This Heat were a UK trio who were probably the closest that we've come to the original, groundbreaking Faust albums - a band that understood & used the studio as an integral part of their sound. Unlike Faust, they were (a) a great live act & (b) much..

"Between “Blue & Yellow” and “Deceit” came the EP, “Health & Efficiency”. It bridges a gap between the mostly improvisational former, and the highly composed latter, showing great diversity in the band’s sound in general, as well as nicely documenting their two extreme directions.
The title track is This Heat’s single most high-energy piece ever, and is a tour de force of singing, ensemble playing and sound texture; It is propelled along by Charles Bullen’s signature guitar strumming & ratcheting...

Great sounding and spirited shows from the John Peel show. Recommended.

"This Heat’s earliest public recordings came from two sessions for John Peel’s BBC radio show, in April and October of 1977. Peel was one of their greatest enthusiasts at the time, hearing excellence in the band’s mixed repertoire of post-krautrock songs and uniquely approached improvisation. Of special merit here is the band’s maverick use of real-time tape loops to augment their basic three-piece sound, as well as their...

"Repeat is This Heat’s fourth album proper, posthumously released in 1993. It harbours the most extreme musical side of This Heat’s experimental tendencies on disc, and is assuredly the band’s most radical offering. The title track is an oxymoron: An extended/edited version of the piece “24 Track Loop”, which had been previously issued on the Recommended Records’ double lp sampler in 1981, heard here sans the harmonizer effect. The original tracks were produced by David Cunningham (Flying Lizards)...

“A suite of fiendishly complex compositions for mixed real and virtual resources. Bob Drake, Djorge Delibasic, Pegja Milosavljevic and Chris Cutler make appearances - playing electric guitar, bass, drums and virtuoso violin between them, but mainly it is Stevan who plays all kinds of keyboards, strings, double bass, zither, samples and software.
Three thoroughly through-composed and finely articulated pieces make up this very concentrated suite: Concerto Grosso (for keyboards, string instruments and..

? known to this audience for his work with The Science Group. The part below about sounding like all possible musics being stuck in a bag together sorta sums up my very confused feelings about this after only one listening. More time is de...

"Keystone works from the various streams of musique concrete, electronic music, soundscape, electroacoustics and plunderphonics - including two masterworks from Eastern Europe, a territory traditionally overlooked in collections of this medium.
This is the classic collection of Contemporary, Concrete, Tapeworked and Processed works - and an indispensable survey of a crucial field:
It comprises: John Oswald's 'Parade', a complex work drawn and extended from Satie's celebrated ballet composition...

Features over 70' of music by Robert Wyatt, David Thomas, Henry Kaiser, John Oswald, Jean Derome, Jocelyn Robert, Iva Bittova/Pavel Fajt, When, Musci/Venosta, James Grigsby, Bill Gilonis, Joseph Racaille, & many more. This is a really good collection; ...

The early 1980s seemingly weren't a great time for creative music. Punk had come, swept away all the old (both good and bad - they didn't care!) and had mostly self-destructed by then, leaving the generally less interesting 'new wave' and all its subsets, all of which seemed to be made to get people to dress up 'creatively' and go out, snort cocaine and dance ('punk disco', my wife called it then). While there *were* a few exciting signs if you knew where to look for it, for the most part the collision...

Bob Drake: drums, bass, backing vocals, tapes, viola
Susanne Lewis: vocals, guitar, viola, accordion, synths

Venus Handcuffs is an early, pre-Hail project by Bob Drake and Susanne Lewis, both of whom were working in Thinking Plague at the time they were also simultaneously doing this duo work.

"Referred to as "a cross between Throbbing Gristle and Nick Cave" during the band's lifetime, Venus Handcuffs got their start in the ranks of Colorado's most far-reaching band, Thinking...

Nice record by an instrumental trio of Lukas Simonis-guitar, Bob Drake-bass, Chris Cutler-drums, playing music very much in the vein of The Ventures and of twangy guitar / instrumental music of the sixties. The main goal was to:" return to the old work method, rarer today, where the band sits around with instruments, plays the pieces in real time, and works out the arrangements together, and then records them while they are still fresh." The ‘twangy guitar / instrumental rock sound’ definitely brings...

"After a break of six years, Chris Cutler, Bob Drake and Lukas Simonis, now with added ingredient Pierre Omer, present the second volume of recordings by the elusive VRIL - a band who revive and update both the great institution of the guitar instrumental and the now sadly neglected practice of collective arrangement, intense rehearsal and live studio performance. Appropriate to the half century that has passed since the birth of the form, these hits dodge about, get bored easily and blend both...

When Is Norwegian multi-instrumentalist Lars Pedersen. His music here is complex sound collages and dramatic narative (with words by Chris Cutler) mixed with music.

“When is the one-man project of Norwegian multi-instrumentalist Lars Pedersen, a musician who has also spent time in some punk outfits as well as the Beatlesesque retro band The Last James. This is the only When album I've heard, but it is a hard-core Avant/RIO album collaboration with Henry Cow's Chris Cutler, released on Cutler's...

Woof was Tim Hodgkinson's label. This release is a pretty big deal, if only for the inclusion of the really, really great "I Do, I Do...I Don’t, I Don’t" EP by Tim and Bill Gilonis, which has been unavailable for over 20 years, was a miserable grotty pressing to begin with, and was Tim's very first post-Cow recordings and the roots of The Work. Not to mention the inclusion of Houdini, one of The Work's greatest...uh...works!

"This CD comprises all four 7” releases by the British underground....

This is a really great album, although I didn’t appreciate it as much when it was first released, because I was a TOTAL fan of Slow Crimes by The Work, and only half that band appears here.
Having said that, as time has gone on, I’ve grown more and more to be aware of what a splendid performance is captured here AND ALSO to appreciate what a utterly slaying performance Chris gives on drums!
And now with the CD issue of this, Udi made what I always thought of a not very good live recording sound...

Here's something I *never* thought I would see; an album of 'new' (new as in unheard) material by The Work! If you don’t know The Work, they were formed by Tim Hodgkinson after Henry Cow and they are one of the greatest ‘difficult rock music’ bands of the 80s and one of the least heralded.

"The 4th World is the band's long-lost, never before issued, very last album, from 1994. Succeeding See by some two years, it shares that album's aesthetics and approach -- an economy of means, and superior...

Long out of print second ReR release by this Rigan electro-acoustic ensemble. “Stonery industrial with noise pop hints. Great and psychedelic.”

The 1st by the duo of Hector Zazou & Joseph Racaille plus guests. Primitive electronics, reeds, electric & acoustic pianos, noise, songs, & the hovering spirit of Satie. Not as divine as Traite De Mechanique, but still an excellent and essential releas...

“This legendary band, whose reputation continues to grow as time passes, were gone before anyone knew they were there. They played a handful of concerts, reformed very briefly to make a second LP, then immediately disbanded again. But the records attracted a cult following, especially in Japan.
Their existence became tenuous, flickering, mythological. How come there's an original Beefheart drawing on the inside cover of their first LP? Why were they invited onto France Culture to debate...