Vinyl


Satin Made of Triggers - Hummings is the result of collaboration between Antonina Nowacka, Teoniki Rożynek, Mila Nowacka, Kamil Szuszkiewicz, and Sebastian Buczek (Altanova Press). In 2018, Kamil, Antonina and Teoniki took up the subject of the ASMR phenomenon (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) as part of the Unsound festival during SMOT concerts at the Alchemia club in Krakow. A year later, an idea arose to extend the project to include other media. A fragment of the recording from the festival was released on the lathe cut album in a limited series of 10 copies, each of them as a unique artifact, prepared by Mila Nowacka and Sebastian Buczek. Altanova Press is an analog record label run by Sebastian Buczek. The sound is recorded in real time using the Polish cutter for sound postcards from the 1960s, improved by Buczek, each disc is made by hand. The covers of Satin Made of Triggers Hummings were framed with original drawings and the plates were engraved with a diamond needle by Mila Nowacka. As part of the premiere, there was a premiere exhibition of records and a concert performed by Antonina Nowacka, Teonika Rożynek and Kamil Szuszkiewicz in the space of the Pracownia Wschodnia gallery. Satin Made of Triggers - Hummings is only available at the Sklep-Galeria Karowa in Warsaw and the Cafe OTO store in London. --- Composition: Kamil Szuszkiewicz Execution:  Antonina Nowacka Teoniki Rożynek  Kamil Szuszkiewicz Lathe cuts and covers: Mila Nowacka, Sebastian Buczek / Altanova Press Material recorded at the Unsound Festival in 2018

Satin Made of Triggers – Hummings

This first-time vinyl reissue comes with bonus 7-inch, inserts and 20-page booklet. --- Emerging out of Amsterdam's vibrant squat scene in 1979, The Ex - a name chosen for the ease and speed with which it could be spray-painted onto a wall - have for four decades been an entirely self-sustaining musical entity, charting a course through the global underground with a spirit of freedom and radical exploration. Disturbing Domestic Peace, The Ex's debut album, appeared mere months after their first single, 1980's All Corpses Smell The Same. Originally released on the band's own Verrecords (they made up different label names with each record), the LP falls squarely within a punk idiom and, at the same time, shows this influential Dutch group's restless energy. Terrie Ex's guitar serves up vectors of percussive pulse, fraying the edges of the music's squared-off rhythms. Vocalist G.W. Sok - an anarchist Dziga Vertov with a mic - observes, declaims and condemns across a set of interrelated political concerns that would return in Ex-music for years to come. While The Ex channel the poise and principled attack of Crass or Flux Of Pink Indians, they create a unique declamatory sound all their own - trailing brilliant flashes of color in the wake of punk's monochrome palette. Offering ten songs in only twenty-two minutes, Disturbing Domestic Peace lays bare a vivid snapshot of a truly singular band who (at the time) were just finding their feet.

The Ex – Disturbing Domestic Peace

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. "Ears Are Filled With Wonder, the debut release from the duo of pedal steel player Heather Leigh and reedist Peter Brötzmann, blows the old adage about improvised music somehow not being best appreciated via the recordings to beautiful pieces. This is a music that demands re-visiting, that seems to alter, slightly, every time it is played, with new details emerging, new relationships of tone and style, new romance, even. Recorded during a mammoth stint in Kraków, Poland, where Brötzmann and Leigh played as part of big bands, trios, quartets, and duos, this duo performance represents the diamond heart of the sessions, an improvised set that bears little relation to what either of the players has achieved outside of its prodigious gravity. We mentioned romance and really Ears Are Filled With Wonder, a play on a line from the poet Kenneth Patchen, showcases the full reach of Brötzmann's rebel lyricism, his lover man style, now smoky, seductive, late night, now roaring and vibrating with energy. Leigh plays it extremely subtly, sometimes fixing on the most suggestive detail and from there spinning luscious webs of repeat-time bliss that make for some of the most psychedelic and otherworldly settings of strings and horn. Elsewhere the two of them tear the roof off with tactile fuzz and horn ascensions. It's a music of organic depth, of endlessly evocative unfolding, as themes bloom and sigh and disappear and arise and it feels curiously out of time, even as both players push their instruments into futuristic configurations. As such it doesn't sit neatly in either players' extensive catalogs. . . . Ears Are Filled With Wonder is a coming together of two of the most original voices on their respective instruments and the title reflects the joyful uncovering of a whole new way of listening and relating. Indeed, it might well be the first ever freely improvised electric pedal steel and saxophone duet ever put to tape. Either way it is one of the most startlingly beautiful combinations of players and temperaments to orbit the European jazz scene in years. And this is only the beginning. So hold tight." --Moshe Idel, Ronda, Spain, February 2016 Heather Leigh: pedal steel guitar. Peter Brötzmann: tenor saxophone, bass and B-flat clarinet, tárogató. Recorded November 8, 2015, in Kraków, Poland.

