Search:our own organization

Our Own Organisation is a special collaboration project from Tetrode's own Specter and Downbeat's Josè Rico. The deep, hypnotic, relentless songs through the whole ep make this a great addition to Neroli's catalogue!

Blues, country and folk or funk, rock and soul – Broussard always gives his songs a very special touch; here he reaches his peak performance!

Acclaimed soul singer and songwriter Marc Broussard returns with his new studio album, "S.O.S. V: Songs Of The 50's," paying homage to the timeless classics of the 1950s. With his unmistakable, warm soul voice, Broussard interprets timeless songs by legends such as Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Nat King Cole, and Fats Domino—complemented by his own original composition that fits seamlessly into the era. The album is the fifth installment in his successful S.O.S. (Save Our Soul) benefit series, with proceeds once again benefiting the non-profit organization Love Of People in his hometown of Lafayette, Louisiana. His latest charity album, "S.O.S. 4: Blues For Your Soul" (2023), a collaboration with blues icon Joe Bonamassa, benefited the Keeping The Blues Alive Foundation and the organization Guitars Over Guns – and debuted at number 1 on the Billboard Blues Albums chart.

Norman Westberg (guitar), Giridhar Udupa (ghatam, konnakol, khanjira, percussion) and Jacek Mazurkiewicz (double bass, electronics)An extraordinary meeting of three artists from three different musical worlds and three different continents. Norman Westberg (ex-Swans) and Jacek Mazurkiewicz have already released one album together "First Man In The Moon" in 2021 (published by the Swiss label Hallow Ground).In the new project, they are accompanied by Giridhar Udupa, an Indian master of ghatam (a clay percussion instrument that looks like a jug). The album will feature 3 long trance compositions, referring to ambient, krautrock, free jazz and Indian music.Jacek Mazurkiewicz describes the creation of this album as follows:"I met Norman Westberg while supporting the Swans tour in Poland as 3FoNIA. A few years later, during Norman's tour with Gira, we recorded a duet.The trio session took place similarly to the previous duet session during Norman's solo concert in Warsaw on the Swans tour.Recorded with Adam Toczko, a quick meeting on a day off from work.I invited Giridhar Udupa to the trio, whom I had met earlier during the period when I co-founded the band Limboski. I once invited Wacek Zimpel to play a few concerts with Giridhar. Wacek later created Saagara and I was wondering about some unusual musical context in which I would find myself with Giridhar. I was looking for an interesting sound configuration, but also a cultural one, with a different approach to creating music. I got the impression that for both Norman and Giridhar it was a fairly fresh meeting, not obvious. And on the other hand, ordinary - everyone did their own thing."Detroit guitarist Norman Westberg moved to New York in 1980 and became a part of the experimental music scene that was experiencing its golden age. Westberg himself became a permanent fixture when he joined the iconic avant-rock band Swans in 1983, and was the only member other than frontman Michael Gira to play with them for most of the band's run, both until their 1997 disbandment and his return in 2010. Westberg has also been involved with other legendary New York noise-rock acts, including Jim Thirlwell's Foetus and the post-Swans Heroine Sheiks, in which he played with Cows frontman Shannon Selberg; and in 2014, he joined the noise-rock supergroup Hidden Rifles, whose members included Mike Watt of Minutemen and Mark Shippy of U.S. Maple. Westberg's solo compositions, most often for solo guitar and a set of effects, draw on drone and post-minimalism, bringing to mind dark ambient passages from Swans albums.Giridhar Udupa is an extremely valued teacher and world-renowned artist, an Indian master of ghatam (a clay percussion instrument that looks like a jug). He was born into a family with long musical traditions. He began learning to play at the age of four, guided by his father. At the age of twelve, he already had his first performances behind him. He currently gives concerts alongside the greatest masters. He has received many prestigious awards. He performs in the USA, Spain, Canada, France, Switzerland, Germany, Oman and Kuwait. Giridhar Udupa is a member of the band of the Indian vocalist Bombay Jayashri, nominated for an Oscar for the best song for the film Life of Pi. He is one of the founders of the Layatharanga band. He also plays virtuoso other traditional instruments of South India, such as mridangam and kanjira, and is excellent at using the konnakol technique (a type of rhythmic vocalization).For three decades, the artist has been a global ambassador and icon of Carnatic music. He is the founder of The Udupa Foundation, a charity organization established in 2015 to promote Indian music, performing arts and culture. He has participated in recording dozens of albums. He is also well-known in our country thanks to his cooperation with Polish performers, which resulted in excellent artistic effects, such as the famous Indialucia - Michał Czachowski's group / project or the Saagara formation, led by Wacław Zimpel. Udupa also played on the album Lechoechoplexita, released by Leszek Hefi Wiśniewski, and on the album of the band Layatharanga, released in our country.Jacek Mazurkiewicz is interested in music in the broad sense. He puts his sounds together based on emotional impressions and pulse. Combining acoustics with electronics, he is constantly looking for a new sound. Solo as 3FoNIA, in a duet with Mikołaj Trzaska or Tomek Dąbrowski, the JMB trio with Wojtek Jachna and Jacek Buhl, in the Modular String Trio quartet, the Afrobeat quintet Faso Tamala are just some of his musical incarnations. With Patryk Zakrocki, as part of an audio mission, he massaged hundreds of pairs of ears in the Inner Ear Massage Office. He also deals with sound design, composing and producing music for films and theatre performances. He collaborated with many Polish and foreign artists.

