Reviews

Kui Dong, Larry Polansky, Christian Wolff
... to listen with curiosity

Continue reading

- Julien Héraud

Elliot Sharp
This is a truly impressive work on CD, involving, fascinating, emotionally powerful, one of the most accomplished new, non-standard operas I’ve heard in a long time.

Continue reading

- The Big City Blog

Toca Loca
There is in these recordings a sort of respect of order, that the grades very enthusiasts of Gregory Oh, equally boss of orchestra of the body, do nothing to break.

Continue reading

- Noël Tachet

Adventurous Canadian trio Toca Loca’s cryptically titled new album Shed is a strangely captivating, grippingly energetic, strikingly rhythmic collection of new and older avant garde music.

Continue reading

- Lucid Culture

The Dither Quartet
Canadian trio devoted to contemporary art with passion, Toca Loca in the "Shed" face four works selected from the repertoire of fairly old lions of the vanguard (Heinz Hollinger, Frederic Rzewski) and new rising stars of the classical experiments (Dai …

Continue reading

- Sergio Eletto, Kathodi

Rocking out and breaking boundaries: A genre-bending amalgam.

Continue reading

- Hannis Brown, Tokafi

Brilliantly realized but not for melody seekers or the musically faint of heart.

Continue reading

- Barry Cleveland, Guitar Player

A stunning album - literally and figuratively. It completely avoided my expectations and offers a stunning insight into what can be done in a 'classical' quartet format with modern instruments. Another adjective - thrilling.

Continue reading

- Jeremy Keens, Ampersand Etcetera

Of the many "Dithers" you may find on amazon.com, this Dither, a NYC-based electric guitar quartet, is one of the more extreme and satisfying.

Continue reading

- Mark Keresman, Signal to Noise #59 p.6

Caution your speakers: do not be fooled by starting low and subheading of this album. After just over ninety seconds of music amniotic remote, subtly suggestive, unleashed the beast that lurks in this quartet of electric guitars.

Continue reading

- Maurizio Comandini, AllAboutJazz.com

Colossal at one moment and reduced to a few notes in another, the music defines a mineral and rigorous world where pleasure opens up to vigorous overtures ... An astounding example of what modern music can be in creating its own instrumental form and borrowing freely from pre-existing music.

Continue reading

- Noël Tachet

... all of Dither's music wholeheartedly embraces the beautiful, engulfing, and often gloriously loud sound of electric guitars

Continue reading

- Bruce Gallanter, Downtown Music Gallery

Nowadays the electric guitar has become ubiquitous, deployed to vastly different ends in a wide variety of formats. The New York quartet Dither focuses almost exclusively on sounds produced by electric guitars — clean, plucked lines, strummed chords, grungy feedback, resonating overtones, even the static buzz of amps and loose plugs...

Continue reading

- Steve Smith, The New York Times

... there’s a consistent dedication to thinking out of the box and just simply having fun.

Continue reading

- Lucid Culture

Mike Olson
... this is music that makes you take notice and listen - to the skill of both players and composer. An exciting release.

Continue reading

- Jeremy Keens, Ampersand Etcetera

"Incidental", by Minneapolis composer Mike Olson, is an intricate and amusing work, which chews and spits the author's accumulated experiences with a constant alternating tension between 1970s vintage Jazz and Rock.

Continue reading

- Marco Carcasi, Cathodik

What impresses most here is the ambition of Olson’s vision . . .

Continue reading

- Devin Hurd via JG, Hurd Audio

Mike Olson's 'Incidental' sounds like some long lost prog masterwork that has somehow escaped from the looney bin of popular spotlight. Don't let this gem escape your grasp.

Continue reading

- Bruce Lee Gallanter, Downtown Music Gallery

Olson waxes madly adventurous into cerebral territory at the same time, making music the listener can feel. No mean feat.

