Long overdue repress of Urpa i musell beutiful reisse of Carlos Maria Trindade and Nuno Canavarro's seminal 1990 album Mr. Wollogallu   Urpa i musell feels very fortunate to announce the reprint of its second release (reissued in 2018), the first ever vinyl reissue of Mr. Wollogallu, the collaboration album between Carlos Maria Trindade and Nuno Canavarro originally released in Portugal on União Lisboa, Produções Audiovisuais Lda. in 1991. The collaboration began when the manager António Cunha, a mutual friend of both musicians, brought the two together for a performance. Afterwards they decided to embark on Mr. Wollogallu. They had never worked together before, although their careers had parallels between them. Both were part of the 80s Portuguese pop-rock scene: Carlos Maria Trindade had played with Corpo Diplomático and Heróis do Mar, while Nuno Canavarro played in Street Kids and Delfins. Moreover, individually, Carlos Maria had released the single Princesa / Em Campo Aberto (Vimúsica, 1982), and Nuno had done the LP Plux Quba (Ama Romanta, 1988), now recognized worldwide for its uniqueness. The conception and recording of Mr. Wollogallu took quiet a long time. Both luminaries would convene in a home studio during the first half of 1990, brainstorming together with calm, care, and love. The sessions resulted in this collaborative record. Although the A side is credited to Carlos Maria and the B side to Nuno, everything was done hand in hand, each artist taking active part in the other’s side. After the release of the record and some live performances together, each musician set out on separate paths: Carlos Maria joined the internationally renowned band Madredeus, while Nuno concentrated on making music for documentaries and feature films. As such, this record is evidence of a unique, magical moment. When Mr. Wollogallu was released, it went mostly unnoticed; the public reaction was not as enthusiastic as one might expect. It was an ouvre ahead of its time, difficult, winding, and diffuse, one that would take years to become more widely accepted. After a second release on CD in 1996, the album was finally praised in an important article published January 2000 in the supplement Sons of the Portuguese newspaper Público, in which the influential music journalist Fernando Magalhães traced the history of Electronic music in Portugal –by then Nuno Canavarro’s Plux Quba had become more recognized worldwide, thanks to a 1998 reissue on Jim O’Rourke’s label Moikai. At the end of the article, Mr. Wollogallu appeared on a list of ten fundamental national Electronic records. Apart from the media’s contribution, word of mouth among music lovers around the world has also been crucial in amplifying the record’s fame and status. Carlos Maria and Nuno created everlasting music that contains an undeniable, enchanting mystery. Mr. Wollogallu features sophisticated, adventurous soundscapes that depict, in a manner both blurry and clear at the same time, ancient maps, distant travels and evocative landscapes, an alchemy of the acoustic and the electronic, created using techniques that were unusual at the time. The reissue includes the remastered album, with the original artwork and a new insert, in which Mia B. gives an insightful view of Mr. Wollogallu’s conception. 

Before coming to Europe, in 1970, pianist Manuel Villarroel was a vet in his native Chilli. A few years later, as leader of the Machi Oul Big Band, he returned to the animal kingdom. A very specific kind of animal, for sure, the Quetzalcoatl, also known as the Feathered Serpent. What is behind this title (also the name of one of the three original compositions on this album released on the Palm label in 1976), is first and foremost a sort of homecoming… After discovering the jazz of Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Villarroel was taken by the free jazz which was all the rage at the time in America and Europe, and this would inspire the first version of his Machi-Oul, project. This was a septet, with which the pianist would record, in 1971, the tremendous Terremoto (re-released by Souffle Continu FFL085). After this masterstroke Villarroel was invited to record with Perception (Perception & Friends) and with Baikida Carroll (Orange Fish Tears). While these were notable contributions, Villarroel was already looking into other combinations. “I had to deal personally with my situation as an expatriate, without disavowing it. I tried not to betray my roots, I tried to translate into my music what was essential to me, to reflect my origins – Latin America, its musical and above all human feelings – while remaining faithful to jazz, which is the mode of expression of the musicians in the group”. This then is the ‘homecoming’ we mentioned, which would incite Manuel Villarroel to compose what he would call “structured free music”. In January 1972 the pianist enlarged his formation to reach the size of a real big band: the Septet became the Machi-Oul Big Band. Three years later in January 1975, with producer Jef Gilson at the helm, fifteen musicians including those from the old Septet (Jef Sicard, François and Jean-Louis Méchali, Gérard Coppéré) worked on a rare form of jazz. From togetherness to dissonance, we danse to it “Bolerito” then shake it up on “Leyendas De Nahuelbuta”. As for the concluding serpent, it is a piece which is impossible to pin down: “Quetzalcoat” is as impressive as it is difficult to grasp. To remind ourselves of this, lets listen to it again.

