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viewing 1 To 10 of 10 items
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WELLE 113LP
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Reissue, originally released in 1974. Our Swimmer present this first-ever vinyl reissue from a UK songwriting hero. English singer-songwriter Bridget St. John grew up in a musical family in Surrey, beginning on piano, viola, and trumpet before picking up the guitar in high school. In the late 1960s she met the brilliant John Martyn who quickly became a fan and brought her music to a larger audience, which included the legendary DJ John Peel, for whose label Dandelion St. John recorded her first three albums. Jumble Queen, St. John's fourth album, was originally released in 1974 on Chrysalis, following the dissolution of Peel's label. Featuring help from members of Jethro Tull, King Crimson alum Michael Giles, American guitarist Stefan Grossman, and, most surprisingly, founding Whitesnake guitarist Bernie Marsden, the album is heady, dreamy folk-rock that stands up alongside the singer's more well-known Dandelion albums. St. John's voice -- best described as a more refined Nico -- is the focal point here. Her breathy, earthen tones perfectly complement the lovelorn lyrical content. With a more subdued sound than the rock-heavy backing group might suggest, Jumble Queen is an essential bit of UK folk-rock and singer-songwriter brilliance. After this album, St. John moved to the States and all but left the music business, not releasing another album for more than twenty years.
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WELLE 109LP
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Reissue, originally released in 1980. Our Swimmer presents the first official vinyl reissue of The Hilversum Session in over thirty years. Licensed from Hat Hut. Jazz iconoclast Albert Ayler took the experimental leanings of contemporaries like John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman as a starting point and then blasted them to stratospheric extremes, creating some of the most polarizing and brilliant music of the 20th Century. In particular, 1964 was a pivotal -- and well documented -- year in the free jazz artist's career. After returning to New York, Ayler assembled a brilliant group with Sunny Murray on drums and Gary Peacock on bass, recording Spiritual Unity (ESPDISK 1002CD/LP), Ayler's first record for the legendary ESP-Disk' label, that summer. Soon after that session, Ayler took his trio to Europe where they were joined by cornetist Don Cherry for a tour of The Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark. The Hilversum Session is a live radio session recorded on November 9th, 1964. At that point the quartet was months into its European tour and the interplay is extraordinary. On classic Ayler compositions like "Spirits" and "Ghosts" the band absolutely rip, with a kind of intuition and connectivity rarely heard, creating some of the most untethered and undeniably powerful music in the history of free jazz.
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WELLE 112LP
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2023 repress. Reissue, originally released in 1983. Deux Filles was not, in fact, two girls despite what the group name and its elaborate hoax of a backstory suggest. No, they were not Gemini Forque and Claudine Coule, French women who met as teenagers under tragic circumstances and became fast friends, recording two albums together before disappearing into the ether. In reality, Deux Filles was Simon Fisher Turner and Colin Lloyd Tucker, a UK duo who first worked together in an early incarnation of The The. Straddling the line between experimental and pop, Turner was an actor and teen singing star who later composed soundtracks for the iconic queer filmmaker Derek Jarman while Tucker's career began as an engineer for the famed UK library music studio, De Wolfe, before forming experimental wave group The Gadgets. In Deux Filles, the duo found an outlet for their least commercial tendencies, combining lo-fi proto-dream-pop instrumentals with samples, tape experiments, ambient textures, and drum machines. Even in the vibrant, seemingly endless well of UK DIY, Deux Filles stand out. Double Happiness is the duo's second album, originally released in 1983 on their own imprint, Papier Maché. Full of meandering guitar and with a more ominous tone than the debut, the album is recommended for fans of Durutti Column and Thomas Leer & Robert Rental's The Bridge (1979).
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WELLE 111LP
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2023 repress. Reissue, originally released in 1982. Deux Filles was not, in fact, two girls despite what the group name and its elaborate hoax of a backstory suggest. No, they were not Gemini Forque and Claudine Coule, French women who met as teenagers under tragic circumstances and became fast friends, recording two albums together before disappearing into the ether. In reality, Deux Filles was Simon Fisher Turner and Colin Lloyd Tucker, a UK duo who first worked together in an early incarnation of The The. Straddling the line between experimental and pop, Turner was an actor and teen singing star who later composed soundtracks for the iconic queer filmmaker Derek Jarman while Tucker's career began as an engineer for the famed UK library music studio, De Wolfe, before forming experimental wave group The Gadgets. In Deux Filles, the duo found an outlet for their least commercial tendencies, combining lo-fi proto-dream-pop instrumentals with samples, tape experiments, ambient textures, and drum machines. Even in the vibrant, seemingly endless well of UK DIY, Deux Filles stand out. Silence & Wisdom -- the duo's 1982 debut -- is a series of musical vignettes, like the score of an unrealized arthouse film. Blending processed guitars, sheets of synthesizers, echo-ey pianos, and washed-out vocal snippets to surprisingly varied effect, the album is recommended for fans of Durutti Column and Virginia Astley's From Gardens Where We Feel Secure (1983).
