Multireedist Roscoe Mitchell is well into his 70s, but coasting just isn’t on his agenda. These two albums, which are products of the same two-day session, reflect a recent strategy in which the master woodwind player has matched up with much younger drummers who have some concepts of their own. Like drummer Mike Reed and multi-instrumentalist Weasel Walter, both of whom he has played with in the past year, Kikanju Baku, the percussionist on this session, is a player who makes things happen. Possessed of both manic energy and a fine instinct for restraint, he articulates elaborate shapes that sound like they owe as much to prog rock as to any radition of improvisation.
Mitchell takes to their convolution like a duck to water; his own playing is all sharp angles, coarse cries and pitches so acrid, they seem to have been set alight by Baku’s ferocity. Taborn’s piano runs match Mitchell’s lines in momentum and persistence, but he also has good instincts for when to hold back; there are long passages where he plays sparsely or not at all. His other keyboards add subliminal textures and tonal variety without once lapsing into mere novelty.
Both of these CDs are remarkably consistent; the engagement and invention never flags, which makes it hard to favor one over the other. Honor also goes out to the session engineers, Gregory Howe and Jimmy Fontana. Not only is the sound crisp and immaculate, it imparts a spacial experience that makes it feel like the music is happening all around the listener.

—Bill Meyer

These excellent trio recordings provide proof that, 50 years into his recording career, multi-instrumentalist Roscoe Mitchell continues to find new worlds to explore in his musical universe. Though his compositional methods range from music notated along traditional lines to free improvisation, it seems safe to assume that most of what we hear on Conversations I and Angel City is improvised along preset guidelines. What these might be is, ultimately, irrelevant to the experience of hearing the music, but the fact that they guide the ways that the musicians relate to one another is worth keeping in mind. On Conversations I, Mitchell is joined by Craig Taborn (piano, keyboards and synthesizers) and Kikanju Baku (percussion). Taborn has worked with Mitchell frequently since the late ‘90s while Baku is newer to the scene and information gleaned online (there are no liners here) indicates that he is a Japanese musician based in London. Taborn never puts a foot wrong, whether he is working through the avant side of his widely varied piano style or showing how well a judiciously handled synthesizer can blend in on a group improvisation. Baku is extremely impressive as well, his concept of rhythm not unlike the constant fragmentation of either a Milford Graves or such Europeans as Tony Oxley, but his frame of reference is completely different from either of these masters.

Baku’s willingness either to lay out or simply lay low for prolonged periods helps the overall flow enormously and when things heat up, he is right there, dancing through the traffic with agility and poise. As for Mitchell, he spends more time giving subtle cues than pouring out a lot of flipped-out saxophone lines. It’s a blast when he does get into some of this, as on “Outpost Nine Calling” for instance, but when this happens it feels like part of the whole play, not just one actor’s monologue.

— Duck Baker

a monstrous zoic arborisation, even by my own cacuminal sub-stream & successive stints of stupefaction Ha-Ha-Ha! Poise-Spore & Abnorm-Avant Noise-Imeptuity mutagen & meta-misplacement precipitancy draconian-divergent horology re-wiring & acute teratoid metanoia…y’ dig?

So iyl be fuckin’ it up with volcanic-visionary Roscoe Mitchell at this years Vision Festival on th 7th of April along with a large segment of his henchmen – Tyshawn Sorey, Hugh Ragin etc. Hopefully some recordings will also generate from/around this event, mull th mordancy, marked – by mercurial miscuity & circuitry….can I get a witness?