Oliver Coates' Throb, shiver, arrow of time is a portal into somatic chiaroscuro, aglow with the embers of imperfect memories and smudged with the plumes of internal echoes, which augment in vast, mercurial dimensions. For his third album on RVNG Intl., the British cellist, composer and producer offers a capsule of personal resonance and remembrance, assembled over the past six years. Throb, shiver, arrow of time traces the familiar metallic anatomy and viscous string modulations of his 2020 release skins n slime, while recentering his inner compulsions following a procession of lauded score writing projects, including the films Aftersun (Charlotte Wells, 2022), The Stranger (Thomas M Wright, 2022) and Occupied City (Steve McQueen, 2023). While working on Aftersun, Wells asked Coates how music could signal that someone is going on a trawl through their memory_a question that has stayed with him ever since and fosters a heartbeat running through the record. Throb, shiver, arrow of time is "all about inaccurate transmissions from our memories, overlaid with emotions from other sources," says Coates. The release is imbued with the ache and glow of recollections mulched together, where the guttural dissonance of misremembering is shrouded by strange orbs of sentiment. At the record's inner core is "Shopping centre curfew," a swift yet cavernous track that emerged five years ago when two real world events, both occurring in South London during the pandemic lockdowns, became fused in a dream: the demolition of Elephant and Castle shopping center, and the discussion of a curfew as a real possibility for all men following a violent crime. A strange simultaneity occurred with this piece of music and Coates built the album out from there, a sense of temporal entropy refracting shimmers of lurking convulsions into lucid sonic topologies. The ten compositions of Throb, shiver, arrow of time find weightless melodies soaring across after-image gradients, magnified and compressed. Misted tones within "Please be normal" and "90" soften drone-soaked shudders of inner acoustics messing up. Vocal invocations appear from long-term collaborators Malibu and chrysanthemum bear, as well as drifting synth radiance from Faten Kanaan. Throb, shiver, arrow of time furthers Coates' reach in collapsing the digital into the analogue and vice versa, allowing serendipity to reorganize the material and push out against the confines of flatness. This sculptural approach to sound is deeply influenced by the intricate installations of artist Sarah Sze, whose permutations of visual matter with its own after-image form kaleidoscopic epitaphs for ephemera and emotion. Coates' thinking about Sze's work and processes flowed together with his own playing and editing techniques, superimposing the textural relief of a live take back into a composition, and allowing the sound to succumb to a dream of itself. As Coates expands, "The cello is a kind of melancholic instrument with a light ethereal spirit. When the sound is flattened into digital processes, with shifted frequencies and time stretching I'm trying to give it even more of those qualities. Sometimes I'm distancing myself from it, so it becomes a piece of discarded debris that has soul in it, a down-sampling. Or other times, it's trying to maximize the present tense in the act of playing, and collapse that vivid color into a burnished, photocopied kind of sound. So the music acts like weather, weathering the listener, or as flames licking at the sides of objects." As the record unfurls, the compositions swell in duration, until the granular glimmers of its finale "Make it happen" persist in almost violent delight. "There's a feeling of not wanting to let this album go, trying to defy the extinguishing sound at the end of the music, trying to push the colors beyond the confines of the structure, to defeat the silence." In the scramble to resist denouement, Coates suspends the arrow of time in its eternal flight, just for a moment, to reveal the solace of the dust settling in the afterglow. Oliver Coates' Throb, shiver, arrow of time will be released on vinyl, Japanese import CD, and digital editions on October 18, 2024. On behalf of Oliver and RVNG Intl., a portion of the proceeds from this release will benefit The Traditional Music and Song Association of Scotland, an organization fostering opportunities for people of all ages to participate in the traditional music and culture of Scotland.