To abandon animals for music – and avant-garde jazz at that –, could seeming shocking to some people. However, it is exactly what Manuel Villarroel did, as he was a vet for three years before leaving his native Chili for Europe and a career in music. And though the animals may have suffered, the world of music can be grateful. Born in 1944, Manuel Villarroel lent an ear to the best pianists from North America: Oscar Peterson and Erroll Garner then Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner and Cecil Taylor. Manuel left Santiago in September 1970 to participate in the Contemporary Music Workshop in Berlin. To pursue his musical career, he rapidly decided to remain in Europe. The following year in Paris, Manuel began a quartet with saxophonist Jef Sicard (who would also play with his brother Patricio, in the Dharma Quintet). But the group would rapidly expand: Villarroel and Sicard added Gérard Coppéré (saxophone), William Treve (trombone), François Méchali (bass) and Jean-Louis Méchali (drums). And with the arrival of Sonny Grey, a Jamaican trumpeter heard ten years earlier with Daniel Humair, the Matchi-Oul Septet was complete. Complete and ready: on May 8th, 1971, Matchi-Oul was in the studio for Gérard Terronès’ Futura label. The septet recorded seven of the pianist’s compositions. A succession of tracks which flow magically from one to the next: from the first drum strokes to the last deep notes of the bass, the successive waves roll over the piano and whistle through the wind instruments. And when they all come together it gives even greater force to Villarroel’s beautiful songs. Terremoto is a masterpiece of collective expression: but what else could we expect from a “supergroup’’ of this stature? 

Espontaneamente se Tenta: Aventuras Sonoras de Djalma Corrêa is an album of deeply exploratory pieces by legendary percussionist and composer Djalma Corrêa. This double-LP set features previously unreleased recordings that cover a wide range of sonic experiments, revealing an unknown side of the prolific and groundbreaking Brazilian artist. Most of the tracks on this album were digitized for the first time – directly from the original tapes – and were compiled in collaboration with Corrêa just before he passed. The result is a wild and unsettling collage that shows us just how original and intense Corrêa could be: from the unorthodox electroacoustic piece Evolução (Para Fita e Filme), which channels ancestral African inspirations to create a sonic cosmogonical narrative, to the proto-mixtape Exemplo de Sintetizadores, in which he transitions from transcendental drones to astral cha-cha-chas. While the compilation might seem disjointed at first listen, it is in fact the most accurate translation or representation of his central concept: spontaneous music. Djalma's relationship with sound was always guided by his fearless approach to listening, and by his audacious and dynamic interaction with both musicians and equipment, which enabled him to work across a wide array of genres: from jazz to completely abstract music, always through a personal DIY ethic. Corrêa developed a strong bond with experimentalist and inventor Walter Smetak, with whom he shared a studio during his formative years at Universidade Federal da Bahia. Suite Contagotas, featured in this collection, is no less than a sonic materialization of that bond: an experiment revolving around dripping water and its randomness – a tentative exploration of the ideas and possibilities envisioned by Smetak for his audacious, albeit unrealized, Estúdio OVO. Djalma, however, is best known for his studio work in historical albums, including many by Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil and Jorge Ben, and for his own polyrhythmic opus Baiafro. The last track is an early recording called Bossa 2000 dC, first performed by Djalma at the 1964 Nós, Por Exemplo concert, an event which is often cited as marking the beginning of the Tropicalia movement. At the time, he was the only artist in the lineup using electronic devices to create sounds, e.g. medical oscillators and contact mics to augment his percussive palette. The artwork is an amalgamation of material found in the Djalma Corrêa Archive (currently managed by his son Caetano Corrêa) and other material created during the period in which the record was being put together. The intention is to guide the listeners through this possibly tempestuous soundscape, giving them additional resources so that they may draw their own meanings and make their own sense of this extremely immersive and original experience – which is like nothing we've ever heard before. 

