This is high quality live Swedish radio recordings from Goteborg (1975 - with John Greaves) and Stockholm (1977 - with Georgie Born). The sound is great here; Bob Drake worked from the original 8 track and stereo 2 track masters and you can finally hear Tim's follow-up masterpiece to "Living in the Heart of the Beast", entitled "Erk Gah". There's also some nice improvisations and other tunes and Fred's never otherwise released "The March", which is a really great one as well. Highly recommended...

Nearly 8 years after the big box set by Henry Cow was unleashed on the world, they’ve made the sets available individually! This is the period when I saw them (twice in June 1977).

“A collection of live performances from late 1976 and 1977. "Joan" & "On Suicide", traditionally associated with Art Bears & Hopes and Fears (1978), feature here, showing that they were Henry Cow songs long before Art Bears existed "On Suicide" is longer here & ends with a cello solo by Georgie Born. The Art Bears'...

The final Henry Cow album, & along with their first, this is my favorite of their many great works. This stuff is the ultimate in humanly impossible to play works, but there they are playing it! One side of Tim Hodgkinson's composerly insanity (no wonder he gave up composed music for the improvised life! How does one top this?) and one side of Lindsay Cooper's fine works. Fred Frith provides guitar and bass & Chris Cutler turns in one of his greatest drumming performances. You know that the voting is...

“Three long and recent compositions: Under the Void, scored for flute, oboe, clarinet, trumpet, horn, trombone, 2 violins, 2 violas, cello, bass, piano and percussion, here virtually realised; Then, for virtual strings, brass, woodwinds, accordion and piano -combined with real Siberian frame drums, gongs, viola, electronics, bowed cymbals, lap steel guitar and Yamaha DX21 keyboard assembled by ear in the studio, not from a score, and Ortemchei, scored and assembled from parts of a live performance by...

"Cellist Honsinger and pre-existing media manipulist Simonini with a piece that falls between radio art, music theatre and... and what? A highly unusual performance in 10 parts that deploys its materials sparingly and intelligently and, through a...

Robert Iolini is a composer who transcends the divisions between music, documentary and radio art, mixing investigative journalism, sound ecology, storyboarding and conventional notated composition using songs, spoken word, field recording, improvisat...

The Kalahari Surfers were a South African group who released a few lps in the early 1980's that were hugely critical of the apartheid government that was still in power at the time, and who were unable to get their albums pressed or released in South A...

This Hungarian band was formed in 1984, and this is their fifth release. Led by guitarist Csaba Hajnoczy & featuring vocalist/violinist Gabi Kenderesi (both of whom also make up 1/2 of The Danubians), the band also includes soprano sax, bass & drums. '...

The first release of music by this unknown Eastern European septegenerian composer. His music stems from two main sources; the traditional folks musics of his country & the noted avant composer Edgard Varese. In addition, Kiraly is an inventor & builde...

"The award-winning Macedonian composer, Nikola Kodjabashia, is best known for his classical works, having studied extensively with Anatol Vieru (himself a student of Khachaturian and Shostakovich). But over the past few years Kodjabashia has succesfully integrated a modernist approach into his musical agenda, venturing away from the purely academic curriculum of a standard, classical repetoire, and has become a noteworthy proponent of contemporary ideas.
Reveries Of The Solitary Walker is an oddly...

“Boris Kovacs was born in Vojvodina, the multi-ethnic region of what was then Yugoslavia. He studied accordion and saxophone, going on to teach himself many other instruments. On this record he plays mainly soprano saxophone, leaving Jasna Jovisevic to take alto and bassclarinet. Like pianist Slobodank Stevic, she was classically trained, as was bassist Sinisa Mazalica. The drummer, Boris' son Lav Kovac, is celebrated for his very different playing in Howling Owl and with a variety of eastern bands...

''Venosta & Mariani have long been concerned with manipulating & reconfiguring found musical objects, often using ethnic musics as source material. Rather than find music in the field, they have employed brilliant Flamenco guitarist Lagos. Eleven guita...

