This special "Name Your Price" compilation album, 'The Albums of 2015', features 1.5 hours of creative and fun music over the course of 16 tracks all of which was released or reissued by Cuneiform Records in 2015. Immediately download it, right here: https://cuneiformrecords.bandcamp.com/album/the-albums-of-2015

So, what did Cuneiform release in 2015? You can hear Cuneiform’s year of releases in this compilation album, 'The Albums of 2015' featuring tracks from all 16 of our 2015 releases.

What kind of music is on it? Orchestras and Big Bands!!!! LARGE ensembles performing New/Creative Music, Jazz and/or genre-bending Jazz/Beyond including Adam Rudolph/Go: Organic Guitar Orchestra; guitarists Henry Kaiser and Ray Russell (US & UK) with a ten-piece ensemble, Rob Mazurek Ensembles’ Exploding Star Orchestra; and two albums by Michael Gibbs and the NDR Bigband, one of which features Bill Frisell's Music, along with a Frisell set list. New cutting-edge jazz & beyond recordings by bands from around the world, including The Kandinsky Effect (Paris & NYC); Le Rex (Switzerland); Pixel (Norway); Raoul Björkenheim’s Ecstasy (Finland) and schnellertollermeier (Switzerland). New recordings by experimental/art rock/avant progressive bands such as Sonar (Switzerland); Guapo (UK); Schnellertollermeier (Switzerland); and a reissue of the 1989 album, 'In This Life', by American Rock in Opposition associates, Thinking Plague. We released the first-ever vinyl-only reissue of French electronic musician/guitarist Richard Pinhas-Heldon’ 1978 'Chronolyse', which he initially conceived as a Moog tribute to Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic Dune (which celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2015). We also released two previously-unreleased archival jazz recordings: a CD of 1966 and 1970 archival recordings by the late great British saxophonist Mike Osborne, and a CD/DVD set of the British avant-group Soft Machine with Alan Holdsworth, filmed and recorded live at the 1974 Montreux Jazz Festival. Looking over these 2015 releases, one can’t help noticing that many feature some of the world’s most acclaimed guitarists, including Bill Frisell, Alan Holdsworth, Ray Russell, Henry Kaiser, Richard Pinhas, and Raoul Bjorkenheim, to name a few.

We invite you to listen to Cuneiform's 'The Albums of 2015'.

Immediately download it, right here: 
https://cuneiformrecords.bandcamp.com/album/the-albums-of-2015

We're honored to have worked with and released albums by some of the best musicians in the world in 2015.

Cuneiform Records' Year In Review: 2015

The brutal-jazz power trio Schnellertollermeier doesn't screw around. Their uncompromising attitude is even apparent before you hear a note of their music -- it's right there in that deliberate tongue-twister of a name. Their fresh and uncompromising mix of jazz, punk, rock, sound and free improvised music, combined with great musicianship, interplay and a lot of energy, immediately hits the bullseye!

The three men behind the music, guitarist Manuel Troller, bassist Andi Schnellmann, and drummer David Meier, are all eclectic musicians. Schnellmann earned a degree from the Jazz School of Lucerne; Troller studied with British guitar legend Fred Frith and has collaborated with famed U.S. jazz drummer/composer Gerry Hemingway, among others; Meier's ability to bring his own voice into many different musical contexts has made him one of the most sought-after drummers of his generation and he has toured in most parts of Europe, as well as Russia, China and Japan.

In 2006, the three musicians, all around the age of 20, started the trio. Very quickly after their first concerts and their their 2008 debut album, Holz, they become something of a 'underground buzz' in Switzerland, leading to many further appearances. While Holz mostly featured traditional structures of composing revealing their eclectic influences (ranging from Tim Berne to John Abercrombie to Mr. Bungle etc.), Schnellertollermeier soon started working on new material, seeking a more personal sound, both compositionally and improvisationally. The result of this work, combined with the many concerts the group was playing, was their second album Zorn Einen Ehmer Üttert Stem, which was enthusiastically received critically and led to appearances in the most important clubs as well as festivals in Switzerland and Austria.