PETER BROTZMANN/HEATHER LEIGH – Ears Are Filled With Wonder

New music from XT (saxophone player Seymour Wright and percussionist Paul Abbott) in the form of an exhilarating, super compressed, reflective re-assembling of a dozen years working together. Re-animating free improvisation with a Chicago house palette, Deorlaf X is made up of frenetic slabs of mutated multiphonics and triggered percussion, suspended in bouts of possessed reflexive quiet. Where the duo’s 2019 release Palina'tufa on Empty Editions focused primarily on a response to the real (and imagined) landscapes of Hong Kong, Deorlaf X is located in Dalston, and specifically at OTO. Wrung through Shuan Crook’s studio over three nights, the recordings dug from XT’s archive aren’t simply ‘duo’ - instead they actively draw on their public and social contexts, involving the influence of audience, engineers and other visiting musicians - Ghédalia Tazartès, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Senyawa, RP Boo and others. “A changing cast of OTO guests, audience and emotions hosted each time in a new London. XT structures sound an ongoing attempt to listen and learn about the rich and transformative affordances of the situations we occupy.” The resulting record puts a pin through a dialogue between Abbott and Wright, between histories, potentials, fact, fiction, ideas, friends, audiences, and spaces. The heavy use of referencing recalls the footwork or house traditions of sampling across all manner of influences; what’s recalled is primarily the structures of jazz - Ornette Coleman, Charlie Parker, Anthony Braxton - but also Ann Quin, Clarice Lispector, Anna Halprin. What’s created in recall is a kind of diary, a hyper re-membering - a blisteringly warped kind of future music. --- Recorded by James Dunn, Shaun Crook and Paul Skinner. Assembled, mixed and re-recorded 19, 20 and 21 January, 2020 by XT at Lockdown Studio, Cable Street. Engineer Shaun Crook. Sounds/design by XT. Cover painting Leon Kossoff 'Dalston Junction No.3, June 1973' oil on board, 20.5 x 25 cm. © The Estate of Leon Kossoff. ROKU026

XT – Deorlaf X

"Japanese bluesman Kan Mikami is nothing less than an unalloyed force of nature. A skin-shredding blast of frozen wind from the poor, rural north of Japan that he calls home. In the late 1960s, like thousands of other Japanese young people Mikami made his way to Tokyo in search of a life different from that of his parents. Since then he has forcefully carved out a space for himself in the culture as a modernist poet, a raging folk singer, an author, a actor, an engaging TV personality, and one of Japan’s most uniquely powerful performers. For most of Mikami’s career as a singer, he has performed solo. Just him and his electric guitar against the world, creating jagged A-minor vamps to drive along the surreal wisdom of his lyrics. But he’s equally at home in more demanding improvisational contexts such as those provided here by John Edwards on bass and Alex Neilson on drums. Their dense propulsive textures seem to spur on Mikami, his voice arcing powerfully into fragmented spaces, his guitar darting, colliding, shedding jagged and angular splinters of sound. A pulsing, raging maelstrom of serrated-edged energy. Gruff, rough, honest and very, very real." - Alan Cummings --- Kan Mikami / vocals, guitar John Edwards / bass Alex Neilson / percussion --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO on 3rd April 2013 by James Dunn. Mixed by John Chantler. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi

