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MAWJA
“Studio one”
Michael Bullock (contrabass & feedback), Mazen Kerbaj (trumpet) and Vic Rawlings (cello & surface electronics). “One strike isn’t enough. This album struck me like a big wave, a wave that makes you lose your consciousness and equilibrium for several minutes, leaving you wondering what just happened to you during this elusive lapse of time. Probably this is exactly the purpose of this trio, where as their music draws rust from your very skin, suburban rust, from those big suburbs where the individual melts, and all individuality is melted by the heavy burden that eats all. The sound ate the self, ate the collective, ate time, and invaded space. I wasn’t expecting such a radical treatment of sound. The music here goes out of time, depriving it of its value despite the usual ties that link time and music as an art form. What we hear is rather a strong binding with space, using it as a compositional tool. This music does not move, but it wanders like blocks of colours or shapes in the empty. The reunion of Bullock, Rawlings and Kerbaj for this recording leaves no possibilities for any future; it is a meeting of the here and now, like the musical result that is released with this recording. The Present time is simultaneously constructed and deconstructed, making the “now quality” predominant on the atmosphere of this record. The unified sound of the trio fills the air like a short-wave radio signal, carrying its usual load of small marginal details; a sound that resembles music or walks by it without remorse, not stopping at any station along the way. Three musicians, both friends and enemies, yet above all partners of this same game, where there are no rules for improvising; one erases the other, without regret, for the sake of unity in sound.” Raed Yassin, Beirut, March 2007.
Original price was: 14,00€.8,00€Current price is: 8,00€.
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ARIHA BRASS QUARTET
s/t
Axel Dörner trumpet. Franz Hautzinger trumpet. Mazen Kerbaj trumpet. Carl Ludwig Hübsch tuba. Recorded (on the 20th and 21st of november 2013). Artwork & design by Mazen Kerbaj.
15,00€
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“A” TRIO
“Music to our ears”
Mazen Kerbaj, trumpet. Sharif Sehnaoui, acoustic guitar. Raed Yassin, double bass. All music improvised by Kerbaj, Sehnaoui, Yassin. Recorded, mixed and mastered by Fadi Tabbal at tunefork studio on the 29th and 30th of september 2010. Artwork & design by Mazen Kerbaj.
14,00€
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SPILL
“Stockholm syndrome”
Magda Mayas, piano. Tony Buck, drums. All music by Magda Mayas and Tony Buck. Track 1 recorded live by teemu korpipää at kiasma theatre, helsinki, on the 12th of november 2010 during the äänen lumo festival for new sounds. Track 2 recorded live at nasjonal jazz scene, oslo, on the 20th of october 2010. Mixed and mastered by Tony Buck. Artwork & design by Mazen Kerbaj.
14,00€
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Stéphane RIVES
“Much remains to be heard”
All music by Stéphane Rives (soprano saxophone). Recorded in october 2007 at Villa Bustros, Beirut. Recording, mixing and mastering by Stéphane Rives.
“In my first solo record, Fibres (on Potlatch), the physicality of sound - meant in both dimensions of physics and corporality - made the listener instantaneously captive of the predominant high-pitches, the density of the textures and the stretched durations. It offered to hear a work in progress, where the assumed presence of labour took part in the process of the music itself, putting in question the very act of listening by forcefully imposing its occupation of place and time. For instance the process created by the combination of mechanical and acoustic factors proper to the saxophone could bring the totality of desired random events, but paradoxically also had the negative effect of constraining the sound field into a space that is very difficult to mould. Guided by this paradox, I was first drawn towards extending the duration of the solo to exhaust it’s intrinsic possibilities, but the repeated experience of live situations lead me to a transformed problematic. This new solo presents itself less as a continuity of Fibres, but rather as an "introspection" of the elements present there, emancipated from their agglomerated state. The progressive discontinuous density of this piece gives silence a its role of quasi existential questioning yet liberating the listener from its apparent formalism, allowing him to relocate his listening in a space and a temporality that is his own. This autonomy pushes, I believe, towards an increase of tension and expectation. This solo is neither an improvisation nor a composition. The sound elements created through improvising are not ordered according to a premeditated composition, but rather by a shaping of intuitions derived from concert experiences. The piece was built in a natural and continuous equilibrium where sounds seem to generate one another within their structural components - intensity, dynamics, duration, stability, thickness…” Stéphane RIVES - Beirut, January 2008
14,00€
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Nicholas CHRISTIAN-Matt MILTON-Eddie PREVOST-Bechir SAADE
“A church is only sacred to believers”
“Recorded on sunday 17th of june 2007 at Atomic studio London by Tim Adams. Mixed and mastered by Marc Codsi. Artwork and design by Mazen Kerbaj. Spontaneity is not mere impulse... It does not imply undeliberated behaviour or feeling. Spontaneity is behaviour, feeling and thought that is free of external constraint, of imposed restriction. It is not an an uncontrolled effluvium of passion and action. Insofar as the individual removes the fetters of domination that have stifled her or his self-activity, she or he is acting, feeling and thinking spontaneously. [...] Spontaneity does not preclude organization and structure... [It] ordinarily yields non-hierarchichal forms of organization.” Murray Bookchin, On Spontaneity and Organization, 1972. (quoted by Maurice Brinton in Solidarity Pamphlet 49, December 1975)
