Cuneiform Records: Releases for May 2007

From Cuneiform PR******

ALEC K. REDFEARN AND THE EYESORES - THE BLIND SPOT (Rune 244)     GENRE: ROCK / POST-ROCK
Post-rock's magical/"folk" surrealists, Alec K. Redfearn and the Eyesores are based in Providence, Rhode Island, fertile ground for horror writers, academics, colorful politicians and artists of all stripes. The band's music captures that city's essence, blurring the lines between past and present, fiction and fact, shrouding dark secrets. Simultaneously beautiful and horrific, elegant and lowbrow, playful and cynical, its sound crosses genres as easily as a ghost floats through solid walls. Composed by Redfearn, the music combines myriad influences - traditional eastern and western European folk music (including gypsy music), pre-WWII French and German cabaret, circus music, early 20th century classical, classical minimalism, maverick 20th century Americana, elements from visionary French iconoclasts (Pierre Bastien, Pascal Comelade, Albert Marcoeur), acid folk, noise, psychedelia, drone rock, and more - with a dark, primitive, intentionally rough-edged and gritty, folk-crafted sensibility. Redfearn's songs, whether instrumental or darkly lyrical, are rhythmically entrancing, evocative and remarkably cinematic, leading one critic to call them "as much stage set as free-standing compositions, a space against which unusual and foreign activities might be acted out." The Blind Spot, Alec K. Redfearn and the Eyesores' 6th CD and its 2nd release on Cuneiform, is musically and conceptually the band's most ambitious work to date. In the 11 songs on The Blind Spot, Redfearn explores the wavering veil that separates life and death, heaven and hell, soul and body, fact and fiction, and art and reality. In doing so, he blurs the lines separating musical genres, and folk and fine art. At the core of The Blind Spot lays an astonishing 8-song funereal song cycle - "I am the Resurrection and the Light" - that Redfearn created as a eulogy for friends who died from addiction and as a personal lament on spiritual bankruptcy, physical addiction and human loss.

UPSILON ACRUX - GALAPAGOS MOMENTUM (Rune 245)     GENRE: ROCK / POST-PUNK
Upsilon Acrux is among the best of the young bands transforming punk rock's landscape, reinvigorating punk's physically powerful, aggressive and speed-driven sound by infusing it with a compositional intensity and technical prowess long associated with various forms of metal and progressive rock. In Upsilon Acrux's hands, this sonic fusion results in an explosive new music that is both exhilarating and abstract. A tapestry of complex and hyperkinetic instrumental sound, Upsilon Acrux's music is composed of disparate elements, dissonance and unexpected time changes daringly interwoven with, and/or punctuated by, beautiful and accessible melodies. This CD, Galapagos Momentum, is Upsilon Acrux's 5th release and its first on Cuneiform. Galapagos Momentum features 41 minutes of aggressive, intricate, athletic and composed post-punk instrumental rock contained on 10 tracks. Simultaneously physical and cerebral, challenging and melodic, Galapagos Momentum is Upsilon Acrux's most accessible yet sophisticated release to date.

THE CLAUDIA QUINTET - FOR (Rune 247)     GENRE: JAZZ / POST-JAZZ
"For" is the new CD by the Claudia Quintet, the genre-defying band led by Grammy-nominated composer John Hollenbeck. Since Hollenbeck first presented the band in an internet cafe on Avenue A in Manhattan in 1997, the Claudia Quintet has amazed audiences from Alabama to the Amazon. Their unique sound has inspired dancing hippie girls at a New Mexico noise festival, the avant-garde cognoscenti in the concert halls of Vienna and Sao Paolo, and a generation of young musicians worldwide. In the course of the thousands of miles they have traveled together and hundreds of concerts they've played, the Claudia Quintet has evolved and grown, developing a dynamic live sound based on trust and spontaneity. They bring this powerful energy into the studio, where they record the old-fashioned way, live, playing as a band. The legions of people who have been won over by the music of the Claudia Quintet live and on CD attest to the fact that genre-defying new music need not be "inaccessible." "For" is for everyone. "For" is a positive message. "For" is driving rhythms, beautiful melodies, and passionate virtuosity. "For" is for all music lovers. "For" is also their fourth CD.

