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This year marks a milestone for the Chicago Underground Duo. It is their 15th year together as a band. In celebration of this momentous occasion they have released a new record on a brand new label. Age of Energy is Chad Taylor and Rob Mazurek’s sixth release as Chicago Underground Duo and the twelfth release in the Chicago Underground catalog. Finding time to get back in the studio was a challenge, as Rob has been touring with his trio Starlicker, The Sao Paulo Underground and the Exploding Star Orchestra and Chad with the Marc Ribot Trio, Side A (Ken Vandermark, Havaard Wiik) and Digital Primitives. The heavenly bodies even deigned to interrupt their plans to record, raining baseball-sized hailstones down like a plague upon the sessions. And yet, the Duo persevered against the cosmos to complete the new record over 4 days in Chicago with Todd Carter (TV Pow). Developed during 2009 when the duo toured the east and west coasts, most of the material on the record was recorded live with very few overdubs. Thematically, Age of Energy is concerned with the balance between controlled and uncontrolled experiences. Computers, keyboards and drum machines pulse alongside ancient instruments like the African Mbira. ‘Winds and Sweeping Pines’ opens with Chad and Rob playing synthesizers and electronics, gradually as the piece develops, Chad switches to drums and Rob switches to cornet and they improvise over a blistering bass vamp in classic Chicago Underground Duo style. ‘It’s Alright’ is a piece making extensive use of electroacoustics, starting with a drone which incorporates extreme high and low frequencies. The electronics are overdriven with results of both known and unknown nature. ‘Castle In Your Heart’ is based on a traditional Shona song from Zimbabwe and constitutes the only acoustic composition. ‘Age of Energy’ alternates between a 21/8 and a 12/8 rhythmic cycle over a dissonant pedal point. This track was also recorded live in the studio, without any overdubs. Northern Spy Records.

This year marks a milestone for the Chicago Underground Duo. It is their 15th year together as a band. In celebration of this momentous occasion they have released a new record on a brand new label. Age of Energy is Chad Taylor and Rob Mazurek’s sixth release as Chicago Underground Duo and the twelfth release in the Chicago Underground catalog. Finding time to get back in the studio was a challenge, as Rob has been touring with his trio Starlicker, The Sao Paulo Underground and the Exploding Star Orchestra and Chad with the Marc Ribot Trio, Side A (Ken Vandermark, Havaard Wiik) and Digital Primitives. The heavenly bodies even deigned to interrupt their plans to record, raining baseball-sized hailstones down like a plague upon the sessions. And yet, the Duo persevered against the cosmos to complete the new record over 4 days in Chicago with Todd Carter (TV Pow). Developed during 2009 when the duo toured the east and west coasts, most of the material on the record was recorded live with very few overdubs. Thematically, Age of Energy is concerned with the balance between controlled and uncontrolled experiences. Computers, keyboards and drum machines pulse alongside ancient instruments like the African Mbira. ‘Winds and Sweeping Pines’ opens with Chad and Rob playing synthesizers and electronics, gradually as the piece develops, Chad switches to drums and Rob switches to cornet and they improvise over a blistering bass vamp in classic Chicago Underground Duo style. ‘It’s Alright’ is a piece making extensive use of electroacoustics, starting with a drone which incorporates extreme high and low frequencies. The electronics are overdriven with results of both known and unknown nature. ‘Castle In Your Heart’ is based on a traditional Shona song from Zimbabwe and constitutes the only acoustic composition. ‘Age of Energy’ alternates between a 21/8 and a 12/8 rhythmic cycle over a dissonant pedal point. This track was also recorded live in the studio, without any overdubs. Northern Spy Records.