Continue reading

- Dwight Hobbes, Twin Cities Daily Planet

Henceforth Records is proud to release, on January 5, 2010, its 7th CD, Incidental, by Minneapolis based composer Mike Olson. The music encapsulates his new approach to composition, but its diversity, intellectual rigor and sheer sonic splendor make it right at home in our Henceforth catalog.

Continue reading

The Skein
Made of rugged digital fragmentation, melancholy acoustic bursts, and an intense voice, wavering between blues and jazz drives / avant.

Continue reading

- Marco Carcasi, Kathodik

This duet is a shock. More than a duet it is like an innumerable ant hill of musical creatures

Continue reading

- Noel Tachet

A multitude of sounds lie brooding beneath the ashes of “Cities and Eyes”.

Continue reading

- Alexandre Pierrepont, critic

Sembrerebbe che la musica al femminile si presenti gentile e delicata, ed invece no, il duo The Skein, composto dalla vocalista inglese Jessica Constable e dall´americana Andrea Parkins alla fisarmonica elettrica e strumentazioni elettroniche, fa subito pulizia con questo pregiudizio. …

Continue reading

- Vittorio LoConte, Musicboom.it

I was surprised by the wealth of evocative and expressive sounds that this fine duo pulls off. Jessica seems to be singing in some strange invented language (when she is not singing in English) while Andrea adds layers of kaleidoscopic electronic sounds that are forever in flux.

Continue reading

- Bruce Gallanter, Downtown Music Gallery

They fill me with joy because the many ways they hop from one matter to another seem natural, they discover without effort new paths that close back after them as it always happens with enchantresses.

Continue reading

- Noël Tachet, ImprovJazz

...deliciously unpredictable...Cities And Eyes is a thrilling ride; get on board.

Continue reading

- Dan Warburton, Paris Transatlantic

Cities and Eyes is music in the broadest sense, made for a specific, not generalized audience, evoking the stark nakedness of metropolitan rat race life. At once industrial, futuristic, and multi-cultural, it represents musique concrète performance art taken to the extreme.

Continue reading

- Michael G. Nastos, All Music Guide

Lisle Ellis
An utterly brilliant conceptual piece that mixes notated materials, electronic post-manipulations and improvisation to realize an expression of a fractured requiem to Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Continue reading

- Devin Hurd, Hurd Audio

Non esiste coerenza nel sound-design di Lisle Ellis. "Sucker Punch Requiem" pressa in un format varie estetiche dell'emisfero nu-contemporanea: fermezze avant-jazz, assennati sballottamenti elettro-beat, loop molestati dai fiati e da vocalizzi oltremodo destrutturati (di routine per signorine-nichiliste quali Pamela Z), …

Continue reading

- Sergio Eletto, Recensioni

La ricerca dell´espressione artistica nel contrabbassista Lisle Ellis (su questo CD anche agli effetti elettronici)) è passata di recente attraverso la pittura, ed è così che spunta fuoti un omaggio, musicale, beninteso, a Jean-Michel Basquiat, artista figurativo travolto dalle droghe …

Continue reading

- Cosimo Parisi, Musicboom

Sucker punch Requiem sounds like an achievement, something important.

Continue reading

- Noel Tachet, Improjazz France

Boasting fluid ensemble interplay, dramatic stylistic shifts and rich harmonic writing, Sucker Punch Requiem blends forward thinking experimentation with old school craft, resulting in one of Ellis' most accessible and rewarding albums.

Continue reading

- Troy Collins, All About Jazz

'Sucker Punch Requiem' is a most fascinating work. . . . Each piece is like a painting with attention to each detail on the canvas . . . 'Sucker Punch Requiem' is a wonderful endeavor overall and not very "out." This might come as a surprise to some who expect more outside sounds from Lisle based on his previous recordings. Forget those expectations and enjoy this special gift.

Continue reading

- Bruce Gallanter, Downtown Music Gallery

And then, during a full listening, I realised that there were two aspects to the album. A smaller part is the constructed stream, from the opening it appears in a number of 'interludes' - shorter pieces which are titled Perishable fig. 1a to 3. These create interesting contrasts to the longer parts, and carry the themes of the opening.

