Avant Music News

The latest from New World Records includes efforts from Rova and the Nels Cline Singers, as well as Lukas Foss:

Rova Saxophone Quartet & Nels Cline Singers – The Celestial Septet

Bruce Ackley, soprano, tenor saxophones; Steve Adams, alto, sopranino saxophones; Scott Amendola, drums; Nels Cline, guitars; Devin Hoff, bass; Larry Ochs, tenor, sopranino saxophones; Jon Raskin, baritone, alto, sopranino saxophones.

On their own, the Nels Cline Singers and the Rova Saxophone Quartet have established themselves as the most forward-looking groups not only in their respective formats—a trio of guitar, bass, and drums, and a quartet of saxophones ranging from baritone to sopranino—but also in the area of music that has variously and inadequately been called “free,” “avant-garde,” “creative,” and “improvised.” The Septet is a vehicle for time and space travel through dense, narrow thickets and airy, wide expanses of boundary-blurred extrapolations of jazz, rock, late-20th-century European modernism and American minimalism, and 21st-century postmodern fusions.

Lukas Foss – Curriculum Vitae
Columbia String Quartet; University of Buffalo Percussion Ensemble; Guy Klucevsek, accordion; RoseMarie Freni, mezzo-soprano; Robert Dick, flute; Jan Williams, percussion; Yvar Mikhashoff, piano

The four works on this disc represent the culmination of Foss’s long period of experimentation beginning in the mid-1950s. String Quartet No. 3 (1976) is his most extreme composition; it is themeless, tuneless, and restless. It is probably the first quartet without a single pizzicato since Haydn. The sound vision which gave birth to this quartet may be the most merciless in the quartet literature. It’s been characterized as a “minimalist Grosse Fuge.”

Perhaps Contraption is a UK band that mixes up avant-rock with rock-in-opposition weirdness and other varied influences. Highly recommended.

Their release is available as a CD as well as a download. Streaming samples can be found at the link above.

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• Zs Announce New Album, “New Slaves,” Out May 11th on The Social Registry! (hangout.altsounds.com)

New releases just out on Leo:

Mike Nord / Georg Hofmann - The Flow – Music for Improvised Dance
Triangulation – Whirligigs
Veronique Dubois / Francois Carrier – Being With
Sainkho Namchylak / Nick Sudnick – Not Quite Songs
Gratkowski / Nabatov / Schmickler - Deployment
Alexey Kruglov – Seal Of Time
Steve Day - Visitors
Carolyn Hume / Paul May – Come To Nothing

Ifwhen is a relatively new three piece from New York that describes themselves as “Animal Collective playing King Crimson or even Syd Barrett joining Melt Banana to play Serena Maneesh covers.” Regardless, their music is interesting enough to raise a few eyebrows in these parts.

Null Set, their latest release, will be available May 3rd.