Spontaneous Music Ensemble – Challenge - August 2013 August 11th, 2013

In 1966, three RAF band escapees coaxed a cautiously iconoclastic British response to American free jazz from like-minded experimentalists. The Spontaneous Music Ensemble’s debut is an ur-text of improvisation, here with the addition of percussionist John Stevens’ meditational ode to the son he hardly saw, Distant Little Soul. Challenge’s didactic sleeve notes continue to resonate;…

Kid Congo And The Pink Monkeybirds – Haunted Head - August 2013 August 11th, 2013

The faithful gun dog guitarist Kid Congo Powers spent his early years loping alongside various legends of the blues punk aristocracy, retrieving wounded rock and roll riffs for The Cramps, Gun Club, and Nick Cave. But his third album with The Pink Monkeybirds buffs the black leather with bright shards of Fifties sci-fi sonics. Echoed…

Skullflower – Kino I : Birthdeath - August 2013 August 4th, 2013

This massively expanded version of Skullflower’s 1988 debut e.p. is the addictive noise fix your nan warned you about. Dumb ugly titles christen filthy dirges of militaristic pounding, unmanly retching, and tidal swathes of space rock guitar sewage. Often recorded in rehearsal rooms on audibly overburdened dictaphones, Skullflower’s youthful stirrings suggest an obsessively single-minded British…

Lol Coxhill & Michael Doneda – Sitting On Your Stairs - August 2013 August 4th, 2013

Lol Coxhill, who died last year, exemplified the sort of celebrated English eccentric artist and free spirit currently being priced and legislated out of existence. Here he is, live in Paris, in one of his final recordings, with his fellow soprano saxophone virtuoso Michael Doneda. Their opening nineteen minute dialogue buries half-familiar snatches of melody…

Martin Simpson – Vagrant Stanzas - July 2013 July 28th, 2013

Martin Simpson’s a generation younger than the Sixties folk revivalists, like Martin Carthy and Bert Jansch, who beat the path he followed. But, now sixty, he has a unique ability to make traditional tunes from both sides of the Atlantic sound like relatives only recently separated. Here’s Simpson alone at a dramatically close mic’d acoustic…

Major Surgery – The First Cut - July 2013 July 28th, 2013

Recorded in London in 1976, Major Surgery’s lone album is mid-Seventies jazz rock, Jimmy Roche’s electric guitar funkily truncating behind Don Weller’s Kojak sax, but not as we know it. The quartet weren’t the smooth operators soon to characterize UK jazz, nor the anti-melodic improvisers already embedded in the scene’s underbelly, though drummer Tony Marsh…