I Shall Die Here / Earth Triumphant is an expanded edition of the fourth full-length album by The Body, first released to widespread acclaim, and terror, in 2014. Sharing their moribund vision with Bobby Krlic, aka The Haxan Cloak, the tried and true sound of The Body is shred to pieces on I Shall Die Here, mutilated by process and re-animated in a spectral state by the collaboration.

This double album set is expanded with the previously unreleased Earth Triumphant, a full-length companion album that would become I Shall Die Here, showcasing The Body's brutality in its most primal form. With both albums revisited by The Body and Seth Manchester at Machines With Magnets and remastered by Matt Colton at Metropolis Studios, this is the definitive edition of a shocking classic of unbridled bleakness and innovation. Formed by drummer Lee Buford and guitarist Chip King in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1999, The Body soon relocated to Providence, Rhode Island. The duo remained in Providence for a decade before moving west to their current home of Portland, Oregon. Their debut self-titled album (Moganano, 2003) and on the widely-acclaimed, classification curtailing of All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood (At A Loss, 2011) readied the band for even more experimentations. The employment of the Assembly of Light Choir's classical chorales on All the Waters, alongside more industrial music techniques such as vocal sampling and drum programming, prompted RVNG to inquire with King and Buford which darker corners of the electronic universe they were presumably interested in exploring.

The undertaking of I Shall Die Here was aided by Seth Manchester and Keith Souza, The Body's long standing engineer and creative collaborator, and noted producer Bobby Krlic. Krlic's own work as The Haxan Cloak struck a similarly despairing chord to The Body with the celebrated Excavation (Tri Angle, 2013), itself a minimalist evocation of the afterlife. I Shall Die Here shares similar nether space with the morbidly deviating darkness of Excavation, but remains sculpturally frozen in a sort of earthen purgatory.

The Body's musical approach, engraved by Buford's colossal beats and King's mad howl and bass-bladed guitar dirge, became something even more terrifying with Krlic's post-mortem ambiences serving as both baseline and outer limit. I Shall Die Here sonically serrates the remains of metal's already unidentifiable corpse and splays it amid tormented voices in shadow. This expanded edition gives us a window into the creation of a classic with the inclusion of its in utero twin, Earth Triumphant. Recorded as a nearly finished album by Buford and King before The Haxan Cloak's transformation, it stands as a raw statement of intent, the original DNA for what would soon mutate into something wholly new.

Fans of I Shall Die Here will find familiar sonic fragments in a more primitive state - like seeing an out-of-context photograph of a family member taken well before you knew them - but the album stands on its own in its minimalist brutality, a natural bridge to what The Body was soon to become. The Body's I Shall Die Here / Earth Triumphant will be released in digital and vinyl formats on June 30, 2023. On behalf of The Body, The Haxan Cloak, and RVNG Intl., a portion of the proceeds from this release will benefit Intransitive, an organization that works to advance the cause of Trans liberation in Arkansas through art, education, advocacy, organizing and culture in order to create effective systemic change and on-the-ground impact.

