Franco Degrassi & Gianni Lenoci - Franco Degrassi Gianni Lenoci (1998)

Earliest of a handful of collaborations between avant-garde composer and improviser Franco Degrassi (b. 1958, Bari) and fellow Italian Gianni Lenoci (1963-2019), a jazz pianist and composer from Monopoli.  The eight untitled tracks on this album credit both artists with "piano, computer, environmental sounds and acoustical instrument sounds", and after initial tracks focused on piano then concrete sounds, progress to various amalgamations of both.  The piano textures and sounds of the room can be loud and grating, or richly textured and meditative, adding up to just under an hour of closely-observed possibilities in improvised sound.

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Horde Catalytique Pour La Fin - Gestation Sonore (1971)

French free-improvisation at its finest, in the sole release from this quartet.  As per the group name, they envisaged themselves making music for the apocalypse, birthing an elemental new sound as per the album title/track titles. 

In practice, this means plenty of skronking, ill-sounding sax, slippery bass, bits of vibraphone tinkling around like animated skeletons, and atmospheric percussion.  At times the sax player switches to flute, either calming proceedings or enhancing the creepout according to the moment.  All of this comes together most effectively on the 19-minute closing track, the sustained atmosphere working best at length.  By the end of the decade, the sounds of this strange, great record had wafted across the Channel and onto a certain List - and deservedly so. You can definitely hear the influence on early Nurse With Wound.

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Keith Jarrett - Invocations / The Moth And The Flame (1981)

Two completely distinct albums in one package from Keith Jarrett today, with the first disc being a November 1980 recording and the second from a year earlier.  On the seven-part Invocations, Jarrett takes the droning pipe organ sound of Hymns/Spheres and refines it, also adding saxophone.  In fact, the first part is a saxophone solo (as is the finale), before the organ is introduced in the second, playing in Riley-esque arpeggios that gradually slow and become more indistinct.

The two instruments are first heard together, in overdub, on part four.  ECM record buyers had been given this combination not long before, in Jan Garbarek/Kjell Johnsen's Aftenland (wonder if it was an influence on Jarrett here?), but the sound of Invocations is both heavier and warmer - although to be honest, achieving a warmer sax sound than Garbarek isn't that hard...

The Moth And The Flame brings Jarrett back on to home turf, with 40 minutes of piano improvisations in five sections.  The gently rippling first section gives way to a meditative second, and so on with Jarrett running through the expected modes of expression on piano that he could produce in his sleep by this point.  In short, there's nothing stunning or outstanding here if you're familiar with the Jarrett essentials, but neither is it forgettable.  And paired with one of his most experimental records, The Moth And The Flame acts as a very nice palate cleanser.

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Jean-François Pauvros & Gaby Bizien - No Man's Land (1976)

Nicely unhinged one-off collaboration between two lesser-known figures of the French avant-garde, guitarist Pauvros and percussionist Bizien.  Both put in brief appearances with Jac Berrocal, but a few years prior to that they released No Man's Land together.  The fact that practically the first sound you hear on this LP is a tuba being played underwater might tell you all you need to know about an album like this, but there's lots of nice little oddities beside that are worth a listen.

The main mode of operation is generally echoed/speed shifted/otherwise mutated bits of guitar from Pauvros (occasionally bringing Fred Frith to mind) and free percussion from Bizien, as in the opening title track, Barre D'Etel and Dr Livingstone I Presume.  Elsewhere, the more audio-verite free improvs of Plage De Bling sound like a sort of Berrocal/Tazartès hybrid, and Bizien gets to work on some nice melodic percussion on Gloire A L'Aeropostale while Pauvros swishes away in the background.  Wish they'd done another couple of records together to develop this sound, but No Man's Land is a great rewarding listen for its uniqueness.

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Jacques Berrocal - Parallèles (1977)

Debut solo album by French avant-gardist and multiple-horn skronker Jac(ques) Berrocal.  This is the one with the original Rock 'N' Roll Station, memorably covered by Nurse With Wound in 1994.  Back in 1976, Berrocal got on his bike (in the studio, to record the sounds of it as an instrument) and left the words to British rock 'n' roll singer Vince Taylor, whose biggest audience had always been in mainland Europe since his 60s peak.  The result, accompanied by a pedaling bass note, was five minutes of surrealist brilliance - 18 years later, Stapleton would even name his album after it.

Elsewhere on Parallèles, there's a sample of the free jazz improvisations on trumpet, trombone, cornet and more that Berrocal and his main collaborators Roger Ferlet and Michel Potage were playing at the time.  One track, Post-Card, adds guitar and a spoken-word part, and was apparently recorded in a pigsty.

