Chevreuil live

Live Big'n

New Purkinje Shift?

Just came across this. Don't have other info:

Shorty

Shorty
Last One In My Mouth Is A Jerk 7"

WorryBird Disk

I don't remember where I got this vinyl rip, but I stumbled across it in my files a few weeks ago and can't seem to stop playing it. I'm ordered the vinyl for myself this morning, and will be on the hunt for any of their 7" still outstanding from my collection. Shorty was, of course, the preamble to U.S. Maple, and the best I can describe them is as a much noisier and US Maplier version of Chicago noise rock bands from the early 90's. They are not nearly as popular as they should be, but they did it right before I knew what right even was.

d/l

Red X Red M

Red X Red M
Australian Cattle God Records
Austin, TX


Just got this in the mail.

Listen.

Trunks

I just got this in an email.

Still Here.

Hastas
Migration To The Magenta Pond

I've been meaning to get to some cassette uploads from an assortment of noisy artists but can't seem to find a free hour as I am GD strapped for time with several other debilitatingly consumptive obsessions. This post happens to be about a project related to one of those artists, but dude's already set up an mp3 all ready to go in the provided link.

I've been running this SOB on repeat since I first heard it. Do your brain and whatever exists beyond the brain a favor and check it out.

Listen and D/L.

Couch

Couch

7" (1996)

Kollaps

Munich, Germany

These homies are german homies, and they released a full length in 1997, Etwas Benutzen, which I always found awesomely minimalist, before modernizing their sound and thereby diluting their attractiveness substantially. I haven't met a lot of people who feel the same way, but what I usually do is give them the crazy eyes, drag my finger across my throat, and then mouth the words, "I am gonna slit your throat with my index finger" and then they usually change their minds and agree with me.

This 7" was the harbinger to that LP, and it is pretty rad. Checkity check check it:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/qeqwuu

Buyity buy buy it.
http://www.discogs.com/sell/list?release_id=857500&ev=r2

Gorge Trio

Gorge Trio

He bringeth me Low 7" (1995)

Forces in Motion Records

Here's these guys, just doin' it.
http://www.sendspace.com/file/8i2llc

Haberdasher

Haberdasher

Quarry 7"

Reptillian Records

Bodymore, Murderland



Put your tounge on it!

http://www.sendspace.com/file/sc7v6z

Oxes

Oxes

Arab on Radar 'Split' (2000)

Wantage (USA)



This is another vinyl rip of mine.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/ybptan

BSC

Burning Star Core

The Very Heart of the World (2005)

Thin Wrist









You'll want to buy this HERE, after listening.

Antlers

Bastro

Antlers Live: 1991

Blue Chopsticks

Chicago, IL





Dudes, you guys know that I love John McEntire and Tortoise and Bastro and a lot of the things he's done but just listen to this, from the liner notes:

I would argue that our interpretations of these songs and the performances contained herein exist in a disembodied, ahistorical world; a world whose origins and possible future destinations seem wonderfully disconnected from our own, verifiable musical history.

Uh, what?

http://www.sendspace.com/file/qasq57

Buy

Listen

Interstellar Space

John Coltrane

Interstellar Space (1967)

Impulse!


Why Not? Why not up this record? It is after all the greatest record of all time. I just upped the original four tracks, just to keep you from getting side-tracked.


These are mp3's from my CD copy, but if you ever get the chance pick up the Vinyl.

The Radiant Mirror

Flower-Corsano Duo

The Radiant Mirror

Textile Records (2007)

.

I bought this a while back and things being as they are, it sat on my right speaker for a long fucking time. Why? None of your fucking business thats why.

But, water under the bridge, here it is tonight, blaring through that same right speaker, appropriately living up to it's description as psyche/drone/free-jazz. A beautiful change of pace for our favorite free drummer Chris Corsano. Michael Flower uses what he calls a 'Japan Banjo' described as a "giant unwieldy instrument fed through effects pedals and an amplifier played with fingers and bows" to deliver his sound. (Look here for the quote, and some MP3's.)

Safe travels, kids.

Buy.

Listen.

Zing!

Zing!

Magnetic Flux

ears & eyes

Chicago, IL

Caught these guys at the Empty Bottle a week or two back. Exactly right in our wheelhouse. They had that jazz/rock merger attack pinned, that ol' tightrope. I enjoy that the group is not afraid to delve deep into noisy rants and still create plenty of opportunities to declare themselves prim and proper 'musicians'. That's a respectable thing these days. I found the guitarist after the show and jawed his ear for what he seemed to think was way too long about his influences, objectives, contemporaries, things like that. And i just kept saying more words and he just kept staring at me all freaked-out looking. Some people don't like to talk all that much shop I suppose.