Kan Mikami / John Edwards / Alex Neilson – Live at Cafe OTO

Originally recorded and released in 1980, "Six of One" beautifully captures the detail in Evan Parker's high frequency split tones for which he is now perhaps better known. Five years on from "Saxophone Solos" and with circular breathing and polyphonics well worn into his live performances, Parker's experimentations here produce sustained passages of brilliant flight. Set into the echoes and resonances of a St Judes On The Hill church, the results are stunning.  "The recital commences with a split tone line of twining sine waves that expand and contract in telepathic collusion. Pitch dynamics narrow and redefine themselves more emphatically on the second piece where sliding legato rivulets born of Parker’s compartmentalized tonguing create the sonic semblance of up to three separate voices emanating from the single reed speech center. It’s a feat he’s accomplished innumerable times since, but every fresh hearing never fails to open an aperture into a style of improvisatory expression that is at once wholly alien and intensely mesmerizing. There’s also something strangely subterranean about the flood of sounds, like the rush percolating water through an underground aquifer system enroute to unknown tributaries. The third piece trades tightly braided tones for leaner and more linear phrases, but a vaporous trail of phantom notes still clings to the central line. And so it goes, with the illusion of repetition guiding the momentum, though Parker never explicitly repeats himself." - Derek Taylor, All About Jazz Transferred from the original master tapes and released in an edition of 500. 

Evan Parker – Six of One

Following his first record on Rekem (Fullness of Harmony... Rekem 08), Panos Charalambous returns with a double vinyl collection that compiles a wide amount of sound and material within its four sides of vinyl. On top of recordings of his performances -where existing records are brought alive using objects from nature as cartridges- this album collects field recordings, performance and installation documentations. In addition, Charalambous has included a number of contributions from other artists, which he uses to compliment and contrast his own material and actions. Bringing together –amongst others- Mike Cooper & Tasos Stamou’s London Taximi, midnight recordings of jackals captured on Greece’s Mount Athos, Aggelos Krallis’ raw take on Misirlou, a rhythmic dance on glass cups under the distant sounds of a country festival, as well as voice-o-graph records containing voices and immigrant stories from the 50s, Charalambous pieces together a rich and manifold sound mosaic, reinstating neglected or unknown voices from the Balkan peninsula. Focusing both on content and sonic atmosphere, he manages once more to bring together the disparate and distant elements of the land, and to draw out a parallel ethnography and rapprochement of the local aural tradition. Building upon this aspect, the physical edition includes, amongst others, a pamphlet featuring an essay by Thanasis Moutsopoulos on the secret post-war history of folk music in Greece.

Panos Charalambous – An Eagle Was Standing

Vi Är Alla Guds Slavar is the latest missive from the long-running duo pairing of Mats Gustafsson (The Thing, Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet, etc) and Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth, Chelsea Light Moving, Dream/Aktion Unit, etc). Thurston had first come across Mats' playing on a duo disc with Barry Guy and had assumed he was one of those older beardy European improv guys - Remember this was before the internet and everyone knew everything. Their first actual meeting goes back to the early 90s at Blue Tower Records in Stockholm (now Andra Jazz - arguably the greatest jazz record store in the world) on one of Thurston's frequent soundcheck-skipping discaholic binges. The young guy behind the counter was blowing his mind with side after side of crazy rare jazz, test pressings, acetates and more. Running late, he offered Thurston a lift to the gig and en route asked if there was any particular records he was looking for. "There is this sax player - Mats Gustafsson - I'm looking for some of his stuff" "That's me" says the young guy - and there started an intense friendship that has manifested intself in music through their discaholics anonymous trio (with Jim O'Rourke), Gustafsson's large scale HIDROS 3 composition for Sonic Youth and much more besides… You can watch a video interview with Thurston where he tells the story of their first meeting here:

Mats Gustafsson & Thurston Moore – Vi Är Alla Guds Slavar

Recorded by Holger Scheuermann and Jost Gebers, October 30 and 31, 1991, in Berlin. First released on FMP as FMP CD 53 in 1994. "In perhaps the most understated performance of his entire career, German saxophone giant Peter Brötzmann played in a trio with American free jazz legends Fred Hopkins and Rashied Ali back in 1991 at the now mythical Total Music Meeting. . . . Brötzmann appears to have been in awe on this date so great is his restraint. There are literally no passages in the entire concert where he attempts to push his way through the rhythm section to get to the other side. No mean feat when you consider the man's powerful personality both on and off the stage. But Hopkins was a founding member of Air with Henry Threadgill, and Ali, of course, played with John Coltrane. Given these proceedings with their haunted, hunted, beauty, it would be fair to say that -- even on his own compositions -- the mighty Brötzmann was humbled in the presence of these great musicians. Does that mean he was humbled by them? Hardly. Brötzmann's playing here is so fiery and lyrical, so completely focused on his rhythm section that he turns harmonies on their heads and finds intervals in places where the only thing that should be happening is free blowing. He is the band's leader by the force of that lyricism and restraint. He makes room for the other players to move through and around him rather than behind him. His sheer 'musicality' is wondrous. Hopkins and Ali are no strangers to each other -- there is telepathic communication; the shift from one modality to the next is seamless and grounded, each player by the other. There are six compositions on this record; it comes off as a very intense, extremely quiet kind of blowing gig, where this trio were looking to discover things about each other and the music they were making. As a result, it is one of the finest performances issued from that festival, and a landmark in Brötzmann's career in particular." -- Thom Jurek, --- Peter Brötzmann / tenor saxophone, alto saxophone, tárogató  Fred Hopkins / double bass Rashied Ali / drums. 