Drawn from his six monumental singles for the Philips, Amha and Yared labels between 1970-73, revolutionising traditional Eritrean music via the innovations of amplified kirar, electric guitar and horns. Thick, deep declarations and considerations of love over a mixture of sombre and joyous tunes (with the hand-clapped beat often shifting into double-time near the end). Co-released with Mitmitta Musika in Addis Ababa; handsomely presented in a tip-on sleeve, with extensive liner notes, translations and exclusive photos. Fab.

Joyful rug-cutters and sweet soul-uplifters from the town of Morogoro, in early-1960s Tanzania: muziki wa dansi, inspired by Cuban 78s, and dance crazes like the twist and cha cha cha, but making them its own. Here is the cream of over a hundred recordings by Salum, mostly for Mzuri Records of Kenya; pretty much lost till now. In an old-school tip-on cover, with lyrics in Swahili and English on the inner sleeve. Lovely stuff.

Repressed at Pallas in Germany on 180g black vinyl. Cover printed on reverse board and includes printed inner sleeve with liner notes from Francis Gooding. Initial copies shipped with exclusive 30cm x 30cm print of Batsumi performing in 1974. Landmark South African jazz from 1974 — spiritual and political, shimmering and surging. Reverbed trad and trap drums, mesmeric bass, soaring flute, rocking sax. Highly recommended! An absolute monster!

L’Escalier des Aveugles, or The Stairway of the Blind, was commissioned in November 1990 by Spanish National Radio (Radio Nacional de España). Asked for a piece to premiere as part of the European Day of Music, Luc Ferrari returned with a radiophonic concept that organised his anecdotal music into montage form, sequencing short, elusive narratives in a successive way.The completed composition is formed of thirteen chapters containing a mixture of environmental and synthesised sound, commentary, chatter, and encounters with people and places. Each focuses on a small event within this playbook, and Ferrari notes that each “in addition to being a realistic photograph, will be the subject of a ‘setting to music’: fragments of voice and atmosphere will be sampled and will produce musical matter or a ‘song’.”The sonic language of Madrid forms the setting to which Ferrari lays out the persistent theme of the piece, that of the composer being guided throughout the city by a young woman. Using a game-like structure (liners for this edition include Ferrari’s “Regles de Jeu”, or “Rules of the Game” which act as a script or score to the piece) the motivation is posed: imagine that one day you are told “I know a place in Madrid that sounds amazing (or bizarre)”, to which you reply “Let’s go to it together.” The recordings toy with the relationships between guide and tourist, translator, director and actress, and masculine and feminine that emerge as Ferrari and the actresses follow this action, documenting the shared experience and connections they make as they visit these places.Six actresses guide Ferrari (and the listener) through locations simultaneously ordinary and sonically rich: the metro; the El Corte Inglés department store where we hear the gossip from changing rooms set against music emanating from the PA; vagabonds declaiming their political stance in the Conde de Barajas plaza; interactions buying apples in a market; the reverberant and spacious halls of the Prado Museum where one actress gives a moving description of her favourite painting - Goya’s The 3rd of May 1808.Ferrari replies in French to their comments in Spanish, and there are several self-referential plots, devices, and word games that flirt with the poetics and rhythm of language and sound. A recital of Lorca’s poem "La Casada Infiel" in “Hommage À Lorca” in amongst the location recordings feels striking, and the call and response of “La Nouvelle de L’Escalier”, where one of the actresses descends the staircase of the blind - a long stone stairway in Madrid proposed to Ferrari as an interesting location to visit during the trip by producer José Iges. She replies to Ferrari’s vocal enunciation of the place (and title) in French - L’Escalier des Aveugles - with the place-name in Spanish: La Escalera de los Ciegos.Using this repeated title and image of the staircase of the blind as a symbolic place, a line is drawn to a situational landscape experienced and diffused through snapshots and allusion rather than holistically overviewed, sound conjuring pictures within the imagination. In the sensorial qualities of Ferrari’s treatment of emotion and language—fortified with electro-acoustic motifs and musical properties—the piece accelerates towards a render that is truthful, beautiful, yet also surreal; somewhere between theatre and reality, a gonzo cinema of the ear.

