The B side has a long title that begins ‘C’est La Raison Pour Laquelle…’ and here the band display a little more finesse in their execution of the cosmic blues jam. For one thing at least there’s a chord change or two, and we don’t feel quite the same merciless hammering of the senses. Somewhere there’s an implied grid creating spaces where the vocal interjections can land more successfully, so it doesn’t come across as a rant from a lectern by a frenzied guy holding a megaphone. The music here gives ample evidence of the band’s profligacy; they meet up every month, “improvise freely without any restraint”, and always record the results.

Babils has its origins in the friendship between Gabriel Séverin and Michel Duyck, a twosome who also used to perform as The Joint Between, though Duyck’s connection stretch back even further to Digital Dance, a Belgian New Wave band from the early 1980s. Babils grew into a five-piece, with guitarist Stephan Barbery asking to join in 2009 after he saw them freaking out on stage. Michel Duyck (the original guitarist) died in 2014 however, and Séverin has kindly dedicated this release to his old friend. To hear Babils with Duyck’s guitar contributions, I suppose you could do worse than start with 2011’s QTAB. Babils aren’t incompetent, and it sounds like they’re having fun, but I also feel the music is a little over-strained, as if too much effort is expended in the generation of these dense and heavy episodes. I’m reminded of Kosmose, another Belgian band who at least had the distinction of creating 1970s-styled music in the 1970s, instead of trying to emulate it in 2017. It so happens Kosmose were also released on Sub Rosa, who may have an agenda trying to restore Belgian avant-rock to the pantheon of European art music. We’ve also heard Séverin in his Rob (u) Rang guise here. From 20th March 2017.

This double-CD release rounds up all known private recordings of Kosmose, a lesser-known Belgian band who made their own form of free-improvised cosmic music in the 1970s. Some of its members may be known to you through later Belgian bands: for instance the keyboard player Alain Neffe and the drummer Guy-Marc Hinant went on to form Pseudo Code in the 1980s, whose work has crossed our path very tangentially; and Neffe went on to create the Insane Music cassette label, home to all sorts of unfathomably strange Belgian art music (often involving his own contributions), by I Scream, Human Flesh, Cortex, Bene Gesserit, and others – and at least 25 volumes of the series Insane Music for Insane People. But before that, there was a band called SIC founded in 1969, just at the dog-end of the hippy culture’s height, which was led by Kosmose’s bass guitarist, Francis Pourcel and the guitarist Daniel Malempré. SIC grew into Kosmose as more members joined, including Alain Neffe, and “attempts at home-made and experimental music” were made in 1971. However, what’s represented here is 11 tracks of free-form trippery from 1974 to 1978, made on an open-reel tape recorder; and most of the music is performed by the core trio of Pourcel, Hinant and Neffe, with occasional guitar solos from Malempré or Paul Kutzner when present; however, Kosmose want to stress they were a collective and had “no specific leader”.

The label proposes this music was consciously influenced by Kosmische Musik from Germany and evolved into “a purely improvised form of noisy free jazz”. I found it heavy going. Despite some moments where the combo manage to lift themselves off the ground, the music trudges and plods where we’d prefer it to soar in the air and glide through outer space. There are superficial resemblances to Gong, Pink Floyd, and Tangerine Dream, which unfortunately only serve to remind us how much better these commercially-successful bands did it. Kosmose’s improvisations are rather dull, staying in the same key for long stretches of time, and the lead instrumentalist generally struggles to find an original or unexpected statement that might lift the band out of their self-made quagmire. The sound of the band has few surprises, too; the guitars, bass and drums sound much the same as many other workaday third-division prog clumpers from the period, and Neffe’s unimaginative use of strings organ and synthesiser routinely fails to provide any excitement to the music. The comparisons to improvisation and free jazz don’t really stand up; there is little evidence that Kosmose understand extended technique, or were aware any of the adventurous ground-breaking work that was done in UK improvisation in the mid-1970s. Terms like “improvised” and “free jazz” are used carelessly these days. The most we can say for Kosmose is that they shared a collaborative form of playing open-ended rock music that didn’t depend on rehearsals or charts or 12-bar boogie.

The “Black Country” of the subtitle refers to Charleroi, a municipality of Belgium where the band originated, and from which they didn’t budge; the dozen or so concerts Kosmose played did not venture outside the Charleroi area. It used to be a thriving city of heavy industry, called the Black Country because of the coal basin, and the workers produced steel, metal and glass; but these industries were starting to fail in the 1970s, leading to economic depression, unemployment and crime in the 1980s and 1990s. The parallels with my own country’s coal industry (and that of others) are sadly all too apparent. However, if members of Kosmose felt any disaffection or political unrest, it’s certainly not reflected in their music, which is solipsistic to the point of being vacuous. None of the tunes have any titles, and they are pretty much vague abstractions, whose central purpose is about the band burrowing into themselves, taking comfort in the warmth of meaningless free noodling. I would say this attitude is clearly shown in the sleeve notes which contain many paragraphs of reminiscences by the band members; but what they talk about is how they rehearsed, played, interacted with each other, speaking of “a silent form of alchemy made its way through our music-playing bodies”, and similar guff. I’d like to learn more about how (if) they assimilated and learned from the music culture of the 1970s, but that is not discussed in much detail; they appear to have absorbed it all by osmosis, and then spent their musical career feeding off each other. They never signed with a label and never had a record released.

Not unpleasant to listen to, nor do I begrudge them two CDs of materials – they clearly needed 18-minute sprawling jam sessions just to get warmed up. But the stunted ambitions of this group don’t make for a rewarding spin. A rather disappointing set of flabby, introspective music by not very distinguished musicians. From 31 December 2015.

Book Of Air have discovered to their own satisfaction that there’s a sound embedded in nature, and have taken its “slow groove” as inspiration for their music, based largely it seems on positive but highly subjective emotions they may have felt by the seaside or walking in the forest or simply sitting in an open field. Emotions too deep to be expressed in words are instead expressed by silence; at root, it’s this silence – something which might imply a deep respect for nature – which Book Of Air are attempting to capture in their slow music. There’s also something to do with “room tone”, which may be about the acoustics and “unique character” of a performance space. However the notes also refer to the times when a performance space is dormant, and no music is played or no words are spoken in this space. They want to capture that too. At this point I could feel the exercise becoming a shade too metaphysical for my poor brain to comprehend.

The music is played with faultless expertise, for sure, and the assurance with which easy syrupy strum is uttered, or each string harmonic is plucked carries a lot of weight and craft behind it. I find each piece is also very static; in attempting to bottle the indefinable atmosphere of nature in this way, Fieldtone opt to stay pretty much in one place for a very long time, the better to contemplate their projected memories of fields and skies, and savour the lush silences. While the ideas on offer are original, and one must applaud their ecological bent, I find this record unsatisfying; the tastefulness of their sound is a problem for me, and the sense that the musicians are not really exerting themselves very much at all. From November 2015.