Sunny Murray, John Edwards and Tony Bevan – I Stepped Onto A Bee - June 2011 June 11th, 2011

Working with Cecil Taylor and Albert Ayler in the Sixties, Sunny Murray, the Dr Who of the drumkit, escaped the tyranny of time. Here he teams again with his British collaborators, the saxophonist Tony Bevan and John Edwards, the European improviser’s bass player of choice. Bevan and Edwards are in uncharacteristically bluesalicious mode here. Having…

The Long Ryders – Native Sons - June 2011 June 11th, 2011

In the early Eighties, The Long Ryders played country-influenced garage rock to LA crowds culturally programmed to despise it. Such is the subliminal influence of their 1984 debut, here with thirteen indispensible extras, that without it the whole world would sound very slightly different. Punked country stomps like (Sweet) Mental Revenge and Run Dusty Run…

Muhal Richard Abrams with Fred Anderson and George Lewis – SoundDance - June 2011 June 11th, 2011

When jazz got serious in the sixties, Muhal Richard Abrahams’ Association For the Advancement Of Creative Musicians facilitated Chicago night club turns’ migrations to art lofts. On the first disc of this double set, the octogenarian pianist duets with Fred Anderson, on his final recording. The misunderstood saxophonst died last year, his bold choices often…

Various Artists – Messthetics 108 South Coast DIY ’77-’81 - June 2011 June 5th, 2011

The Messthetics series assembles extremely raw punk era ephemera, culled from demos and cassette releases, into documents of distinct regional undergrounds, this time making the case for a South Coast sensibility. The airy, post-pop of Chichester’s Indifferent Dance Centre should have blossomed; Portsmouth’s Parasites sound utterly inept, but O.D. Baby’s has a haunted grandeur; from…

Gnod – Ingnodwetrust - June 2011 June 5th, 2011

Gnod, sometime collaborators with White Hills (above), underpin echoing guitar and bad dream vocal snippets with metronomic Krautrock rhythms. Ingnodwetrust’s two offensively single-minded epics are available on vinyl or as downloads only, the band looking from their Salford lair towards the future and the past, oblivious to the decaying present. The twenty minute, monochromatic splurge…

Barry Gray – Stand By For Adverts - June 2011 June 5th, 2011

Barry Gray’s best known for his bombastic Thunderbirds score, but Trunk records offers the incidental music aficionados that deify him the Holy Grail with this previously unissued trove of eighty-one of Gray’s advertising jingles. The inclusion of five different attempts to summon the spirit of Hoover’s Keymatic washing machine with oscillating electronica suddenly reveals him…