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WELLE 119LP
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Reissue, originally released in 1977. Founded in Amsterdam in 1967 by saxophonist Willem Breuker, pianist Misha Mengelberg, and percussionist Han Bennink, Instant Composers Pool (or ICP) was an independent free jazz label and orchestra that would go on to release over fifty albums featuring such pillars of the scene as Derek Bailey, Peter Brötzmann, Evan Parker, Jeanne Lee, John Tchicai, and Steve Lacy. Based around the concept that improvisation was, in fact, an act of instantaneous composition, ICP's legacy on improvised and free music is impossible to overstate. The ICP Tentet's Tetterettet is made up of recordings from 14-17 of September, 1977, cut and spliced together by pianist/composer Misha Mengelberg in a style similar to Teo Macero's work with Miles Davis. The first side is taken up entirely by Mengelberg's multi-part title track that breaks in and out of different tempos, with a loose arrangement style owing more than a bit to Charles Mingus's finest work on Black Saint or Ah Um. Traversing across decades and styles from free-jazz funereal marches, to carnivalesque excursions, broken piano rolls, and ear-splitting skronk, ICP Tentet show remarkable skill and chops in both their compositional craft and improvisational symbiosis. There's a playful undercurrent here that finds its home in some previously uncharted land between Mingus and Spike Jones. Featuring numerous ICP regulars along with the brilliant Alan Silva on bass, and a return to the fold of the amazing saxophonist John Tchicai, Tetterettet is one of the best of ICP's larger group recordings; humorous, unnerving, and ultimately, quite beautiful. This limited-edition reissue marks the first time this album has been in print on vinyl since its initial release.
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WELLE 118LP
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Reissue, originally released in 1979. Founded in Amsterdam in 1967 by saxophonist Willem Breuker, pianist Misha Mengelberg, and percussionist Han Bennink, Instant Composers Pool (or ICP) was an independent free jazz label and orchestra that would go on to release over fifty albums featuring such pillars of the scene as Derek Bailey, Peter Brötzmann, Evan Parker, Jeanne Lee, John Tchicai, and Steve Lacy. Based around the concept that improvisation was, in fact, an act of instantaneous composition, ICP's legacy on improvised and free music is impossible to overstate. Yi Yole -- recorded in 1978 -- was the first time the legendary South African saxophonist Dudu Pukwana had worked with the ICP. An innovator in the genre of Cape Jazz with the Blue Notes -- which also featured Chris McGregor, Louis Moholo, and Johnny Dyani -- who fled the apartheid regime for London in 1964, Pukwana's style is the perfect complement to ICP co-founders Han Bennink and Misha Mengelberg, who round out the trio here. Relaxed and somewhat understated for the ICP catalog, Yi Yole is the one and only time these leaders in European free improvisation would record together in a trio setting. This limited reissue marks the first time the album has been in print on vinyl since its initial release.
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WELLE 120LP
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Reissue, originally released in 1978. Founded in Amsterdam in 1967 by saxophonist Willem Breuker, pianist Misha Mengelberg, and percussionist Han Bennink, Instant Composers Pool (or ICP) was an independent free jazz label and orchestra that would go on to release over fifty albums featuring such pillars of the scene as Derek Bailey, Peter Brötzmann, Evan Parker, Jeanne Lee, John Tchicai, and Steve Lacy. Based around the concept that improvisation was, in fact, an act of instantaneous composition, ICP's legacy on improvised and free music is impossible to overstate. A live performance from May of 1970 in Rotterdam, Groupcomposing features a North Sea-crossing ICP lineup of British free improv luminaries Derek Bailey on guitar, Evan Parker on saxophone, and Paul Rutherford on trombone, along with ICP mainstays Han Bennink, his brother Peter, Misha Mengelberg, and Peter Brötzmann. The first side, "Groupcomposing, Part 1" is a nearly all-out assault with the reeds trio and Rutherford's trombone blasting nigh-continuously for the album's first side, culminating in a blistering Peter Bennink bagpipes solo. "Part 2" acts at first as the comedown, beginning with a playful piano and percussion back-and-forth before meandering a dark, brooding, path of trill horns to the album's eventual, tense conclusion. Recorded just a few years into the ICP's long tenure, it is hard to think of a release more representative of the label's musical principles -- or, more broadly, of the power of free group improvisation -- than the aptly-named Groupcomposing. This limited reissue marks the first time the album has been in print on vinyl in over forty years.
