Cuneiform Releases for October 2015

Rez Abbasi - Nels Cline - Liberty Ellman - David Gilmore - Miles Okazaki - Marvin Sewell (electric guitars and effects); Damon Banks (el. bass guitar); Marco Capelli (acoustic guitar, effects); Jerome Harris (el. guitar, el. bass guitar, lap steel guitar); Joel Harrison (el. guitar, national steel guitar); Kenny Wessel (el. guitar, banjo)
Composed and improvisationally conducted by Adam Rudolph.
Recorded live in studio on December 21, 2014 - Winter Solstice  
Produced by Adam Rudolph.

On the Winter Solstice of 2014 – the Northern Hemisphere’s longest night of the year – composer, bandleader & percussionist Adam Rudolph convened 11 of New York City’s finest and most adventurous guitarists in a New Jersey studio for a most auspicious event: the debut of Go: Organic Guitar Orchestra, his all-guitar orchestra. In attendance were guitarists Rez Abbasi, Nels Cline, Liberty Ellman, David Gilmore, Miles Okazaki, and Marvin Sewell, all on electric guitars and effects; Damon Banks on bass guitar; Marco Capelli on acoustic guitar, effects; Jerome Harris on electric guitar, electric bass guitar, and lap steel guitar; Joel Harrison on electric guitar and national steel guitar; and Kenny Wessel on electric guitar and banjo. With Rudolph at the helm, conducting musical charts and creative improvisational energy, the orchestra began to play.  The result is this extraordinary release, Turning Towards the Light.
Rudolph grew up and began playing music on the South Side of Chicago, performing with artists like Fred Anderson. By 1978 he was touring Europe with Don Cherry. Hailed by the New York Times as “a pioneer in world music”, in 1977 Rudolph began his collaborations with kora player Foday Musa Suso, followed by his work with the Gnawa musician Hassan Hakmoun, L. Shankar and other musicians from around the globe. His longest and most significant collaboration was with the great Yusef Lateef; from 1988 until Yusef’s death in 2013 they performed as a duet and collaborated as composers on many large ensemble projects. He has also taken influences from contemporary composers such as Pierre Schafer, Olivier Messian, Bela Bartok & Toru Takemitsu.
Rudolph has integrated and transformed all of these influences into a highly personalized language, a language whose rhythmic component, which he calls “Cyclic Verticalism,” combines polyrhythms (from African music) and rhythm cycles (from Indian music).
Turning Towards the Light is the 10th release in Rudolph’s series of recordings for Go: Organic Orchestra. His previous recordings for Go: Organic Orchestra featured an array of instrumentation to bring to life his rhythmically unique creative music. But for Turning Towards the Light, Rudolph envisioned a new kind of orchestral sound conveyed by a single instrument: guitars, whose strings, coaxed by the right hands, are capable of unleashing an orchestra of different musical sounds. He says: “I try to do something new with each performance and recording. This time I wanted to experiment with a new kind of orchestration. I felt that with their range of sound and rhythm, these 11 electric guitars could generate a sonic palate that had never been heard before. I was looking for a new kind of “Future Orchestra”  – and I think we found it.”

Adam Rudolph / Go: Organic Guitar Orchestra, "Heliotropic" from 'Turning Towards The Light'

"...a quirky, catchy blend of pop hooks and jazz-centric soloing...it's rare for a group so young to emerge with such a fully formed and distinctive concept, but Pixel seems to have accomplished just that."
– AllAboutJazz

“The first thirty seconds of this album was enough to tell me that I would probably like Norwegian band Pixel. I did...this band has something new to say musically and produces tunes that are toe-tappingly, wantonly catchy."
– London Jazz News

"...unique and compelling."
– Expose

The award-winning Norwegian jazz quartet Pixel is in the vanguard of a scene brimming with exceptional young musicians, charting an exhilarating, improvisation-steeped jazz path infused with the cathartic energy of indie rock. Pixel’s third album Golden Years captures the next step in the band’s rapid evolution.

Pixel consists of double bassist and vocalist Ellen Andrea Wang, drummer Jon Audun Baar, trumpeter Jonas Kilmork Vemøy, and saxophonist Harald Lassen (with everyone contributing vocals).

