Holidays HHV Records 19 Items

Nancy Mounir’s debut album, Nozhet El Nofous, is a remarkable communion with ghosts. Moody, hypnotic, and sneakily catchy, the album - whose title means “Promenade of the Souls'' in Arabic - explores microtonality, non-metered rhythms, and bold vulnerability through a musical dialogue between Mounir’s own arrangements and the sounds of archival recordings of once-famed singers from Egypt at the turn of the 20th century. Adding her own ambient arrangements over voices haunted with passion and desire as she creates a sound that is warmly familiar but utterly new.

On the album, Mounir slips into the gaps left by the lost frequencies of the aging recordings, finding space for counterpoint and harmony in a traditional sound built on monophony. Elegant melodies unfold in measured gestures as Mounir - who plays most of the instruments herself -revels in the plaintive intonations and brash lyrics of the departed singers. With layers enmeshed together, it’s at times hard to pin down when the past ends and the present begins, but beneath it all is a liberating attitude of defiance that feels timeless.

Nozhet El Nofous is brilliant in the way it explores the techniques and perspectives of a more freewheeling time period in Arabic music, before Arabic maqam (modal systems) and other musical foundations were standardized by the Middle East’s cultural power brokers in the early 1930s. As she summons a rich, atmospheric landscape of tone and texture, Mounir engages an older generation of musical rebels in a creative dialogue across time and space - and the results are stunning in their ambition and beauty.

Mixed by Adham Zidan. Mastered by Heba Kadry. Remastered for vinyl by Matt Bordin at Outside Inside Studio. Artwork by Egyptian filmmaker and photographer Ahmad Abdalla, with original typography and design by Salma Shamel. Lyrics translation by Katharine Halls.

includes an 8-page booklet with lyrics in English and Arabic.

Norwegian musicians Lasse Marhaug and Jon Wesseltoft team up for a computer duo. Pretty abstract but not too noisy computer music this. Marhaug is well known in the field of noise music but has frequently drifted into other areas such as improvisation and jazz, contributing throughout his career to well over three-hundred releases, and also publishing the amazing fanzine Personal Best under his own imprint Marhaug Forlag. Jon Wesseltoft is a multi-instrumentalist actively performing in a wide variety of projects, shifting from acoustic sources to electronics. The record features five tracks recorded in 2016 at the best studio in Oslo, slightly edited and overdubbed by Wesseltoft but still clear and strict.

towards the end of the 1970s, a film about me and my work was made in kabul for the south german tv program. the director was arpad bondy. in order to find a venue for my music that is typical for afghanistan, it was agreed that my “percussion environment”, a tubular cube of 2x2x2 meters including the associated instruments, would be transported on a barren, stony ridge in the hindukush mountains. the people called the place “maidan”, which means nothing but “place”. while a couple of men dragged the frame pipes and the instruments up the hill, I decided to carry my large wuhan gong (100 cm diameter) up the mountain, in a kind of ritual. michael ranta sent me this gong from wuhan/china to kabul. – with slow and careful steps, carrying the heavy gong like an umbrella on my head, I walked over the difficult rocky terrain without a path up. suddenly a snake about two meters long came out of the rocks towards me and hissed aggressively at me. I could only take the gong off my head and put it like a shield in front of my legs. as I later discovered, it was a very venomous snake! since I couldn’t go on or back without her attacking me, I had to bring myself to kill the beautiful animal. I managed to smash her skull with a rock that I threw at her while standing behind my gong. finally I hung the lifeless body around my neck, put the gong back on my head and continued my way up, with a pounding heart. when the percussion environment was set up, I hung the dead snake between my instruments and spontaneously decided to name my solo performance “requiem for the snake of maidan”.

since I was able to reach an orbit between heaven and earth while playing in such an unique and very privileged place, I definitely didn’t want to be disturbed or interrupted by a film team and made the following parameter a condition: I will play six hours continuously, and the filmmakers can do what they want, but are not allowed to interfere with or talk to me. - while I was playing I only had one musician with me: the wind. sun ra entitled one of his records “my brother the wind”. I hung my metallophones on the linkage so that the wind could touch them and create sounds. the recording captured a few parts where I didn’t have to lift a finger and the wind did everything that was necessary. the room was a wide landscape without any echo. if an echo can be heard in the recording, it is the reverberation from the big gong. only a few noises came, apart from the wind, from outside. flying insects passed near the microphone from time to time, few shouts of the film team from a nearby hill or you could hear a jet at a great height. sometimes, if you listen carefully, you can hear steps on loose rock: I was not sitting all the time within the cube but also played on my percussion environment from outside, for example throwing small stones or clods of earth onto the big gong from a greater distance. the big gong and the boo chals (tibetan cymbals) produced a whole series of overtones. the string instruments, the metallo- and lithophones dominate the recording.

