New limited to 50 copies DVD from this aggressively angular free improv/No Wave unit featuring drummer Pascal Nichols.

Much-anticipated new album from the greatest live band in the UK right now, Manchester’s Part Wild Horses Mane On Both Sides. Percussionist Pascal Nichols and flautist Kelly Jones have minted a profound new form of improvisation that carves spectral shapes from silence and creates free music with a spare orchestral beauty and deep psychedelic atmosphere. Augmenting their instruments with electronics, tapes and old military communication systems, they expand the basic free jazz format with drones, feedback and zoned vocals, taking the Cherry/Blackwell duets and relocating them upwind of the alien soundtracks generated by Japan’s Taj Mahal Travellers. This latest album presents five tracks of sublime, infinitely nuanced duo exchange. Nichols kit is so tonal, so expressive of melody, that at points it sounds like he’s playing acoustic bass lines with it, shadowing Jones’s flute as it ascends through heavenly stratas of pure tone. At points the hand-drums and scuttering vocal chants bring to mind Sun City Girls’ ethno-forgeries but there’s also aspects of Angus MacLise and Amon Duul in their cultic depth. Unlike so many improvisers who suffer from attention-deficit Nichols and Jones are capable of incredible subtlety and of painstaking minimalist tension, using silence and single notes to dissolve both space and time. And when Jones plays those incredible sighing runs that sound somewhere between Roland Kirk and Sabu Orimo, dissolving like pink clouds, and Nichols makes one simple movement of his hands and then the next, the effect is overwhelming. We’ve said it before but there’s no one else that can touch them right now. Their combination of inspired musicianship and refusal of received technique makes them the most exciting psychedelic free jazz ritualists of their time. And this is a stunning document of a group at the peak of their powers. Edition of 530 copies. Highly recommended. 

Beautiful vinyl upgrade, with individual hand-painted detail on the sleeves, from one of the most consistently mind-blowing groups in the UK. This one is even more claustrophobic and disturbing than their creeped-out Chocolate Monk disc, with the sound of creaking percussion and dooms of gong tone conjuring the whole ghost galleon in distress feel of Nurse With Wound’s A Salt Marie Celeste while mutated vocals, voids of breath and Jones’s fantastic flute playing carve halos in the air. It’s still amazing to me that they manage to be so inventive and so consistently ‘on’ while working from such a minimal instrumental palette but I’ve yet to hear anything by these two that hasn’t handed me my ass on a plate. On 180g vinyl. Highly recommended.

Dream team split release that pairs two of the best free/folk jam bands on the goddamn planet, England’s Part Wild Horses Mane On Both Sides and Denmark’s Shiggajon. Shiggajon contribute two tracks, a slow-burning vertical ascension of reeds over slow bowing strings and a final epic traverse of organ drone and triumphal brass that takes off on John Coltrane’s Cosmic Music. Part Wild Horses are on equally epic form, with the sound of slow feedback tones and prayer bowls sparkling in deep silence before Pascal starts batting around time signatures and Kelly summons the ghost of Takehisa Kosugi. Still no one like them. Highly recommended.