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Patrick Higgins' new album Tocsin is full of thrilling opposites. It is a masterclass of visceral genre-bending sounds that are physical and delicate at the same time. Over the course of three large compositions, the listener is brought on a journey of constant surprise, as when the sound of violins dissolves into a halo of pure noise, more at home in an underground electronics show than anything that appears on a concert stage. The performers include the Wet Ink Ensemble, hailed as the 'Best Classical Ensemble of 2018'; acclaimed pianist Vicky Chow, 'one of our era's most brilliant pianists,"; and the Mivos Quartet, 'one of America's most daring and ferocious new-music ensembles.

"Couldn't find any acoustic covers of these two masterpieces by Gigi Masin from 1989, so decided to give it a go with one of my biggest local musical idols, Olli Aarni who I am proud to call my friend. I consider the original tracks quite holy, so it took me years of courage to ask Olli to record these with me. Never had any goal to release these in any professional way, we just had an idea, for fun, to salute the golden era of YouTube when people made these poorly recorded acoustic YouTube covers. Thanks Pete & Janne for making the record happen and thank you Gigi Masin for the incredible music!"

This famous Alexander Gibson/New Symphony Orchestra of London collection from 1958 debuted at the dawn of the RCA Living Stereo era. It became one of the most sought-after Living Stereos with music by Arnold, Liszt and Mussorgsky amongst others, all with a spooky, witchy theme. The performances remain today as characterful and incisive as they were then.
We've taken this classic and given it the full Analogue Productions reissue treatment, featuring a remaster by Germany's Willem Makkee from the original analog tapes, and plating and 200-gram pressing by Quality Record Pressings. Toping it off is a thick cardboard Stoughton Printing tip-on jacket.
If such music didn't cast the right sort of spell, so many listeners wouldn't be returning to it on so many occasions, somehow feeling constantly refreshed.

Record is close to NM. Cover has slight ring wear.

Human Remains follows Creatures of the Deep and Black Sarabande as the final installment of a trilogy of piano based recordings by Robert Haigh for Unseen Worlds. The trilogy marks the end of the late era of solo albums by Haigh before he steps away from music production.The title, Human Remains, was initially based on a painting of the same name by Haigh that is suggestive of an ancient structure resolute in the wake of overwhelming forces. As a metaphor for our current times, it could be interpreted as human frailty in the face of nature's unyielding dominion. Conversely, it could represent the persistence of human spirit and resourcefulness in the midst of catastrophe and upheaval.The album opens with 'Beginner's Mind' - a semi-improvised motif develops into an impressionistic refrain. This is followed by "Twilight Flowers" and "Waltz On Treated Wire" - intimate, monochrome piano portraits. Later tracks such as "Lost Albion" and "Signs Of Life" build on skeletal piano motifs with subtle electronic washes, textures and field sounds. The album ends with the elegiac "On Terminus Hill" where a stately piano refrain explores a series of sparse harmonic variations evoking a sense of closure.

Cover with ring wear

Albert Alan Owen was born in Wales in 1948 to parents of Welsh and Latvian heritage. His family later moved to Zimbabwe, where his father took up a teaching position. There, Owen was deeply influenced by local music and culture, while also exploring American RnB and jazz. It was during this period that he became acutely aware of the harsh inequalities under British colonial rule, which instilled in him a lifelong aversion to discrimination and racism.

In 1967, Owen returned to Europe to pursue his studies and enrolled at the Royal Academy of Music in London. He went on to spend time in Paris, studying composition with the eminent Nadia Boulanger and piano under Jacques Février, a favorite pianist of Ravel’s and Poulenc’s. Owen's focus shifted almost entirely to composition, and the acquisition of a Fender Rhodes electric piano marked the beginning of a divorce from his classical Western training. This transition allowed him to merge his passion for African and African-American music with the impressionistic styles of Ravel and Debussy while exploring the innovative realm of electroacoustic composition. These formative experiences framed Owen’s career as a composer and educator at the Royal Academy of Music and London’s Working Men’s College. He eventually returned to Wales, where he continues to reside. In 1979, 29-year-old Albert Alan Owen released “Keyboards & Strings”, a light magical chamber music masterpiece. Transcending the formal conventions of its era, “Keyboard & Strings” is an acoustic and electric piano piece, where the violin is met by synths and electronics.

As is often the case in Albert Alan Owen’s most intimate works, there is a sense of ethereal beauty that emerges from the music, akin to the emotional state one might experience while contemplating a Félix Vallotton landscape or the unfathomable mystery of dawn’s first light. Quiet, profound, and immersive, “Keyboard & Strings” stands out as an electronic-age tone poem, a rare gem that transcends time and place.