I Shall Die Here / Earth Triumphant is an expanded edition of the fourth full-length album by The Body, first released to widespread acclaim, and terror, in 2014. Sharing their moribund vision with Bobby Krlic, aka The Haxan Cloak, the tried and true sound of The Body is shred to pieces on I Shall Die Here, mutilated by process and re-animated in a spectral state by the collaboration.

This double album set is expanded with the previously unreleased Earth Triumphant, a full-length companion album that would become I Shall Die Here, showcasing The Body's brutality in its most primal form. With both albums revisited by The Body and Seth Manchester at Machines With Magnets and remastered by Matt Colton at Metropolis Studios, this is the definitive edition of a shocking classic of unbridled bleakness and innovation. Formed by drummer Lee Buford and guitarist Chip King in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1999, The Body soon relocated to Providence, Rhode Island. The duo remained in Providence for a decade before moving west to their current home of Portland, Oregon. Their debut self-titled album (Moganano, 2003) and on the widely-acclaimed, classification curtailing of All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood (At A Loss, 2011) readied the band for even more experimentations. The employment of the Assembly of Light Choir's classical chorales on All the Waters, alongside more industrial music techniques such as vocal sampling and drum programming, prompted RVNG to inquire with King and Buford which darker corners of the electronic universe they were presumably interested in exploring.

The undertaking of I Shall Die Here was aided by Seth Manchester and Keith Souza, The Body's long standing engineer and creative collaborator, and noted producer Bobby Krlic. Krlic's own work as The Haxan Cloak struck a similarly despairing chord to The Body with the celebrated Excavation (Tri Angle, 2013), itself a minimalist evocation of the afterlife. I Shall Die Here shares similar nether space with the morbidly deviating darkness of Excavation, but remains sculpturally frozen in a sort of earthen purgatory.

The Body's musical approach, engraved by Buford's colossal beats and King's mad howl and bass-bladed guitar dirge, became something even more terrifying with Krlic's post-mortem ambiences serving as both baseline and outer limit. I Shall Die Here sonically serrates the remains of metal's already unidentifiable corpse and splays it amid tormented voices in shadow. This expanded edition gives us a window into the creation of a classic with the inclusion of its in utero twin, Earth Triumphant. Recorded as a nearly finished album by Buford and King before The Haxan Cloak's transformation, it stands as a raw statement of intent, the original DNA for what would soon mutate into something wholly new.

Fans of I Shall Die Here will find familiar sonic fragments in a more primitive state - like seeing an out-of-context photograph of a family member taken well before you knew them - but the album stands on its own in its minimalist brutality, a natural bridge to what The Body was soon to become. The Body's I Shall Die Here / Earth Triumphant will be released in digital and vinyl formats on June 30, 2023. On behalf of The Body, The Haxan Cloak, and RVNG Intl., a portion of the proceeds from this release will benefit Intransitive, an organization that works to advance the cause of Trans liberation in Arkansas through art, education, advocacy, organizing and culture in order to create effective systemic change and on-the-ground impact.

For this uniquely personal retrospective spread over twelve vinyl discs, Sven Väth takes us back to the early days of his DJ career. On What I Used To Play we meet great pioneers of electronic music, gifted percussionists, obscure wave bands, and innovative producers of a bygone 'new electronic' era. Rough beats and irresistible grooves from the identification stage of house, techno, and acid remind us not just how far electronic music has evolved over the past four decades, but how great it was to dance to EBM, techno, and house for the very first time.

