Jeugdbrand is the voice (Dennis Tyfus) and the beat (Jeroen Stevens) of Antwerp. They perform a sparkling drama, a theatrical tragedy, marinated in our classic Antwerp anarchic sense of humor. This is a true art record with cover art by famous German painter Albert Oehlen. Recorded at Joris Caluwaerts’ Finster Studios - a landmark in Belgian music. Inside the multiverse that is Dennis Tyfus’ oeuvre there exists this body of detailed pencil drawings of various sizes. In these drawings the artist puts himself in many tragic situations. Like vomiting on his way home after a long night at the bar. Boiling right wing idiots. Telling sweet little lies on your Tinder profile. Or, you know, taking out the garbage on a Sunday evening. The horror. These seemingly hermetic pencil drawings show a deceivingly simple world. But you’re often stuck with a bitter aftertaste when you understand a bit more what is actually happening behind the colorful masque. When it comes to his music - and in contrast to aforementioned drawings - Dennis pencils a more piecemeal picture. His recordings and performances often feel like spliced excerpts. Strange sentences and funny remarks waiver by and interconnect. Musical symbols are casually thrown on the table. Instead of a clear picture, we now have the feeling of looking at a bunch of different doodles. Like... sometimes I have the feeling compared to how focussed Dennis works on his drawings, how unfocussed and sketchy he treats his music. We are simply thrown from emotion to emotion. From laughter to tears. It’s a bumpy ride. I’d like to imagine that Dennis constantly notates all the shards of conversation he picks up during his regular walks in the centre of Antwerp - a wormhole congested with characters, the one more tragic than the other. In a kind of R. Murray Schafer way, Dennis takes in every sentence very un-arbitrary... and that’s the soundscape. Dramatic, normal, boasted, silly, urgent... Enter Jeroen Stevens. Antwerp’s number one percussionist. If I would have to list all the bands he performs in this text, well, we would be truly wasting data and printers. Jeroen is the grand gift of the well- schooled session musician. But thank the heavens of white improv, he is also sweet and creative. Jeugdbrand is his second entry in the Edições CN catalogue, after taking care of some of the percussive fragments on the “KAGIROI" LP with Sugai Ken (2021). Recently Jeroen has been performing very lengthy - thus correct - performances of Satie’s Vexations for midi instrumentation; Christmas music; and his famed De Stoeltjes project, where he covers Stooges songs on a camping chair. Apparently much to the confusion of Iggy himself. This might all feel like a big joke to you, but when you dare to listen, you will have to admit that Steven’s adventurous music is very rewarding. Special stuff. The music of Jeugdbrand reminds me a bit of the music of the late Ghédalia Tazartès - especially when it comes to reinterpreting and combining musical idioms - but trying to put a direct reference on this album does it a bit short. Most important, this is music how it could be: incomprehensible, hilarious, serious, ludicrous, well crafted, sloppy, non-genre. With a strong sense of personality. You know, a fragmented beam for your own overstimulated temple. To shake things up a little ... “They told us, they told her. I told everybody.” 

split LP by tongue depressor and gateway Tongue Depressor - “never saw’m” And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues. They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover. Mark 16:17–18 Gateway - “why should not my spirit be troubled” But Job answered and said, Hear diligently my speech, and let this be your consolations. Suffer me that I may speak; and after that I have spoken, mock on. As for me, is my complaint to man? and if it were so, why should not my spirit be troubled? Mark me, and be astonished, and lay your hand upon your mouth. Job 21:4 I’ve just heard some of our neighbors think we have injected the mark of the beast as soon as we set foot into a CVS. Poison ivy grows someplace new every day in America. The sun is red. Most days our house is covered in flies. The question is: What dark lord here tests Gateway and Tongue Depressor? As Job wept among the ashes of Uz, the duos Filer & Gick + Birdsey & Rowden scrape the strings and freak the saxophones of late capital, making scrap-metal occult music both into & out of something sacred. If there is chanting, it feels like a recovery or recovering, as if voices that once held serpents had emerged from graves still green. Gateway’s side I imagined howled through a megaphone at a tent revival outside an abandoned Circuit City; Tongue Depressor grows down by the river leaking from a dishwasher, a rattlesnake-ivy covered by nematodes, growing in the shape of a satellite dish. They worry & they worship the sounds these places make. - Jacob Sunderlin 

