The music is non-specific object-based noise with electronics – Bohman’s specialty area in fine – ditto for Crow, who is credited with amplified objects, electronics and projections. Furt of course are all electronics – Richard Barrett and Paul Obermayer, from whom we would love to hear more…we do glimpse Barrett now and again playing in Han-Earl Park groups, but what about his classical avant-garde compositions? Hospital as it turns out is a “classic” 1993 performance of that vintage…and was even recorded at a site of high experimentation and avant-magnetism, the London Film-Makers Co-op. Some lucky souls may even have heard it on cassette through Vintage Productions at the time. It would have had an Elastoplast stuck to the cover.

Now thanks to that German label that takes Komnmissar Hjuler seriously, we have this reissue – which already is growing as rare and collectible as the cassette. I think it’s got a CD and CDR inside the bandages. I refuse to open the package. I savour the hand-written messages in felt-tip pen. This patient will live forever in a bed of healing in my private wing. But you can stream it on Bandcamp and enjoy an amazing passage of slow, deliberative strangeness and charm.

Cacahlot (AUSSENRAUM AR-LP-013) by Cacahlot got tucked away in the vinyl stack for about two or three years (was released in 2022) but has now been rescued as part of this negotiation. Powerful improvised grind-drone horrifier created by Jamasp Jhabvala on violin and Marc Berman on the accordion. Researchers, they consider themselves, audio researchers…they claim to have used photos of a nuclear accident as inspiration, or perhaps as a music score? And then threw their own recording tapes into the sea. Then rescued them again. Their name is that of a sperm whale, so our two explorers evidently wish to emulate such monsters of the deep, or evoke their surroundings…”long and obscure exploration of the abyss” indicate the press merchants. The violinist has played in Swiss combo Insub Meta Orchestra and may have some connection to Paracelze, Convulsif, and The Raspoutine Smoked Band. I liked the first track on side one where things might be distorted by electronic assistance and traffic cones, less enchanting when they emerge into acoustic no-robes mode, and playing is revealed as a bit sluggish. However, rainbow balm awaits us on the melancholic stirrings of track 3. At their best, these two really scrape the scales off your skin and blast your muscle tone with sand. Cover painting by Mara Krastina, Flo Kaufmann lacquer cut, and pressed in clear vinyl. (26/01/2023)

American player Keir Neuringer is the sax player behind Dromedaries, and though I never heard him before he also played in Irreversible Entanglements, a group who are so free they don’t just play free jazz – they’re “liberation-oriented”. I liked the use of electronics (played by the drummer Julius Masri) on ‘A Brass Planet’, which shows how the trio don’t have to go full-on energy jazz every minute of the day and have a nice line in “open” structures, highly suitable for this mode of cosmic voyage music. There’s also a splendid where-are-we-now vibe emerging from the chaotic strands of ‘Avant Jawn’ – Keir Neuringer is also a synth player and while he’s no match for Sun Ra on Oblique Parallax, his music somehow intrigues me more when he lays down his overpowering sax.

Alexoteric, also of Philadelphia (where this was recorded), is a very advanced practitioner of “Afrotopian tension” (selon Glyphhaus) and manifests his visions in comic books, collage zines, and art-punk bands, pushing beyond the expected tropes of “cyberpunk”. I found his breathless expositions exhausting at first, but I gotta admit the rush of imagery is exhilarating, and he gets more reflective towards the end of the record, and does much to convey the crags and crevices of a twisted unknowable universe, riven with doubts and anguish. He doesn’t despair of the potential of the human race to rebuild society, but neither should we expect a joyous celebration of humanity, such as June Tyson might have delivered. Vinyl LP release for this unusual item. (19/12/2024)

At four sides, there’s a fair bit of music on offer, but they like a wide canvas on which to express their musical fantasies, which veer from a sort of cinematic sci-fi soundtrack thing, to tasteful fusion jazz noodling, with by-roads in the area of La Düsseldorf and Camel. The science fiction thing seems to blight a lot of players lately; is everyone fed up of the modern world and can’t wait to discover a better future? Teleport Collective are certainly hoping for a “posthuman” existence, a prospect that doesn’t thrill me much, but they make it seem positively comforting with their elegant chords and poised, mannered plinkling. A narrator by name of “Desert Survivor” is roped in to recite spoken-word portions of sides A-B, intoning excerpts from an imaginary diary set on an imaginary world. This particular vision doesn’t quite come into focus, but alludes vaguely to dreams, sandstorms, memories, and a world where our all our excessive consumerism and materialistic ways has finally led us to realise “the uselessness of things”.