in addition to the acoustic environment of my instruments, in some parts of my improvisation I used a battery-powered tape recorder (uher 4400 report stereo IC) with a pre-recorded feeding tape that I had pre-recorded before alone or together with michael ranta in kabul. the stones of the lithophone were collected by ranta and myself in the valley of goldara around an old collapsed buddhist stupa. almost each of the hundred stone plate we had lifted was ringing.

(hartmut geerken)

Two pieces made with dismantled toy pianos, wind up toys, popping candy, bow, toy spring reverb, Buddha Machine, Tamayura bell, Japanese iron wind chimes, electronics, and voice. Percussive rhythms, hypnotic sounds and Cantonese words used like magic formulas. Somewhere between minimalism and gamelan, but still unmistakably unique.

Recorded and mixed at Outlau’d Studio, Brussels, in 2020 (Chinese Year of the Rat) during pandemic, and finalised in 2021 (Chinese Year of the Ox). Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Cover illustration by Eleusi.

Edition of 300 copies, gold foil printed sleeve, includes 12-page booklet and two leporello inserts printed on translucent paper

On the centenary of the birth of Luigi Nono, the Maurice Quartet – Georgia Privitera (violin), Laura Bertolino (violin), Francesco Vernero (viola) and Aline Privitera (cello) – reinterprets the composition for string quartet by the Venetian composer: Fragmente - Stille, An Diotima, dedicated to LaSalle Quartet on the occasion of the thirtieth Beethovenfest in Bonn, in 1980. The driving force of inspiration must have been Beethoven, understood as a radical innovator of the conventions of his time. This same definition was attributed to Nono after composing this work, so much so that the critics of the time spoke of the “turning point work”. An extreme chamber music work, at the same time private and political, which Nono himself summarized as follows: “I have not changed at all. Even tenderness, the private, has its collective, political side. Therefore my String Quartet is not the expression of a new retrospective line in me, but rather my current position of experimentation: I want the great, rebellious affirmation with the minimum means”.

The edition includes a set of evocative photographs of the Giudecca in Venice – which follow the aesthetics of the fragment – realized by Sophie-Anne Herin and a precious musicological contribution by Francesca Scigliuzzo.

The Maurice Quartet – active for more than twenty years in the field of experimentation between contemporary music, electronics and multimedia – joins the numerous homages that the world of music pays to Nono one hundred years after his birth with a recording work of great philological and interpretative relevance, aimed at capturing the most intimate and feverish side of one of the most significant composers of the last century.

150 copies on crystal clear red vinyl, deluxe edition 3LP Box, silver print on deluxe Fedrigoni Ultra Black paper, released with the full approval of the Sun Ra Estate

Born Herman Poole Blount in Alabama during 1914, Sun Ra first emerged on the Chicago jazz scene during the late 1940s. One of the great avant-garde composers of his generation - leading the way on piano, organ, and (eventually) synthesizer - beginning in the mid-1950s and lasting until his death in 1993, led the Arkestra, a band through which a near countless number of important artists passed and collaborated with, and many remained for the duration of their careers, notably Marshall Allen, John Gilmore and June Tyson. Known for their wild costumes and theatrics, Ra’s eccentric image and claims that he was from Saturn was deeply political, imagining an alternate social order, history, and future for African Americans that rests as a pioneering force in the Afro-Futurist movement.

While Sun Ra and his Arkestra can best be located within the broader movements of avant-garde jazz - particularly as innovators of free and spiritual jazz in their evolving forms - the composer was notoriously hard to pin down on creative terms. He was a visionary titan whose work traversed nearly half of the 20th Century, continuously pushing the idiom of jazz at every turn, ingesting and incorporating the entire history African American music - the blues, R&B, soul, gospel, ragtime, hot jazz, swing, bebop, free jazz, and fusion, etc. - into his work, without any division or hierarchy, producing roughly 100 full lengths bear his name, beginning with 1957’s “Jazz By Sun Ra Vol.1”, and stretching well beyond his death in 1993. Despite how much was captured and released, remarkably, rare and previously unheard recordings continue to emerge and amaze.