Definitely listen in, here.

And buy the shit, here.

new link for the CD!^

Suite: Bittersweet

Nels Cline/ Wally Shoup/ Greg Campbell

Suite: Bittersweet (2007)

Strange Attractors

There's a good amount of records out there that are of Suite: Bittersweet's brand of modern free-jazz. Most of this brand involves the participation of names like Flaherty, Corsano, Shoup and Cline (and a host of others in this revolving door of worthy improvisers). These are the best of the best of our day, to be sure, but it's strange how these records now have a particular, unique set of expectations attached to them. You could not safely call these improvisations 'ground-breaking', or 'cutting-edge' as they seemed to have evolved into their own sub-genre, their own classification. But saying that does not intend to take anything from the unforeseen landscapes welded in these sessions. Nor do I intend to imply that they are premeditated. What in fact we have is a sort of controlled apocalypse. Like a C.I.A. experiment in which they remove a small town from all contact with the outside world in order to simulate Armageddon. It's real. The hysteria is real. But you can be assured knowing that it will not spread into some sort of John Zorn debacle.

This particular album has gotten quite a bit of playing time recently. I wouldn't rate it any better or any worse then any of it's contemporaries, if such a comparison is even possible. It does score a 100% for genuineness, which is probably the ony requisite we should have on improvised music. This is guitar, sax, drums, from 2007, and it is in print at SAAH. but assuming you'll hear this and immediately go out and buy the full record and the multitude of others of it's kind, I'll be willing to post the B side only to this record temporarily, and by request. Enjoy.

Updater

Not to get off-topic, but Summer is the most wretched of the seasons; an egregiously long string of unnecessarily hot days defined by excess, idleness, and reckless hedonism. A time in which everything of importance seems to dilute - 0ur convictions, our focus, our passions. It takes a disparate and cruel drop in temperature to remind us that our primary function is still simply to survive in an unforgiving planet. And that some things need to be explored before we're gone. Back to work.
.
By virtue of a welcome but inexplicable surge in email requests here are some re-ups:

.
The Music Improvisation Company
Instant Composers Pool 006
Haberdasher
Lynx
Guitar Solos 2
The Made-Ups
.

The Futurist

Shellac of North America
The Futurist (1997)
Self-Released
Chicago, IL

Ah, yes, the not so super secret Shellac album. I'm not going to go into what this record was, you can google all that. But I will tell you that it is my favorite Shellac work. All the expert minimalism and math, none of the doo-doo and feces talk.

I know posting a Shellac record may be breaching the sort of obscurity standard we've established here at M&N, but I just happened to have upped it for a friend last night and thought, some young kid out there in the vast reaches of our universe hasn't heard Shellac yet. And here it will be a bright morning for some new student of the non-song.

OOP.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/xkix56

Big'N

Well obviously it's been a while since the last post and I could blame that on a number of things, any of which would seem terribly irrelevant. So I will spare you the excuses and instead implore what few of you there are left to grab this CD.

Six weeks ago the "Prison City", IL band Big'N got together for their drummer's birthday in an effort to demonstrate how vulnerable the skull actually is to fierce emissions of noise. Their shows are rare and celebrated events , so I was quick to seize the night.

I'm fairly certain such a night is a primarily regional delicacy at best, so for all those unfortunate and innocently out-of-the-know, here is a site link, and a buy link. You should know, though, that after listening you'll prob be like, "woah man, like where'd my balls go? This music totally just ripped them off."

Myspace.

Amazon.

The Music Improvisation Company

The Music Improvisation Co.

Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Hugh Davies, Jamie Muir, Christene Jeffrey

ECM Records

If you're like me than the Gorge Trio's Madeups really left a hole in your brain when you first heard it. Mostly due to the amount of restraint the Trio showed. For Noise, or Free-Noise this is a quality that is largely overlooked. The players will typically opt instead to compact as many layers of sound possible into each recorded second. The Madeups was patient, poised, minimalist, somethings I thought to be quite revolutionary.

So imagine my surprise when I found they've been doing it since the seventies.