The group now had a more clear and more original roadmap they were traveling: the group's 'traditional jazz' elements were being subsumed by the brute energy from rock and experimental music, as well as improvisational soundscapes, minimal music and, finally, jazz in the modern, broad, experimental sense. Additionally the idea of a band sounding like one compact organism, with every element having its own importance and clear function, found its result on X. On X, the traditional function of the instruments - the classic power trio of bass, guitar and drums - have clearly been expanded, the bands energy as well as their compositional and performance qualities are even more intense and original than before. The songs, whether long or short, crushing or ambient, have absolutely no padding on them.

schnellertollermeier, "X" (excerpt) from 'X' (Cuneiform Records)

Guitar summits don't ascend higher than when legendary British free-jazz pioneer and longtime session ace Ray Russell meets the brilliant California avant-improv overachiever and Antarctic diver Henry Kaiser in the realm of The Celestial Squid. With more than countless session and soundtrack performances to his credit, including the early James Bond film scores, Russell is returning to his bone-rattling, noise-rocking roots for the first time since the very early 70s. You'll be shaken and stirred as Kaiser, Russell and eight super friends deliver a no-holds-barred, free-range sonic cage match.

Russell created some of the early '70s' most outrageously outside music, releasing hallmark works of guitar shock-and-awe. Russell's "stabbing, singing notes and psychotic runs up the fretboard have nothing to do with scalular architecture," wrote All Music's Thom Jurek, "but rather with viscera and tonal exploration." Russell anticipated the wildest and most intrepid vibrations of Terje Rypdal, Dave Fuzinski, Sonic Youth, Keiji Haino, Tisziji Muñoz and their boundary-dissolving ilk. Russell is hardly a niche performer, though. Untold millions of music and film fans have actually, if unknowingly, already enjoyed Russell's riffs – at least if they saw any of the James Bond films that John Barry scored, beginning with Dr. No in 1962.

For over 40 years, Russell would not make such exploratory music until West Coast guitar experimentalist Henry Kaiser called him out of the blue and asked if he would be interested in co-leading an ensemble in the style of his '71 masterpiece, Live at the ICA: June 11th 1971. Russell was surprised and delighted by the offer, and readily accepted. Why had he waited so long to once again explore the free-jazz spaceways you might well wonder? Simple – no one had asked him to do so!

So on April 12, 2014, Henry Kaiser and Ray Russell – along with drummers Weasel Walter and William Winant, bassists Michael Manring (electric) and Damon Smith (acoustic), and saxophonists Steve Adams, Joshua Allen, Phillip Greenlief, and Aram Shelton – entered Berkeley, California's Fantasy Studios for a day-long session that resulted in The Celestial Squid, a nearly eighty-minute embryonic journey through the deepest waters and most cosmic heights of improvised music. Except for melodic heads and compositional structures, everything on The Celestial Squid is improvised, down to some astonishing extemporaneous horn arrangements. While The Celestial Squid echoes the raw energy and youthful bravado of Russell's earliest achievements, this music synergizes the combined power and imagination of all ten of these musical masters into a force to be reckoned with.

Henry Kaiser & Ray Russell, "GuKTen LIMPo" from 'The Celestial Squid' (Cuneiform Records)

"...a mind-bending, eclectic and challenging sonic stream that doesn’t contain even a shred of pretentiousness, but is full of creativity, individuality, expressivity and outside of the box thinking." - Igloo
"Come to this show blindfolded and you’ll have a hard time believing the music is being created by just three people." – Capital Bop

"The Kandinsky Effect is an accomplished band not because they implement electronics into jazz music, but rather for how they utilize electronic configurations to make their music radiate." – Audiophile Audition

"...five solid years of recording and touring have fine-tuned their approach, stretching out beyond the confines of jazz into many directions, with electronics, funk grooves, bop, touches of punk, progressive rock, ambient and much more....not content to just re-tread what’s been done before them, but determined to break new ground at every turn, all the while keeping their sound completely listenable and satisfying." – Exposé

On Somnambulist, The Kandinsky Effect wields its musical power in a welcoming way. Their third album isn't form-eschewing free jazz, nor are the tonalities the trio employs particularly "out". The real revelation -- and revolution -- comes simply in the way saxophonist Warren Walker, bassist Gael Petrina, and drummer Caleb Dolister organize sound.