There might be a strong message we could support lurking in among the languid sentences, were the music not so bland; the jazz-esque noodling and pastel chords seem to carry on completely oblivious to the implications of this sketched-in dystopia, and the half-baked attempts at emitting unusual electronic noises fall flat. The trio, who used to perform as Killah Tofu and made a couple of “jazz-funk-soul” records in Vienna, are described here as “electronic jazz”, but as usual with many contemporary musicians, one genre is not enough to satisfy them, and they also want to capture flavours of movie soundtracks, hip-hop, and dance beats in their sweep. (01/11/2024)

Alizadeh combines the traditional music of the kamancheh, an instrument which he learned to play from age ten onwards, with more contemporary electronica moves – plaintive synths, samples, and beats. Some of the samples come from TV and radio broadcasts directly related to his theme (about which more shortly), and there’s also the harrowing singing voices of Saeed Farajpoury and Kayhan Kalhor. By his own account, he’s all about the sound-sculpting – a process which consumes his time in his “noisework” studio in Tehran – but there’s no neglecting his other artistic apprehensions, since a lot of his inspiration comes from visual images – either atrocities he has seen, or has visualised from information about other atrocities – and then his imagination won’t let him rest until the composition is completed.

The particular conflict he refers to on this record is the Woman, Life, Freedom movement which started in Iran in 2022, after the death of Mahsa Amini. It turns out there’s a wave of resistance to the strict rules surrounding the correct wearing of the hijab, and for the young female rebels it’s clearly become a matter of life and death – not just a struggle about religious dress, but also against police brutality, government corruption, oppression of minorities, and the general subjugation of women in this particular culture. To show his solidarity, and his emotional distress, Saba Alizadeh not only made this record but insisted on the posed cover photograph showing women standing in a circle around a school blackboard. It’s a reminder that this progressive movement started life in places of education – schools and universities. And he did the right thing by dedicating the record to his own mother.

To make his points even more emphatically, he gives provocative titles (said titles also printed in Persian on the back cover) to each grim track, such as ‘To Become A Martyr, One Has To Be Murdered’ or ‘Drop By Drop An Ocean Of Blood Forms’, although there’s still a glimmer of hope in the spirited title ‘Women Of Fire’. There’s a strong and purposeful mood to this forceful release. (19/12/2024)

At first spin it seems heavy on the electronic elements, all programmed and synthed by our man in the chair, but it turns out a number of acoustic musicians have lent their trumpets, flutes, trombones, guitars, strings and woodwinds (and their singing voices) to the collective effort. Simon Öggl is gifted enough a musician to blend in all these contributions to produce a convincing set of instrumentals, and more than once there’s a “cinematic” feeling wafting in through the skylight of the studio. Track titles seem to allude to travels to an alien world, and the demented cover art proposes an impossible landscape where perspectives are going crazy, yet there’s still time for some form of agriculture and exploration in among the weird trees and clouds.

Press notes suggest this landscape is balanced precariously “between affiliation and alienation”, but the user-friendly music indicates that, for the most part, Simon Öggl has little interest in exploring the darker side of human nature. Polished studio tracks, sometimes veering towards a stilted cerebral take on drum-n-bass, are his stock in trade. If you have the taste for more, Öggl also plays in the Viennese quartet Drahthaus, who play a form of ambient lounge electro-pop according to some sources. (19/12/2024)

On Lower Marsh (Duos) (NI VU NI CONNU nvnc-lp046), he’s doing it on tenor and soprano saxophone in duo pairings with Pat Thomas, John Edwards, Angharad Davies and Mark Sanders. These are all English players, excepting the Welsh Angharad. I mention this as there’s a strong London link to the whole set, which was recorded at the Iklectik venue in 2022, a location not far from Waterloo station which was one of the few places in this city where experimental music of all hues stood a chance of thriving. (I think it’s since moved to Peckham, forced out from Waterloo by developers, if I’ve understood correctly.)