Recorded live at Teatro Giulio Cesare on March 28, 1980, comprising an astounding 27 compositions, including the highly celebrated “Astro Black”, “Mr. Mystery”, “Romance of Two Planets”, “Space Is the Place”, “We Travel the Spaceways”, and “Calling Planet Earth”, over six vinyl sides. High among the greatest live gigs by the Arkestra captured on tape, carefully mastered by Matt Bordin at Outside Inside Studio, “Live in Rome 1980” is a near perfect snapshot of the band’s versatility and range, including many of their most notably and famous songs, as well as striking renditions of the Horace Henderson penned Benny Goodman number “Big John’s Special”, Fletcher Henderson’s “Yeah Man!”, and "Limehouse Blues”, displaying Ra’s willingness to address and rework the entire, diverse history of jazz in a single go.

Heard in its totality, perhaps what makes “Live in Rome 1980” most striking is the way in which the concert plays out. Roughly the first half encounters the band locked in some of the most out-there, free jazz fire that can be imagined, weaving a startling sense of interplay and furious energy into a brilliant tapestry of writhing sonority, the likes of which were only really achieved by this band. The second half, with only moments of exception that return to the furious energy of the first, is very different affair, easy toward the vocal standards, led by June Tyson’s vocals and the joyous collective chanting of the band, for which they have become so widely celebrated, threading the sounds of off-kilter big band swing with heavy grooves and imagines of outer space.

Recorded live at Teatro Giulio Cesare on March 28, 1980. Sun Ra: Piano, Keyboards, Vocals. Noel Scott: Alto Saxophone, Baritone Saxophone, Percussion. Marshall Allen: Alto Saxophone, Flute, Oboe. Danny Ray Thompson: Baritone Saxophone, Flute. Chris Henderson, Eric “Samurai” Walker: Drums. Kenny Williams: Tenor Saxophone, Baritone Saxophone, Percussion. John Gilmore: Tenor Saxophone, Percussion. Michael Ray: Trumpet. June Tyson: Vocals. Mastered by Matt Bordin at Outside Inside Studio. Lacquer cut by Daniel Krieger at SST, Frankfurt am Main. All pictures by Paolo Ferraresi (Milano, Teatro Orfeo, March 26, 1980). All compositions by Sun Ra © Enterplanetary Koncepts (bmi) except where otherwise stated. Released under license from Sun Ra LLC.

Since a few years Alessandro Bosetti has been collecting voices that become part of the Plane/Talea archive. The creation of the archive stems from dozens of individual meetings and recording sessions, in which each voice is detached from its owner or originator and anonymized. With each new iteration and performance, Bosetti plays the archive as if it were an instrument. He searches for hidden details and correspondences through exploration, immersion and contemplation. Each re-activation of the archive results in a dense and swarming polyphony made up of thousands of short utterances - shorter than any word bearing a meaning - recombined and interwoven into complex textures. The particularity of the grain of Plane/Talea lies in the autonomous and darting life that each of these fragments lives in a teeming community of voices. Such polyphonies are rich in microtonal detail emerging from the incessant juxtaposition of vocal objets trouvés. Harmonic relationships are sometimes rough and chaotic, other times surprisingly just. The voices are never treated electronically but only recombined and musical tension is provided by the particular grain, inflection, energy of each one of them in counterpoint to the others and to a frugally used instrumentarium (Harpsichord, Ondes Martenot, Cristal Baschet, grand piano, analog synth, Hammond organ). Implicit reference goes to ancient, modern and postmodern forms of vocal polyphony. "Plane/Talea 31-34" - the continuation of the homonymous 2016 LP - is a work of sampling that projects an imaginary community and a disembodied choir. The four arching and extensive tracks were created between 2017 and 2018 and bear the trace of two specific moments: August nights in a country house in Vicobarone, in the hills of Piacenza (31-32) and a week-long residency at the "Studio Venezia", an environment created by French artist Xavier Veilhan in the French pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale (33-34). « Encounters of this sort did happen, with the voice still clinging onto its own origin, and then seen, as it were, coming out of the original mouth and caught saying other things, with a slightly different intonation, a slightly different timbre, maybe due to a little aging, an extra cigarette, a cold. At that point we would come out unsettled, or maybe convinced that it was not the same voice anymore, but another. »

