I\'m A Badass Caption: I can haz links, style or anything that is valid markup :)

CD/DVD Releases: Cuneiform Records Presents Their May Releases

Posted on Sunday, April 29 @ 17:00:00 UTC by nightowl

Below are five new Cuneiform releases, including one title also available in a beautiful, limited edition vinyl edition, all of which are not going to be generally released for another 5 weeks, but which you can buy directly from Wayside Music now.

Lars Hollmer - Med Mjölad Hand/With Floury Hand (sketches) (CD + NTSC (all region) DVD $21.00): "With Floury Hand (Sketches) is exhilarating listening (and viewing), and in a world now without Lars, poignant and bittersweet." – Dave Lynch/All Music Guide

Lars Hollmer was a Swedish composer, accordionist and keyboardist. He was a founding member of the influential "Rock in Opposition (R.I.O.)" movement. His band Samla Mammas Manna were a huge and hugely popular force on the Swedish progressive rock / avant rock scene for about 15 years in the 70s and into the 80s.

After Samla/Zamla/Von Zamla ended in the mid 80s, he founded and performed in a number of other bands. With one or another of his bands he toured throughout Europe, the Americas and beyond.

Starting in the 1980s and concurrent with his band work, he had a solo career where he emphasized his compositions and his accordion playing and he wrote and introduced many beautiful and exciting pieces into the modern accordion repertoire, including a piece that is a modern-day standard in Sweden, "Boeves Psalm."

"Towards the end of working on Viandra, (Lars) talked about wanting to make a new album that would be full of weird ideas and weird songs. He intended the new album to be a contrast to the melancholy and, at times, dark Viandra that he worked so hard with for several years. He said that he dug deep into his archive and found several hours of unreleased stuff, sketches, demos, and even finished songs, ranging from the early 1980s to 2008. He asked me to listen through the material and suggest a sample. That however did not happen as, in May 2008, my father was diagnosed with severe lung cancer and all plans were put on hold.... This is not With Floury Hand as my father might have imagined it and it is not a finished album. It is my selection from the more than four hours of music my father himself collected for his album. It is a mix of more or less unfinished songs and sketches that I love. It is full of wild and crazy ideas and antics, pieces of utter frivolity, but equally places full of delicate beauty. This is music straight from the heart. Just like how my father was." -Gabriel Strand Hollmer.

With Floury Hand is the final release by Lars Hollmer. In addition to the CD that contains the best recordings of what he was working on before he died and which is a huge treat in itself, also included is a professionally filmed DVD from 2005 of a performance at the Gouveia Art Rock Festival in Portugal. The beautiful 45' performance here has six solo pieces, four duet pieces with his long-time friend and musical associate, bassoonist Michel Berckmans (of Univers Zero and Von Zamla), and one track with Miriodor, with all of them performing "Talrika," the piece Lars specifically wrote for them, plus DVD extras.

This DVD is the only professional video footage ever released of Lars and it's a revelation (or a wonderful reminder) to see and hear what a gigantic sound he got out of his huge and beautiful Zero Sette accordion. The joy and humor and melody of his work and the enthusiastic response from the audience is wonderfully captured here.

You can hear a track from the album here.

Find it here at Wayside

Janel And Anthony - Where Is Home ($15.00): "Janel & Anthony - guitars and 'cello respectively - play a haunting and humbly virtuosic form of music wherein the elements of electronics, looping, and lo-fi timbres live both in intimacy and in majesty in the same house as acoustic instruments and folk/blues-inspired melodies. As such, it is both timely and timeless, drenched as it is in intoxicating atmosphere; wan, quiet voices submitting to waves of sonic drama. Who could possibly resist it?" -- Nels Cline

"If your soul is downright weary from the burdens of everyday life, cellist Janel Leppin and guitarist Anthony Pirog present an ideal antidote with their intimate, intuitive music. In both bucolic acoustic numbers and immersive dronescapes, the duo offers transport from mundane matters of the world." -- Time Out New York

"Janel and Anthony are an important step in the evolution of music. They both exist on so many levels, each piece is like a hundred doors opening up!" – Jimmy Chamberlin (Smashing Pumpkins)