Astonishing music on here. John Butcher has been steadily evolving his own voice, his own sound, for many years; nothing less than fully realised personal music has emerged from his bell, but today he sounds supremely confident. Nary a wasted utterance nor a commonplace phrase ‘scapes his lips. No doubt these gifted players bring out his best qualities. While it’s all great music, my personal fave is the segment featuring Angharad Davies on her violin; ‘This Vivid Strain’ sees her embroidering the very air around her with intricate, delicate beads of glass, while Butcher respectfully drones and sighs with the taut breath control of a lizard.

Second fave is Pat Thomas on ‘Breakthrough Serenade’. This joint assault of electronics and soprano sax moves at twice the speed of thought. If translated into human words, it would confound all our enemies in just 8:21 mins. We need to start using improvised music (all art, in fact) as tools to shape our thoughts, guide our prayers, articulate deepest sentiments with accuracy in a productive dynamic. John Butcher, who has always seemed to me capable of realising emotions and abstractions in precise, repeatable, comprehensible form, should be reckoned a hero on this account.

I’ll also single out here the simpatico notes written by Clive Bell (one of the nicest fellows in this branch of showbiz), as they articulate more about the music than I can, and he also has a surprising sideline in unexpected dimensional observations, including blinking twice at the metadata on his PC when he spun the sound files he was sent. These fine essay-form notes are printed on the cover in the letterpress mode, as they deserve.

In picking his dream teams, Butcher reports: “choosing is probably 75 % about the player and 25 % about the instrument”, once again indicating the exactitude of his mind, but also highlighting the very human side of free improvisation, a factor which might be in danger of being overlooked – it’s played by real people, not generated some vague amorphous entity called “art” – and we don’t want its players to become an endangered species. (15/10/2024).

He’s here solo today under his alias Kabaal with his debut LP, World Why Web (MOLI DEL TRO MDT008). It’s an exhausting listen. Warmenbol is a frenetic, energised stickman and if he sees a space between two oranges in the fruit bowl, he’ll instantly fill it with a watermelon if so disposed. Not content with hammering out the railroad ties as he builds his one-man passage to the North-West frontier through the Sonian Forest, he’s also caught the sampling bug, drawing on a very eclectic range of pre-records which would be enough to consume 18 hard drives in flames, and presumably he’s triggering these samples live in real time while he pads away behind the kit. Already the frantic action is doubled. This doubling also tends towards sonic overload for the listener, as one odd / surprising / shocking / puzzling escapade follows another in the stream of exotic selections, powered by ceaseless beats. To return to the fruit metaphor, it’s like eating psychedelic grapes laced with pineapples, whose herbaceous crowns have somehow transformed into lattice spindlework gathered from a nearby spider.

According to the text here, we might find the music of jazzman Paul Dunmall and composer Ligeti sampled somewhere in the fast-moving array, but no use in attempting to trap these errant dragonflies by the riverbed nor identify their species. I like the lively chutzpah with which Warmenbol pilfers from recordings, even if this hopppermathon is a confusing jumble, whose novelty value is high but whose staying power has yet to be determined. I’d like it if his Kabaal name did in fact indicate an interest in the Kabbalah; perhaps then he might attach a mystic significance to the odd images on the covers here, such as buzzsaws embedded in tree trunks and a random spill of coloured balls. It would also be possible to assess the internet – the “world why web” – as a huge storehouse of puzzling symbols and signs, in need of decoding by a Talmudic scholar. However, I expect the name is just a coincidence. LP is pressed in turquoise vinyl. From 01/11/2024.

On today’s spin I’m reminded more than once of the similar odd sound produced by Hans Reichel and his “Dachsophon” or Daxophone, which he invented in 1987 and played on The Dawn of Dachsman, and other recordings. Reichel’s wooden instruments were carefully carved tongues mounted in resonant wooden boxes, but like Hornorkesteret he tended to apply the bow and likewise produced animalistic whines and grunts. Qvale and team also add percussion and some conventional instruments to the mix, but to remind us of their quasi-pagan roots, there are four antler-players in the band, plus the use of bone flute, moose skull and hoof rattle tells us that animals are never very far away – in spirit, and in a very corporeal sense.

