This is a collection of most of the 1984 album “Glass Tube”, which was After Dinner’s first album + some other stuff, plus 30’ of live material by this Japanese new music rock band, who predated the current huge interest in all things "Japan".
Characterized by leader Haco's vocals, this is subtly detailed, almost pastel, progressive Japanese music; they don’t sound like ANYBODY else!

“Can't say I've heard anything quite like this. Truly awesome in its presentation, it's hard not to want to...

"This disc will play in stereo on a CD player and with film and 5.1 surround sound (or stereo) on a DVD player or computer. The music, as always, is prodigious, sounding like a small band, but played by one person in real time (as the film attests). In this format, you can also see the instrument close-to - a highly rebuilt and extended giant Sardinian guitar - with many sympathetic and extra strings, motor driven hurdy gurdy wheels, whirling strings, springs and other appendages, played, like a cello...

"Six years in the making, this is the sixth CD released by ReR from the visual/sonic art group Biota. Unique in their history and method, Biota painstakingly construct complex, organic structures that mix extensive studio processing and musique concréte techniques, with a highly eclectic orchestra of acoustic and electronic resources - from kit drums, through mediaeval winds, strings and barrel organs, to early experimental electronic instruments. Their works are always performance driven and interleaved...

With John Greaves and Chris Cutler. Follow up to the masterly Just Woke Up, sporting great new songs and guests including B.J.Cole, Geraint Watkins, Adam X, Chris Stamey, Bob Drake, Stoffer Blegvad.

“Described as a "fusion of Lou Reed and Bob Dylan, cross bred with English humorist Jon Hegley", Peter Blegvad has carved out a unique position as performer, songwriter and cartoonist. This is his third solo album on ReR.
The 1996 release "Just Woke Up" was a big critical success; Hangman's...

The Camberwell Now were led by Charles Hayward, the drumming/vocalist mastermind behind This Heat, and was the band that he formed immediately after This Heat broke up.
They were released an album and 2 EPs in their lifetime, and this includes all of them in complete, chronological form, plus a track from a sampler.
Their sound was very informed by the This Heat esthetic, with more creative usages of drones than before and some incredible basswork.
While they didn't always quite...

"Like its companion ‘Twice around the Earth', ‘There and Back Again’ is derived from a selection of the 365 location recordings made for Cutler’s daily Resonance FM radio programme ‘Out of the Blue Radio’ (2004-2005). It takes extracts from 44 of these environmental recordings to explore - amongst other things - the way memory works, and how the experience of passing time is constructed. That’s subtext. More important, it should make enjoyably complex listening: surprising, serendipitous, mundane but...

“There must have been something special going on in Verona last April; neither of these old sparring partners from Henry Cow and Art Bears can remember anything about this concert! By far the most aggressive of their duo albums, it leads us via howling fuzz guitar and machine gun percussion into walls of post-rock improvisation, obsessive industrial rhythms, and levels of excitement rarely generated by two people on a stage. The album is remarkable for Chris and Fred's rediscovery of melody and time...

"A subtle, moody, rich and wide-ranging work, in which atmosphere, emotion and dramaturgy lead the ear far beyond music into a world of hints, evocations, anticipation and association and, in passing, reveal a complex metonymic language that, at a deep level, invokes that mostly unconscious lexicon of sound we have all absorbed collectively and subliminally in the course of a century of movie-going, television viewing, documentary recording and electroacoustic experimentation. Once sounds have been...

"The finest composer who ever worked in the medium of sounds assembled on tape"-OP

"The legendary collaboration between a leading American Musique Concrete composer and an instrumental ensemble directed by James Reichert where, for I think the first and to date only time, there was full integration of the written, played and manipulated sounds. The instrumental parts were derived from 'cells' of concrete sound and in turn were electronically transformed (in Robert Moog's then state of the art...

"52 songs of strange events, places and things. Includes 20 original paintings by Ray O'Bannon"-Bob Drake.

"The songs are brief, amusingly creepy or creepily amusing (takes your pick!) with really nice creepy/cool paintings to accompany the mood. Perhaps the scariest thing is that each of these miniatures is a fully formed, fully orchestrated and complete structure - no lazy snippets here - and Bob plays all the parts with his famously Paganini-esque virtuosity in spooky variable-tempo synchrony..

Compositions for the Hyperion ensemble by Dumitrescu, Avram, Hodgkinson and Cutler recorded at the Nancy-Vanoeuvre festival. Contents:

New Meteors and Pulsars (Dumitrescu, 1982) : For Tape and Percussion : Tape by Iancu Dumitrescu, Soloist, Chris Cutler

Nouvelle Axe (Avram, 1988) : Hyperion Ensemble

Life On Earth (Cutler, 1998) : Hyperion Ensemble with Ana Maria Avram, Prepared Piano and Tim Hodgkinson, Clarinet and Bass Clarinet, Chris Cutler, Percussion

Black Death...