One of the great projects in Egyptian jazz, the Cairo Free Jazz Ensemble was formed by Salah Ragab and Hartmut Geerken as an avant-garde offshoot of The Cairo Jazz Band - the first jazz big band in the country - formed in 1968 when Ragab was appointed chief of Egypt’s Military Department of Music and had at his disposal a vast staff of musicians (almost three thousand!), an entire military building, and a full range collection of musical instruments. When encountering this recording, issued in 1970, the deep resonance found between the ensemble and its American counterparts becomes startlingly clear. Heliopolis is a stunning blend of big band spiritual jazz, the music of the Middle East, and the fire and energy of free jazz, unveiling a deep creative resonance with the contemporaneous efforts of Pharoah Sanders, Phil Cohran, and - of course - Sun Ra, combining jazz instrumentation and musical style with indigenous melodies and instruments to create a musical object with few parallels. The album is a throbbing, squealing, wild journey through the creative heights of sound channeling swirling, focused artistry that taps future and past in a single blow.
Copies of the original pressing are between the rarest and most sought-after records in canon of recorded jazz. This is the first ever authorized repress released under license from Hartmut Geerken.

We consider ourselves extremely fortunate having met Hüseyin Ęrtunc during his terrestrial transit. After we reissued his wonderful album Musikî (privately released on Intex Sound in 1974) and a few collaborative albums with the Konstrukt collective, in 2017 we finally managed to invite him, Doğan Doğusel, Cem Tan and Umut Çağlar to play some shows in Italy as a quartet. Things got really complicated when their visas got rejected - only one week before their plane was scheduled to take off - but then we found a stalwart supporter of free jazz music at the phone of the Italian Embassy and incredibly we got the visas in time so we could spend a whole week with Hüseyin and his band, touring Italy and playing four shows of the best spiritual free jazz we heard in a long while.
Right after that, we took the chance to book a recording session at the good old Outside Inside Studio, where our loyal partner Matt Bordin captured on tape two days of improvisation by Hüseyin Ęrtunc (Fender Rhodes electric piano, Philicorda organ and chant), Umut Çağlar (percussion and bamboo flutes), Doğan Doğusel (double bass), Cem Tan (drums), joined for this special occasion by the almighty Jooklo Duo: Virginia Genta (tenor and sopranino saxophones, clarinet, flutes), and David Vanzan (percussion). What came out of this is an incredible musical document, and not only for the fact that -unfortunately- it was Hüseyin's last session on this world.
"Most of Ertunç’s recorded appearances have been on drum set, where he’s employed a massive and materialist cymbal approach that takes Sunny Murray’s explosive chatter as a lifting-off point. Ertunç waxed one LP as a leader in 1974, Musikî (with then-regular partners Michael Cosmic and Phill Musra, issued on the tiny Intex label), and returned to Turkey in the early 1990s. Ertunç’s playing, relentless as it might be, evinces a strident, swinging quality that reaches back decades. His pianistic approach is rooted in the outpouring of voluminous, allover rhythm in concentrated shards. One might first think of early Cecil Taylor, though another Boston resident is also worth mentioning – Jaki Byard, who could move from barrelhouse to crepuscular romanticism and dense chordal superimpositions at the drop of a hat. If he and Ertunç didn’t necessarily work together, their spirits are kindred." (Clifford Allen)

Acchiappashpirt is the sound and video, poetry/poetronic collaboration between the Albanian poet and vocalist Jonida Prifti and the Italian sound artist Stefano Di Trapani. “Ninulla” was conceived as a suite of lullabies that were written and sung for, with, and by their son Arion. An album divided between conscious and unconscious recordings, where dream and wake merge.

Despite the obvious gentle and holistic conception of “Ninulla”, the album is a deeply experimental excursion into sound practice, entirely rethinking the notion of what a lullaby might be. Drenched in a deep sense of atmosphere and reverberance, with drifting, often processed vocals floating and weaving their way through simple and seductive melodies, haunting environmental images and textures, and flirtations with playful left-field pop, the album has the unavoidable effect of catapulting you into the joyous, elemental nature of music making at its purest form, while also throwing a wrench in the cogs every step of the way.