Volker Bertelmann and Hildur Guðnadóttir hardly need an introduction - their distinct styles have graced the speakers of pretty much anyone enamored with experimental music in the last decade, and between them the two have chalked up an enviable canon of successes. Bertelmann, under the Hauschka moniker has explored the extremities of prepared piano improvisation, and Guðnadóttir has taken cinematic, explorative cello music into a new era of depth and passion, so to hear them both together is a rare and unexpected treat. Rare is putting it lightly even - „Pan Tone“ is a recording of a single concert which the duo performed on the 26th of February 2010 as part of Arctic Circle - Bubbly Blue and Green festival at Kings Place in London, and documents an event that would truly never be repeated. Sure, they could attempt to re-create the event, but the spontaneity and glorious serendipity in this particular recording is a pleasure to behold.

Bertelmann and Guðnadóttir decided to create a set of compositions which based on the idea of the ocean, and took a book of Pantones to extract exact references to the specific colors of the sea. These watery tones form the backbone of the performance and inform the direction of the collaboration, guiding us through rich blues, glassy greens and frothy whites. In listening to the music it seems incredibly appropriate that the artists should choose blue as the middle ground in their work; the ineffable lightness that Bertelmann brings to the table is a stark contrast to Guðnadóttir´s sinking darkness, and as the two styles collide we witness a plethora of tones, shades and hues. It sounds as if the two artists have been playing together for decades, and their sound is so perfectly matched you might wonder why it´s taken them this long to collaborate. All that´s left for us to do is to soak in the tidal beauty of this very exclusive body of music, to listen to it sing, bubble and crash through its duration before settling in total silence. When the record reaches its conclusion there is an unsettling calm, a sense that you have witnessed something very special indeed, and that is a feeling to prize amongst all else.

Both prolific composers in their own right working within the field of modern composition/ new electronic music, Berlin-based Yair Elazar Glotman and Stockholm-based Mats Erlandsson have been collaborating since 2015. ‘Negative Chambers’, their first joint album together was released on Miasmah Recordings in 2017, and saw them exploring new approaches to the use of traditional acoustic instruments. Having recently signed to FatCat’s 130701 imprint, and following closely on from Deutsche Gramophon’s release of Jóhann Jóhannsson’s ‘Last and First Men’ project which Yair co-composed, the pair’s sophomore album ‘Emanate’ is a powerful and stunningly executed extended duration work that utilises a fantastic ensemble cast and continues to explore their ideas of a ‘displaced sound’ – combining electronic and acoustic sound sources through both analogue and digital means to create an ambiguous composite work, a music that sounds neither clearly electronic or acoustic, existing instead in some in-between space.

Post-punk/new wave hero Ann Margaret Hogan’s second album of solo piano and field recordings for Downwards is a box of subtle wonders, mastered by Veronica Vasicka and highly recommended if yr into Satie, Virginia Astley, Sarah Davachi. A weight of history flows through Hogan’s keys with a stark intimacy, beautifully illuminated by naturally effortless, quietly grand songwriting. It’s a direct continuation of the landscaped themes and atavism of 2020’s ‘Honeysuckle Burials’ and the ‘Reversing Into Tomorrow’ collaboration with Karl O’Connor, vividly capturing the slow passage of time in a way that has quite literally compelled us to stop the relentless mind-grind for its 40 minute duration on more than one occasion. After previous fixations on the iron age forts and burial mounds of the Clywdian Range in North Wales, Hogan transmutes the scenery of her more immediate locale, Oxton on The Wirral - from the cadence of its red sandstone landmark Thor’s Rock, to memories of its boating lake, for example - into a quiet yet ravishing suite inflected with traces of wildlife and industry recorded on long walks, all subsumed within a deep blue estuarial atmosphere silted by the strange reality of life in the current era, echoing the surreal, sunny period when the album was conceived. A generation on from her pivotal work with spar Marc Almond and likes of Deux Filles and Nick Cave, and forty generations since The Wirral hosted, as she says “a Norse parliament at Thingwall”, Hogan weaves time and place into a reflective, funereal sort of parlour music, turning daily ambulations amid the gorse and under luminous skies into gorgeous, life affirming and intimate self expressions. The eight pieces are mostly improvised and flow with a free, fleeting concision from the palpable warmth of ‘Forgotten Prelude’ and bluesy ache of ‘Fragile Elements’ to more funereal modes in ’Mesto’ and ‘Funeral Cargo’ suggestive of a Viking burial soundtrack. At its core, ‘Wolfswalzer’, a dedication to her one time collaborator and erstwhile Kraftwerk member Wolfgang Flür - is described by Hogan as “a simple waltz of coffee, food, friends and music”, and ‘Impromptu’ is the album’s slowest, soaked in the feeling of atmospheric immanence that defines the album’s timeless appeal. It’s an unspeakably moving album, words really do it no justice.