“Scrape meets sigh, jagged fish-hook pluck meets sparse wire-damped drizzle, instinct meets intuition, and when the disc is done, it’ll seem quite sensible to dive back in and swim the whole length in reverse. - Bill Meyer, Dusted” Even though both Kaja Draksler and Terrie Ex are experienced improvisers, their methods and characters are so different that a sensible merger of their considerable forces seems out of the question. But then you realize that entire scenes and band catalogs were built on nonsensical premises. Don’t they say that opposites attract? Extremes can also cancel each other out and lead to something entirely new and thrilling. That’s exactly what happens here. Far from a trip full of explosive power, this performance is a celebration of textural possibilities. Sounds flail around, are thrown around to be disregarded, dismantled and reassembled again, turned into a shower of musical drops, with a minimalist sparseness that can switch to quick runs and jumpy intervals in the blink of an eye. Everything becomes malleable. There’s an unmistakable alchemy at work here - spiky and subversive - that is as refreshing as a piano sonata, as thrilling as the repetitive punk that Ex started playing before Draksler was even born. In the hands of born improvisers like these two, concepts such as age, nationality and background become irrelevant. Above all, it is about connection and its amazing, intoxicating potential. The Swim has a story to tell. 

Elodie’s Andrew Chalk & Timo Van Luijk present their soundtrack for Peter Hutton’s ’Skagafjörður’, responding to the film’s desolate imagery of Iceland with half an hour of exquisite, weather-beaten, smoke-curl atmospheres, highly recommended if yr into the cold tonalities of Kevin Drumm's 'Imperial Distortion' or Aphex Twin's 'SAW II'... Recorded as part of ‘Night of Experimental Film’ event in Ghent, Belgium, 2018 that also saw screenings of Derek Jarman’s ‘The Angelic Conversation’ and performance by Tom James Scott, the recording captures the quintessence of Chalk and Van Luijk’s richly evocative music and the natural mystery of Hutton’s film, which is handily available on YouTube for you to synch with its suggested soundtrack for optimal zoner times.  Following a cassette edition in 2020, this vinyl edition gives the performance more room to breathe, with Chalk and Van Lujik’s patented atmospheric magick seeping out from the peripheries to best envelope the listener in their tantalising descriptions of the Icelandic landscape. Chalk & Van Luijk are masters of this kind of layer-within-layer rendering, where you no longer know if you’re listening to vast winds or analogue interference, where harmonic washes are often punctuated with frequency fuckries; feedback, jolts of electricity. The effect is quietly stunning and effortlessly transfixing; like so much of their peerless catalogue --- Faraway Press 2021

French-born, Amsterdam-based clarinetist Joris Roelofs has built his career balancing intense discipline and a deep commitment to post-bop tradition with a measured exploratory streak. He’s worked extensively in the Vienna Art Orchestra and maintains a wonderfully buoyant trio with the American rhythm section of Ted Poor and Matt Penman. But this new recording suggests that his attraction to freedom is growing stronger. Icarus is a lovely duo project with veteran free-jazz drummer Han Bennink, a perfect match for the reedist. The percussionist is both a master of chaos and one of the most naturally swinging musicians on the planet, and he provides both grounding and provocation to his much younger associate. Most of the music is freely improvised and the album opens with a blast of disorder on “Carmen,” with Bennink banging out piano clusters and injecting some discordant cymbal explosions, while Roelofs blows harsh squawks. Suddenly, a wild gear-shift occurs and a tender, breathy melody that sounds like a lost standard and a rumbling groove takes over, indicating the sort of polarities that the pair giddily explores throughout. The clarinetist’s lyrical gifts are so strong that when the duo tackle jazz standards like Eric Dolphy’s “Something Sweet, Something Tender”—presented with an attractively slack drag from Bennink that deftly adds tension to the in-and-out-of-focus treatment of the theme—or Charlie Haden’s indelible “Song For Che,” they feel entirely of a piece with the spontaneous creations. Icarus captures an electric dialogue: raw, giddy, trusting. Here’s hoping this conversation continues. - Peter Margasak

“‘Rhea’ begins as an event and concludes as printed matter. Much like Cage’s ‘Water Walk’, the event of ‘Rhea’ consists of a series of fragmented performative gestures each with their own sonic characteristics. These movements will have auditory qualities that contradict their symbolic meaning; such as stepping on a bag of crisps or spreading butter on toast. Over time, these actions accumulate to reveal various rhythmic and melodic structures to be repeated or interrupted. This will be documented and then printed into an auditory and visual format. The conceptual essence of ‘Rhea’ is that the event oscillates between the symbolic and the auditory, whilst the printed matter amplifies this oscillation by projecting it into past and present.” Released by Calling Cards Publishing

'UK-based purveyors of noise Sly & The Family Drone and Dutch/British free jazz unit Dead Neanderthals form the ultimate tag team of the murky European underground. After releasing a split on the God Unknown label last year, they are now gearing up for the release of their collaborative album 'Molar Wrench' on Hominid Sounds. Expect disgusting noise rock of titanic proportions ready to pound the muck out of your ears and the pus out of your eyes'

This is the third release from The Slowest Lift who are a West Yorkshire based band comprising of Sophie Cooper (Tor Festival) and Julian Bradley (Vibracathedral Orchestra). This record is being self-released by The Slowest Lift on limited edition cassette and on digital download. There will be a vinyl version coming later released by Feeding Tube Records.