Composed and recorded by Jonida Prifti and Stefano Di Trapani. Produced by Antonio Giannatonio and Acchiappashpirt. Edited by Antonio Giannatonio. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Cover artwork by Re Delle Aringhe. Includes the poem “Ai miei figli e ai miei nipoti” by Dania De Vincenzi.

“Gran trotto” (literally translating to “grand trot”) is a travel diary, in sound, recorded in a diverse range of geographies, meticulously listed in the album’s credits: Tallinn, Scanno, Helsinki, Santo Stefano di Sessanio, Vilnius, Rosello, Brighton, Campo Imperatore, Jūrmala, Barreiro, Ortona, Budapest, Civitella Alfedena. Constructed from tapes and field recordings, with interventions made by a handful of musical instruments – piano, organ, bells, objects – as well as intentional contributions and unintentional appearances. These sounds are what they are and from where they are from. The result is deeply moving, threading the sounds of various environments with dedicated tones and textures, and a great deal of captured speech.

Previously released on CDr by Chocolate Monk (choc. 424, 2018). Remastered for vinyl by Giuseppe Ielasi.

“I’ve also got a note to myself to consider the very pastoral nature of the whole set…there are no modern sounds (like mobile phones, computers, cars) anywhere on the record, and Gran Trotto could almost be an aural snapshot of the 19th century countryside.” - Ed Pinsent, The Sound Projector

Sealed copy.
Cover as new with slightly dented corners.

Edition of 500 copies, screen printed cover. Includes two inserts: a replica of the original insert and the english translation.

Henry Krutzen is a relatively shadowy figure in the history of experimental sound. Between the early 80s and the 2010s, there are only a handful of albums that bear his name, and very little information about them. A multi-instrumentalist and composer who studied percussion, saxophone, and harmony in various schools and jazz clinics across Belgium, over the years he played in a diverse range of musical projects across the idioms of jazz, new wave, heavy metal, experimental, chanson française, world music and progressive rock, before relocating to Brazil during the early 2000s.

“Silances”, originally released by Igloo Records - the Belgian imprint founded in 1978 by Daniel Sotiaux - sitting alongside astounding and remarkably unique albums by Leo Küpper, Jacques Bekaert, Henri Chopin, Arthur Pétronio, André Stordeur, and numerous others, is an entirely singular gesture at the borders of sound poetry, musique concrète, and radical electroacoustic practice that draws upon disparate elements of drone, jazz, minimalism, ecstatic tribalism, and various traditions of music from across the globe. Decades on from its original release it remains as striking, unique, and compelling as it did upon its release.

In a note that Krutzen penned in 2022 when he was contacted for the reissue of “Silances”, Krutzen recalls: “Since I was 16, I had been experimenting with concrete music with a technician friend and we used all a teenager’s room could offer to make sounds into music: faucets, glasses of water, metal springs on ladders, objects of any kind… I had hours of recordings I pitched to Daniel [Sotiaux], to see if he was interested in making an album. I also had other ideas I wanted to be able to develop. What a joy when he accepted to work on the project! So I got to work. First, I set up a vocal improvisation quartet, and we spent long afternoons rehearsing using input I provided… We went into the studio and recorded almost two hours of improvisation, from which I then chose the best moments for the final product”.

Blending Native American references into a body of sonority that draws on free improvisation, experimental electronic music, and spiritual jazz, Pygmy Unit’s “Signals From Earth” - originally self-released by the band in 1974 - forges a singular and almost entirely unknown path, and stands almost entirely on its own in the history of west coast American jazz.

First appearing on the San Francisco scene sometime during the early 1970s, almost nothing is know about the Pygmy Unit, a seven piece band steered by Darrel De Vore, who contributed flute, bass, percussion, piano, and vocals to the band's lone LP, first appeared with percussionist Terry Wilson within the psychedelic folk rock band, The Charlatans, who belonged to the legendary Family Dog scene. Jim Pepper, a Native American tenor saxophonist known for being a member of the Mal Waldron Quartet, played with Charlie Haden, Don Cherry, and numerous others, and produced the cult favourite, “Pepper's Pow Wow”, for Embryo Records in 1971. John Celona, who contributes parts on sax, synthesizer, and percussion, would later go on to be regarded as an electronic composer of some note. Of the remaining members, saxophonist Frank Albright, bassoonist Ron Grunn, and percussionist Marvin Kirkland, very little else is known. It seems this LP is more or less all they recorded.