For the time being we are unable to get to the post but if you order now your item will be posted as soon as things return to normal. Thank you for your support. The third release in a series of collaborations between Honest Jon's Records and Incus: a reissue of Derek Bailey & Han Bennink, originally released in 1972. The tussling vegetables in Mal Dean's cover-sketch somehow befit perfectly this extraordinary duo of Bailey and the great Dutch drummer Han Bennink. Recorded in London in 1972, Incus 9 was their second record (after an Instant Composers Pool in 1969), becoming a blueprint and inspiration for generations of free-improvisers. It is paired here with a brilliant session from the following year, with the same power and friendly combativeness, and oodles of creativity, technique, and humor. It's obvious how much they loved playing together. Newly transferred from tape at Abbey Road, and remastered by Rashad Becker. Available exclusively for download here.    --- Derek Bailey / guitar, voice Han Bennink / percussion, saw, reeds, brass, strings, voice --- Engineered by Bob Woolford (tracks: A.1.-B.3.). Mastered by Rashad Becker. Cover by Mal Dean ---

For the time being we are unable to get to the post but if you order now your item will be posted as soon as things return to normal. Thank you for your support. Kicking off a series of collaborations between Honest Jon's Records and Incus: Solo Guitar Volume 1, a reissue of Derek Bailey's Solo Guitar release on Incus in 1971, with additional tracks included on previous reissues and a performance at York University in 1972. Recorded in 1971, this was Bailey's first solo album. Its cover is an iconic montage of photos taken in the guitar shop where he worked. He and the photographer piled up the instruments whilst the proprietor was at lunch, with Bailey promptly sacked on his return. The LP was issued in two versions over the years -- Incus 2 and 2R -- with different groupings of free improvisations paired with Bailey's performances of notated pieces by his friends Misha Mengelberg, Gavin Bryars, and Willem Breuker. All this music is here, plus a superb solo performance at York University in 1972, a welcome shock at the end of an evening of notated music. It's a striking demonstration of the way Bailey rewrote the language of the guitar with endless inventiveness, intelligence, and wit. As throughout the series, the recordings are newly transferred from tape at Abbey Road, remastered by Rashad Becker, and available for download exclusively here. --- Derek Bailey / guitar, synthesizer — Tracks 1-13 recorded by Bob Woolford and Hugh Davies. Photographs by Roberto Masotti. Mastered by Rashad Becker.

Wonderful, previously unreleased recordings by Derek Bailey and his guests at Company Week in 1983. What's remarkable throughout this album is the respect and affection the musicians show for each other, exemplifying the dictionary definition of "company" as "the fact or condition of being with another or others, especially in a way that provides friendship and enjoyment." It starts with "Landslide", a brilliant, spiky, spluttering, twanging reunion of Music Improvisation Company members Evan Parker (tenor sax), Hugh Davies (electronics), and Jamie Muir (percussion). Next up, "Seconde Choix", with Joëlle Léandre's close-miked prepared bass and Bailey's acoustic guitar seemingly heading in different directions before coming together miraculously in just four minutes. The opening of "First Choice", a duet between Bailey and Muir, is a revelation for those who moan that the guitarist plays too many notes. His patient and truly exquisite exploration of harmonics is beautifully counterpointed by Muir's metallic percussion. On "Pile Ou Face" (Heads Or Tails) Davies concentrates on his high register oscillators, carefully shadowed by Parker's soprano until Léandre's deft, springy pizzicato lures them into the playground. "JD In Paradise" is a surprisingly delicate wind quartet, with John Corbett's trumpet, fragile and Don Cherry-like, punctuating the sinuous interplay between Peter Brötzmann and J.D. Parran (on sopranos, flutes and clarinet), while trombonist Vinko Globokar growls approvingly in the background. Igor Stravinsky's magnificent definition of music as the jeu de notes comes to mind listening to Bailey's duet with cellist Ernst Reijseger (executing fiendish double-stopped harmonics with staggering ease). Technical virtuosity has never sounded so effortless -- it is, as its title "Een Plezierig Stukje" simply states, a fun piece. On the closing "La Horda", Bailey and Reijseger team up with the horns for what on paper looks like it could be rough and rowdy sextet but which turns out once more to be a thoughtful, spacious exchange of ideas, shapes, and colors.