If there is one protagonist of the electronic music scene who has remained curious, innovative and at the very cutting edge of music for over four decades, it's Sven Väth. His multi-layered artist albums and Sound of the Season mix compilations have been defining the genre for over two decades, and even today, he is constantly on the lookout for the next top tune to add to the highlights of his next set. At least, that's the case when he's not producing them himself as an artist or remixer. "Actually, it's always been part of my DNA to think ahead," and nothing had been further from his mind than looking back at his past, but when in spring of 2020 the international DJ circuit had to be scaled down to virtually zero, the 'restless traveler' suddenly had time. Time to stop and reflect on "how it actually was back then, at the very beginning of my career..."

"It was a great trip and with every track, beautiful memories came flooding back".
In the London apartment, he had just moved into, Sven has set up a "little music room", where he cocooned himself for several days, "to look way back for the first time and review my musical journey through the eighties, so to speak."

The interim result was six thematically oriented playlists with a grand total of 120 tracks from 'early 80s' to 'Balearic late 80s', together with excursions into afrobeat, European new wave, and EBM sounds and a few epochal techno/house tracks from the USA in between. From these 'Best of Sven Väth's favorites', the project What I Used To Play crystallized. Sven remembers how the Cocoon team reacted to his proposal: "They found the idea of making a compilation out of it MEGA from the beginning and everyone said 'Sven, go for it', but then, of course, the work really started, namely, to clear the rights and to get clean sounding masters of the up to 40-year-old tracks. There was also disappointment, of course. We couldn't clear certain titles because the rights holders in the USA had fallen out with each other or simply disappeared from the scene. In short, it wasn't easy, but now I can safely say we got the most important tracks."

Finally, after two years of research, curation, design, and administrative fine-tuning, the "little retrospective" from 1981 to 1990 is available. The exquisitely packaged, and three-kilo heavy box set is not only physically impressive, WIUTP is also the definitive record of Sven Väth's musical development. On each of the twenty-four sides of vinyl, you can trace track by track, what influenced him during which phase, and how he took off as a DJ from his parents' Queen's Pub straight into the spotlight at Dorian Gray. There and at Vogue (later OMEN), Sven became the style-defining player in the DJ booth that he still is today.




1981 - 1990: Future Sounds of Now

In the early eighties, the crowd in clubs like Vogue and Dorian Gray danced to what nowadays we call 'dance classics' - mainly disco, funk, soul, and chart pop. It was up to a new generation of DJs, including Sven Väth, the youngest protagonist in the Rhine-Main area at the time, to create their own club-ready music mix. Good new tracks and potential floor-fillers were rarities that had to be sought out and found, in order to prove oneself worthy.
Without MP3s, internet streaming, or other digital download possibilities, music didn't just gravitate to the DJ, instead, it had to be tracked down. In well-stocked record stores in Frankfurt and Wiesbaden or even in Amsterdam, London, or New York, Sven and friends sourced the material for countless magical nights. On WIUTP we can follow Sven's very personal journey through this wild, innovative era in which synth-pop, funk, hip-hop, and disco were successively replaced as 'club music' by house, techno, acid, and breakbeat. By the end of the decade, it was clear to see that these once exotic 'fringe' phenomena would soon become 'mass' phenomena.



Early 80s

Dirty Talk by the Italian-American duo Klein & M.B.O. represents the most innovative phase of the Italo-disco genre in the early eighties like no other track. Mario Boncaldo (I) and Tony Carrasco relied entirely on the original synthetic drum and percussion sounds of the Roland TR-808, coupled with the raunchy vocals of Rossana Casale and guitar accents of Davide Piatto. Of course, other tracks from this period were also influential in style, most notably Unit by Logic System, which worked as the perfect soundtrack to the laser lighting system at the legendary Dorian Gray club. With stomping beats and robotic rap interludes, Bostich by Yello also belongs on Sven's eternal playlist - after all, it caught the attention of Afrikaa Bambaataa, who invited the Swiss duo to perform at the Roxy in New York in 1983.