To say that John Butcher has made a science of the saxophone is no idle chatter. By the time he earned a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Imperial College in 1977, Butcher had already turned his attention to the saxophone. Over the ensuing decades, he has developed a thoroughly unique language based on an intense understanding of the properties of air moving through a tube. Few have done as much to advance the language of the saxophone since John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders and the fiery explosion of the 1960s than Butcher has. In more recent years he has extended his sound chamber to include the whole of the space he’s playing in – sometimes as large as an empty water cistern in Scotland, a 400-foot tall gas pipe in Germany or a lava-carved cavern in Japan. He has played in windstorms, allowing the elements to blow through the mouthpiece as he positioned and fingered the horn. And he has reduced the playing field to the horn’s interior, using a microphone positioned inside the bell to create what is essentially a device for controlling and modifying feedback. Northern Spy is proud to present two of Butcher’s most recent experiments in moving soundwaves through space. On Bell Trove Spools we hear Butcher in two distinct situations: Richmond Hall, a Houston art gallery housing a permanent Dan Flavin collection that has been compared to a bowling alley; and the high-ceilinged marble room in Brooklyn which is the new home to Issue Project Room. Butcher is heard on his two saxes of choice, the soprano and the tenor, and suspended in space, fluid, challenging, at times melodic and always exciting. In short, John Butcher knows how to work a room – and that’s not about relating to the audience. In fact, there was no audience present for the Brooklyn session. Bell Trove Spools is just Butcher and a saxophone and spaces ready to receive. The results speak for themselves. Northern Spy.

Part four of Northern Spy's Clandestine Cassette series comes at you with whopping 90-minutes of music to further excel the gaul-laden flamboyance of second annual Spy Music fest. Two-weeks of shows; fantasy driven collaborations; signature beers; limited edition lavender 7-inches – a 90-minute cassette is but another cog in the Northern Spy machine, one that should not be overshadowed by the vibrant big picture. 5,429 seconds (the actual runtime is 90-minutes and 29-seconds) of virgin sounds created by eight artists appearing at the festival leaves you wondering: could I ask for anything more? The answer to that comes in the form of another question: would you expect anything less? Featuring tracks by: Arthur Doyle & His New Quiet Screamers; Diamond Terrifier; Rhys Chatham; PC Worship; Rhyton; Chris Forsyth; Tom Carter and Pat Murano; Gold Sparkle Band; Bird Names; Colin L Orchestra (with Guardian Alien); Gunn-Truscinski Duo; K-Salvatore; and Starring. Northern Spy.

Honky Tonk Medusa is Donovan Quinn’s first album that he’s both recorded and produced since the Skygreen Leopards’ adventurous Life & Love in Sparrow’s Meadow. Along with Quinn’s work on vocals, guitar and synth, the album also employs San Francisco musicians Jason Quever (Papercuts), Michael Tapscott (Odawas), along with his regular rhythm section of Nick Marcantonio and Michael Carreira. Working in reverse order to many current acts, the sound of Honky Tonk Medusa is molded to each individual song; letting the lyrics and spirit of the song dictate the instrumentation and style with the lyrical narrative tying it all together. The story of the album is one of decaying American cities, Internet age entropy, and equal parts romance and loneliness. In addition to the music, the album features artwork by San Francisco artist Joe Roberts and liner notes by Elisa Ambrogio (Magik Markers, 200 Years) & Ben Chasney (Six Organs of Admittance). Northern Spy Records.

Honky Tonk Medusa is Donovan Quinn’s first album that he’s both recorded and produced since the Skygreen Leopards’ adventurous Life & Love in Sparrow’s Meadow. Along with Quinn’s work on vocals, guitar and synth, the album also employs San Francisco musicians Jason Quever (Papercuts), Michael Tapscott (Odawas), along with his regular rhythm section of Nick Marcantonio and Michael Carreira. Working in reverse order to many current acts, the sound of Honky Tonk Medusa is molded to each individual song; letting the lyrics and spirit of the song dictate the instrumentation and style with the lyrical narrative tying it all together. The story of the album is one of decaying American cities, Internet age entropy, and equal parts romance and loneliness. In addition to the music, the album features artwork by San Francisco artist Joe Roberts and liner notes by Elisa Ambrogio (Magik Markers, 200 Years) & Ben Chasney (Six Organs of Admittance). Northern Spy Records.