Both musicians, together and separately, have long been an important and active part of Washington D.C.'s new-music scene. Anthony Pirog, an omnivorous, multi-faceted guitarist who studied jazz at Berklee and has performed country, fingerstyle, rock and surf music and Janel Leppin, a conservatory trained cellist steeped in North Indian and Persian classical music, who also plays electric bass in rock bands, have created a lavishly detailed musical journey, by turns ravishing and harrowing. Janel and Anthony alternately charm and challenge, with music that draws from classical, experimental, jazz, rock and electronic traditions but that ultimately is simply theirs.

Self-recording and releasing their 1st album in 2006 and selling thousands of copies at their hundreds of shows, they spent over 3 years conceiving and recording Where Is Home in a professional, analog studio, giving the album a thoughtful, comfortable and lived in feel. Alternating compositions with brief improvisations and soundscapes, Where Is Home captures the dynamic ebb and flow of their live shows where they artfully employ live looping, an array of effects and prepared backing. Simple musical lines grow into complex blocks of echoing sound which eventually are spun and turned into elegiac melodies. The music is both experimental and elegant and smokily psychedelic in a completely modern way.

You can hear a track from their album here

Find it here at Wayside

Janel And Anthony - Where Is Home (vinyl lp with download card; due to size and weight, this price for the USA only: $20.00, outside the USA $28.00): This is an extremely high-quality, vinyl version of this great album; it came out beautifully! It includes a download coupon for the digital version of the music. Limited edition, one time-only pressing of 500 copies, but 200 went directly to the band and there are only 300 for us and our distributors to sell!

Find it here at Wayside (US)
Find it here at Wayside (outside US)

Pixel - Reminder ($15.00): Pixel, the powerhouse indie-jazz ensemble from Norway, makes an indelible first impression with Reminder. Led by bassist, vocalist and composer Ellen Andrea Wang, the band also features drummer Jon Audun Baar, saxist Harald Lassen and trumpeter Jonas Vemøy. Combining indie-rock energy with the improvisational flexibility of jazz, Pixel are earthy and ethereal, wistful and agressive, sensuous and pummeling.

Pixel features the same classic, piano-less, 'modern jazz' quartet lineup of sax, trumpet, bass and drums as the epochal jazz quartets led by Ornette Coleman and Gerry Mulligan. Like these antecedents, the band takes full advantage of the harmonic freedom given by the lack of a chordal instrument, but Pixel is more interested in painting scenes than in setting up extended solos. With sharply etched compositions, Pixel has attained preternatural cohesion after two years together, moving seamlessly from composed passages to group improvisation marked by conversational interplay. A radical democracy, no one instrument stays in the foreground for long. With every track but one clocking well under five minutes, Pixel makes every note count, never wasting a moment or letting a tune wear out its welcome.

All four Pixels are ubiquitous on the fiercely creative Scandinavian jazz scene, which has embraced the quartet as an exemplar of Norway’s populist cutting edge. Slated for a series of major festivals and showcases across the region and the UK in conjunction with the release of Reminder, Pixel is poised to take the jazz world by storm. Like similarly forward thinking groups such as The Bad Plus and Rob Mazurek's Chicago Underground, this is definitely jazz, but it's jazz that rock audiences can relate to.

Reminder is the debut release by the most exciting band to come out of the insanely active Norwegian jazz scene in recent memory. In a country where jazz talent seems to seep out through the tap water, that's saying a lot!