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WELLE 104LP
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Musica Elettronica Viva, or MEV for short, was formed in 1966 in Rome by Allan Bryant, Alvin Curran, Jon Phetteplace, Carol Plantamura, Frederic Rzweski, Richard Teitelbaum, and Ivan Vandor. From the very beginning the group was based on musical freedom and the shunning of convention. Using contact microphones to record and manipulate sound wherever it could be found -- from box springs to vibrators -- and improvisationally combining those recordings with tenor sax, homemade synths and the very first Moog to trek cross the Atlantic, MEV made some of the most imaginative and abrasive sounds of the time. Recorded in live performance at the Academy of Arts (Akademie der Künste) in Berlin on October 5, 1967, Spacecraft is made up of a single piece of the same name -- a slow building, jarring and disquieting work that reveals the entire MEV ethos in its lone half hour. As group member Alvin Curran put it, "the music could go anywhere, gliding into self-regenerating unity or lurching into irrevocable chaos -- both were valuable goals. In the general euphoria of the times, MEV thought it had re-invented music; in any case it had certainly rediscovered it." Our Swimmer present this first ever vinyl issue of MEV's Spacecraft, an early piece from the most free-spirited group of the 20th century avant-garde. Translucent green vinyl.
Personnel: Alvin Curran - kalimba (mbira thumb piano mounted on a ten-litre Agip motor oil can), electronics (contact microphones), trumpet (amplified), voice; Frederic Rzewski - performer (amplified glass plate with attached springs), electronics (contact microphones); Allan Bryant - synthesizer (homemade from electronic organ parts); Richard Teitelbaum - synthesizer (modular Moog), electronics (contact microphones), voice; Ivan Vandor - tenor saxophone; Carol Plantamura - voice.
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WELLE 101LP
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The Works -- one of the most famous pieces by brilliant American composer Alvin Curran -- was not created by will and direct purpose but, as the composer himself states, as a "providential accident" which is to say quite organically. Combining piano and voice with found sound and a custom-built Serge modular synthesizer, The Works is a slowly developing piece where space and ambient tape are eventually overtaken by raga-esque chanting and frenetic piano playing, where synthesizer washes become full-on workouts all leading to a coda where the listener is "finally carried off on the wheels of the Berlin U-Bahn." Curran -- whose initial training and musical education was as a pianist -- had been living in Roma, Italy, in the mid-70s returning to his roots and performing regularly in cocktail lounges on Via Veneto. It was this return to piano and vocals that became the genesis for The Works. In relearning the piano, a five-note "motive" took hold. Added to this was "a recording I had made of our 14 year old dachshund Caspar just before he died. It was, in fact, a love song which he persisted in singing all day after meeting a lovely bitch in heat in Piazza Navona. This I knew would be the beginning of the piece." As the piece expands further the listener will hear "cows munching grass, the Rome-Florence express train, a horse-fly caught against a window pane, my footsteps approaching a Roman fountain and later going up the steps of my old studio, cicadas, an Amsterdam calliope, a tin can being kicked, and a series of sounds from La Serra di Lerici." Though The Works has been performed in many incarnations over the years, it's this performance -- captured on February 24, 1980, and originally released that same year by the short-lived Italian avant-garde label Fore -- that is the definitive version, and one of the finest recordings ever made by the celebrated composer.
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WELLE 107LP
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2022 repress. Billy Harper is one of the great tenor saxophonists in the post-Coltrane mold. Originally from Houston, TX and with a degree from the venerable University of North Texas College of Music, Harper emerged on the New York City jazz scene in the late 1960s performing with Art Blakey, Max Roach, Lee Morgan, and others. Known for his soulful and propulsive tone, Harper was already a highly regarded and prolific session man before the release of his debut album as a leader on the cult favorite Strata-East label in 1973. Recorded in 1975, Black Saint was the second album for Billy Harper as bandleader and is the most acclaimed and fully realized of his long career. The inaugural release of the Italian label Black Saint -- to which the album lent its name -- is comprised entirely of Harper compositions; the peaceful and subdued opener "Dance, Eternal Spirits, Dance!," the swinging and fiery "Croquet Ballet" and the side-long epic "Call Of The Wild And Peaceful Heart." Harper's group features trumpeter Virgil Jones -- a graduate of Roland Kirk's mid-60s groups and session player for McCoy Tyner, Charles Tolliver, and others -- along with Joe Bonner on piano, David Friesen on bass, and Malcom Pinson on drums. Black Saint is too melodic and swinging to be free jazz but too forward-thinking to be described as modal post-bop; Harper's advanced compositional sense and galvanic tenor work make this an album of pure fire music. This is a beautiful album back into print on its original format for the first time in over 40 years.
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