‘Dave Cudlip’s debut album, inaugurating the highly promising, experimental label Klang Tone (spawn of the estimable Stroud record shop): a stunning and unique combination of ethereal ambient soundscapes, undulating rhythms, and atonal sound collage, with Harmonia and Autechre looming amongst its forebears.’
‘These recordings are traces of something I have come to love to do in large resonant spaces, which is to set up sustained chords on multiple organs and then move slowly through the sound. The instruments are usually far apart, which makes for the emergence of large fields of continuous change, spaces of harmonicity that can be passed through layer by layer and which contain within them points of both clarity and overwhelming complexity. The organ pipes are tuned and retuned, though sometimes I leave them just as they are. What I’m searching for is the moment when a particular kind of sounding texturality is revealed – it is rough, focused and yet strangely transparent.’
Funky Donkey is brawling, invigorating, all-in, full-throttle fire music by the Human Arts Ensemble, recorded live in the Berea Presbyterian Church in St. Louis, in 1973, with Lester Bowie and co giving it some hoof. Charles Bobo Shaw’s composition Una New York is more spaced-out, limber, melodious, and funky. Guitarist Marvin Horne plays a blinder.
A key Black Arts Group recording.
‘Recorded at home in 2012, early acoustic guitar improv performances from the Bhutanese expat, who’d come to Asheville, NC to study in 2000 and discovered worlds of anarcho-punk and avant garde such as he’d only dreamed. Having made recordings of his newly-located improvisational conception, he intuited a desire to go deeper in his explorations of the recorded sound of the guitar, melding and colliding traditional music with his feeling for the range of textures within.’
The duo of Bill Orcutt — on four-string guitar — and drummer Tim Koffley.
‘Taking leads from James Blood Ulmer and Fred Frith’s Massacre, here is the link between the contemporaneous Thunders-esque punk of Orcutt’s Trash Monkeys and the mayhem of Harry Pussy…
‘Consider the closer Wattstock, where Koffley forms the bedrock for an extended Orcutt hotbox of instantly-composed harmolodics. And also God Are You There, It’s Me, Watt, where we can hear the spontaneous vocal bursts (the only vocals on the album) that would re-emerge on Orcutt’s early solo records…
‘An early, major piece of the unfolding and complex puzzle of Orcutt’s music. A foundation.’
Dub counterpart to the Experience LP, with assistance from Prince Jammy.
‘Verve By Request.’