You can hear a track from their album here

Find it here at Wayside

Postive Catastrophe - Dibrujo, Dibrujo, Dibrujo... ($15.00): "...a raucous 10-piece ensemble which nails its distinctive blend of Afro-Cuban rhythm and freewheeling improvisation."- The New York Times

"This group combined the Latin and avant-garde traditions in unheard ways, sinking its teeth into everything from Arkestra pandemonium to deep Afro-Cuban grooves to long-form composition. This music was full of roof-raising pleasures but also artful decision-making." - JazzTimes

The 10 piece strong 'little big band' Positive Catastrophe was founded in 2007 by cornetist/composer Taylor Ho Bynum and percussionist/vocalist/composer Abraham Gomez-Delgado. Uniquely fusing Latin and avant-garde jazz, the group enlists many of New York's most adventurous jazz and salsa musicians:

Taylor Ho Bynum (cornet)
Abraham Gomez-Delgado (percussion, vocals)
Kamala Sankaram (accordion, vocals)
Mark Taylor (french horn)
Reut Regev (trombone)
Matt Bauder (tenor saxophone)
Michael Attias (baritone saxophone)
Pete Fitzpatrick (electric guitar)
Alvaro Benavides (electric bass)
Tomas Fujiwara (drums)

Dibrujo, Dibrujo, Dibrujo... is Positive Catastrophe's second album. Here, the group combines salsa-derived groove with the intensity of modern jazz for a mix that is both artistic (dibujo = drawing) and magical (brujo = sorcerer). It features new music by both Bynum and Gomez-Delgado, including an extended suite by each.

Throughout the recording, all of the performers in the ensemble receive ample room to feature their musical voices and there are exciting scored passages that roll into rollicking solos; this is new music that knows how to swing and shake!

You can hear a track from their album here

Find it here at Wayside

Wadada Leo Smith - Ten Freedom Summers (4 x CDs $25.00): "Ten Freedom Summers is one of my life's defining works." – Wadada Leo Smith

"I’ve been blown over by the epic scope. This is an African-American Ring Cycle." – Jeff von der Schmidt, conductor

"Wadada is one of the most imaginative and explorative composers in creative music. His vision is uncompromising, his methods holistic and mystical. His playing is consistently brilliant and his sound is personal, with a clarity of tone recognizable after one note. His compositions have a special focus combining improvisation with written passages of extreme sensitivity and beauty... He is a National Treasure." – John Zorn

Trumpeter/composer Wadada Leo Smith's Ten Freedom Summers is the work of a lifetime by one of jazz's true visionaries, a kaleidoscopic, spiritually charged opus inspired by the struggle for African-American freedom and equality before the law. Triumphant and mournful, visceral and philosophical, searching, scathing and relentlessly humane, Smith's music embraces the turbulent era's milestones while celebrating the civil rights movement's heroes and martyrs. This four-disc set documents a stunning, career-capping accomplishment by a jazz giant in the midst of an astonishing creative surge.

An orchestral collaboration with the acclaimed eight-piece ensemble Southwest Chamber Music (harp, clarinet, 2 violins, cello, flute, viola, bass, percussion) conducted by Grammy Award-winner Jeff von der Schmidt, Ten Freedom Summers is built upon Smith's celebrated Golden Quartet featuring pianist Anthony Davis, bassist John Lindberg, drummer Susie Ibarra and/or drummer Pheeroan akLaff (who often expands the ensemble to a quintet). As a child of the Deep South who was raised in the red-hot crucible of the civil rights movement, Smith traces the project's origins back to 1977, when he wrote "Medgar Evers," an expansive evocation of the NAACP activist gunned down in Mississippi 14 years earlier.

Working in fits and starts, Smith completed the 19-piece project 34 years later in October of 2011 with a portentous, elegiac piece for Southwest Chamber Music. In designing the huge, multi-movement work, he focused on the transformative decade framed by the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

"I was born in 1941 and grew up in segregated Mississippi and experienced the conditions which made it imperative for an activist movement for equality," says Smith says, who marked his 70th birthday with a presentation of this, perhaps his most ambitious undertaking. "I saw that stuff happening. Those are the moments that triggered this. It was in that same environment that I had my first dreams of becoming a composer and performer."

After decades of being revered by his peers and colleagues, Smith is attaining his rightful place at the forefront of American music. Ten Freedom Summers is an important work that combines unique, fully scored rigorous passages and great improvisational skills into one huge and cohesive work. It is a thrilling, emotionally charged and satisfying work from a master.

You can hear a track from the album here

Find it here at Wayside

[Source: Cuneiform Records/Wayside Music]

Posted in Album Release News