This is the very limited and hand-numbered special art edition, including original art by painter M P Landis, with blank labels and stamped on Orange, transparent vinyl. Collaboration produced & conceived by Kurt Gottschalk. Inspired by the W.D. series of paintings by artist M P Landis. “Cease to Do Evil” is adapted from the poem by Denis McCarthy, in Irish Legends and Lyrics, published by McGlashan & Gill in Dublin, 1858. The “Shenandoah” verse is adapted from a re-write of “Oh Shenandoah” written and sung by Robert Horton, who played a character in a western (“A Man Called Shenandoah”) that aired one season, 1965-1966. In the story, Shenandoah is a stranger who has amnesia; the town doctor gives him the name, telling him that it means, “Land of Silence.”Horton sang it on a record on Columbia in 1965. Wikipedia says the only cover of this rewrite of Shenandoah was by The Gang, in 1977, on Trash Records (T0003). This music was improvised live in the studio. There are no overdubs. Northern Spy.

I Wish I Didn’t Dream, the new album of duets by guitarist Loren Connors and vocalist Suzanne Langille, was cut in just a few hours of studio time. But the pieces started falling into place 15 years earlier on the 10th floor of a nondescript building in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. It was there, at the old location of the Brecht Forum, that Connors got to know writer and WFMU DJ Kurt Gottschalk, who was curating a concert series there. On occasion Tom Abbs (now President of Northern Spy Records) would co-program weekend festivals there, sometimes bringing in MP Landis to do live painting during the performances. Flash forward to the present. Gottschalk was selecting paintings and writing text for a book of Landis’ paintings and the two begin imagining a soundtrack for the book. The obvious choice would be Connors, a painter himself, and Langille, an admirer of Landis’ work. The more they talked about it, the more plausible it seemed. Gottschalk had already produced a Northern Spy release with Connors and Langille (Haunted House, Blue Ghost Blues, NS012, with Andrew Burnes and Neel Murgai) which featured one of Landis’ paintings on the cover. Within a few months a session had been booked in the same studio where Blue Ghost Blues was recorded. The process was simple. Slides from Landis’ WD series of paintings were shown on a screen and Connors and Langille responded. There was no advance preparation other than a folder of verses (her own as well as Keats, Denis McCarthy and some nearly lost to history) Langille brought to the session. The resulting album, their first duo record in 14 years, is as vulnerable as it is beautiful. Langille sings as if she’s speaking cautiously, Connors’ guitar barely whispers, but at any turn either might erupt in screams. Do they not want to yearn for more, or do they fear their nightmares? Their dreams are a haunting mystery. Northern Spy.

“Kill the Self That Wants to Kill Yourself” is the debut full-length vinyl LP from Diamond Terrifier, the solo sax and electronics project of New York-based Sam Hillmer (from avant-rockers Zs et al). Infinite Limits has been championing Diamond Terrifier since the release of the project’s earliest (and very limited) tape titles on the Sockets Records and Words+Dreams labels (both still available at Infinite Limits, by the way). “Kill the Self That Wants to Kill Yourself” easily surpasses those exceptional early tape titles, opening-up a new chapter of possibilities along the way. Hillmer’s more meditative sax works are discernible on the LP but this full-length is dominated by the way he juxtaposes his wilder free-jazz-based noise with melodic and harmonic sound structures, as well as some riffs that touch R’n’B territory. Hillmer stretches his sax and equipment (including harmonizer pedals and synthesiser) to extreme margins, allowing him to entirely discard the shackles of convention. On the album’s opening (titular) track, “Kill the Self That Wants to Kill Yourself”, Hillmer’s scratching and screeching sax chords rip free and float with grace and power, seeming to startle a passing backdrop of ambient melody. The flip-side opens with “Becoming An Object”, a set of haunting, alien-style atmospherics. Both sides feature a ton of apparent contrasts that initially appear on course to collide like juggernauts but which Hillmer skilfully guides towards some kind of harmony. The sense of joy that Hillmer seems to take from this project is palpable throughout the LP, whilst “Transference Trance” shows an apparently playful side to his character. This is a singular, stunning LP that clearly marks the Diamond Terrifier project’s strongest expression to date. Produced by Chris Taylor (Grizzly Bear) and released on the Northern Spy Records label.

Rhys Chatham has trail-blazed a course through late 20th century music, equally aplomb in post-minimalist composition as he is in punk. Not since Roebling laid his span across the East River has there been an artist who builds bridges in both how we hear music and how we can appreciate art. His latest album, Outdoor Spell, is a further document in that direction. Here has has eschewed 100 guitars, or even himself playing a single guitar, for the trumpet and voice, both electrified and dry. It is an Earthquake Island for the 21st century, tugging at the corners of new ideas, taking in forms endemic to a shared imagination and renewing the beauty there. Northern Spy Records. Recommended!

