Great new all-improvised junk ritual and ethno-blurt from the winning duo of Jon Marshall (Hunter Gracchus/La Drapeau  et al) and Ben Morris (Chora/Le Drapeau Noir et al). A little more over-loaded than any of the players’ previous outings, this has almost a Futura/Red Records ‘feel’, with the kind of odd percussive miniatures, contorted almost-jazz and convulsive vocalese that would situate it somewhere downwind of Jac Berrocal w/aspects of the more ferocious passages of Richard Youngs’ Festival or even Flower/Corsano factored in. There’s a tactile, hands-on quality to the jams that is well beyond the usual improv furniture-polishers and if the sound of swallowing your own tongue makes you a sound-poet then these guys are friggin Lettrists. A great set that mixes psych, bandstand rocking freedom and hands-on DIY ritual to maximal psychoactive effect. Edition of 100 copies. 

The Le Drapeau Noir LP that came out on Chironex a while back pretty much raised the bar in terms of UK higher-minded Planetary Sit-In-style communal drone, immediately filed alongside classic of the form like John Clyde-Evans’ Fisheye LP and your favourite Vibracathedral Orchestra and early A Band sides. Whalley Range documents this big band’s third performance, a group that sees the massed ranks of the ‘Sheffield scene’ – Part Wild Horses Mane On Both Sides, Chora, The Hunter Gracchus – combining post Dream Syndicate string drones with the kind of brutalist/scattershot free jazz of New York Eye & Ear Control while levitating the goddamn room. The various components are actually fairly distinguishable – Kelly Jones’ majestic flute work, Pascal Nichols loose, martial drums, Chora’s Industrial gamelan, Hunter Gracchus’s ethno-flux – but the combination somehow transcends alla its component parts making for a music of profound simultaneity while accessing the kind of eternally peaking zone of classics like Don Cherry’s Organic Music Society or the Henry Flynt Orchestra. Pro-dubbed tapes, fold-out colour sleeves, another major release from these heads. Recommended.