For our money the weirdest and most satisfying Regis record in a while, featuring stripped, slow, highly atmospheric & muscular productions that were recorded as part of that mad 'Let The Night Return’ feature film (Regis, performing more or less alone in a 2000-year-old, empty greek amphitheater) here rendered in brilliant monochrome including contributions from Justin Broadrick, Ann Margaret Hogan and the music school chorus of Corfu. There’s something brutally bare and demented about this one, opening with the simmering choral drone ‘Epidaurus’ fizzing with whirring industrial components and rumbling subs, before 'Calling Down a Curse’ extends to terrifying dimensions with an intoxicating Ugandan Methods style percussive backbone and a slowed down voiceover by filmmaker Vasileios Trigkas, to our ears sounding like Burial as if rendered by Conny Plank as a kind of alternate version to his still entirely unclassifiable ‘Biomutanten’. 'The Blind Departing’ is a slow headmelter, all industrial synths and exposed percussion, every hi-hat and kickdrum separated and pristine, like the toughest, most angular sort of bare-boned warehouse chugger slowed to a crawl. If you shut your eyes you can almost imagine Alan Wilder and Martin Gore hitting sheets of metal with a mallet on that crazy old Depeche Mode footage that’s knocking about - played at half speed. Perhaps best of all is the closing 'Temporary Thing’, featuring Regis, Anni Hogan, and Justin Broadrick taking on a cover version of the Lou Reed classic, here extended to HD. --- Downwards Records, 2021

Limited edition of 500 units pressed on black wax. The LP contains original compositions by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Pascal Comelade, Laurie Spiegel, Lyra Pramuk, Chassol, Nicolas Godin and Pierre Rousseau, Pedro Vian and Pierre Bastien, Visible Cloaks, Kelman Duran, Raul Refree, Lucrecia Dalt, and Lafawndah.incl. writings by contemporary thinkers like Shumon Bazar and François J. Bonnet, and images from, Wolfgang Tillmans, Joel Meyerowitz, Juergen Teller, Araki, Jack Davison, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Dani Pujalte, Elizaveta Porodina, Adrià Cañameras, Larissa Zaidan, Zhong Lin and Javier Tles among others

"The band seem to move together as one, crawling and then leaping like a lurching animal, with each musical event getting slightly more crazed as it progresses forward on stamping paws." – Ed Pinsent, The Sound Projector 2010 - 2020 compilation album: Tracks 1 and 5 are taken from "Inwards opened the floor." (2020) Tracks 2 and 3 are taken from "Kadita sessions" (2016) Track 4 is taken from "From inside the log" (2010) Track 6 is taken from "Still life with apples" (2020) Played by: Gosha Hniu, Ran Nahmias, Maya Pik, Grundik Kasyansky, Amos Ungar, Tom Wheatley, Lior Lerman, Andrea Serafino, Yoni Silver, Jonathan Shohet, Matthias Moos, Uri Eichelmann, George Priymenko, Ig Yu Kun, Timurti, Guillaume Viltard, Hans Grusel and Gretel Grusel. Lyrics are based on the poems by Arthur Molev and Avenir Snyatkov.

Chra is the artist moniker for Austrian Christina Nemec (Bray, Shampoo Boy). SEAMONS is the latest missive in her ongoing exploration of suffocating abstract audio. At once designed and falling apart SEAMONS is rough and crude, a stumbling and staggering electronic expedition where nothing presents itself explicit in intent. It’s a tense obscure record that teases you into it’s peculiar vortex from it’s suggestive nature of exploring the enigma beyond it’s haunted facade. VICIOUS WATER REGIMES stutters along as an ‘ugly’ mass of grey electronica. CAST(O)RO shines from light from the depths with it’s occasional foray into glistening tones. COLONIA MARINA SERENELLA is a dank squelching backdrop for a dark age. CAST twists tension with flickering electronics chaotic in their perpetual design of order confronting inevitable collapse. LET SHARKS SLEEP is not only a great title but a mind tickling adventure of descending/rising digital dance that builds in intensity with it's relentless repetition. WIDOW WALKS gallops and creaks along a path veiled in whispers. ENGE lunges through time with an air of deep uncertainty. SEAMONS hovers on the outskirts, crawling out of the speakers with endless surprising turns, few of them comfortable. SEAMONS is progressive ambient, not the kind that makes you escape, but rather one you can't escape from. SEAMONS crawls into the very guts of sound to uncover and unravel the uneasy and unsettling underbelly within. 