PETER BROTZMANN/FRED HOPKINS/RASHIED ALI – Songlines

2LP / CD

Black Truffle is pleased to announce a tenth anniversary reissue of Oren Ambarchi’s Quixotism, originally released on Editions Mego in 2014. Recorded with a multitude of collaborators in Europe, Japan, Australia and the USA, Quixotism presents the fruit of two years of work in the form of a single, LP-length piece in five parts. Quixotism takes the driving rhythmic aspect of works such as Sagittarian Domain to new levels, with the entirety of this long-form work built on a foundation of pulsing double-time electronic percussion provided by Thomas Brinkmann. Beginning as almost subliminal propulsion behind cavernous orchestral textures and John Tilbury’s delicate piano interjections, the percussive elements (elaborated on by Ambarchi and Matt Chamberlain) slowly inch into the foreground of the piece before suddenly breaking out into a polyrhythmic shuffle around the halfway mark, and joined by master Japanese tabla player U-zhaan for the piece’s final, beautiful passages. The pulse acts as thread leading the listener through a heterogeneous variety of acoustic spaces, from the concert hall in which the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra were recorded to the intimacy of crys cole’s contact-mic textures. Ambarchi’s guitar itself ranges over this wide variety of acoustic spaces, from airless, clipped tones to swirling, reverberated fog. Within the complex web Ambarchi spins over the piece’s steadily pulsing foundation, elements approach and recede in a non-linear fashion, even as the piece plots an overall course from the grey, almost Nono-esque reverberated space of its opening section to the crisp foreground presence of Jim O’Rourke’s synth and Evyind Kang’s strings in its final moments. Formally indebted to the side-long workouts of classic Cologne techno, the long-form works of composers such as Éliane Radigue and the organic push and pull of improvised performance,  Quixotism is constantly in motion, yet its transitions happen slowly and steadily, often nearly imperceptible, the diverse elements which make up the piece succeeding one another with the logic of a dream. At the time of its first release, Quixotism was clearly a summation of Ambarchi’s work in the years leading up to it. Now, listening back a decade later, it also seems like an arrow pointing to the future, suggesting paths that would be explored further in works to come: the pulsating guitar layers of Hubris, the album-length collaboration with Jim O’Rourke and U-zhaan on Hence, Shebang’s joyous layering and percussive drive. Now sounding better than ever in a new remaster by Joe Talia, the time is ripe to rediscover its quixotic charms. 

Oren Ambarchi – Quixotism (10th Anniversary Remaster)