Supra seditionary Gratecore/Grindcore unit Law Facilitates Crime will be recording our debut EP this February. A website is impending. More hi-cap on LFC from Jigokuki ryt’ here toots – 
“Incomparable Grind/ Gratecore propulsion. Electing the most savage & ascetic tenets of integral Grind virtue & battering them to an advanced stage of combat – combining uneven time signatures, modal intricacies & syncopations with irregular as fuck punctuations directly to the classic single-foot D & C Beat & multifarious Blastbeat formula to transmute a terrifyingly effective, absurdly fast & aggressive advancement, with Grate & Grind so destructive it will file down any obstacle. Savvy as fuck & monstrously progressive as well as taking the core elements of non-metallic Grind severity to the most tumultuous & peerless crest with speeds & consecutive attack that literally defy belief. With radical activist, subversive & rogue-journalist links, contributions & samples hewing some of the most strident philippic & informed attacks on the corporation-crisis, putrefaction-politics & rampant Western corruption.”

Th kiddd will be playing a live gig with Roscoe & HIS ENTIRE Trio conventicle in Chicago this September at th MCA in Chiraq. Loox lyk ECM will also be recording th eruption for their label, not a bad bloody idea iyl tell e’. I also hope to throw down with th AACM & scavenge some cool recordings to smack convention a new farce-goal. Hopefully I can pull some Kanju autonomy & become th first damn fool frum Th Divided Kingdom to merge with those maniacs n’ break bitches off sumthin’ superlunary Hyuk-Hyuk!!! Basically, MAJOR pyromania & intemperate dalliance n’ megrim are on th cards!

Next Year (2015 dat is) is the 50TH Anniversary of the AACM. The Musuem of Contemporary Art in Chicago will be mounting the Freedom Principle Exhibition starts July through November 2015.

http://www2.mcachicago.org/exhibition/the-freedom-principle-experiments-in-art-and-music-1965-to-now/

Junk-yard Poise-Spore frum th vaults! ginormous rough-cement discordant dissimilitude somewhere between Sludgecore, instrumental Hip-Hop, Noyz, improvised-exogen, Breakcore/Jungle & jagged noxious Free-Funk Farrago distortion erosion. satisfyingly lo-fi with dirt clods on th disc lens, this is ultra-limited to just 64 hand numbered copies, dug out of a Mayan burial complex by th cultists at Erst-While Antrum & hawked from th sewage cistern to adventurist sono-psychedelic explorers ( www.jigokuki.org )  

Erst-While Antrum #15 (Leg-Getter) careens out of th laboratory catacombs, a fustian misalliant miscegenation of exotic aberration to challenge even th most eclectic eremites amongst us. tons & tons of really anfractuous byzantine outermost from m’self n’ others to lynch those limits!!! snatch up one of th hand numbered pink spray-painted CDR’s frum me or Erst-While Antrum.

 clock formation of four old improvised jams in th Phosphorus-Funk, kinetic Off-Road-Farrago Jazz hemisphere. run & knock, run amok, stun th clock!!! download th full MP3 zip ryt here dimples.

YAAAAY! NO ONE stoves yur guts in as hard, fast & ferociously as those Bollock Swine brutes! Back from th flower garden with 5yv incinerators of beyond bestial Olympic marathon blast-cornucopia Torikowashi User-Hostile Gunk Neko-Neko-Noyzcore. Shrieking Oriental femme mania, remorseless numenesque kinetic percussion poly-pummel & harsh blat with shredding Blur-Bass distortion downpour. BS’s hysterical hifalutin heterosexuals are heavenly homologated by Hungarian Anti-Listener harsh NoyzGrynd Blastcore mob Chappa’ai to that wunerful’ puréed hippocampus after-glow & thoroughly scoured cranial scoop gouge. I don’t read th bible, but pretty sure this wus wut they were trying to get at! Comes on a sassy pink pro-cassette with neon-green spray-paint spatter job & full colour glossy (heh!) three panel inlay in a coloured case. Hand numbered to 377 copies, secreted by those mutant scientist, rogue botanical chemists tantric-terrrorists at Tetsubish Gob-Stopper/Jigokuki. Available direct from me, from TGS/Jigokuki or any self-respecting hazardous sonix merchant. www.jigokuki.org