Originally recorded in 1984, “Jumping and Standing” consists of a live performance at Musashino Art University by pioneering Japanese sound artist Akio Suzuki, accompanied by five toy rabbits. This long-awaited release epitomizes Suzuki’s approach to performance, imbued with a characteristic sense of humor and an organic interplay with his audiences, as evinced by uproarious laughter heard on the opening track. Now some three decades later, contemporary listeners are likewise drawn ever deeper into this novel noisescape featuring an ensemble of wind-up bunnies on broken boards, metallic fragments, and a reel-to-reel tape deck on the fritz. --- “Jumping and Standing” 1984"Akio SuzukiNovember 30, 1984 1-103 Hall, Musashino Art UniversityRecorded by Akio SuzukiMastered by Kiyoharu Kuwayama (Lethe).

Steve Swell: trombone Jemeel Moondoc: alto saxophone Dave Burrell: piano William Parker: double bass Gerald Cleaver: drums released April 25, 2016 All compositions by Steve Swell Recorded by Jim Clouse, Park West Studio, June 2015 Mixing and mastering: Jim Clouse Liner notes: Steven Loewy Photographs: Ziga Koritnik, Peter Gannushkin, Jacques Bisceglia, RogueArt Cover design: Max Schoendorff Cover realisation: David Bourguignon Executive producer: Michel Dorbon So, listen closely, and savor the sounds: treat them with delicate abandon, indulge in their intricately measured poignancy; but don’t forget to relax (a little) and enjoy: You are in the hands of a master soul traveler. Steven Loewy

New vinyl music by Joanne Robertson & Sidsel Meineche Hansen A limited edition 12” vinyl with 16 tracks in an edition of 250 copies with full colour sleeve. oanne Roberston is a visual artist, musician and poet based in Glasgow. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Feels’, Edouard Montassut, Paris, 2021, and, ’Natural Behavior’, Svetlana, New York, 2019. Recent publications include 1971 (a year in record review poems) and 1979 Songbook, both in collaboration with writer Byron Coley, published by Tenderbooks and Bad Taste Press.‘With a lovely series of solo LPs, Joanne Robertson has become known for the lyrical drifting beauty of her music. The Lighter (Textile), Black Moon Days (Feeding Tube), Wildflower (Escho) and Painting Stupid Girls (World Music) have all been hailed as brilliant extensions of the avant garde wing of the femme-folk tradition. She has also remained active with her friend, Dean Blunt, issuing the Walhalla LP (Textile) as a duo, and appearing on his recordings, the most recent being Black Metal 2 (Rough Trade).’ Byron ColeySidsel Meineche Hansen is a London based artist. Her artworks vary in medium and form spanning wood, clay and metals through which crafted objects are made, to Computer Generated Imagery, Virtual Reality and other reproducible mediums. Her work also includes musical collaborations with musician Nkisi and the poet Lydia Lunch. She collaborates regularly with London-based Design a Wave and Copenhagen-based Brynje recently released on the LP sex robot from 2019. Joanne Robertson and Sidsel Meineche Hansen have previously collaborated together along with artist and writer Reba Maybury on the 2020 video 12 Rules for Life, a reinterpretation of Dies irae, the thirteenth-century sequence for mourning the dead. She has an upcoming solo-exhibition at Bergen Kunsthalle in November 2021.