Janet is a great, great, classically trained guitarist who plays a unique, personal music, usually for solo and/or prepared solo guitar. She's been quietly working for a long time and this, her third release, recorded with the equally great, great (but better, better known) Fred Frith will bring her a lot more attention, which she fully deserves.
Having had a rare chance to see her perform in the East (she opened up for Boud Deun at one of their final shows in 1998), the fact that the public at...

"In 1996, at the end of a two year residency, Fred organised an event at L'Ecole Nationale de Musique de Villeurbanne in France involving as many of the students as possible, grouped according to their departments - early music, rock, African drumming, classical etc. Each group was set up in a different room in the school building and during the concert the public was encouraged to wander around creating their own mix, or to sit in the courtyard and listen to the sound drifting out through the open...

This is the soundtrack to the film which followed Fred touring & playing in the late 80's, when he was actively on the road all the time. This functions as a sort of a 'best of' sampler, featuring many aspects of his work, some of which can be found on other albums, but most of which is only available here.
This includes many great players: Tom Cora, Haco, Zeena Parkins, John Zorn, Rene Lussier, Bob Ostertag, Lars Hollmer, Eino Haapala, Iva Bittova, Hans Bruniusson, Joey Barron, and many many others..

“The long-awaited follow up to their first release on Derek Bailey's Incus label and a kind of prequel, going back to the time when Fred was playing home-made instruments and John was using mouthpieces and duck-calls as much or more than alto sax; this was back in the New York glory days when 100 new ideas popped up somewhere every day, and these performances lie right at the fringe of what most people would accept as "music".
Anyone wanting to get back to one of the roots of what later became known..

"Although following The 5th Elephant in its musical organisation - around grids of pulses and highly crafted, rich sonorities - this work is more evolved, more focussed and more internally economic. Following a narrative thread this time, the whole is bound into a complex and ramifying exposition of repetition, transformation and evolution, where a return is no return and where perceiver and perceived are lost to time.
Tightly bounded by speech-derived (but massively re-formed) sonic materials, as...

"This album is gorgeous. I picked it up expecting some crazy experimental thing because it's a Haco project, but what I ended up hearing was an achingly beautiful collaboration of slow, climaxing songs, inventive string technique, and head-bobbing goodness. This is a really, really good disc."-Eon Fontes May

"Charismatic singer, lyricist and performer Haco came to the fore in the early 80s with the group After Dinner, a sublime incarnation of surreal, direct, and offbeat Japanese/European pop...

"Ad Hoc Records' new, four-panel digipack reissue of The Hat Shoes debut album will be especially welcomed by lovers of intelligent and thoughtful progressive music, with a hint of Romanticism.
Originally released in 1991, Differently Desperate is a studio offering of diverse avant-pop songs by a 'super-group' comprised of members Bill Gilonis (The Work), Catherine Jauniaux (Fluvial), Charles Hayward (This Heat, Camberwell Now) and Tom Cora (Skeleton Crew, Curlew). There's also a slew of well-known...

The last of the Henry Cow albums on Virgin, this includes their amazing final BBC session; 25' of Henry Cow perfection, a small taste of the famous shows that they performed with Robert Wyatt and a lot of purely free improvisation or prepared free improvisation, which is what they were doing live at this time.
This has been out of print for a bit now and is always in demand, and it has been remastered by Bob Drake and sounds significantly better to my ears!

"Originally released in 197

Note: These copies are the original issue of this CD on the ESD label at a special price. Very few available.

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....

“Some will remember his two great small ensemble compositions from an earlier quarterly. This collection concentrates more on his (prize-winning) tape works and includes the great Hong Kong changeover cityscape 'In Between', extracts from works about Israeli whistleblower Mordecai Vanunu and Edwin Armstrong (inventor of FM modulation) as well as other radio works and three chamber pieces based on African rhythms. Enormous variety.”-Chris Cutler

“One of the strangest CDs ever to come your way...

South Africa's Warrick Sony, working under the name The Kalahari Surfers, created an important body of political and socially charged songs on albums like Bigger than Jesus," "Own Afffairs" and "Sleep Armed", the albums from which this compilation is drawn. This is the second volume in the reissue series of his work. The music, while being ostensibly influenced by Henry Cow, Canterbury, punk etc. is pop with an attitude, and spoke out loudly against conditions in his country at the time.
From his...

"Performed by the Macedonian Symphony Orchestra with Balkan electro legend Kiril Dzajkovski, Chris Cutler (percussion), Nikola Kodjbashia (prepared piano), Patric Driver and Valere Novarina (readers). Text fragments are by Heiner Muller and Valere...

“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...

Tim Hodgkinson-Steel Guitar [Lap], Clarinet, Bass Clarinet, Clarinet [Klarnet], Alto Saxophone, Sounds [Sound Manipulation], Voice, Tüngür [Dungur], Percussion, Ocarina
Ken Hyder-Percussion, Percussion [Drum Kit], Tüngür [Dungur], Voice, Ektare [Ektara, Bass Ektara], Sounds [Sound Manipulation]
Gendos Chamzyryn-Voice, Tüngür [Dungur], Percussion, Doshpuluur, Cello, Performer [Chadagan, Khomous], Ocarina

“The one album, I'd say, that deserves a perfect score on concept alone.
Why..