This September 2012 New York City band Zs celebrates 10 years of being a band with the release of Score – The Complete Sextet Works: 2002-2007. Zs has been described with a dizzying array of musical vocabularies, and has performed alongside an equally dizzying complement of colleagues and collaborators ranging from Throbbing Gristle’s Genesis P. Orridge, to Roscoe Mitchell, to Christian Wolf, not to mention hundreds of comrades from the Brooklyn DIY scene, that has been home to Zs’ myriad incarnations and musical and artistic tangents. Belonging nowhere and everywhere, Zs has absorbed the editorial space of Howard Stern and Alex Ross alike. In 10 years of activity, the band has changed in countless ways without ever changing a fierce commitment to inscrutable aesthetics and execution crafted to provoke reflection and challenge assumption in the consumption of music. When Zs first formed the sextet, the band operated as a composers collective who played their own compositions. All members of the band huddled over sheet music on music stands illuminated by floodlights. The band was known for ensemble style rather than individual styles of the players, and developed a particular reputation for a near pathological commitment to unison execution of counter intuitive rhythms at an ear splitting volume, or at a virtually inaudible volume. Additionally, the band wore uniforms, a way of drawing attention away from the people playing in the band, and toward the group responsible for the monolithic rhythms and harmonies Zs spun out relentlessly at early shows. This stands in stark contrast to the emphasis on individual style found in Zs’ recent work. That said, this music is important in the development of Zs as it articulates the formation of the aesthetic and formal vocabulary that would form the underpinning for all future journeys the band would take. At present Zs remains committed to constant change in method and stasis in intention – different means, people, and aesthetics, always meant to instigate questioning and challenge preconception. The band is working on writing their 3rd full length record and an EP, both due out in 2013. In the mean season, dive into the early world of Zs with Score – The Complete Sextet Works: 2002-2007. Northern Spy.

The post New Thing lineage is a sacred thing. In the fields sown by Ayler and Coltrane and Sanders and Shepp, the music is free and flowing without ego but with purpose. It’s a judgment call of course, but the proponents are arguably few. Without attaching too many words to it, it’s a style of playing that’s something spiritual, something other, a connectivity between the players and with the listener. And without overly delineating who’s in and who’s out, it’s certain that Gayle is a master of the form. Deeply committed to free improvisation and the jazz tradition in all its manifestations, Gayle is a blazing saxophonist, a fluent pianist and, has more recently been playing the double bass. Here he is heard at his best, in classic form on the tenor horn with an exhilarating trio. The title and cover here evoke a character Gayle took to portraying onstage back in the 1990s, a bit of social commentary using the familiar face of a sad clown (read Emmett Kelly or even Charlie Chaplin), using a tragic face with no comedic angle to reflect on his own homeless days. But the music within is all new, recorded in the studio this year with Gayle heard on tenor exclusively joined by longtime timekeeper Michael TA Thompson on drums and Larry Roland on bass. To say that he recalls the pilgrims of free jazz is no small praise, but it’s not to lock him in the past. At 72, Gayle remains a vital force. The Streets are paved with some serious intentions. Northern Spy Records.

Not since Albert Ayler stalked the hamnar of Stockholm and reverberated his fire music off the walls of LES tenements has there been an avant-garde jazz saxophonist who can all out wail like Virginia Genta can. Don’t let her calm presence fool you. Nor should David Vanzan’s taller stature lead to believe this is not an equal opportunity free jazz freak-out. From when their poles first were converged by the Cosmic Force in 1999, Italy’s (with Finnish godparents) Jooklo Duo has been winning hearts and brains worldwide through jaw-dropping performances and a series of limited edition releases keeping at bay ravenous fans only long enough to get to the next gig. Now, for their first U.S. release, Northern-Spy Records launches its own assault on an as yet unsuspecting public with the 7”, The Warrior. Recorded October 11th, 2010, at Troglosound Home Studio, it’s as compact and complex as a leather-bound book of esoterica ready to haul you off to the most hidden lands of universal energy. The kids are gonna love it. Northern Spy Records. Highly recommended.