Pixel tends toward translucent textures, tight orchestration and pop-inflected songcraft. While the sound is essentially acoustic, Vemøy and Lassen increasingly employ subtle effects that provide deeper textural depth to the already charged mélange of bright harmonies and protean rhythmic thrust.

Golden Years is the result of Pixel’s bustling 2014, a year in which the quartet played nearly 100 gigs (while also each pursuing projects of their own). When they started the recording process at the end of the year, everyone brought new songs to the table, tunes documented over five intensive days in the studio. Together these extraordinary musicians created an expansive album and sound unlike any other band on the scene. Still growing and discovering what they’re capable of, the musicians of Pixel are in their prime, and the group’s third album makes a compelling case that these are the best of times on the Norwegian scene.

Pixel, "Nothing Beats Reality" from 'Golden Years' (Cuneiform Records)

Thinking Plague-In This Life (25th anniversary remaster) $15.00
"Perhaps the finest attempt so far by an American band to add to the pantheon of classic Rock In Opposition records...Mike Johnson's compositions are astonishing and - the clincher - beautiful, and Susanne Lewis' vocals are ...eerily enigmatic..."
– New Sonic Architecture

"Every now and then a landmark group emerges. Thinking Plague in my opinion belongs in that category."
– Chris Cutler

Thinking Plague has been releasing impossible to categorize albums to a devoted fan-base for over 30 years.

In This Life, originally released in 1989, was the group's 3rd album and their first CD release after two previous albums that flew under the radar of most listeners.

Originally released by the ReR label, this was the first album to really bring this superb US band to a wider audience. It was their last to feature singer Susanne Lewis, who lends a convincing  air to the menace of some of the lyrics. It is also their last album to feature Bob Drake as a full member of the band.

Just over twenty five years have passed since I first heard this album upon its release, but what I originally wrote about it still rings quite true, even if I didn't anticipate that the band would still be a vital force two and a half decades later: 'Combine the sound of the 5uu's with the Art Bears, add a (non Dagmar like) female singer & woodwinds, & you come up with this unique U.S. slant on the European art rock song sound. What a great album; one of 1989's best releases!'

It comes back into print now for the first time in years. The two 'bonus tracks', which were taken from their first two albums and can be found in superior form on Early Plague Years have been removed and this presents the album as the band originally planned it. The CD is now shorter, but much more focused this way and a more coherent, single work. It has been newly remastered  by Mark Fuller from the original stereo mixdown master, as overseen by the band. 

Thinking Plague, "Lycanthrope" from 'In This Life' (Cuneiform Records)

Le Rex, "Le Clic" from 'Wild Man' (Cuneiform Records)

"I...was stunned by his Hendrix meets late era Coltrane approach."
– Guitar Moderne

"Despite the boilingly hot drive...influenced by Cream, Lifetime, the Jimi Hendrix Experience (and perhaps more notionally the Pete Cosey/Reggie Lucas version of the Miles Davis group), there's a lyrical side to the guitarist’s playing as well...Excellent."
– Point Of Departure

"...out jazz with lots of sass and vigor...recalls the thornier side of the ECM Records catalog, especially the works of fellow Scandinavians Edward Vesala and Terje Rypdal. Björkenheim attacks the guitar the way the late great Sonny Sharrock did - like Coltrane and Ayler “attacked” their saxophones...yet blues is never very far away. There’s also the chunky focus of pre-Mahavishnu John McLaughlin...The way RB cross-pollinates between jazz and rock recalls fellow traveler Nels Cline, and the results are similar: Oblique swing, gnarly noise, predictably unpredictable, swell."
– Icon

Ecstasy is usually an all too fleeting experience offering the briefest glimpse at transcendence. But a heightened sense of consciousness and discovery manifests throughout Out of the Blue, the transporting second album by composer and guitar maestro Raoul Björkenheim and his extraordinary Finnish quartet Ecstasy.
Featuring the celebrated drummer Markku Ounaskari, the young and dauntingly prolific bassist Jori Huhtala and saxophonist Pauli Lyytinen, Ecstasy has forged more than a signature sound. Over the course of five years the musicians have honed a supremely interactive modus operandi marked by unstable textures, rapidly shifting meters, and emotionally charged melodic flights. Earthy, pristine and unmistakably Nordic, the music evokes the grandeur of Finnish landscapes and the hothouse intimacy of a tight-knit Helsinki scene where the musicians regularly convene to refine their volatile sound.