This release is drawn from 3 separate recordings the trio made in the 80's. The disc is a combination of compositions & improvisations. Guitars, reeds, keyboards, electronics, bass & drums. Cellist Tom Cora guests on about 1/3rd. [ReR]

"Steve MacLean began playing drums and guitar at the age of seven and composing at twelve. Completing high school early, he met Roswell Rudd and began playing concerts with him in New York. He moved to the city and took a job in a busy recording studio...

"A remarkable set of pieces for mediated acoustic piano that operates in the shadowy territory between what is playable and what is programmable; between narrative simplicity and performative complexity; between hopeful intentionality and flawless execution. Unusually, Steve has put our ear right inside the piano, sans artificial reverberations and blurring tools and, over the course of the CD, various musical dialects are explored and extended - from the plausible, through the exquisite, to the...

"Careful compositions converse with focused improvisations under the precise direction of Steve MacLean who, on this CD, after various excursions that took him through experimental works for piano, interactive insect/guitar compositions and pure electronics, returns to a performing band and a journey through complex polyrhythmic compositions imaginatively intercut with careful, atmospheric inventions, for guitar, bass, keyboard, percussion and various objects. There is a quiet rigour, almost a formality...

"This CD of songs, grittily arranged and produced is noticeably more straight-ahead than ReR’s usual releases though it sits comfortably within the broad range of Steve’s tirelessly experimental output. This is a project with a long history: Steve...

"Maksymenko plays drums with the force and power of a thousand supercomputers, he composes with the originality of a team of duck billed platypuses writing a sequel to Gravity's Rainbow, and he's more fun to listen to than Disneyland."-Henry Kaiser.

This is a collection of some of the very small but very great work by drummer/composer Michael Maksymenko, best known - if at all - for the amazing album and EP he did with the trio Kraldjuranstalten.
It collects eight tracks by Kraldjursanstan...

One of the albums of the decade. A collaboration between Hungarian composer Martha, poet Endre Szkarosi & the frighteningly gothic Sandor Bernath. Sounds of the Transylvanian countryside, medieval instruments fused with industrial percussion...structur...

Tightly focused electroacoustic compositions that are austere, rich, strange and brilliantly executed. Elio has an ear like a bat and a serious antipathy toward cliche, and he never relies on repetition for structure; these pieces seem rather to grow ou..

Tito Pueblo-vocals
Bill Gilonis-guitar (of The Work)
Ilja Komarov-bass
Trixa Arnold-drums

"Tito Pueblo, aka Rob Murphy (Orchestre Murphy), has been responsible for some terrible lapses of judgement & taste. Here he gives us an album of post-Beatles pop songs that deal with the key issues of our times - drinking, sex, love, melancholy, obsession, & drinking. Expect fake French accordion, ludicrous cowboy songs & Flamenco rip-offs."-Chris Cutler

Phil Minton and Veryan Weston began their collaboration in 1987 when they were commissioned by the Le Mans Festival in 1989 to write and perform a composition for 22 voices based on the prison writings of Ho Chi Minh. Since then they have toured the wo...

The 3rd release by this acclaimed organized sound group from Colorado, & their first, classic, which is a high-water mark of churning sonic storms. This is some of their finest work.

"...reminiscent of peering through a mircoscope at a drop of pond water: There's a lot more going on than you'd ever suspect."-Option

"Mnemonists were the precursor to Biota, essentially the same band with a different name, and a slightly more alien quality to their stream of consciousness expression...

Excellent works by Robert Musci and Giovanni Venosta, two Italian composers. Using samplers, synths, tapes and more, they combine their music with ethnic recordings.
Their use of recorded ethnic voices and rhythms combined with their own work makes for a cross between Jon Hassell & Holger Czukay. This is 75 minutes of music from their two early ReR lp titles Water Messages On Desert Sand and Urban And Tribal Portraits. For me, Water Messages especially was their best work....

This ensemble was formed to perform live music to films. The score straddles genres, running the gamut between composed, improvised, graphic, atmospheric and avant garde movie soundtrack. The films were three silent black and white classics: Joris Iven...