In 1999 I took part in the Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium in Ontario, Canada. During this festival I presented a key-note talk, played some drums and presented some ideas in a music ’clinic.’ After my practical demonstration and discussion with the audience, LaDonna Smith a violinist and an improviser of long-standing, enquired whether I offered this ’workshop’ practice on a regular basis. To which I replied that I did not. To which she responded by saying that I should. On the long flight home from Canada to England I began to reflect upon LaDonna’s words. And, finally I resolved (given I was reaching a - let us say - maturer period in my life) that such an initiative might have some merit. I made myself the promise that I would start a workshop devoted to improvisation with an emphasis upon what I think of as an ’experimental’ kind. The promise included the caveat that I would continue to do this until people stopped coming. With the initial help of the London Musicians’ Collective I found a place to hold a weekly session in central London and, mostly through the grape-vine, people began to arrive. Nine years later they are still coming. And, I suppose it means that I will have to continue. But contrary to whatever vision I had of any outcome, the experience of being involved in the Friday night improvisation workshop in London has produced innumerable, unmeasurable and unexpected outcomes. Not least being meeting with some very remarkable people. For at the date of this CD, some three hundred people have been to this workshop, representing over twenty different nationalities. So, it is not particularly surprising that half of this ensemble are non British. Bechir Saade is from Lebanon and Nicolas Christian is from France. What is surprising however, is the seriousness of the engagement. For in this most informal and fragile of musical forms, in which the musicians are searching and simultaneously reviewing new sounds and new configurations and responses, it would be a surprise if there were no doubts about this practice and numerous failures. But of course, negotiating failure (whatever that might be!) can be the route to other kinds of success (whatever that might be!). One thing of which I do feel certain however, is that in an enquiring and open-minded engagement, of the kind that characterizes improvisations such as on this CD, requires the development of an unconventional intelligence. In the looking for new sounds and new musical (and social) relationships the mind accesses (and maybe thereby enhances) a cognitive fluidity. For to make music of meaning for the moment the musician has to go beyond what is understood as the ’musical’. Paradoxically, the ’notion of music’ is perhaps an inhibiting factor in making music. Music for the world at large had perhaps become a fixed idea and often institutionalised. Possibly forms of music have become kinds of a church that is subtly alluded to in this title for the CD. Whether or not we too are creating a church may be an open question. Certainly the way we work, individually and together, suggests and encourages methods and an ethos very different from any other kind of music I know of. If it is becoming ’a church’ (and co-incidently the weekly London workshop takes place in the school room of a Welsh Chapel), then it is extremely open and tolerant of all approaches. All that it seems to abhor is unthinking responses and intolerance itself.” Eddie Prévost - 30th September 2008
14,00€
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Mike COOPER – Chris ABRAHAMS
“Trace”
Veterans experimental musicians Mike Cooper (originally from the UK, now living in Italy) and Chris Abrahams (from Australia) first teamed up as a duo in Sydney in 2005 to record the album Oceanic Felling Like, released in 2007 on Australian label Room40 to critical acclaim. Their second album Live In Sydney was recorded in April 2009 at a Sydney Improvised Music Association (SIMA) concert in the Sound Lounge of Sydney University, and released on Turkish improv music label Re:Konstrukt in late 2009. Trace, the duo’s second studio album, was released by Lebanese experimental label Al-Maslakh in April 2014, during the 14th edition of the Irtijal Festival for improvised music. Mike Cooper, electroacoustic guitar, effects. Chris Abrahams, piano, organ and electric piano. All music improvised, recorded and mixed by Abrahams and Cooper in Sydney, Australia on the 9th of April 2009. Artwork and design by Mazen Kerbaj. Inside drawings by Mike Cooper.
14,00€
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Christine SEHNAOUI – Michel WAISVISZ
“Shortwave”
Edition of 500 numbered copies. About the recording : Christine Sehnaoui and Michel Waiswisz, met in Sweden in September 2006 when they performed a trio with percussionist Sven-Åke Johansson (this music can be heard on the Beirut-Ystad / Olof Bright CD16/17). They kept on working together until the present days whenever that was possible. The highlight of their collaboration could be several full days of recording at the famous GRM studios in Paris at 2 different periods during the year 2007. Selecting the music that you will hear on this CD has surely been the hardest part of the entire process. There was so much interesting and different material available that narrowing them down to an hour seemed an impossible task. There have been as much as 6 different versions of the recording, many of them with no single track in common, and all of them seemed perfect in the moment. The final decision was made after the artists gave the label this responsibility. We hope to have made the most out of the material at hand. About the musicians : Christine Sehnaoui has emerged in a short period as an innovative alto sax player, developing a personal language on her instrument. She has been involved in the Lebanese improvisation scene since its very first hours. Michel Waisvisz is a key figure in the live-electronics scene. He is one of the first live performers on synthesizers and the creator of many instruments, the most famous being the Crackle-Box and The Hands. Shortwave is his first studio recording to be released since the late seventies.
14,00€