Source: Bandcamp Daily.

Over the course of two studio albums, several EPs, and live sessions, the UK group This Heat sought to decondition listeners to traditional song structures. Though the trio had superficial similarities to the post-punk bands that were emerging alongside them in late 1970’s London—spindly guitars, hypnotic vocals, and the studio-as-instrument techniques of dub—they never settled into a single approach to avant-rock deconstruction. Instead, they chose to continually experiment. Interrupting churning grooves with quiet or chaotic passages, their discography is speckled with sound collages, tape loops, and proto-techno trickery.

Source: Bandcamp Daily.

Tatsu Aoki was at a crossroads in the mid-1990’s: Though he’d been a respected member of Chicago’s avant-garde scene, he was shunned by white jazz musicians who couldn’t decipher his experimental blend of music, which fused rock, ambient, and jazz. The city’s creative community was (and still is) divided along racial lines—white musicians on the North Side; Black artists on the South Side. Aoki, an experimental bassist from Tokyo, struggled to find footing. “I didn’t exactly fit the profile of doing this kind of avant-garde jazz, not being white or Black,” he says. “My music is ethnically-charged, and I think that did not fit into the 1990’s Chicago music scene. These North Side white guys didn’t like me anyway, so I hung out on the South Side with the Black musicians.”

Source: Louder.

Brain Salad Surgery is the group at the pinnacle of its powers,” says drummer Carl Palmer of Emerson Lake & Palmer’s fifth album. “It’s very well recorded and it was definitely one of our most creative periods. If I had to choose one of our albums, that would be the one.”

It’s a viewpoint echoed by his erstwhile bandmates. Keyboard player Keith Emerson sees it as a “step forward from the past”, which “represented the camaraderie of the band at the time”. Bass player and vocalist Greg Lake reckons that it was “the last original, unique ELP album”.

Source: San Francisco Classical Voice.

A fascinating slice of electro-acoustic music history has just come out on the Carrier label. This 1984 concert performance of Rainbow Family by George Lewis — composer, master jazz trombonist, Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians member, computer music explorer — takes us back to an early stage of artificial intelligence (AI) when desktop computers (then known as microcomputers) were starting to interact with live musicians.

After two years of research and experimentation at IRCAM — Pierre Boulez’s new music laboratory underneath the Pompidou Centre in Paris — Lewis put together what he believes was IRCAM’s first commission for microcomputers and musicians improvising together. In his long booklet note, Lewis writes that he did all of the computer programming and “hardware hacking” himself, using the computer language Forth that he learned from his mentor, composer/record producer David Behrman.

Source: Bandcamp Daily.

After forming his own independent label Slub Music in 1994, Sugimoto would explore new frontiers in playing and improvising on the guitar, turning his focus to interspersing sound with silence and making each note resonate in the listener with a sense of purpose. Sugimoto would cultivate relationships with like-minded people during this period, bringing in collaborators from Tokyo and, eventually, the rest of the world. A friendship he formed with Austrian trombonist and composer Radu Malfatti would prove an important gateway to his discovery of the Wandelweiser collective, a group of composers and performers that utilized silence in avant-garde music in a way Sugimoto had not yet realized was possible. Sugimoto’s relationship with Wandelweiser would be mutually beneficial, his skilled playing and thoughtful philosophical musings on sound pushing them to the brink of possibilities they hadn’t considered either.

Source: Bandcamp Daily.

Mort Garson contained multitudes. Over the course of his prolific lifespan, the electronic composer blurred the line between commercial commissions and a vast array of experimental projects. While his synth peer Suzanne Ciani created sound effects for Coca-Cola commercials, Garson’s albums were given away with Sealy mattresses. Before Brian Eno recorded the soundtrack for a 1983 NASA documentary, Garson’s music was heard on TV transmissions of the Apollo 11 moon landing by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in 1969.