The trio is a purist's nightmare -- and not only that of a jazz purist either. Since their first, self-titled album came out in 2010, The Kandinsky Effect has been boldly blending jazz with elements of everything from hip-hop to electronic music, making for an idiosyncratic amalgam that never goes exactly where you might expect it to;  nothing can completely prepare you for its marriage of groove, atmosphere, and incendiary playing.
Bandleader Walker feels the album is the most effectively conceived collection of what he wryly calls the group's "nerd music" to date. "I feel like I had a clearer idea of what I was looking for in the sound of my compositions and how to approach writing for this group," he says, "it's a sort of coming-of-age piece."

The ability to incorporate a broad range of musical, geographical, and emotional influences into their music is at the core of The Kandinsky Effect's makeup. Formed 2007 in Paris, France, the original lineup included Petrina and Parisian drummer Gautier Garrigue. In 2010 they recorded their first album, The Kandinsky Effect. While influenced by hip-hop and electronics, the album was much more rooted in jazz and featured mostly acoustic instrumentation. Dolister joined for 2013's Synesthesia, which began to expand the band's sound, blending everything from Petrinas fondness for electronica to Dolister's love of heavy rock bands like Meshuggah, and Walker’s unique approach to composition and electronic soundscapes. 

Over the years, the group has traveled extensively, performing multiple trips and tours in Europe, Asia, and North America, perfecting what Dolister calls their "intellectual groove instrumental music." And from the slip-sliding beats and slithering sax lines of opening track "Copalchi Distress Signal" to the insistent pulse and layered, lyrical melodies of closing cut "Muji," there's a feeling of the refinement process reaching fruition on Somnambulist.

The Kandinsky Effect, "Somnambulist" from 'Somnambulist' (Cuneiform Records)

In the history of British jazz, there were few voices as unmistakable as Mike Osborne's alto saxophone, but his story is one of the tragedies of British jazz. Within 15 years of his first recordings, simmering mental illness had taken over and forced him away from his musical compatriots in vibrant London and brought him back to his native Hereford (near the Welsh border), where he lived under care until his death in 2007, his saxophone silent for decades.

But during his career, Osborne was one of British jazz's most versatile players, working with members of the various spheres creating a new indigenous British jazz: the Spontaneous Music Ensemble circle; the crowd around the South African Blue Notes; members of the Canterbury Scene; and the modernists centered on John Surman.

Dawn presents Osborne in both his earliest surviving recording, as a co-leader with Surman of a quartet from 1966, and in 1970 with the first known recordings of his mighty trio with the transplanted South African rhythm team of Harry Miller and Louis Moholo. These unearthed recordings not only fill in important gaps in Osborne's own discography but in the history of British jazz as a whole.

The first six tracks, recorded in 1970, are by his trio, his main vehicle as a leader and featuring his most long-standing partners in Miller and Moholo. The band only made two albums during its lifetime, Bordercrossing and All Night Long. Dawn is significant for presenting the trio years before these sessions and demonstrating that the group's sound, marked by Osborne's tart melodicism, Miller's brawny lines and Moholo's propulsive freedom, was established at the beginning of their partnership.

Listeners will then travel back four years earlier, with four recordings taken from a period when names now famous were just coming out from the shadow of Britain's traditional jazz scene. Osborne, 24, is there in his first recording, Surman, 21, in only his second, supported by Miller and drummer Alan Jackson. This was an era of formal suits and allegiance to the innovations in American jazz happening on labels like Blue Note and ESP-Disk', reflected in the performances and the material.

In all, there is well over an hour of excellent quality, previously unheard and unreleased recordings here, as well as a 12 page booklet with informative liner notes and many previously unseen photos. This is an important document historically, but even more importantly, it's really great music.

Mike Osborne, "An Idea" from 'Dawn' (Cuneiform Records)

Soft Machine were one of the greatest UK avant/jazz-rock bands of all time and their work, whether their earliest performances as a psychedelic band, who were contemporaries of, and shared stages with Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, all the way to being one of Europe's best known 'fusion' bands, their work continues to be name-checked by today's hip experimentalists.

By mid 1973, Soft Machine had gone through a tremendous amount of personnel turnover and a shifting in their sound over the previous year. The band now consisted of founding member Mike Ratledge (electric piano, synthesizer), Karls Jenkins (electric piano, piano, sax, oboe), Roy Babbington (electric bass) and John Marshall (drums and percussion). Having already collaborated with a guitarist, Gary Boyle (as documented on NDR Jazz Workshop), upon meeting guitarist Allan Holdsworth, then in the early stages of his professional career, in November, the group invited him to join the band, which he did, becoming the first guitarist to join the band in over 5 years!