“I always felt there’s something special about having a band,” Björkenheim says. “An all-star session can be good too, but the thing I’m missing nowadays in jazz is really good bands playing together tightly, turning on a dime together, and especially improvising together.” True to Raoul's statement, this is a band effort, and like all great bands, the sum is greater than the parts. With 2 years additional experience together for this album, everything is upped from the last one: the compositions, the improvisations, the ensemble work and the solos!

Raoul Björkenheim / eCsTaSy, "Uptown" from 'Out Of The Blue' (Cuneiform Records)

Far too many groups are described using the words "nobody sounds like them," but with Switzerland's Sonar, it's a description of rare verisimilitude. At a time when most guitarists' acumen is measured in notes per second, Sonar is, instead, the confluence of rigorously considered writing, collective restraint, and a sound instantly recognizable as much for what is not there as for what is. A musical animal that manages to engage the mind while hitting the heart and the feet (despite its disposition towards complex polyrhythms), to call SONAR "instrumental rock" is unfairly reductionist for a group whose purview extends beyond progressive rock into contemporary classicism...certainly minimalism...a subtle taste of jazz...and, on its latest album, Black Light, perhaps even a hint of surf music described by the group's primary composer, guitarist Stephan Thelen, as "Duane Eddy Meets Jackson Pollock."

Thelen may cite King Crimson, the compositional rigour of Nik Bärtsch, and minimalist composer Steve Reich amongst SONAR's more obvious touchstones but, just as its previous albums did, Black Light manages to come out of the gate sounding like none of them. An integrated team of players who place music ahead of ego, guitarists Thelen and Bernhard Wagner relentlessly eschew flashy gymnastics and even largely avoid the usual arsenal of effects beyond a touch of reverb and a bit of distortion; Christian Kuntner is a lithe, dancing and eminently intuitive bassist while, at the same time, providing a potently visceral foundation; and Manuel Pasquinelli accomplishes the seemingly impossible feat of simultaneously delivering multiple rhythms in real time.

Black Light also represents the first time Sonar has recorded with an outside producer in tow. And what a producer: David Bottrill, whose work as a producer and/or engineer, in addition to Crimson, Peter Gabriel and Tool, also includes time spent with Rush, Smashing Pumpkins and Dream Theater. "The music is at once simple and complex," Bottrill writes at his website, "polyrhythms over melodies over thunderous bass and a drummer who can seem to split his own body in half to play in two or more different meters at once." Recorded live in the studio with no overdubs, Black Light is as in-the-moment as it gets and is a perfect representation of this band and what this band does!

SONAR, "Black Light" from 'Black Light' (Cuneiform Records)

"...ranges from industrial drones (during pre-industrial times) to earth-shaking rock to pre-new age visions of beauty." 
– Alternative Press

Richard Pinhas has long been recognized as a pivotal figure in the development of combining rock music with electronics. Years before MIDI existed, Richard was creating sophisticated electronic music using vast walls of the available components of the day. Both as a solo artist and with his band Heldon, he released a number of advanced and classic albums in the 70s that set the stage for much of what is thought of as 'contemporary music'.  

Originally released only in France in 1977, Chronolyse was his second solo album. It included one side of solo, live Moog synthesizer pieces, notable for their wide, stereo field and unique sound - a product of the weeks he spent setting up and programming the sounds on his huge Moog modular synthesizer and one side with a lengthy, stormy, drone-filled, epic of mellotrons, electronics, guitar, bass and drums by Heldon. 

This is the first-ever vinyl reissue of this classic, which has been unavailable on vinyl for 35 years!

Richard Pinhas, "Sur Le Theme De Bene Gesserit VII" from 'Chronolyse' (Cuneiform Records)

Cuneiform Records is an independent record label releasing adventurous, boundary-bursting music by artists from around the world. Founded in 1984.