Avant Garde 2023

New Future City Radio is the first duo collaboration of longtime creative partners Damon Locks & Rob Mazurek. In a hyperactive 40-minute, 18-track suite that runs like a boombox mixtape, the two prolific multi-media artists contemplate community, transformation, and the future through the programmatic format of a pirate radio station for the people.

RSD 2023 release. This iconic concert performance has NEVER been released on vinyl until now. This deluxe package includes an OBI strip, single album jacket, printed inner sleeve, new record labels unique for this release and a special Crystal Clear Light Blue Color Vinyl pressing.

Eli Wallace’s first studio solo piano album - pieces & interludes - is a collection of four pieces (compositions) and three interludes in juxtaposition with each other. The pieces materialized from intentional experimentation with specific piano preparations that came to define the content and generate the morphology. However, the entire album is improvised; there’s no score. These compositions are a framework for spontaneity.

When Gaia Falls from composer Bradford Blackburn is an environmental call for action in the face of climate change manifested through musical, literary, and sonic eclecticism as a medium of universality. Its central message? There is no better time to save the future than the present.

Laughter erupts onto the scene like a mighty roar. Melodic riffs burst forth from the saxophone amid the lush tones of the vibraphone. The cello cuts across in thick, chocolatey slices, fading into a whisper at times. From out of the primordial darkness, a shapeshifting voice materializes, inviting us to partake in the ritual.

The 2022 Jazzfest Berlin performance by revered, iconoclastic reedist Peter Brötzmann, Moroccan Gnaoua adept Majid Bekkas playing the two-stringed, camelskin-backed guembre, and Chicago-bred drummer Hamid Drake, documented as Catching Ghosts, is historic.

Cain and Abel: War Dances for Prepared Piano is the second contemporary composition by the experimental pianist Christian Grifa, transcribed and set to music by paraphrasing bold sequences of notes on the score, along the lines of those of the previous composition, which develop in an anachronistic way the most classic of the biblical episodes after the creation of Man through God (the death and the killing of Abel at the hands of his brother Cain), and at the same time outline sacred, profane, philosophical and historical themes, highlighting the interesting archetypal reasoning that gravitates around the orbit of the same episode, on the which still today the man reflects, and asks himself important questions, without however being able to find a precise answer, bringing back to the mind and to the listener's ear a reflection of the key musical theme of the previous piano piece prepared "Hymn to the Earth”.

Abstraction, with feeling. Saxophonist Paul Dunmall, a veteran experimental jazz musician, was feeling drawn to vitality. He wanted to organize a group of musicians that were driven by an underlying pulse and a central energy, beyond the abstract improvisations he had been familiar with for years. He had always appreciated jazz that had a driving, uplifting energy, and organized this quartet, inspired by these musicians’ previous improvisational performances. Alongside guitarist Steven Saunders, bassist Dave Kane, drummer Miles Levin, Dunmall produces an exuberant two-track, hour-long album, ‘World Without,' ranging from spontaneous crescendo to moments of quieter interlude.

Berlin trumpeters Axel Dörner and Lina Allemano team up to create experimental improvised sonic explorations, both in duo and in larger trumpet-ensemble form. The pieces' titles reference the small lesser-known objects circling around the sun in our solar system; the album’s title Aphelia being the furthest distance away in orbit around the sun.

Expanding on pianist/composer Matt Mitchell's 2013 duo album Fiction with Ches Smith is this double-duo release over 2 CDs, one CD with Smith performing on drums, gongs, percussion, vibraphone, glockenspiel, tam-tam & timpani, and one CD with drummer/percussionist Kate Gentile, performing Mitchell's fascinatingly convoluted works that integrate composition with improvisation.