Jerry Granelli - 1313 LP
Jerry Granelli has lived a mythic life. He drummed in some of the biggest jazz outfits of the 50s-60s, including Vince Guaraldi Trio and the Denny Zeitlin Trio. Like many of his peers, Granelli could have played it safe and made a comfortable career doing traditional jazz into his old age, but instead he dove into the new worlds of free and psychedelic music that were opening up around him during the hippie era in San Francisco. In the early 60’s he led one of the first free jazz bands in America. They did a three month opening spot for Lenny Bruce and toured extensively through Europe with the Grateful Dead, playing completely wild and spontaneous sets night after night, often to the scorn of unsuspecting audiences. A few years later he joined Light Sound Dimension (LSD), an outfit that paired marathons of free, amplified jazz with projection painting, effectively launching the first ever psychedelic light and sound event at the San Francisco Art Museum in 1967. LSD was recently inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.>>more

 

Grand Trine - Sunglasses 12"
The Sunglasses EP finds Montreal's leather clad, psych delinquents Grand Trine injecting the energy of rock with the liberating sonic adventurism of the avant-garde. They do it with violence, piss, life, bleakness and primitivism. And they do it well. Led by agitated frontman Tobias Rochman (formerly of Be Bad) and featuring free jazz sax player Cabral Jacobs, this 5 song EP captures that primal four-on-the-floor frenzy epitomized by proto-punk outfits like the Stooges, MC5, Electric Eels, and early Velvet Underground, bands that lit the spark for the initial punk movement. >>more

Chuck Blazevic – This is our Chicago ‘94
The infinite number of possibilities that present themselves to a modern day electronic musician must make the task of shaping poignant music incredibly difficult. How does someone wade through all the processing options to manifest a clear and effective vision? Charles Blazevic makes it look easy. The three songs on this Freewave offering are minimal and emotionally focused. There is a steady approach here that definitely evokes the music of modern composers like Terry Riley and Steve Reich, but there are also some especially original structural elements at work.  As minimal as these tracks seem, the passages never stop soaring through peaks and valleys in the most subtle of ways. The ride is so gentle and the transitions so smooth that you'll feel as if you are flying with both feet still firmly planted on the ground.

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Les Beyond - You Speak in Circles + Shortened Nights
Les Beyond is the new solo project of ex-Shearing Pinx guitarist Erin Ward. Although the tranquil mood of Les Beyond is a 180 degree turn from her contribution to the explorative noise punk of Shearing Pinx, the depth of this new work is just as strong. Les Beyond is meditative guitar music made for inward listening and dissolving the world around us. But it is an unease calm that take us away. The swells of melodic guitar drone follow an ever darkening cloud, leaving the contemplative listener a zoned wanderer with eyes to the shadowy corners of the mind. Mastered by Evan Cardwell.

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Ryan Kirk - Microtonal Freewaves
Ryan Kirk is another excellent product of Dalhousie University’s current Modern Composition Program. Somehow I was lucky enough to end up on Ryan’s email list, so for the last half a year or so I’ve been getting download links to all these brilliant guitar experimentations. Every one of them seemed like a potential release, so I asked Ryan about doing a Freewave EP. Thankfully he agreed. Microtonal Freewaves certainly has an academic flavour. As the album notes explain, the five tracks here explore the spaces between the twelve standardized notes in a modern keyboard octave --- the microtones. So the melodic movement of this music is quite unusual and interesting. Whereas some academic types might turn out a dull listen when it comes to exercises like this one, Ryan conjures up an especially moving performance, using these unique tonalities to touch on a very distinct emotional experience.

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