Jazxing
Pearls Of The Baltic Sea

Available from Blank Forms for the first time since its original 1980 release on ALM-Uranoia, New Sense of Hearing documents a collaboration between Takehisa Kosugi and Akio Suzuki, two luminaries of Japanese experimental music in the lineage of Fluxus. Blank Forms's high-quality reissue of the sought-after, long out of print LP, is produced by musician-artist Aki Onda and mastered from the original tapes recorded on April 2, 1979, at Tokyo's Aeolian Hall. Described by Suzuki as the "culmination" of their sound,New Sense of Hearing features the two musicians improvising together in that empty Tokyo theater, Kosugi on vocals, violin, and radio transmitter and Suzuki on the Analapos, his namesake glass harmonica, spring cong, and kikkokikiriki, all apparatuses of his own invention. Suzuki and Kosugi first met at the city's Minami Gallery in 1976 on the occasion of "Sound Objects and Sound Tools," an exhibition of Suzuki's homemade instruments. Two years later, at the Festival d'Automne in Paris, Suzuki invited Kosugi to join him for a suite of performances as part of the exhibition "MA: Espace - Temps au Japon," organized by architect Arata Isozaki and composer-writer Toru Takemitsu. Suzuki and Kosugi performed together at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, nearly fifty times, honing their approach to mutual improvisation, before traveling with the exhibition to Stockholm and New York_critic Tom Johnson wrote in the Village Voice that he had "seldom seen two performers so completely tuned in on the same types of sounds, the same performance attitude, the same philosophy, the same sense of what music ought to be."For New Sense of Hearing, the duo reunited in Japan and produced an extraordinary dispatch from their collaboration of arioso violin, echoing vocals and bangs, and metallic twangs. As Johnson observed in 1979, Kosugi and Suzuki are "in a very subtle artistic world where there can be no direct relationships. . . . Only coincidence." Takehisa Kosugi (1938-2018) was a composer, artist, and violinist from Tokyo. In 1960, Kosugi founded Group Ongaku, the country's first improvisational performance collective dedicated to Happenings, with Mieko Shiomi and Yasunao Tone. Four years later, Fluxus leader George Maciunas published Events, an eighteen-piece set of his text compositions. Between 1971 and '74, his band the Taj Mahal Travelers produced four live albums. In 1977, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company invited Kosugi to be their resident musician; from 1995 to 2011 he served as the company's musical director. The Whitney Museum of American Art presented "Takehisa Kosugi: Music Expanded," a two-day retrospective of Kosugi's work, in 2015. Akio Suzuki (b. 1941) was born in Pyongyang, North Korea, to Japanese parents. For the artist-musician's first Fluxus-style work Kaidan ni Mono wo Nageru (Throwing Things at the Stairs), 1963, Suzuki tossed a bucket of miscellaneous objects down a flight of stairs in Nagoya Station and listened to the sounds it produced. During the next decade, he would create original instruments including the Suzuki-type glass harmonica and the echo instrument Analapos. In 1976, Tokyo's Minami gallery hosted his first exhibition, "Akio Suzuki's World: Sound Objects and Sound Tools." For his 1988 performance piece Space in the Sun, Suzuki spent twenty-four hours listening to his surroundings on the meridian line which runs through Amino, Kyoto. Suzuki has performed and exhibited at many venues and music festivals, including Documenta 8 (Germany, 1987), the British Museum (2003), Musée Zadkine (France, 2004), Kunstmuseum Bonn (Germany, 2018), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2019).

Switching RhetoricsFirst-ever vinyl edition of Shora & Merzbow’s split release Switching Rhetorics, originally published on CD in 2001, with remastered audio and updated artwork.Following the release of their acclaimed first record Shaping The Random in June 2000, Shora spent the next year touring and gigging around Europe, eventually reconvening in the studio in the summer of 2001 to record four tracks for a collaborative project with Japanese noise-meister Merzbow, a pairing initiated by Bisect Bleep Industries. The band’s sound had by that point coalesced into a tighter and arguably even more hard-hitting affair, however no less puzzling. The blistering first three tracks exude formidable confidence, embracing Dazzling Killmen-styled noise-rock and apocalyptic black metal alike, while maintaining all of Shora’s eloquent singularity. The drumming particularly shines ­throughout, with its multidirectional eruptions of seemingly pure kinetic energy. As its title suggests, the record’s grandiose and repetitive closing piece “To Further Confines” is a clear indication of the Swiss band’s desire to keep challenging itself and looking ahead. Completed with Merzbow’s extended psychedelic digital noise études, Switching Rhetorics is an era-defining record of genuinely great artistry.

