Tortuga Alada
Cuadernos de viaje No 2
Sonic Transmissions
“La Tortuga Alada (The winged turtle) is an imaginary animal whose particular anatomy draws us to an ambiguous being that scurries restlessly and, at the same time, achieves weightlessness. In these two antipodes is the musical project created in 2017 by the Colombian saxophonist and clarinetist María Valencia and the Argentine cellist Violeta García, who exceed the rigorousness of jazz and contemporary chamber music, placing their explorations at the limit of improvised music and instant composition. In that place of free forms, risky soundscapes and real-time dialogues, was born Cuadernos de Viaje Nº 1, a recording made in Bogotá, Colombia, on January 26, 2018, and released by Discos Chichigua.”
Perch Hen Brock & Rain
Elegiacal
Wig
“Perch Hen Brock & Rain featuring Ab Baars, Ig Henneman, Ingrid Laubrock and Tom Rainey is an improvising quartet drawing on myriad experiences and backgrounds. Each member is conscious of their own weight and power to add to the communal conversation, understanding silence and restraint can be as powerful a contribution to the whole as density. Ingrid Laubrock and Tom Rainey represent the best of the New York scene while Ab Baars and Ig Henneman are key members of the idiosyncratic Dutch improvised music community. Either duo showcases the kind of telepathic interplay that comes from years of dedicated playing. Together, the wealth of experience allows limitless possibilities.”
Kyle Bruckmann, Tim Daisy, Phillip Greenlief & Lisa Mezzacappa
Semaphore
Relay Recordings
“Semaphore is a new band organized jointly by Chicago drummer and percussionist Tim Daisy and long-time friend and collaborator Kyle Bruckmann (oboe, English horn, electronics.) Rounding out the quartet are two pillars of the San Francisco Bay Area contemporary music scene: bassist Lisa Mezzacappa and tenor saxophonist Phillip Greenlief.”
Joakim Rainer Trio
Light.Sentence
Sonic Transmissions Records
“This exciting and young piano trio lead by Joakim Rainer Petersen consists of some of Norways most active young jazz musicians. They play with their eyes directed forward while being rooted in the classic piano trio format. The music is spontaneous and playful, and rhythmically captivating. The compositions build complex shapes and asymmetric loops. The trio draws lines to composers and musicians such as Andrew Hill, Paul Bley and Kris Davis! A particularly exciting mix of expressions that are combined with listening, playing and focused interaction.”
TOG
Megamax
Sonic Transmissions Records
“Tog - the trio of Steinar Heide Bø (drums & percussion), Vetle André Skåli (baritone guitar) and Brede Sørum (soprano & tenor saxophones, moog) - is an unstoppable engine, powered by rhythmic outbursts, crunching riffs, saxophone scurries and wails, the kind of playing that teases and herds the listener towards an unrelenting frenzy, a breathless sonic assault on the senses.”
Dave Rempis / Elisabeth Harnik / Fred Lonberg-Holm / Tim Daisy
Earscratcher
Aerophonic Records
“When these four combine as Earscratcher, we sometimes end up with swirling spirals of sound that twist up ribbons of tension into a cyclone, and sometimes find ourselves in the eye of that storm, swaddled in a wash of patient and centered calm. Two poles that in this context have an endless set of routes in between, conjured up during an outing that was definitely worth the wait. ”
Barbara Ellison
Cybersongs
Unsounds
“CyberSongs is a 'transhuman song cycle for human-like computer voices' by composer/artist Barbara Ellison. She delves in this work into the sonic intricacies of voice avatars and the ‘musicalisation’ of TTS (Text-to-speech), a type of speech synthesis application that is used to create a spoken sound version of raw text in a computer document. In the 13 tracks of this album, she creates hypnotic textures of vocal utterances through the intensive and extensive use of repetition, as tools and materials to give rise to surprising audible phenomena of a fascinating and odd musicality. Words, morphemes, phonemes, phrases and speech particles acquire constantly-shifting new aural meanings, turning into the rhythmic, melodic and harmonic patterns of the obsessively phantasmatic trans-human song cycle of the ‘CyberSongs’.”