Continue reading

- Jeremy, Ampersand Etcetera

You put it on out of curiosity, and what you get is a different musical world than the one you know . . . Ellis manages to create his own musical world here, based on the example of - and in homage to - graffitti poet and painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. . . . And the musicianship is truly great . . .

Continue reading

- stef, Free Jazz

His sensitivity to the visual, as well as musical, realms makes him ideally suited to salute Basquiat's graffiti-inspired paintings. His music on this album dances between - and around - form and abstraction, tradition and confrontation, clarity and distortion.

Continue reading

- George Varga, San Diego Union-Tribune

Despite Basquiat's frequent references to jazz, bassist/composer/painter Lisle Ellis is the first in the jazz world to create an album-length homage to the painter's life and work...The point of the project is as a springboard, something to be revisited time and again as Ellis solidifies the relationship between the painter's immense oeuvre and his own work.

Continue reading

- Clifford Allen, All About Jazz

Carla Kihlstedt & Satoko Fujii
Minamo is a perfect thing, everything seems possible

Continue reading

- Noel Tachet, Improjazz France

For those listeners who enjoy free, truly spontaneous improvisation and the combination of violin and piano, Minamo with violinist Carla Kihlstedt and pianist Satoko Fujii cannot be recommended highly enough. Minamo is a triumph

Continue reading

- Budd Kopman, All About Jazz

The playing is absolutely beautiful, and oddly enough it's beautiful in that classical way in which you might separate an individual's performance from the music that he or she is playing. There are moments here, as in the spontaneous melody of "One Hundred and Sixty Billion Spray," that are executed so well it wouldn't matter what the notes are (if such a distinction could be made, and it often is). But the two are actually making this up from the material of their interaction. Fujii is especially adept at elaborating form, sometimes creating a complex dialogue between left and right hands that follows, frames and amplifies Kihlstedt's lines. That expressive richness here (the Bartok/ Prokofiev lineage) springs from Kihlstedt's profound sound and attack, as rich and dynamic as any violinist who has entered the improvising community.

Continue reading

- Stuart Broomer, Point of Departure

'Minamo' is extraordinary, a series of tight, dramatic events. Even without written music the musicians have plenty of ground under their feet: vamps, patterns, echoed motions. Both play with virtuosic precision and a great range of technique, even when the music becomes gestural and built on hummingbird pulses, glassy wipes of the violin strings, dark rumbles of rubbed piano strings. The whole record, but especially the second concert, runs on its own vivid tension.

Continue reading

- Ben Ratliff, The New York Times

Gustavo Aguilar
I love your "GUSTAVO AGUILAR: Unsettled On An Old Sense Of Place" CD so much I'm going to feature it on the Front Page of CD Baby for a few days. We're REALLY picky about what goes on the front page. We get about 150 new albums a day. . . . and yours is one of the best I've ever heard.

Continue reading

- CD Baby

Gustavo Aguilar is a brilliant percussionist who grew up in Brownsville, where Texas meets Mexico. He now lives in New York . . . and has located himself in music at a point where composition and improvisation get into one another in extraordinary ways. . . . Gustavo Aguilar is himself a defiantly unorthodox musician - the kind we need - and this is a wonderful CD

Continue reading

- Julian Cowley, The Wire

Lisle Ellis, Marco Eneidi & Peter Valsam
Sound on survival, dont Philippe Elhem a chroniqué un précédent disque axé sur le blues (Américan roadwork cimp 312 in Improjazz 116) a regroupé sur ce cd trois morceaux de neuf à dix-huit minutes enregistrés à Amherst et un quatrième …

Continue reading

- Noel Tachet, Improjazz France

Non ci sono pretese di neutralità in queste improvvisazioni tratte da due concerti del trio Sound On Survival: il contrabbasso di Lisle Ellis, la batteria di Peter Valsamis e il sax alto di Marco Eneidi prendono subito possesso dello spazio …