Stemming from Speers’ background as a percussionist and technician testing large amounts of audio equipment, ‘xtr’ctn’ pairs nanoscopic recordings of electronic equipment’s internal behaviours with samples of the natural world and feedback from no-input mixers to yield a visceral and inventively personalised view on sound phenomena and resonant spaces that lay beyond the threshold of human perception. Arranging his unique palette of field recordings, SFX library, YouTube samples and original instrumentation by Olan Monk into non-linear, non-narrative structures, he invites the listener to immerse in a form of sonic fiction which highlights the fine line between referential, objective reality and pareidolic subjectivity. Distinguished by an otherworldy, meta sense of detachment shared with music by Giuseppe Ielasi, Mika Vainio, and :Zoviet*France:, the four pieces form a fascinating sonic weltanschauung that acknowledges and articulates the complex role of non-human and material sound generators upon the self. From the way seagulls resemble death metal screams in ‘obturo’ to the uncanny manner in which Olan Monk’s piano pulse and samples of Liam Byrne’s viola de gamba in ’tombeau’ recalls a scene of ravenous whistle and horn blowing at The Eclipse in Coventry c. 1992, each piece is densely packed with acousmatic data that will stimulate a broad range of reactions as listeners fill in the perceptive gaps according to their own sferic conditioning and grasp of worlds natural, and synthetic. Where the first two pieces steer clear of any blatant emotive cues, the fragmented shrapnel that opens ’sul. locus’ changes at the mid-way point with the suggestively gloomy strokes of a Kemençe, a stringed middle-eastern instrument held in subtle contrast with the sound of ice hacking taken from a 1984 BBC SFX library sample to sound like a location recording from an alchemist’s lab, or passages of When’s proto-BM classic ‘The Black Death’, while ‘ορμή’ follows with an eerie vent of percussive improv, the sound of filing metal, and a pressure washer that recall the lurching rhythm and gauntlet grasp of textures also found in the remarkable debut by Cairo’s 1127. It all points to a penetrative pair of ears and mind that sees the world differently, and should inspire listeners to pay closer attention to the world around them. --- C.A.N.V.A.S., 2019

Previously unreleased, the three tracks on Pays Noir come from recording sessions held at the same time as those for the cult No Man's Land produced by Jef Gilson in 1976, and published on vinyl by Souffle Continu Records in 2017. "Singled out at the time of its release by Actuel, Rock & Folk and Melody Maker, the tabula rasa of No Man's Land is the result of free-flowing experiments born of chance, if the two musicians are to be believed. Indeed, their approach to free improvisation was uninfluenced by those in the know of what was going on in such circles, which makes it even more incredible! To emphasise the point, the saxophonist Evan Parker (already a leader in the field) remarked on the album at the time, surprised by the innovation of the two Frenchmen! Brimming with the same fervour as No Man's Land, mainly on guitar and drums (but once again, not only…), Jean-François Pauvros and Gaby Bizien invent an amazing unbridled chaos of instinctive combinations, which are the fruit of their immense complicity, born of days on end playing together, trying to transform the rebelliousness of rock into free-form sparks unlike anything heard before, and which are often poetic – ah, that final song! Carried along by the frenzied clatter of Gaby Bizien, Jean-François Pauvros emerges without doubt as one the great French improvising guitarists, alongside Gérard Marais (Dharma Quintet, Stu Martin Trio), Joseph Dejean (Cohelmec Ensemble, The Full Moon Ensemble), Raymond Boni (who, like Pauvros and Bizien, is present on the Nurse With Wound list), Dominique Répécaud, Noël Akchoté and Jean-Marc Montera. Furthermore, the duo has a crazy intensity heard only on recordings by Bill Orcutt / Chris Corsano, Arto Lindsay / Paal Nilssen-Love, Thurston Moore / John Moloney and Mesa Of The Lost Women! A kind of French no wave ahead of its time!"

Souffle Continu Records present the first ever reissue of Workshop De Lyon's Tiens! Les Bourgeons Eclatent..., originally released in 1978. The collective methodology of the Workshop De Lyon led to the creation of the Association Searching for an Imaginary Folklore (ARFI) in 1977, their aims were very much a mission statement "encourage improvisation, spread diverse musical styles and provide means of expression to others with similar ideas, establish a folklore..." Their reference was the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (A.A.C.M.) created twelve years previously with the similar idea of providing material assistance to and defending the interests of creative musicians, in order to encourage the emergence of new music. The open-structured ARFI self-produced their music thanks to their own label, on which almost all of the albums of the Workshop De Lyon appeared, from Concert Lave (1980) onwards. Their third album, Tiens! Les Bougeons Éclatent... is a perfect example of how the group sounded when it was released in 1978, about a year after the studio recording. Pianist Patrick Vollat had left but was still very much a part of ARFI (in particular as part of the excellent La Marmite Infernale), so the Workshop De Lyon stabilized to a quartet of Louis Sclavis, Maurice Merle, Jean Bolcato, and Christian Rollet, and already had at the time an unparalleled repertoire. This never ceased to expand, through the meetings and personnel changes, while losing nothing of its generosity, nor showing any signs of aging. This proffers on the Workshop De Lyon a certain universal dignity which honors their original models, Albert Ayler or the Art Ensemble Of Chicago to name but two, transfiguring them into a new, exciting aesthetic approach bursting with openings and exchanges. Irresistible. Licensed from Bisou. Reverse printing; 12-page booklet; Obi strip; Edition of 500