With the addition of a musician of Holdsworth's prowess,  Soft Machine decided to take a fresh start and develop material that would feature their virtuosic new addition in a fitting manner. Jenkins and Ratledge composed a whole new repertoire which was road-tested on extensive tours of North America and continental Europe in the first half of 1974 and which would ultimately make up the Bundles album, widely acknowledged as a jazz-fusion classic alongside the best exponents of the genre worldwide.

On July 4, 1974, Soft Machine were invited to perform at the prestigious Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, sharing the spotlight with such headliners as Billy Cobham’s Spectrum, Larry Coryell’s Eleventh House and the Mahavishnu Orchestra. This alone was evidence of the band being a dominant presence on the now widely popular jazz-rock scene, which had evolved out of the unique and edgy sound that the band had pioneered a few years before. Switzerland 1974 is this performance, captured just a couple of weeks before the studio sessions for Bundles. The hour-long set is the only available visual document of the Ratledge-Marshall-Jenkins-Babbington-Holdsworth  line-up, and it includes live versions of the entire album, most notably the classic “Hazard Profile” suite, augmented with individual showcases for each member as well as a collective improvisation and brief snippets from Six and Seven. As well as retracing Soft Machine’s transformation into one of the leading exponents of jazz-fusion, it provides a rare chance to witness the genesis of Allan Holdsworth’s unique, innovative and unbelievably fluid and dexterous playing, before he went on to universal acclaim with Tony Williams’ New Lifetime, the prog-rock ‘supergroup’ U.K., Jean-Luc Ponty, Bill Bruford and ultimately his own electric fusion groups.

Caveat: Due to the age of these tapes and how they had been previously mixed, edited, used, and stored, there were multiple visual and audio sources of this show in varying lengths, each with their own flaws. While significant flaws could not be completely eliminated, very special thanks are due to our engineers Doug Moon and Udi Koomran, who worked from these multiple copies in order to make the final result as good as it can possibly be. This was deemed the best available option in light of this document’s archival/historical importance.

Soft Machine, "Hazard Profile" (excerpt) from 'Switzerland 1974' (Cuneiform Records)

“The music of Michael Gibbs remains woefully under-recorded, even as the composer hits his mid-70s.... Inspired by Olivier Messiaen as much as Gil Evans, his music is luxurious, complex but accessible, and driven by rock rhythms and electric instruments...”
– BBC Music

While studded with treasured recordings reflecting his singular writing skills, Michael Gibbs’ slim discography has never kept pace with the breadth and depth of his creative output. In a career spanning more than half a century, he’s collaborated with a dazzling array of artists in jazz and beyond, including Pat Metheny, John McLaughlin, Joni Mitchell, John Scofield, Gary Burton, Whitney Houston, Peter Gabriel, and Richard Galliano. 

Gibbs’ intermittent relationship with Germany’s NDR Bigband, one the world's longest-running jazz ensembles, dates back to the early 1970s and has provided a particularly valuable vehicle for his vivid musical imagination. “I feel I know the individual players so well, that I write for them personally, or use how I know them in making orchestrational choices,” Gibbs says of the NDR Bigband. “That’s a luxury these day, when other projects are written more for the standard instrumentation without knowledge of the personal attributes (stunning as though they might be, and often are).” 

Born on September 25th, 1937, Gibbs has studied with such noted figures as Gunther Schuller, George Russell J.J. Johnson, Aaron Copland, Iannis Xenakis, and Lukas Foss. By the beginning of the 70s, he was recognized as one of jazz’s leading young arrangers and composers, and he developed a personal, thickly textured approach inspired by Gil Evans, Charles Ives and Olivier Messiaen. 

Gibbs has honed a subtle and highly personal approach to arranging and composition, incorporating driving rock rhythms and asymmetrical phrasing. When first emerging, his work anticipated the jazz/rock movement of the 70s. Although better known as an arranger than a composer, he really is one of the great writers to emerge out of the 'Brit-jazz' scene, and four wonderful, new original pieces are highlighted here. 

