Monkey Puzzle Trio – The Pattern Familiar (avant-jazz)

The musicians that make up Monkey Puzzle Trio are all confirmed experimentalists, all situated on the peripheries of, or the boundaries between, socially validated zones of practice, where the population is sparse and the musical meanings hard-won. The press release for this album situates the ensemble’s work on ‘a tightrope between song, improvisation and sound-as-sound’; while that helps to give us the general picture, it’s inevitably a simplification. Starting with the idea of song (the album is also described as a ‘song cycle’), it should be noted that while the music …

Mere – Mere (dark-ambient improvisation)

Improvisation is a complex matter, and often a contentious one: some degree of musical freedom is usually identified with it, to the extent that freedom is sometimes regarded as its defining characteristic, its essence, or indeed as the thing itself. Thus some more partisan free improvisers would not really regard formulaic improvisation (improvisation within closely bounded harmonic and rhythmic parameters) as improvisation at all. I’ve never had much time for debates that centre on the definitions of musical styles or characteristics, but I guess that if you’ve staked your career and practice on a particular ideology of creative freedom the stakes might look higher than they do to me. Personally I think there are other parameters of improvisation…

Various Artists – The Deep Vain Trombonist (sampler)

Dusty Curtain Face Records is not a record label in any conventional sense of the term, or even anything that could usually attract the description ‘recording studio’. It’s a sign of things to come, a point of facilitation for independent artists that passes devastating comment on the whole panoply of the music industry circus purely by existing. It’s one man, one man equipped with some very basic recording equipment, a big pair of ears, an unusual degree of motivation and a generous nature. He goes to bands’ rehearsal spaces, records them in the circumstances under which they feel most comfortable, taking care to capture the ambience …