STEVE LACY - ROSWELL RUDD QUARTET - EARLY AND LATE (Rune 250/251)     GENRE: JAZZ
The name of Steve Lacy is synonymous with the term Modern Jazz. One of the greatest soprano saxophonists in the history of jazz, he is responsible for popularizing that instrument in the post-WWII years, resurrecting it from Dixieland and introducing it, liberated and free, into the modern world. One of Lacy's most significant contributions to modern jazz was done in collaboration with trombonist, composer and ethnomusicologist Roswell Rudd, who, paralleling Lacy, had transformed a Dixieland instrument into a modern performance weapon. In a quartet during the early 1960s, Lacy and Rudd pioneered the notion of modern jazz repertory by devoting themselves solely to the music of Thelonious Monk, Herbie Nichols, Cecil Taylor and other modern, living composers - a radical concept at the time. They insisted that each generation should honor its own masters, and that 'jazz standards' should grow exponentially - a "jazz process" - and not be a hermetically sealed, closed set. This double CD release by Cuneiform, titled Early and Late, provides a 40-year overview of Lacy's and Rudd's collaborations in the Steve Lacy-Roswell Rudd Quartet. The earliest recordings on this release date from October 9, 1962, one year after Lacy and Rudd formed their quartet; the latest tracks date from August 9, 2002, two years before Lacy died. None of these recordings have been previously released - they are heard here for the first time. Jason Weiss, editor of Steve Lacy: Conversations (Duke University, 2006) compiled and produced the release and wrote the liner notes. Consisting of both studio and live recordings, Early and Late compliments and illuminates other releases by the Steve Lacy-Roswell Rudd Quartet, helping to complete the Lacy-Rudd story.

STEVE MILLER / LOL COXHILL - COXHILL/MILLER MILLER/COXHILL "THE STORY SO FAR..." "...OH REALLY?" (Rune 253/254)     GENRE: ROCK / JAZZ-ROCK / FUSION
Long embraced as a "national treasure" [BBC] within his native England, a series of reissues, retrospectives, and new releases around the turn of the century have revealed saxophonist Lol Coxhill to be one of the world's most distinctive voices on soprano sax. In a career spanning more than half a century, and continuing unabated in energy and originality today, he has proven himself equally adept at performing music both "inside" and "outside" the box. One of the key formative experiences of Coxhill's early musical career was his work from 1968-73 in composer and pianist Steve Miller's London based band, Delivery, and his independent work with Miller and others from the "Canterbury School" bands that Delivery spawned. This double CD release by Cuneiform documents Steve Miller and Lol Coxhill's collaborations in the early 1970s, a three year period during which they worked together intensely. It includes the first CD reissues of their two albums: Miller/Coxhill Coxhill/Miller, and "The Story so Far." ".Oh Really?" It also includes several previously unreleased live performance recordings. Cuneiform's CD package includes a 20-page booklet containing historical photos of Miller and Coxhill, an interview Steve Miller gave in the summer of 1998 with Nick Loebner, and liner notes written by Mike King, who coordinated this release. The first reissue of Coxhill and Miller's collaborations on CD, and featuring guest performances by the storied Canterbury School musicians Kevin Ayers, Laurie Allan, Archie Legget, Pip Pyle, Richard Sinclair, and Robert Wyatt, this double CD is an essential document for those interested in Canterbury School music, including Soft Machine, Matching Mole, Caravan and Hatfield and the North. It is also a fascinating overview of an important period in the development of one of the masters of contemporary soprano sax and improvisation, providing clues as to how the Blues and Canterbury School music influenced the avant-garde, and how the avant-garde in turn influenced the development of the Canterbury School.