"Since my childhood I have been interested in listening under water. That's exactly what we do every summer in Bern, when we dive into the river Aare. A universe of sounds opens up." Edition of 200 vinyl, all copies numbered and signed by the artist. His work explores the relationship between sound, silence and action in space. He studied music in Basel, Paris and Zuerich, with a concentration in experimental music and improvisation. Kobi performs and creates with various musicians, composers and artists in context of long term partnerships with artists such as Phill Niblock, Jürg Frey, Taku Sugimoto and Keith Rowe. Since 2004 he curates the „zoom in“ festival for improvised music at the Minster of Bern. Christian Kobi teaches improvisation at the Bern University of Arts (HKB).2004 Founder and artistic director of »zoom in«, a festival for improvised music at Berne Minster.

Musician, writer and filmmaker, Sunik Kim follows up ‘The Bent Bow Must Wait to Be Released’ (Takuroku 2021) with their second LP - a deadly serious dismantling of the limits of contemporary computer music, delivered with playful dexterity and a touch of slapstick humour, a la Henry Cow.  Enlisting General MIDI to create frenetic, vital patterns of dis-organisation made up of gleeful synthetic trumpets, wry orchestral sweeps and brutal key clusters, Sunik Kim explodes a kind of simplistic sound into complex, beautifully uncertain structures. Rather than attempting to overwhelm or stun the listener into subjectivity, ‘Potential’ is ever shifting; regularly breaking form and unfolding, discreetly nibbling at the concept of the Spectacle and un-doing fatally closed systems of cyclic music.  On first listens we recalled Cecil Taylor’s Unit Structures, Stockhausen’s Gruppen, and even those weirdo attempts at making music from inside the world of Animal Crossing, Lil Jürg Frey. The overflowing ideas of Henry Cow (to which Kim dedicated a fantastically blended mix for the Wire in 2021) never drift too far from view, but contemporary counterparts lay few except for Yorkshire's most eminent polyceleratrix, Gretchen Aury, who we asked to write the liners. Gretchen’s words are unsurprisingly as extraordinary as the record itself, so we’ll close out the call to elicit a Media response to possibly the wildest OTOROKU yet with their words: “Potential reads as a rare honest response to the disaster capitalist era of the apparent nearing end of the anthropocene, a cyborg music which is not hopelessly psychotic like so much contemporary and especially computer-requiring music, but lucidly possessed with rapture, pain, madness, empathy, ecstasy, torment, fragility; all those vital feelings and incentives which our atrociously depressing times seem engineered to quash and bleed out of us. This sound is a blistering Electro Magnetic Pulse wave of revolutionary hope, exclaiming defiantly that History is not over, that the future is not ‘history,’ that there is still a vast multitude of ideas and identities burning brightly and resiliently, despite the fact that they are inconceivable to the tyrannical Hegemonic axis of global capitalist tech-culture. I ask of you, listener, if you truly wish to plunge beyond The Known, give yourself over in full to this record.” — Artwork by Sunik Kim Layout and design by Jeroen Wille  Liner notes by Vymethoxy Redspiders Mastered by Anotine Nouel at Sound Love Studios Track 1 edited by John Wall —

