Avant Grade

Ensemble Nimbus is a Swedish quartet (keyboards, clarinet, viola and percussions) that belongs to the tradition of Scandinavia's orchestral-grade progressive-rock with a touch of Univers Zero. A very modern and lively twist on the Zamla/RIO/Zeuhl type sound, but high-tech and very very lively, featuring Hasse Bruniusson (ex-Zamla Mammaz Manna) on drums. Bruniusson is also a member of the better known Roine Stolt's Flower Kings where he is the bands percussionist. Within Ensemble Nimbus he also plays acoustic & electric drums as well as adding the percussion. This band, yet another Swedish band, is described as the "second generation of European… RIO. "Garmonbozia" is their 3rd studio album.

Ensemble Nimbus is a Swedish quartet (keyboards, clarinet, viola and percussions) that belongs to the tradition of Scandinavia's orchestral-grade progressive-rock with a touch of Univers Zero. A very modern and lively twist on the Zamla/RIO/Zeuhl type sound, but high-tech and very very lively, featuring Hasse Bruniusson (ex-Zamla Mammaz Manna) on drums. Bruniusson is also a member of the better known Roine Stolt's Flower Kings where he is the bands percussionist. Within Ensemble Nimbus he also plays acoustic & electric drums as well as adding the percussion. This band, yet another Swedish band, is described as the "second generation of European… RIO.

Ensemble Nimbus is a Swedish quartet (keyboards, clarinet, viola and percussions) that belongs to the tradition of Scandinavia's orchestral-grade progressive-rock with a touch of Univers Zero. A very modern and lively twist on the Zamla/RIO/Zeuhl type sound, but high-tech and very very lively, featuring Hasse Bruniusson (ex-Zamla Mammaz Manna) on drums. Bruniusson is also a member of the better known Roine Stolt's Flower Kings where he is the bands percussionist. Within Ensemble Nimbus he also plays acoustic & electric drums as well as adding the percussion. This band, yet another Swedish band, is described as the "second generation of European… RIO.

"I come from the generation that went to school to learn music,” says Lewis, a self-described seeker and old soul of thirty-nine who did his undergrad at Howard University in Washington DC and earned his master’s at Cal Arts, where he studied with Charlie Haden and others. “What happens in that environment is everything becomes overly complicated. [After Jesup Wagon] I was aware about how inside my head I tend to get. I started thinking about the importance of breaking out of those thought patterns from school. At this point I have a kind of trained intuition, to know where stuff is supposed to go. I began to challenge that, and the more I did, the more I became obsessed with the basics.”

Altoist Marion Brown is perhaps best known for performances on albums by his contemporaries, such as Coltrane's Ascension, but Brown stands on his own as one of the most creative and important forces to come out of the 1960s avant-garde jazz movement. Porto Novo is widely regarded as one of Brown's best recordings, captured during a 1967 session in Holland at the peak of his creative powers, accompanied by bassist Maarten van Regteben Altena and drummer Han Bennink. Previously out of print for decades, the recording has now been remastered for a long-overdue reissue on audiophile-grade vinyl, exclusively for Record Store Day 2020.

Recorded April 2018 at Willimantic Records in Willimantic, Connecticut. This is the American debut release from Lao Dan, China’s emerging free player on bamboo flute, suona and alto saxophone. Dan’s voice is starkly unique, even among the blurred lines of international Improv/Jazz. He’s steeped in native traditions yet eagerly obliterates those boundaries with ecstatic intensity and haunting melodies. His dense reedy, drones and jagged melodic shrieks are described as a “Whitmanian yawp,” by Marc Medwin in the liner notes.

Without any obvious keystone event, Biota – who started recording in the late 1970’s as the Mnemonist Orchestra – have quietly become a musical fixture, honoured for their uniquely, abstract, layered, polystylistic approach to musical construction - deaf to fashion or possible sales. And it seems, paradoxically, to have been just this art-orientated commercial indifference that has slowly won them loyal followers and surprisingly respectable sales. Now, for a wider audience - and at a congenial price - this box collects five representative releases that span their discography and track the radical evolution of their crystalline aesthetic – with added documentation, a band history, insights into their work process, and a full-length bonus CD embroidered from their archive of rare and unreleased material. Contents: Funnel to a Thread, Half a True Day, Invisible Map, Object Holder and Gyromancy (recorded as the Mnemonist Orchestra), and the box-only bonus Counterbalance.

One of those releases/events that makes you feel like no other music exists for a hot minute, Dean Blunt returns with a second Black Metal album for Rough Trade, delving deeper into his entirely unfathomable yet completely approachable and direct take on visceral x melancholic folk-pop.