Panda Dub & Roots Raid feat. Cookah & Likkle Ferguson - Rooty Cowboy

Sorang, the debut album of Yalta native Wulffius, represents his work over the last eight years. The playful creature on the cover, Stone Eater, is based on childhood sketches of the producer's father. The album's name alludes to the first collection of his father's poems, which took its name from a short story by Konstantin Paustovsky, a master of nature writing in Russian prose. Sorang is the name of the south wind that "blows once in centuries," and you can hear its unique warmth in these tracks. There is a sense of wholeness here, a palpable style and atmosphere that permeates the individual pieces.Wulffius creates what he refers to as "B-sides": something too strange to be danceable, with "complex ease" and rhythmical variety. The music has a charming serenity and beauty thanks to Wulffius' intuitive approach, which is childlike and whimsical in the best possible sense. By the way, Paustovsky wrote Sorang in an hour and a half at a speed writing competition. You can hear a similar spontaneity here, but make no mistake, this is the work of a master that has been crafted over a period of years. It all comes from experience.

Allen Ravenstine's turbulent futurism behind the synthesizer was a key ingredient in American post-punk innovators Pere Ubu's distinctive sound. Just as Brian Eno's malevolent modulations had adulterated the glam-rock swagger of Roxy Music before him, Ravenstine's corrosive tones oozed through his band's songs like radioactive seepage, illuminating their otherwise guitar-driven landscapes with a strange chemical glow.In addition to playing with them from 1975-1989, he also co-owned the Plaza, a historic apartment complex in Central Cleveland where Pere Ubu members lived and created alongside a vibrant community of other artists. Music took a backseat for Ravenstine afer leaving the group, among other things he obtained his pilot's license and wrote a novel. The invitation to spar with fellow synthesist Robert Wheeler in 2012 for Waveshaper Media's acclaimed synth documentary I Dream Of Wires reignited his dormant sonic interests. Since then, he's unleashed a handful of recordings.The analog abstraction for which he became known remains a significant part of Ravenstine's current sound palette, but recent years have seen him turn increasingly toward outlandish eclecticism as his foundation. 2018's celebrated Waiting for the Bomb (RER Megacorp) bounded freely between disparate styles and instrumentation, all the while managing to convey a cohesive (albeit of-kilter) identity.Ravenstine is now launching his much-anticipated follow-upon Waveshaper—a series of four EPs collectively entitled The Tyranny of Fiction. Materializing as a pair of LPs with one EP per side, or as two double CD sets, these works continue to chronicle the approach unveiled on their predecessor. The cheeky series title hints at a tension that's fundamental to these recordings. Ravenstine's use of genre suggests it's almost a literary device to him—unsurprising, given his forays into the realm prose. Styles will ofen allude to underlying thematic or narrative elements. However, friction begins to arise when this is juxtaposed with his surreal sense of orchestration. He takes pure electronic sound, nuggets of real -world recordings, live instrumentation and the latter's sampled counterparts and stirs them all together vigorously. This makes for decidedly unfaithful reproductions of the various musical idioms his composition cite, leaving the listener to contend with constant dissonance—every feature of the music feels at once completely familiar and utterly inscrutable.Even within the brief span of each installment of The Tyranny of Fiction, Ravenstine gleefully embraces a panoply of modalities. ElectronMusic, the first of the bunch, uses ornery ambient music as its jumping-of point, embarking on excursions into hyperreal chamber music, and swarming sci-fi synthesizer. Shore Leave announces itself with a spartan piano miniature decorated with a sof trickling sound before a meandering into cubist exotica, sinister new age music, and what sound like 21st century nocturnes. A host of other mongrel styles spill forth over the course of Nautilus. Each track weaves its own wayward travelogue amidst stray bits of audio verité and wafting musical fragrances—by turns tropical and foreboding. Rue De Poisson Noir takes cues from its fragmentary companion, slithering between cinematic intrigue, of-brand jazz, avant-garde mischief, and fried electro without batting an eye. At various points throughout, Ravenstine's fried citationality might recall a young generation of Ohioan oddballs, Orange Milk Records. Like many acts on the innovative electronic music imprint, Ravenstine's colorful, innuendo-rich music is restless, playful, inquisitive and most of all evocative—never resorting to irony or other such ploys.