With ‘In My View’, Gibbs makes an unimpeachable case that this jazz cat in winter hasn’t lost a step. Gibbs’ View adds up to one of the year’s most rewarding and successful big band projects. 

Michael Gibbs & The NDR Bigband, "‘Tis As It Should Be" from 'In My View' (Cuneiform Records)

“So much came from my association with Mike... He went from being my hero to a friend, and he’s always been my teacher... I’ve always fantasized about doing something with him adapting some of my music.”
– Bill Frisell

As a dauntingly prolific artist, Bill Frisell has recorded in a vast array of settings, but he’s never made an album like ‘Play A Bill Frisell Set List’. Captured live in concert with the superb NDR Bigband, the guitarist delivers a tour de force performance on a program of ingenious arrangements designed specifically for him and the NDR by Michael Gibbs.
 
Recorded at the Überjazz Festival with the NDR Bigband on Oct 26, 2013, ‘Play A Bill Frisell Set List’ captures Frisell interacting with one of the world’s great jazz orchestras, exploring sleek, spacious, vividly expressive arrangements of compositions drawn from throughout his career. Gibbs didn’t plan the concert as a recording session, but after many years of trying to bring Frisell and the NDR together he felt the results were too good to keep under wraps. “Jeff Ballard playing drums for this concert was a dream, and the band really enjoyed playing it, so the music was magical,” Gibbs says. “I couldn’t resist the opportunity to release it.”

It’s difficult to overstate Gibbs’ impact on the trajectory of Frisell’s music and career. As a Denver teenager, Frisell convinced his father to take him to a touring Newport Jazz Festival show at Red Rocks in the summer of 1968 and the experience radically opened his ears. “It was an amazing program, with Gary Burton with Bob Moses, Coryell, and Steve Swallow, and they blew my brains out,” Frisell recalls. “I’d never heard anything like it. So I started getting those records, and there’s some guy named Mike Gibbs who wrote half the songs on these records. He had so much to do with that sound, making a world for that group to inhabit.”

Frisell started following Gibbs’ music, and was thrilled to discover that he was composer-in-residence at Berklee when he enrolled in 1975. He took all of the classes that Gibbs offered and was tremendously encouraged when Gibbs complimented his playing after catching Frisell’s group at a gig.

By 1978 Frisell had relocated to Belgium to focus on his music, which meant he was well placed to step in when Gibbs needed a guitarist for a tour of the UK. The group included the German bassist Eberhard Weber, with whom Frisell would play a duo at every concert. The connection he forged with the bassist on this tour led to Frisell’s participation on Weber’s 1979 album Fluid Rustle, the first of the dozens of recordings that Frisell would do on ECM as a sideman and leader, and where his career truly started!

‘Play A Bill Frisell Set List’ is Bill Frisell’s first-ever appearance as the featured soloist on a big band session, and with Gibbs’ melodically verdant, harmonically suggestive arrangements, he’s not likely to find a better set list than 'Set List'. 

Michael Gibbs & the NDR Bigband, "On The Lookout/Far Away" from 'Play a Bill Frisell Set List'

"Beautifully crafted instrumental music of the highest standard."
– Postcards From The Yellow Room

"Guapo take classic prog tropes and revivify them...brazenly and gloriously, it brandishes all the hallmarks of golden-era prog rock, but given a steroid boost and stripped of ego."
– The Quietus

"The foursome's sound is fashioned from coordinated chaos, discordant harmony, stimulating but dark auditory shades and graphic musical de-construction."
– Audiophile Audition

"...continues the upward trajectory of development for the band...this is a killer of a progressive work..."
– DPRP

"[Guapo] are conversant with the complex language of R.I.O...their trick is to add an urgent, assertive rock dynamic, which wrests their knotty harmonies and shifting time signatures from the sphere of contemporary classical chamber music towards something direct and gutsy."
– Prog

Celebrating 20 years in the game, the much-admired instrumental, experimental rock band Guapo are celebrating by releasing ‘Obscure Knowledge’, their explosive new album and tenth release!

The group started their life as a heavy bass/drums duo playing post-hardcore, noisy rock, but in the two decades since, they have expanded their instrumentation and their stylistic references to become one of Europe's most highly respected 'muscular and modern' experimental/progressive rock bands. 