While undeniably jazz - riding a remarkable line between avant-garde electronic music, spiritual jazz, and free improvisation - the band was very much a product of the diverse creative ferment that developed in their hometown of San Francisco during the 1960s. Embodying the raw spirit of DIY (many of the instruments used in the recordings were made by DeVore himself, self-described as an “itinerant flute-maker”) the ensemble channels references - via passages of chanting and percussion, as well as conceptual underpinnings - from Jim Pepper’s Native American roots, intuiting them with the soulfulness of spiritual jazz, wild moments of avant-gardism centred around synths and electronic effects, and explosions of wild free improvisation.

“Development of new music is a continuous path that grows directionally according to psychoacoustical phenomena available for unification. This record is evidence of that development, containing 12 performance pieces, at 12 separate times in different acoustical spaces with various combinations of musicians and instrumentation. The music is shaped by signals, received and sent by life forms on this planet. It is unwritten, unrehearsed, utilizing new and traditional approaches to energy, motion, and form. Eventually, music develops as a natural extension of the environment in which it exists. It is the aim of the traditions… to signal the universe from the Earth.”

Edition of 500 copies, includes a 24-page booklet printed with silver ink on Fedrigoni Ultra Black paper.

Born Herman Poole Blount in Alabama during 1914, Sun Ra first emerged on the Chicago jazz scene during the late 1940s. One of the great avant-garde composers of his generation - leading the way on piano, organ, and (eventually) synthesizer - beginning in the mid-1950s and lasting until his death in 1993, led the Arkestra, a band through which a near countless number of important artists passed and collaborated with, and many remained for the duration of their careers, notably Marshall Allen, John Gilmore and June Tyson. Known for their wild costumes and theatrics, Ra’s eccentric image and claims that he was from Saturn was deeply political, imagining an alternate social order, history, and future for African Americans that rests as a pioneering force in the Afro-Futurist movement.

While Sun Ra and his Arkestra can best be located within the broader movements of avant-garde jazz - particularly as innovators of free and spiritual jazz in their evolving forms - the composer was notoriously hard to pin down on creative terms. He was a visionary titan whose work traversed nearly half of the 20th Century, continuously pushing the idiom of jazz at every turn, ingesting and incorporating the entire history African American music - the blues, R&B, soul, gospel, ragtime, hot jazz, swing, bebop, free jazz, and fusion, etc. - into his work, without any division or hierarchy, producing roughly 100 full lengths bear his name, beginning with 1957’s “Jazz By Sun Ra Vol.1”, and stretching well beyond his death in 1993. Despite how much was captured and released, remarkably, rare and previously unheard recordings continue to emerge and amaze.

Recorded live at Teatro Giulio Cesare on March 28, 1980, comprising an astounding 27 compositions, including the highly celebrated “Astro Black”, “Mr. Mystery”, “Romance of Two Planets”, “Space Is the Place”, “We Travel the Spaceways”, and “Calling Planet Earth”, over six vinyl sides. High among the greatest live gigs by the Arkestra captured on tape, carefully mastered by Matt Bordin at Outside Inside Studio, “Live in Rome 1980” is a near perfect snapshot of the band’s versatility and range, including many of their most notably and famous songs, as well as striking renditions of the Horace Henderson penned Benny Goodman number “Big John’s Special”, Fletcher Henderson’s “Yeah Man!”, and "Limehouse Blues”, displaying Ra’s willingness to address and rework the entire, diverse history of jazz in a single go.

Heard in its totality, perhaps what makes “Live in Rome 1980” most striking is the way in which the concert plays out. Roughly the first half encounters the band locked in some of the most out-there, free jazz fire that can be imagined, weaving a startling sense of interplay and furious energy into a brilliant tapestry of writhing sonority, the likes of which were only really achieved by this band. The second half, with only moments of exception that return to the furious energy of the first, is very different affair, easy toward the vocal standards, led by June Tyson’s vocals and the joyous collective chanting of the band, for which they have become so widely celebrated, threading the sounds of off-kilter big band swing with heavy grooves and imagines of outer space.