Reet’ is a lost treasure of late 1960s folk/psych-folk. The only album she ever put to tape, with clear pure voice and guitar. luckily recorded by Andres Raudsepp in 1969. Reet will be loved in the same breath as ;Sibylle Baier, Vashti Bunyan, Molly Drake & Bridget st John. Reet Hendrikson deserves wider listening and we hope this reissue will help . Reet Hendrikson was born in Estonia only months before the “great escape” into exile in 1944. Brought up and educated in Sweden, she went to study in the US in 1967 on a Fulbright scholarship, before she made her mark as an Estonian musician in Canada. While her arrangements of Estonian folksongs on the guitar reflected the styles of the sixties, her voice and choice of material sounded authentic and made a connection with ages past. When Hendrikson arrived in Canada in 1968 via the US, her Estonian was native-like because of the high quality of Estonian schools in Sweden. She was thus able to characterise the identity of young ex-patriate Estonians – especially those born in exile from Soviet occupation – in a new and meaningful way. A formal musical background allowed her to create the arrangements that accompanied her simple but pure singing voice. Having heard her under northern Muskoka pines at an Estonian summer seminar, it didn’t take Andres Raudsepp ( of raindeer records) long to bring her to a recording studio. “Reet – Estonian folksongs” appeared in 1969. Hendrikson soon found her way to the scholarly atmosphere of Boston where, as a multi-instrumentalist, she joined a group of musicians who favoured traditional folk music. Back in Sweden in the 1980ies, she was invited to join a scholarly society of Estonian young women, which she led during musical sessions. She visited Estonia as frequently as possible, trying in particular to be helpful to Estonian musicians by providing sheet music and much-needed repertoire from the Swedish National Radio Archives, where she worked for a while.. Reet Hendrikson died in Stockholm in the autumn of 2000. 

Sholto Dobie puts forth ‘23’ on Infant Tree, his debut solo LP. A wildly accomplished document of practice. After many years spent working with pipes and air, ‘23’ offers us his current developments. Recorded in a year in which the artist worked in Lithuania, Vietnam and Sweden, the record distills a broad approach to sound, using a wide net to gather recordings from performances, gatherings, walks and personal life. Sholto carefully leads the listener between distinct environments and the intimately documented network of compressed air, tubes, reeds, flutes and timers which he works with. In these recordings, life is welcomed in, interiors are heard and felt, obscured voices, insects, forests drift in and out of focus, as we are transported through an unfamiliar landscape.Sholto Dobie was born in Edinburgh and lives in Vilnius, he performs with self-constructed wind instruments, using a frankenstein-like set up which has evolved over many years. An air pump is attached to a series of reeded and metal pipes from various sources - organs, bagpipes and khene - which are brought to life by an interrelated system of timer modules, valves and swinging microphones. ‘23’ captures the rich world of pulses, beatings and breaths that have emerged from Sholto’s performance settings, whilst weaving them into a distinct and unique audio work.For anyone more familiar with Sholto’s work you will no doubt be warmed by recognisably delicate and evocative styles reminiscent of previous solo recordings such as ‘Nevery’ and ‘The Ringer’ as well as influences from friends and collaborators such as Judith Hamann, Malvern Brume, Ahti & Ahti, Rie Nakajima and Shakeeb Abu Hamdan.The 12” LP comes with beautifully matched artwork by Zoë Annesley and printed on reverse board, pressed by Monotype Pressing. Limited to 300 copies. 

‘The Next 60 Years’ leads on from Thomas Bush’s 2018 debut for John T Gast’s 5GT and 2022 one for Mammas Mysteriska Jukebox with a half hour inside his curious mind. Somehow fleeting but fixed, the six songs hit a highly satisfying mark of fine-wrought arrangements riddled with strange artefacts ornamenting the ether, clearly distinguished from his work in the fissures of dub techno and ambient pop as RAP, but nevertheless betraying the fingerprints of his bandmate Guy Gormley as co-producer on its micro-dosed, lysergic patina of tape scribbled textures and avant-dub wise mixing.  Comparisons with Flaming Tunes are surely warranted from the off with his West Coast US-via-East London fusion of harpsichord swag with on-the-turn vocal harmonies in ‘Same Life Flowed’, and which percolate the album thru to the queered hallucination ‘Face in the Water’ and mesh of spindly strings and loner whispers in ‘Flood of Light’. He properly snags us with something like Mark Glynne & Bart Zwier meets Pigbaby on ‘Burn Clear’, especially in the radio interceptions buried deep in the stereo field that caused us to check the speakers were functioning properly, and the curdled tone of ‘Mulligan’ is destined straight for the spiked peaches folder. 