EBM Wave - Mid 80s

From today's point of view, the almost ten-minute-long, downtempo track Giant by Matt Johnson's band project The The, would probably not be considered an obvious club classic. However, a closer (re)listen reveals the rhythmic intricacies of the percussion overdubs by JG Thirlwell (aka Foetus) on Johnson's composition, and it becomes clear why this exceptional piece of music is one of Sven's absolute favorites. Other classics from this phase include Kaw-Liga by the mysterious The Residents, the hypnotic-synthetic Our Darkness by Anne Clark (and David Harrow), and last but not least, the somber, monotonous anthem Where Are You? by 16Bit, one of Sven Väth's projects together with Michael Münzing, Luca Anzilotti from 1986.



US House - Late 80s

You certainly can't talk about Chicago house without mentioning Frankie Knuckles. The resident DJ at the Warehouse not only gave the name to an entire genre, but also produced epochal floor fillers on the Trax label like the timeless Your Love, sung (and moaned) by Jamie Principle. Acid house protagonists Phuture also hail from Chicago, and on We Are Phuture (also released on Trax) we hear the chirping acid sounds of the legendary Roland TB-303 in full effect. Another featured classic is No UFO's by Detroit's Model 500 aka Juan Atkins, who is rightly considered the 'Godfather of Techno' even if the genre-defining track from 1985 still breathes with the spirit of hip-hop and electro from the first breakdance era.





Afrobeat

Le Serpent, by Algerian-born Abdelmadjid Guemguem, is a track that sounds completely different from everything else on WIUTP. Made in 1978, it's a monumental, rousing groove created without bass or synths, just with five congas! Even though Guem sadly passed away in 2021, his immortal, acoustic beats are understood all over the world and will continue to enrich many thousands of DJ sets for years to come. Another classic that not only Sven appreciates beyond measure is Hugh Masekela's Don't Go Lose it, Baby. In addition to being one of the most important jazz pioneers, the trumpeter and freedom fighter from Johannesburg was very experimental, integrating electronic sounds into his music in later years, in a similar vein to Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock. Dutch jazz pianist Jasper van't Hof's afrobeat project Pili Pili has also aged well. The trance-like, almost sixteen-minute-long track of the same name, manages to fill a whole side on the seventh of twelve vinyl discs in the WIUTP box.



UK-US-Euro - Late 80s

Time for a change of scene, in the truest sense of the word, and from a musical perspective, this section is like landing on another planet. First up is Andrew Weatherall's classic remix of Primal Scream's Loaded, featuring the iconic Peter Fonda sample (lifted from the 1966 biker film Wild Angels) that came to personify the mood triggered by the British Second Summer of Love in the late eighties: "We wanna be free to do what we wanna do, and we wanna get loaded...". This period also saw the emergence of M/A/R/R/S whose only single, 1987's Pump Up The Volume, became a club classic with support from DJ legend CJ Mackintosh. In this most eclectic of sections, we also encounter New York house and reggae producer Bobby Konders and his seminal Nervous Acid.



Balearic - Late 80s

Those who know him, know that Sven had already lost his heart to the 'magic island' of Ibiza as a teenager, so with that in mind, the WIUTP project couldn't end without a Balearic chapter. Inspired by Manuel Göttsching's E2-E4, the immortal, eponymously titled Sueño Latino belongs in there without question. Equally popular on the island was, and still is Break 4 Love by Raze, which thinking about it, would also fit perfectly into the house chapter. Last, but not least, there's an overdue reunion with Sven Väth himself, in his role as frontman of the successful Frankfurt trio OFF. Together with Michael Münzing and Luca Anzilotti (later of Snap!) this 'Organization For Fun' created the off-the-wall club hit Electric Salsa in 1986 which incidentally turned into an international chart smash, putting Sven in the enviable position of having to decide between pop stardom and a DJ career. Well, we all know how that decision turned out and the rest, as they say, is history. A not insignificant part of his story is What I Used To Play. Enjoy!

Yellow Jackets number four follows the direction of the previous releases with more phat jams spread on a vinyl only 12’.

This time Fred P, who certainly doesnt need any introduction and who’s labels Private Society and Perpetual Sounds are distributed by Mother Tongue, offers the rhythmic yet melodic and spiritually engaging ‘Inspired By Dopeness’.

