces aplenty as another body flattens against the canvas, but mostly it’s the way the rhythm section work together that creates an endless flow of forward-moving complex musical information, an express train packed with a delegation of University professors and toting 5,000 doctoral theses piled in the caboose. Meanwhile Wilkinson, switching between alto and baritone with the gusto of an Italian gourmet visiting the sweet trolley, exhibits a huge range of techniques – crazy overblowing shrieks, sad and mysterious basso-burbling, sonorous growls and grunts, and (mostly) endless streams of free-thinking diatribes flowing through his supple fingers at a speedy rate of knots. It’s pure streams of abstracted emotional wallop, set to a syncopated beat that makes every sinew in your body pop. In short, the album is a hip throw…from the hippest of the hip!