I like the way they keep the melodies very simple – if they were rock musicians, this could almost be very rough post-punk riffing or even a form of acoustic Black Metal (which is something they ought to try, in my view), but they can’t help syncopating their rhythms, in an attempt to get us onto their dancefloor and watch us execute a lumbering stomp. When I say dancefloor, it’s probably a charmed circle in the forest with mushrooms and stones and goblins nearby. Elaborate cover art curlicues, emblems and pastoral scenes likewise confirm this “wild men of the woods” image they’re trying to push, as do the charming silhouette pix of the band indicating that long hair and nudity are entry-level requirements if you wanna “blow” with the Hornsters. At the same time, they’re also urban sophisticates who are keen to blend krautrock and minimal-improv moves with their folk-inflected antics. Some nice moments of wildlife field-recording punctuate the tracks, but I don’t think they actually recorded it in the open air. (11/11/2024)

Available in the UK through Cold Spring

We’ve been following the releases of the French group L’Autopsie for some time now, as well as related eruptions such as micro_penis and Sun Plexus, and regular readers will know we’ve reacted with a certain amount of nausea and repulsion mixed in with the musical appreciation. Sebastien Borgo is one of the prime movers and shakers in this rotomontade, and it seems there are no lengths to which he won’t go in terms of breaking taboos, unsettling the listener with queasy sounds and shocking imagery, and doing his level best to unbalance normality in his quest to disrupt the “straight” world. In terms of apt collaborations, today’s item is matched only by the time Sun Plexus made a double-LP with Canada’s finest anti-good taste merchants, The Nihilist Spasm Band – not only do they produce horrible music, but also bellow out rude words at the audience.

As to Smegma, despite owning not-a-few records by this unclassifiable Californian band of monstrous weirdos, I still find I can’t say anything remotely useful about their work or their music. They’ve been active since 1973, tangentially associated with the LA Free Music Society, and it’s well-nigh impossible to say who the members are – because people keep coming and going, they often go by absurd alias names, and even long-serving players may not be the same people they started out as. Like the French group, they too have flirted with outré imagery and nasty-ish album titles, and have successfully transitioned into the 21st century via noise collaborations with Wolf Eyes, Merzbow, Carlos Giffoni and other prominent weirdos. For those who want to know which “incarnation” of Smegma appears on today’s record, forget your rock-family-trees and check the Bandcamp page; I will mention that John Wiese, one of the more prolific and abrasive West Coast noisers, is present on the grooves.

The record starts out menacing and broody on side one, then grows hysterical and shocking on side two, ending in a flurry of diabolical shrieks and incessant pandemonium that’s enough to send anyone crazy. It’s all the more troubling for the lack of context, somehow; nothing explained or framed, much like the extreme close-up details of the collage artworks, which make no sense at all yet contain just enough recognisable imagery to confound the poor human brain. You can’t call this free improvisation, or free noise; it’s just some monstrous presence that insists on itself, squatting in your mind like an unwelcome supernatural apparition. The release also includes a witty self-referential self-sabotaging insert, a text written by the French-Japanese artist Samon Takahashi, which does everything it can to undermine the music, the audience, and the framework of music journalism / criticism too; while demonstrating how futile it is for anyone to write about music, it also manages to pull the rug out from the listener’s expectations, especially that segment of the audience who know anything about Smegma and think they know what to expect. Ogrob has played a similar sardonic prank before, on the Musica Acouscousmatica LP, mercilessly poking fun at anyone foolish enough to take art seriously.

Today it has the effect of pre-empting just about any response to Transmissions Des Fluides; maybe that’s the point, to insist that we go in with no preconceptions, and take our medicine without complaining. Either that, or these madmen have jointly decided that modern culture has run out of road long ago, and all that’s left to do is trade bodily fluids, as the title suggests. This record isn’t a friendly jam session at all, but a free-for-all orgy of far-out perversion among consenting freaks. Equally unsettling is the poster insert with an impossible photo of a ruined bridge, with two tiny figures walking across the top of it at an absurdly dizzying height. An indigestible, but unforgettable, melange of extreme sounds and ideas, executed with reckless abandon and flashes of pathological insanity, another nail in the coffin of modern music. (12/11/2024)