Michael Atherton is a writer, composer and educator from Sydney, Australia. Originally born in Liverpool, England, to Welsh-Irish and German parents, his family later migrated to Australia in 1965. Moving to the suburbs in La Perouse, he grew up in a mixed, multicultural community, where he fostered friendships with existing indigenous members and Iberian migrants. His formative migrant experience and his curiosity about vernacular, as well as notated music, led him to study music formally where he was attracted to ethnomusicology. From a self-taught guitarist to an accomplished multi-instrumentalist, Michael’s recorded output spans many different genres and styles – he was a member of the Renaissance Players, an early music group; Sirocco, a pioneering cross-cultural folk group; and Southern Crossings, an innovative ethno-classical ensemble. By 1990, he had moved beyond his earlier musical endeavours, and away from Australia, with ‘Windshift’ seeing him draw on resources from the Asia-Pacific and Europe. With an impressive arsenal of instruments, such as the didjeridu, hurdy gurdy, kulintang, saron and jaw harp, to name but a few, Michael adds intense colour to the recordings using samplers, synths and modulating effects. Recently remastered by fellow Australian-based musician and engineer, Mikey Young, and visually re-imagined by Glasgow-based artist, Jamie Johnson, ‘Windshift’ is now presented once again by Infinite Expanse with a first-time reissue on vinyl.

Suikyō documents a first-time meeting between three Japanese improvisers: Takashi Masubuchi on guitar and harmonica; Ayami Suzuki on voice and electronics; and Tomo on hurdy-gurdy. Recorded at Permian on the 29th of January, 2023, it’s a stunning, forty-minute long improvisation of rare artistic sympathy. Notably, it was the first time the trio had performed together, though Masubuchi and Suzuki have prior form as a duo; on the evening itself, the trio performance was preceded by solo sets from Suzuki and Tomo, which served as a kind of introduction, of sorts, to the broader aesthetic visions of two of the musicians on Suikyō. Masubuchi, Suzuki and Tomo make for a fascinating trio, not only due to the shared musical sympathy that’s clear from their performance, but also due to their histories, and the way these dovetail on the music you hear on Suikyō. Masubuchi has recorded a number of stunning solo albums for guitar and has also improvised with a number of musicians: you can hear his responsiveness and thoughtful playing on albums alongside Suzuki, Taku Sugimoto, Straytone, Shizuo Uchida, Takahiro Kawaguchi, and more. Suzuki’s work for voice has been documented on several solo cassette releases, and in consort with Tetuzi Akiyama, Rob Noyes, Leo Okagawa, Aidan Baker and Tobias Humble. And Tomo’s music can be heard on a small clutch of solo CDs, as a member of Tetragrammaton and Archeus, and in collaboration with Junzo Suzuki. The way their instrumental voices meld together on Suikyō, though, is evidence of a capacity both to draw from these histories, and to take these collective knowledges to new places. And sometimes, unexpectedly old places: Masubuchi notes that his guitar on this set took him back to the rock and blues he used to play, perhaps in earlier groups like Pelktopia, which he suggests contributes to “the psychedelic mood” of Suikyō. Tomo’s hurdy gurdy matches this by pulling drones out of the air or allowing melodies to slowly morph and envelop the listener – their development, at times, reminds me of troubadour music from Occitanie. Suzuki’s presence is equally compelling and curious. Her voice is an eternally flexible instrument, and whether it sits unadorned within the soundworld magic’d into space by Masubuchi and Tomo, or slips between the cracks thanks to subtle use of electronic effects, it has a quality about it that is both otherworldly – at times, the voice soars and pirouettes – and thoroughly, deeply grounded, of this earth, a most human and intimate encounter. There is a lovely consort between Suzuki and Tomo, the voice and hurdy-gurdy shadowing each other: as Tomo notes, “the hurdy gurdy has been an instrument played to accompany singing since the Middle Ages.” For Suzuki, the performance was “psychedelic and hedonistic in a good way,” but it wasn’t simply given in to that experience: “we were at the same time looking at it from an objective point of view.” That feels like the right way to approach Suikyō: as a performance that both sets the mind and ears spinning, but with a careful, thoughtful, and considerate objectivity to its moment-by-moment development. It’s also incredibly gorgeous. As a first encounter, it’s surprising in both its comfort and its challenge: and as Masubuchi says, the playing together feels just the way it had to be: “instinctive, unintentional, and inevitable.”