Continue reading

- Cosimo Parisi, Musicboom

Der freieste, abstrakteste verinnerlichte Ausdruck intimer, wilder, Energiegeladener Musik ist vor allem im Jazz zu finden, mal von Dixieland und anderen Festgefahrenheiten abgesehen. Da werden Instrumente zu Geliebten und die intensive Auseinandersetzung mit kraftvoller, eigenwilliger Komposition und lyrischer bis expressiver …

Continue reading

- Volkmar Mantei, Ragazzi

Occasional errata aside, listeners already wise to these three will find this set a welcome extension of their modest, but hopefully soon expanding studio ledger. Those just becoming acquainted are in for an even bigger treat. Sound on Survival taps the venerable energy source that most fans of free jazz find irresistible.

Continue reading

- Derek Taylor, All About Jazz

Eneidi's awesome alto chops are once more very much in evidence - I like to think his former teacher Jimmy Lyons would be proud of his exuberant post-bop yelps...

Continue reading

- Paris Transatlantic Magazine

Sound on Survival Live is definitely not for the MTV set; the trio's approach is to let things develop over the long haul. Not in the modal sense: the group often turns direction on a dime. But what they do is play on until their ideas are exhausted. Not beyond that point, but right up to it. The result is a rewarding, if slightly draining, listen. Think of it as a workout and enjoy the burn.

Continue reading

- Edward Kane, JazzReview.com

... slowly simmering and building its way to an explosive sprint to the finish.

Continue reading

- Michael Rosenstein, One Final Note

thanks a bunch for the great CD. i will play the dickens out of it here at radio station kwva, eugene, oregon: the seat of anarchy in the pacfic northwest! keep us in mind when you produce/create the out stuff. thanks for the great music. honored to play it

Continue reading

- James Cervantes, Jazz Format Director, KWVA

...It's intensely rhythmic music - even Eneidi treats the saxophone as almost a pulse generator, the source of abruptly fired-off impulses with a surprisingly regular rhythm (though he uses that regularity to create syncopation effects too).

Continue reading

- Don't Explain

These songs explode with life and vibrant ideas. As the liners say. ". . . more often than not . . . the songs come to an arbitrated (not arbitrary) ending." Exactly. All tangents aside, these men know what they're doing and, more importantly, where they're going.

Continue reading

- Aiding and Abetting

Gunda Gottschalk, Peter Jacquemyn & Ute Völker
A spontaneous creation that loses nothing with repeated listening.

Continue reading

- Devin Hurd, Hurd Audio

Bonnie Wright's new label, Henceforth Records is off to a good start with a couple of thrilling releases...What's interesting here is all three players are truly interested in the texture of the sounds. How will the sounds appear as Gottschalk scrapes a mean pattern across her violin, while accordionist Völker weaves waves of chaotic noise, all the while Jacquemyn pounds his bass into submission with brutal force.

Continue reading

- Tom Sekowski, Gaz-eta

...there is joy in the way that you do hear that cosmic thread when you open yourself up to it. An extraordinary and quite challenging trio, well worth your discriminating listening abilities

Continue reading

- Bruce Gallanter, Downtown Music Gallery

Baggerboot (Henceforth) is energized with palpable passion, with the three improvisers - Belgian bassist Peter Jacquemyn participates along with Gottschalk and Völker - liberated by free jazz passion. The trio improvises blatantly in a manner that mixes tension-release and virtuosity.

Continue reading

- Ken Waxman, One Final Note

...it is highly provocative artistry that commands rapt attention to the intricacies of three astute musicians who reward the bold voyager with a startling brand of creativity.

Continue reading

- Frank Rubolino, Cadence

They have discovered shocking and delightful new sounds on their instruments, and range boldly between contemporary classical music and anarchic free jazz. A free music recording you'll find yourself playing again and again.

Continue reading

- John Gill, The Wire