Hessel Veldman - Eigen Boezem (Stroom)
While in the Dutch underground of the early 80’s, Hessel Veldman created his own music world in the small industrial sea town of IJmuiden. It was a world recorded on tapes and reels. A world where things happened according to personal logic based on sonic exploration, electronic sounds and improvisation. The approach was intimate, at times light-hearted, but often following deep inner contemplation and total immersion in the creative process. Above all, music was made according to the Do-It-Yourself principle of the home-taping culture.
Jan Jelinek - Tierbeobachtungen (Faitiche)
Originally released on Scape in 2006 as a CD and download, the album’s six tracks took their cues from Jelinek’s live concerts of that period: dense, slowly unfolding loop improvisations made with a laptop, various effect pedals and miniature synthesizers. In his release notes for Tierbeobachtungen at the time, the late lamented Martin Büsser wrote: “The animal is experiencing a renaissance in music. It provides a reflective surface for our notion of the unbridled and irrational, of that Other the philosophers Deleuze/Guattari – as part of their ‘Animalisation’ – called the embodiment of artistic deliverance. And yet, how much of a liberation can art actually tolerate? To what extent can music truly throw off its fetters without descending into chaos?”
Joëlle Léandre / Myra Melford / Lauren Newton - Stormy Whispers (Fundacja Słuchaj!)
This concert of Léandre/Melford/Newton trio was an epochal event. The 13th International Festival of Improvised Music “Ad Libitum” took place in Warsaw in October 2018 at the Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art. The motto of that edition was “Women Alarm!”
Karl Evangelista w/Alexander Hawkins, Louis Moholo-Moholo and Trevor Watts - Apura! (Astral Spirits)
”It is intended with the utmost respect that this album is entitled Apura!, which in the Filipino language Tagalog translates to “Very Urgent” (the name of an epochal record by the Blue Notes, the pioneering South African jazz sextet of which drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo was the heartbeat). The musicians of Louis and Trevor Watts’s generation cast a tremendous shadow over the legacy of improvised music. It’s not difficult to romanticize the era in which these musicians first made their marks, exercising a creative daring and artistic ingenuity that was transformative in scope. For individuals like Louis, who spent so much of his youth fighting the injustices of the South African Apartheid regime, the raging music of the last century took on a kind of political urgency that reflected very real, very personal consequences [...] My Aunt, Miriam Defensor Santiago, was a longtime progressive public servant in the Philippines, a country browbeaten by rampant corruption and staggering inequity. I look to her example, and the example of my collaborators here, as a way to envision a world where the creative spirit and aspirational performance can battle evil and triumph.” Karl Evangelista
Karuna Trio (Hamid Drake, Ralph M. Jones, Adam Rudolph) - Imaginary Archipelago (Meta Records)
In many cultures, performers put on masks to transform themselves into a transcendent/mythic other. Here, sonic masking moves us beyond the familiar and ordinary. We no longer need to hear, for example, a soprano sax as simply itself; the transformed sound expands us into the mysterious and extra-ordinary. This is because, transformed, the linguistic aspect of each instrumental voice is brought more into focus. We can listen with an ear oriented less towards any preconception of virtuosity and more towards the artists' intention of storytelling, song and dialogue.
Laverno, Patócrata, Traumadol & Tufi Meme - Improvisaciones de riesgo (Metadioses)
”Since the beginning of Matadioses Impressum, three premises were tacitly thrown: making music among people who, amen differences form individualities, we are more or less in the same; giving an audible and persistent format in time to that music (that be recorded, not just something ephemeral for ether); and, at least from my particular vision (′′ hello, they call me Loder ′′), always demanding a little more: the ambient and the noise and the whole scene for moments sin a Little bit of ′′ lazy ", from an expression of involuntary dadaism, that it comes out like this because it can't go out any other way”. DJ Loder aka Traumadol
