Vinyl


When the second Nu Creative Methods album was released, New And Rediscovered Musical Instruments by Max Eastley and David Toop had already been available for almost three years. Without being able to say that there was a direct, real-time influence, the direction taken by the British and French duos was however the same, combining research and tradition in a quest for a new imaginary folklore. The name chosen by the pair was anything but innocent, linking them to both the track 'Nu Creative Love' by Don Cherry (from Symphony For Improvisers) and the book My Creative Method by Francis Ponge. Because the first outlines the route of a free jazz the boundaries of which have constantly been demolished and through which Pierre Bastien and Bernard Pruvost traced their own path, while the second, an anarchist creating a bomb with the irrational as gunpowder, is close to providing an intellectual method. Close, because even this is undermined by other essential routes taken by Nu Creative Methods. The Oulipo, for example, encouraged all sorts of creativity; or perhaps pataphysics, according to which a banal saucepan is equivalent to the Mona Lisa! To get closer to the source of their imagination, the following names would have to be added to the list, Locus Solus by Raymond Roussel, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Harry Partch, New Phonic Art and 'Zwei Mann Orchester' by Maurizio Kagel. That shows, in broad strokes, the creative wheels in motion behind Nu Creative Methods and Nu Jungle Dances offers a taste of the pathways offered by chance, following improvisations using instruments from the five continents. By proceeding thus, that is to say entering an esthetic zone where popular and esoteric music come together at last, an infinite palette of sounds opens up, offering fantastic perspectives. Between free jazz and ancestral music, Nu Jungle Dances makes it happen without pretence but with a rare and luminous extravagance. But also with the willingness to take on board unexpected surprises, and with a natural charm combating for the craft of sound creation.

Nu Creative Methods – Nu Jungles Dances

Souffle Continu Records present a reissue of Jean-Francois Pauvros and Gaby Bizien's No Man's Land, originally released on Un-Deux-Trois in 1976. Whether it is with the label Palm, or for Un-Deux-Trois, Jef Gilson has produced some of the best albums of French free jazz and improvisation. But that's not all: he also offered perfect recording conditions enabling some of the fresh young talent to emerge, including Daunik Lazro, André Jaume, and Jean-François Pauvros, all three of whom released their first recordings on one of those labels. Recorded by Jean-François Pauvros (guitar, but not only...) alongside Gaby Bizien (drums, percussion, aquatic trombone, marimba, bird calls), and, of course, produced by the audacious Jef Gilson, the appropriately named No Man's Land had virtually no equivalent in France (nor worldwide) when it came out in 1976. Radical, free, primitive, timeless: in the image of the musicians, it is not for nothing that it appears in the famous Nurse With Wound list of major influences concocted in 1979. No label can be placed on this vertiginous sensory adventure: an explosive flow of shrapnel and tearing intensity, full of mystery and life. To be clear, No Man's Land is the key recording of French improvisation. So much so that it is difficult to imagine it coming out of nowhere, the two musicians must surely have been listening to the latest forays of the British Music Improvisation Company and decided to reply in their own way. But not at all! If you believe what the protagonists have to say, these experiments were carried out in secret isolation, and with a total lack of awareness of everything that was going on in the avant-garde of improvised music. Indeed, it was only after the album was published that Jean-François Pauvros and Gaby Bizien learned that there was a movement going on with similar ideas. That tells us something about the level of invention of this album, which comfortably bears comparison to other similar duos such as Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley, Fred Frith and Chris Cutler, John Russell and Roger Turner, or Gary Smith and John Stevens... The Frenchmen were well served by their unbridled variety and poly-instrumentalism Edition of 500