Jane Gregory's infamous 'Do Not Go' is a beautiful operatic drama, one seeped in a level of expression and passion rarely found across other genres. Rare too are the original pressings, with as few as 90 copies released by Crass Records in 1985 it's now one of the hardest on their back catalogue to find. One Little Independent have announced it as part of a new vinyl single reissue series. The origins of this record lay a long way from classical music. The band Crass put anarchy to use in a positive way in the post-punk era from 1978 with a mixture of brilliant records and a willingness to educate and engage with their followers through their collective-living mentality, concerts and concerns over a range of issues from animal rights to anti-nuclear campaigning. To be honest, such a summary does not do justice to the powerful effect of Crass, who offered up a sense of empowerment to themselves and their followers, and the influence then extended to the music business. As for Gregory's identity, she was (according to Rimbaud, who produced the single at Southern Studios) an "operatic and classical singer who acted as Sarah Brightman's understudy, in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Requiem". Requiem was actually a classical piece of music rather than a musical that came together in 1984 (with three soloists, Brightman, Placido Domingo and Paul Miles-Kingston and was premiered early in 1985. According to Rimbaud: "Crass wanted to do a crossover single and the idea was to make a popular, classical record, which it isn't - but it is nevertheless very beautiful." By the time Rimbaud had produced the single, Crass had split (1984) and their label - the Crass Records arm - was winding down as a viable concern. This probably accounts for the Jane Gregory single Do Not Go/ After A Dream being issued on the D Sharp imprint in late 1984 or early 1985. It would be fair to say that the record limped out rather than being released and there is web speculation that as few as 90 copies were pressed, so you were very lucky to pick one up. Like the Our Wedding single (which sells for up to a300), the Jane Gregory record is now one of the most sought-after and collectable records in the Crass and Crass Records catalogue. It is in the Rare Record Price Guide at a150 although copies have sold for up to a300 in competitive online auctions. The A-side of this single also appeared on the 1992 Crass Records compilation A Sides Part 2 1982-84.

Hogan’s involvement with new wave, new romanticism, post punk and all-things-avant makes her a uniquely placed character through the last four decades on the scene - her recording/performing biography intersects with everyone from Soft Cell, The The and The Human League through to Simon Fisher Turner, Barry Adamson, The Style Council and more recently with Karl O’Connor aka Regis’ Downwards universe. For ‘Without the Moon’ (a title borrowed from Cathi Unsworth’s book of the same name), Hogan pulls out some of the most satisfying collaborations from her archive, featuring a couple of tracks originally released in 1985 on Cabaret Voltaire’s Doublevision label, as well as recordings that are here issued for the very first time. It’s properly all-over-the-place brilliance, ranging from Nick Cave’s incredible 1983 piano blues slo-mo grind ‘Vixo’ all the way thru to the Paul Kendall (Nitzer Ebb/Depeche Mode) engineered ‘Come Take My Hand’ produced and featuring Barry Adamson and sounding like some vintage Les Disques du Crépuscule poolside obscurity. Opening with ideas mapped out while staying at Lydia Lunch’s gaff in summer ’83, the record lassos 30 years of Hogan’s personal highlights, harking to a time circa 1984 when she regularly caught The Birthday Party playing Leeds or London, often crossing paths with Cave, and right thru to 1989’s ‘Come Take My Hand’. While ‘Delirious Eyes’ is a gorgeous slow dervish of swaying middle eastern scales featuring Gini Ball’s elusive smoke trail vocals, it’s best heard in context of the sequencing, which soon erupts with Marc Almond’s vocals on the arsonist thrill of ‘Burning Boats’ and JG Thirlwell’s signature clangour, while ’Scattered Carelessly’ was written in 2008 and gives the sweetest canvas for Hogan’s keys complemented by a whispering Jarboe ov Swans, and ‘Black Nocturne’ stars a perfectly tempered guitar shimmer by Kid Congo Powers, a longtime accomplice, whom Hogan first heard playing guitar on The Cramps’ records that she played in DJ sets at the time. Illuminated by Hogan’s favoured solo piano, ranging from flickering candlelight to hammering theatrics, and even including a rare appearance of her vocals on the could-have-been-a-popsong closer, the six songs on ‘Without The Moon’ speak to an incredibly rich artistic life spent immured at the core of her practice. Song to song, she outlines an extraordinary oeuvre that ties together and leaps between eras, drawing on decades of experience as a performer, composer, collaborator and ardent listener to portray a full spectra of styles she’s been involved in shaping for decades. Stunning.