Lastly, the side-long Bric-a-Brac (To Russolo) adds some more free-improv acquaintances on cello, bass, piano and several more horns.  Towards the end, that static bassline from Rock 'N' Roll Station comes back in, as do elements of its lyrics, among other things that intrude hilariously into an English-language biographical note of Luigi Russolo.

original LP cover

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Raum-Musik für Saxophone - Doubles (2005)

Raum-Musik für Saxophone, based in Karlsruhe, are a German-Dutch group of nine saxophonists who were founded in 1985 and like to play in large spaces to exploit their natural acoustic characteristics.  The first part of their name is also the preferred descriptor: spatial music. 

For their 20th anniversary, the group decided to record two concerts a week apart, firstly moving through the rooms of the Badische Kunstverein art gallery with both ambient and contact microphones.  These sounds were then used for the second concert in the ZKM Cube hall, with a 'loudspeaker orchestra' playing in Kunstverein recordings whilst the musicians played live again over the top.

The final results were released on this 52-minute album of 11 untitled tracks.  Whilst you clearly had to be there to appreciate the full spatial effects of all these sound sources interacting together, what you do get on CD is still an intriguing and highly-listenable document of the concert in the Cube.  No-one gets too overly noisy, skronky or free-jazzy (track 5 is about as lively as it gets); the players seem content for the most part to just enjoy the various live and recorded sax sounds wafting around in the echoing space, making for a recording that lends itself to repeat listens.

So what, then, was this CD of a 2005 double-concert of ambient sax trails doing sitting in an Edinburgh charity shop in May 2017, surrounded by piles of indie/chart/dance compilations?  Your guess is as good as mine, but I'm glad I spotted it.

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AMM - The Crypt, 12th June 1968 - The Complete Session (rel. 1992)

There's nothing like blowing the cobwebs away at the start of a new week with nearly two hours' worth of fearsome, ear-blasting free improvisation, so enjoy.  A decade before Throbbing Gristle were terrifying London audiences (including at The Crypt), and three years before Kluster recorded Eruption, there was AMM at their most unhinged.

Wishing to stake out territory far beyond free jazz, Eddie Prévost, Keith Rowe and Lou Gare hooked up with pianist/composer Cornelius Cardew and percussionist Christopher Hobbs to make this glorious racket.  Prévost continues with versions of the group to this day.  First released as a an extract on one side of a shared LP, more of the Crypt performance was given a double-LP release in 1981 before the complete recording came out in 1992 on this 2-CD edition.

Fades where they occur are when tapes ran out; other than that, all 109 minutes of the show are here for your, erm, enjoyment, and actually it's not all quite as extreme as it starts out.  Long passages of meditative, near-ambient formlessness crop up at intervals; often I just pick a random 20 minute section of The Crypt to listen to, and always find something new to focus on.

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Kluster - 1970-1971 (this comp. rel. 2008)

Before there was Cluster, the legendary home-base of Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius, there was Kluster - a trio completed by the great Conrad Schnitzler.  Formed in 1969 around the Zodiak Free Arts Lab in Berlin, everything Kluster released in their short lifespan is in this one handy package, and remains some of the most heady, extreme material in the entire krautrock canon.

Unlike the genre's other Year Zero masterworks like Phallus Dei and Monster Movie, or even the Schnitlzer-infused Electronic Meditation, the Kluster sound owed nothing at all to rock music.  Instead, their legacy is these six supermassive black-holes of the freest free improvisation, bearing closer similarities to what AMM were doing on the other side of the English Channel, and also an utterly uncanny prefiguring of the early industrial music of the mid 70s.

In the studio (or rather, in the church where they found themselves recording), Kluster were faced with a bizarre, but very much of the time, compromise: that they allowed the usually religiously-inclined record label to overdub recitations of a couple of lengthy religious texts.  Schnitzler once said that you'll get more enjoyment from both of the vocal pieces if you can't understand the preposterous texts, in which case the stentorian female voice (on the first album Klopfzeichen) and male voice (on the second, Zwei Osterei) are intersting enough soundwise, if a little intrusive at times.

The voice-free second sides are more interesting overall, with plenty of screeching flute, scraping cello shards of guitar/piano to the fore.  The effects-laden sound can also be more clearly heard pointing the way to the first Cluster album sans Schnitzler.  Before he set off on his own however, there was the final Kluster recording.  Taped live, Eruption is an echo/delay masterpiece, stretching out for longer and unencumbered by previous compromises.  The sound is more lo-fi, but if anything this pushes it even closer to the live sound of Throbbing Gristle circa 1976.

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