Jean-François Pauvros & Gaby Bizien – No Man’s Land

Extracts from the Farewell performance at Kings College, London 1978. Jgjgjgjg formed at the  London Sound Poetry Festival in June 1976. Reissue of tape on Balsam Flex. 200 copiesIn those days a number of British poets were producing works influenced by radical international currents in sound art, conceptual art, visual poetry and performance art. Bob Cobbing (1920-2002) was a central figure in this continuation of the ‘British Poetry Revival’, a rather loose poetry movement of the 1960s and 1970s which can be seen as an internationally oriented modernist reaction to the English traditionalist and nationalist approach of poetry of ’The Movement’ (Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin et al.) Many of the Balsam Flex cassettes brought poets connected with ‘Writers Forum’, a small publisher, workshop and writers’ network founded in 1963 by Bob Cobbing, Jeff Nuttall and John Rowan. After Cobbing’s death in 2002 ‘Writers Forum’ has been directed by poet and artist Lawrence Upton (1949), who is one of the poets of the improvisational group JGJJGJG (‘as long as you can say it that’s the name of the band’). The other two members are Cris Cheek – originally from London but currently on the staff of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio – and Clive Fencott, who lectures at Teesside University. Slowscan #37 contains extracts from the Farewell performance of the group at King’s College, London 1978.Lawrence Upton(b. 1949) – poet, prose writer, essay writer, critic, publisher. Author of a great number of publications in literary magazines, collections, miscellanies both in Great Britain and abroad, and also of www-publications on various literary sites. Editor and publisher of a number of magazines and international anthologies, author of numerous books of poetry and prose. For many years he has been collaborating with different literary and artistic associations and perform-groups.

Lawrence Upton, P.C Fencott, Chris Cheek – A Farewell Performance

Published and sold on an audiocassette by Ulises Carrìon (recently rediscovered thanks to an important Alga Marghen retrospective LP) , who in 1975 "created" the legendary Amsterdam bookshop-gallery "Other Books & So," the first space dedicated exclusively to artists' publications such as artists' records, books, magazines, postcards, etc.. only 12 cassettes were actually sold. Reissue of a cassette from 1978, a collection of sound poems and concrete poetry by G.J. de Rook, Michael Gibbs, Greta Monach and Ulises Carrión himself. The initiative for the release at the time originated from Ulises Carrión, who wanted sound poetry to be better known in The Netherlands. His plan was to release a series of sound poetry cassettes through his bookstore Other Books & So in Amsterdam and to distribute them among Dutch conservatories and libraries. The plan was to publish sound poets from all over the world. The series, called ‘Sound-Proof’, was introduced with a zero issue dedicated to sound poets living in The Netherlands. The recordings for Sound-Proof no. 0 were done by Greta Monach (assisted by technician Herman Kooy) at the Institute of Sonology of Utrecht University in 1978. With Sound-Proof no. 0 as an example Ulises Carrión and Greta Monach applied for a grant from the Dutch Ministry of Culture to realise the series they had in mind, but their request was denied and consequently no other cassettes appeared in the series. To make matters worse, only a handful of copies of Sound-Proof no. 0 were sold and the rest of the edition was destroyed by mistake. All that makes Sound-Proof no. 0 a rare set of recordings, which Slowscan released on vinyl in 2014 after they had been digitised by Greta Monach. The LP comes with English and Dutch inserts that contain background information on the recordings and biographical information on the artists.

Various – Sound-Proof No. 0

Edition of 250 copies Giuseppe Chiari (1926–2007) was a Fluxus artist from Florence, Italy. In cooperation with Archivo Silenzio and Chiari’s friend and assistant Paolo Coteni, Slowscan has now released an LP with two previously unreleased piano pieces by Chiari, both recorded in Rome, one in 1974, the other in 1980. ‘Chiari’ it says on the front the cover of the LP and ‘Down With Classic Music’ on the back. Chiari and Slowscan don’t beat around the bush. Already experimenting with new combinations of avantgarde music and visual arts in the 1950s, Chiari became affiliated with Fluxus in 1962. In that open-minded, subversive and experimental group he developed into one of the leading artists and theorists. Among his many Fluxus writings are: ‘Music without counterpoint’ (1969), ‘Mother Music’ (1973), and ‘Method For Playing’ (1976). In these writings Chiari embraces chance as a formative principle and promotes interdisciplinary works of art, combining music, performance, speech and visual arts. Chiari himself experimented with what he called ‘visual music’ and ‘action music’, the latter of which this Slowscan LP contains excellent examples. Started when he joined Fluxus in 1962, the ‘Gesti sul Piano’ developed into Chiari’s central works of deconstruction. They always mark a break with every structure. Demolition by piano hammers. Chiari – Down With Classic Music!

Gesti sul Piano / Down with Classic Music – Giuseppe Chiari