Gorge Trio

The Madeups (2002)

Self-Released

OOP

The paradox of free-music is that you can never achieve a wholly free improvisation. Your ideas have to come from somewhere and that somewhere is a cesspool of idioms and cliche. So naturally what you try to do is something which I call multiple fragmented perspective amalgamation. Imagine a portrait of a man's face, painted from all sides, all combined into one image. Space does not allow you to have all perspectives represented equally so thus each perspective compromises itself and becomes fragmented. The result is something nearly unrecognizable, it is a mural of familiar images cut into such tiny pieces and rearranged so that it becomes nearly totally unfamiliar. And nearly totally unfamiliar is the best free-music can aspire to as well. But it also represents reality much better than anything we're used too.

I recently read a quote defining good art as "that which reflects the viewers perspective most accurately back at him." Now take that same man, and make a painfully thorough documentary on his character. Make sure you interview everyone, and leave out the boring crap that everyone feels they have to say. The result is a mural of details ranging from his deepest, darkest secrets, to pure, unsubstantiated rumor, perhaps a man nearly totally unrecognizable to his own family. That's what you really see, isn't it? Things are actually phantoms of what they're supposed to be. Even those trusted, sacred things. You see, Rhythm and Melody are lies, trying to smuggle into your brain a poisonous, false world of trite, cookie-cutter lyrical and musical cliches.

Free music is the Truth!

The F and The C

The F and The C

S/T

Austin, TX

This here is a three-piece of guitar/bass/drums from Austin, that plays a self-described brand of noise/freerock/absurdist improvisations that might seem obviously comparable to the rattle of disassembled engine parts, individually mutilated and then pieced back together. But it actually sounds nothing like that at all. But I won't blame you for thinking that because it's terribly easy to overthink these things.
-

Case in point: When you're hearing these individually mutilated parts, you can't help but ache to know which parts were mutilated artfully, and which parts recklessly, right? And you can't help but ache to know what's the difference between the two. I mean, certainly you can bang on your instrument for an hour and call it a 'noise/freerock/absurdist improvisation', right? What's so hard about that? But is that all that they are doing? Are you sure? Then why do people like me eat this shit up? Maybe you're missing something. Maybe you should listen again.

Listen here.

Blue Humans

Blue Humans

Clear to Higher Time (1993)

New Alliance Records

NYC

This past week I decided to tie up a few loose ends in my Alan Licht collection, finally finding, among other things, that The Evan Dando of Noise? release from '97, which I just find too funny not to mention here. Anyway, his solo works are all very interesting and I'd recommend them in particular if it were not for his part in this beautiful studio racket from '93.

The recording is two guitars panned hard to the left and right channels respectively. The drums are centered, maybe a bit back in the mix. Someone once described this to me as free-noise, and I've always enjoyed that characterization. The drums splatter around very much in the vein of free-jazz, maybe like a belligerent imitation of Rashied Ali, while the guitars seem to be a wild mess, just raging on separate rants, noteless, unrestrained. But I have a suspicion that if one were to travel in time and sit in on this recording, that the level of coordination observed between the players, whether by design, or improvised, would be surprising. Because there is some quality in these noisy rampages that makes it outstanding, one that I can't quite pin down. Something went terribly right for these three in the August of 1991.

I'll throw up a link to a file with the five tracks later tonight or tomorrow, because I'm pretty sure it's out of print, but I'd like to check first.In the mean time here's one track, "Movement" from another blog. Here's the ZIP.

The CD goes for $.01 used, and under two bucks new, so just buy it already.

Febuary Releases

These are a few records released this month that I have not heard yet, but am excited to get my hands on.


L'ocelle Mare is the newest project of avant guitarist Thomas Bonvalet, formerly one half of France's excellent Cheval De Frise. After the tray time Frenetic Record's Fresques Sur les Parois Secrètes du Cråne received, it would be a sin not to pick up Thomas's solo record. But if that alone wasn't enough, the tracks provided on his website point towards a braver, more complex, fascinating direction for the classically trained guitar man. I've had tracks "9" and "2" in my head for weeks now, trying to decode the narratives hidden within them. You have to wonder about the writing process that led to these songs, because they seem to grow naturally, as if improvised, but retain a flawlessness and a precision that suggests design. Very impressive.

CD available at Sickroom Records. Plays Chicago on Mar. 1st in store at Permanent Records.



My Disco also releases their second record this month, and based on the tracks provided here, it seems likely to be even stronger than their first. I'm basing this mostly from the tracks "You Came to Me Like A" and "Paradise" which boast an impressive understanding of restraint and minimalism in structure which I thought was long dead. If the rest of the album meets the standard reached in these two tracks, then we're in the runnings for the best of year. My Disco hail from Australia and it doesn't look like they have any immediate plans to visit Chicago or the States which is too bad for us, and too bad for the dying genre.

The new record, Paradise, is available at Stomp Entertainment.