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. 

Major re-think of operating strategies from Tom James Scott who has forsaken his earlier incarnation as a ‘folk’ guitarist and instead amplified the minimalist tendencies already present in his work, constructing a series of organic electronic elegies that move in waves of subtly accruing detail and that seem to mimic elemental process. There’s a heady Terry Riley-vibe to much of this, with cells of angelically treated sine-tones and single guitar chords flashing in and out of form as the tracks expand and contract. There’s aspects of William Basinski, even of Makoto Kawabata’s Inui, albeit with a fully electrified palette but overall there’s something uncannily similar to what Oneohtrix Point Never have been attempting with Replica, a modern minimalist take on contemporary synth sound that makes much play of being keyed to very particular states of mind/body. Out of left field for sure but a more than worthwhile development. Edition of 350 copies on clear vinyl.