Recorded live at Teatro Giulio Cesare on March 28, 1980. Sun Ra: Piano, Keyboards, Vocals. Noel Scott: Alto Saxophone, Baritone Saxophone, Percussion. Marshall Allen: Alto Saxophone, Flute, Oboe. Danny Ray Thompson: Baritone Saxophone, Flute. Chris Henderson, Eric “Samurai” Walker: Drums. Kenny Williams: Tenor Saxophone, Baritone Saxophone, Percussion. John Gilmore: Tenor Saxophone, Percussion. Michael Ray: Trumpet. June Tyson: Vocals. Mastered by Matt Bordin at Outside Inside Studio. Lacquer cut by Daniel Krieger at SST, Frankfurt am Main. All pictures by Paolo Ferraresi (Milano, Teatro Orfeo, March 26, 1980). All compositions by Sun Ra © Enterplanetary Koncepts (bmi) except where otherwise stated. Released under license from Sun Ra LLC.

Coupla Triples is a collection of two recordings made by MP Hopkins in 2014. The first piece, Spins, Groans, Tones, was previously self-released as part of a CDR/chapbook edition, while the second piece Waves, Feedback, Thoughts, has remained unreleased until now. Both pieces were created using a simple compositional method, in which random word prompts were selected from a list of sounds and ‘interpreted’ in an immediate manner with only basic recording equipment - a microphone, a tape loop, a voice recorder and an amp. Three sounds, twice. Arranged carelessly but carefully. A coupla triples, nothing fancy.

Recorded and mixed on the land of the Gadigal people, Sydney, 2014.

“Mediterranean Music Water (Mare nostrum in moedium terrae) Op. 203”, a never before issued tape composition, belongs to a body of work embarked upon during the 1980s and 90s connected to Sicily, the other most notable and available being “Op. 201 L'Essere Umano Errabando, La Voca Errabando”, issued by The Henning Christiansen Archive in 2020. These works were an extension of Ursula and Henning Christiansen’s meeting and befriending the Sicily based couple Carlo Quartucci and Carla Tatò, with whom they regularly visited and collaborated.

Like its predecessor, the aforementioned Op. 201, “Mediterranean Music Water Op. 203” is a conceptualization of abstract theatricality at the connection of place and its relationship to the sea. Performed by Ursula Reuter Christiansen and Henning Christiansen and recorded at a small performing arts theatre in Erice, Sicily - Teatro Gebel Hamed - during December of 1991, the abstract for this work reads: “In the morning (after the storm), on the beach. The sea has thrown some things on the beach. Blue light - some mist? On the ground. Ursula's slides on the wall. Henning is rolling from the background of the stage slowly, very slowly, towards, in a fish net. I come in looking for the things the sea has left and discover him. I roll him out of the net, he's nearly dead, and try to get life in him. Light in the background in rainbow colours. Ursula wears a partlett dress, as a siren.”

These images lay a foundation and context for the sounds that emerge over the album’s two sides, a fascinating conjunction between the power of water and the human spirit. Through the processing of heavy delay and reverb, we encounter the howling utterances of violin tones, vocalizations, and countless unplayable instrumental and non-instrumental sound sources, gathering in a vast and sprawling serious of sonorous expanses that seem to echo the power, movements, and myths tied to the Mediterranean.

In this second edition, black ink on the cover print has been replaced by green ink

"I have worked together with sheep before" - says Henning Christiansen - introducing the performance he did in front of the Brucknerhaus in Linz in July 1988. But this time he went beyond, building a "Concert-Castle" with hay blocks where thirty sheep could perform music. Another time the animals - Christiansen’s obsession and passion - become the musical instruments used for his compositions: "Originally most of instrumental sounds derived from animal voices or other sounds of natural phenomena. The violins, for instance: someone found out that stretched intestines, dried bowels, could produce a sound. This has simply been civilized, refined".
Schafe statt Geigen (Sheep Instead of Violins, 1988) and “Verena” Vogelzymphon (Bird Symphony, 1990) first appeared as a small CD edition issued by Galerie Bernd Klüser in 1991. Both works, each one occupying a full side of this LP edition, extend from one of Christiansen’s long standing conceptual strategies - deploying recordings of animals as stand-ins for musical instruments, sheep and birds respectively. While each work allows these source to take the natural lead, at times masquerading as field recordings, both feature subtle tonal and electronic interventions by the composer, creating strange and brilliant compositions which shift the terms and subjects of music as they were long understood. Accompanied by a twenty page booklet featuring drawings and texts by Henning Christiansen, as well as pictures of the performance by René Block.
"The background, the space where music happens is what I want to put into the foreground."