Centered around founding member and extraordinary drummer David J. Smith, the group on the album also features three additional heavy-weights of British experimental rock: 

Kavus Torabi-guitar (also of Knifeworld, Cardiacs, Gong)
Emmett Elvin-keyboards (also of Chrome Hoof, Knifeworld)
James Sedwards-bass (also of Thurston Moore Band, Chrome Hoof)

The album's 43 minute long track is a dynamic, fluid beast that takes the listener on a scenic journey through loud New York minimalism, celestial drones, avant rock, kosmiche-noise, rockin' riffs and way beyond.
 
Smith, who is also a sculptor as well as drummer, looks after the aesthetic considerations of Guapo and is keen to provide a backstory for their albums. Smith explains: "The title of the piece of music and album is derived from the psychoactive rituals of various Native American people who are said to 'tap into obscure knowledge' when performing certain rituals and rites of passage." 

Guapo, "Obscure Knowledge I" [Radio edit] from 'Obscure Knowledge' (Cuneiform Records)

"Mazurek and company channel electric Miles, Sun Ra, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago to make a recording that is cosmic, spiritual, raw, and powerful."
– Avant Music News

“Inspired by years of living in Brazil, Chicago cornet player Rob Mazurek ... mixes jazz fusion influenced by Miles Davis’s early 70s output with Brazilian Tropicalia and electronica. The result is a psychedelic, spacey, multi-layered electro-acoustic trip; epic and, at times, intense and scary."
– The Jazz Breakfast

"I thought the whole band was exceptional. Very shocking, actually, to see how well they absorbed all of that Sun Ra influence and went on to do their own thing...they've absorbed all the things that are relevant so they can take all of that and make their own statement...they sound great to me."
– Amiri Baraka after hearing the music on Disc 1

Composer, cornetist, electronic & acoustic sound specialist and musical director Rob Mazurek leads his largest regular ensemble, the Exploding Star Orchestra through one of his most ambitious recordings.

While ‘Galactic Parables: Volume 1’ is a self-contained cosmos, marked by colliding melodic lines and startlingly beautiful passages, as the title indicates, it’s part of a larger work. Ever since Exploding Star Orchestra’s debut recording, Mazurek has been gradually building an epic science fiction opera inspired by the writings of Samuel R. Delany and Stanislaw Lem. With ‘Galactic Parables’ his vast speculative realm is coming more clearly into focus with an apocalyptic vision of alternate universes, machine reproduction run amuck, and the colonization of distant planets. ‘Galactic Parables’ “is the first record where we’re getting close to hitting on the libretto for this future opera,” says Mazurek, who by both inclination and geography is linked to a constellation of Chicago avant-garde pioneers.

Ultimately what makes the record so enthralling on both the flight into the cosmos and the return journey is that the Exploding Star Orchestra brings together a creatively charged cast of improvisers:

Rob Mazurek - cornet, electronics, direction (I/II)
Damon Locks - text, voice, electronics (I/II)
Angelica Sanchez - piano (I/II)
Jeff Parker - guitar (I/II)
John Herndon - drums (I/II)
Matthew Lux - electric bass (I/II)
Matthew Bauder - tenor sax, clarinet (I/II)
Chad Taylor - drums (I)
Guilherme Ganado - keyboard, samplers, synth, voice (I)
Mauricio Takara - cavaquinho, electronics, percussion (I)
Nicole Mitchell - flutes, voice (II)

All of these musicians have performed and recorded together under Mazurek’s leadership in various ensembles and configurations. In many ways, Exploding Star Orchestra is the mothership, the “conceptual, compositional and philosophical center of all my work.” Mazurek says. 
The band came together in 2005 when the Chicago Cultural Center and the Jazz Institute commissioned Mazurek to create a vehicle that could encompass the disparate styles and ideologies of avant-garde music unfolding in Chicago. Conceived as a one-off event, Exploding Star took on a life of its own, and has continued to evolve reflecting the transient nature of musicians’ lives. Each subsequent Exploding Star Orchestra project has featured an evolving cast of players. ‘Galactic Parables’ brings Mazurek one giant step closer to realizing his oversized vision.

The universe is a very big place. Rob Mazurek is doing his part to fill it with glorious sound. 


Rob Mazurek / Exploding Star Orchestra, "The Arc Of Slavery #72" from 'Galactic Parables: Volume 1'

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.