LP / CD

The heavyweight trio of Keiji Haino, Jim O’Rourke and Oren Ambarchi return with their 12th and most epic release to date, the triple LP With pats on the head, just one too few is evil one too many is good that's all it is. Documenting the entirety of their final performance at the dearly departed Roppongi home of Tokyo underground institution SuperDeluxe in November 2018, the music spread across these six sides splits the difference between the guitar-bass-drums power trio moves and experiments with novel instrumentation that have defined the trio’s decade of working together. Containing some of the most delicate music the three have committed to wax since the gorgeous 12-string acoustic guitar and dulcimer tones of Only wanting to melt beautifully away is it a lack of contentment that stirs affection for those things said to be as of yet unseen (BT011), this wide-ranging release also offers up some of their most blistering free rock performances yet. The side-long opening piece finds Haino on a single snare drum in duet with O’Rourke on unamplified electric guitar, playing in the lovely post-Bailey vein heard on his classic 90s recordings with Henry Kaiser and Mats Gustafsson. Spiky dissonance and ringing harmonics interweave with flowing melodic fragments as Haino single-mindedly explores the resonance of the snare like an untutored Han Bennink. On ‘Right brain, left brain; right, left; right wing, left wing. Just how many combinations can be made from these?’, O’Rourke moves to synth and electronics, joined by Ambarchi on drums, who at first focuses on sizzle cymbals before hypnotic cycles of gentle tom rhythms combine with electronic burbles and flutters to suggest a dream collaboration between Masahiko Togashi and Jean Schwarz. Ambarchi’s percussion is then joined by Haino on wandering, overblown flute, before the man in black switches back to the snare for a bizarre, stuttering drum duet. For the first trio performance, Haino makes another new addition to his seemingly infinite catalogue of instruments, this time a homemade contraption he refers to as ‘Strings of Dubious Reputation’. Joined by O’Rourke on increasingly spaced-out electric guitar and Ambarchi on skittering percussion, Haino’s wonky, slack strings adds a definite ‘musique brut’ edge to this side-long performance, certainly one of the most enchantingly odd in the trio’s discography. When the group reconvene for the second set, spread out across the final three sides, they seem ready to breathe fire from the first instant. O’Rourke slashes distorted chords on the six-string bass, Ambarchi breaks into his signature irregular caveman thump, and Haino squeals and squawks on heavily delayed oboe before unleashing an overpowering electrical storm when he first picks up the guitar. For over half an hour, the trio pound out one of their most relentless performances, a constantly rearranging kaleidoscope of tortured fuzz guitar, insanely busy bass riffing and propulsive, tumbling drums. A hushed atmosphere initially reigns on the final long piece, given the mournful title ‘There are always things I wish to say but I can only convey them in this language August 6 August 9’. Haino’s clean guitar strumming calls up the shimmering tones of his PSF classic Affection, gradually building to a surging wall of sound, bass and drums lumbering through a roar of jet-engine guitar. Arriving in a deluxe trifold package with photos by Lasse Marhaug alongside inner sleeves with extensive live images, this epic release is perhaps the most remarkable document yet of this unique trio’s stamina and continuing inventiveness. 

Jim O'Rourke, Keiji Haino, Oren Ambarchi – With pats on the head, just one too few is evil one too many is good that's all it is - 3LP

Long overdue 2024 repress of this gem! "Hotel Record is the second release from the duo/couple of crys cole and Oren Ambarchi, following on from Sonja Henies Vei 31 (Planam, 2014). Where their debut recording presented a disquieting portrait of the erotic dimension of romantic intimacy, the follow-up continues to explore the pair’s simultaneously musical and romantic relationship in a more subtle fashion, presenting four long-form pieces that touch on the variety of forms the life of this couple takes: as a musical duo, as a pair of travelers to exotic locations, as opponents in a game of cards… Each of the four tracks presents a distinct sound-world, yet each manages to attain the same suspended, half-sleeping feeling, outlining a space where improbable combinations of the electronic and the acoustic, of extreme closeness and amorphous distance, occur with the gentle insistence of a dream. The opening Call Myself calmly unfolds a fabric of long tones from electronic organ and guitar, combining the sliding, aleatoric effects of classic David Behrman with a more hands-on feel. Over the top of this slowly shifting tonal bed, cole’s voice mutters unintelligibly into a Buchla synth, teasing the listener by suggesting a meaning that remains always out of the ear’s reach. Francis Debacle (Uno) builds on the foundations of a heavily amplified session of the titular card game, overlaying vocal murmurs and exhalations and mysterious room-sounds to create an impossible aural environment. On Burrata, a palette of vintage 1980s digital synthesizer sounds combined with guitars create an irregular texture of lush chords and bubbling melodic details, into which cole’s voice processed by a vocoder, is interwoven, reading fragments of romantic correspondence. Finally, on Pad Phet Gob, field recordings made in Thailand become an ambiguously acoustic/electronic rainforest, eventually giving way to a mysterious, wavering electronic tone-field punctuated by sibilant, popping mouth-sounds. Carving out an intimate and human sonic space across a diverse array of compositional approaches, sound sources, fidelities and textures, Hotel Record is the latest dispatch from the continuing explorations of a unique duo. Ambarchi and cole reimagine electro-acoustic music, not simply as ‘abstract’ sound, but as a diary, a love poem, a dream." Photography by crys cole and design via Stephen O’Malley. Mastered by Rashad Becker at D&M, Berlin February 2017. 

Crys Cole & Oren Ambarchi – Hotel Record