Chicago’s own Specter and Madrid’s Josè Rico, who often work together as Our Own Organization, go extradeep, raw and hipnotic on the other side with the aptly titled ‘You Don’t Believe’.

No frills, just the good shit!

On March 13, 2020, Yumi Zouma's highly anticipated album, Truth or Consequences, was released. One day prior, the band played their first show of a fully sold-out US tour, at Washington, DC's DC9. This was also the day the Word Health Organization declared COVID-19 an official pandemic, resulting in the band cancelling the entire tour and flying back to Europe the next day - the day of their album's release.

"So after returning home and spending a few numb weeks adjusting to this strange new way of life, April came, the reality set in, and we quickly started to miss that feeling of exploring our new songs by night," the band says. "Writing new music around them, we took the songs of Truth or Consequences and found ourselves a new way of re-contextualising them safely, amidst the tragedy and fear going on in the world outside our windows – and the Alternate Versions were born. We encouraged each other to be bold, fearless, and to experiment like we would on stage – but from the comfort of our own bedrooms, living rooms and hallways.

Zwerm is a Belgian-Dutch electric guitar quartet (with a backyard rehearsal shed located in Antwerp) that operates along the borders between styles and traverses traditions that are typically not convergent. Zwerm rhymes Larry Polansky with Nadah El Shazly and are galvanized by the likes of guitars pioneers like The Velvet Underground and Sonic Youth, the microtonal DYI-er Harry Partch, Middle Eastern sonorities and the prog-madness of Kind Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. ‘Musical adventure’ is not just a hollow cliché for this quartet, but a genuine commitment. Zwerm calls itself a ‘guitar quartet’, but that can be interpreted broadly as well as with a pinch of salt: “If we want to do something on instruments we don’t really master, we’ll just figure out a way to make it work.”
Toon Callier, Johannes Westendorp, Kobe van Cauwenberghe and Bruno Nelissen all met in 2007 while working on a project with Glenn Branca. A new guitar quartet was born and it became clear rather quickly that staying in the strictly contemporary compositions lane was not for this quartet-with-five-to-six-members (an organizational chart is available upon request).
An appetite for new and lasting collaborations has been a constant theme throughout their artistic parcours. The group has shared stages with theatrical producers like Walpurgis and Post uit Hessdalen, dancers such as Ecce and with the musicians Fred Frith, Stephen O’Malley, Shiva Feshareki, Rudy Trouvé, Mauro Pawlowski, Larry Polansky, Eric Thielemans, Yannis Kyriakides, François Sarhan, Serge Verstockt and Stefan Prins. These projects have not always translated into records, but they have been decisive in creating a unique musical approach. In 2015, when Zwerm was asked by De Handelsbeurs to collaborate with Fred Frith, they proceeded to pen a few new musical sketches over which Firth sublimely improvised. In 2018 ‘Badminton in Tehran’ was released, their first record that was made up completely of only the group’s compositions.
“a basket full of buttons here
and if you push the wrong one: fear
and if you push the right one: love
or maybe none of the above”
The route that Zwerm has taken is often defined by the question “What if... ?” - like a dart thrown at a musical map, not quite blindly, but naive enough to lead to unexpected endings.
“What if we play Renaissance pieces written by John Dowland, but instead of playing lutes we play these tunes with a Telecaster – and then jam it through effect pedals and an amplifier?”
“What if we connect one hundred guitar pedals and just leave our guitars at home?”
“What if we record a record with ten different one-page-pieces that we found on the Internet?”
In 2020 our metaphorical dart landed on “What if we tried microtonality?”.
‘Microtonality’ sounds a bit creepy, but actually there is nothing to be afraid of: there are no out-of- tune notes, just alternate notes. On the continents where Western musical theory is less stringently applied, microtonality is the rule, and has become the subject of many deep and thoughtfully written theories. However for Zwerm, this phenomenon occurs in many, often surprisingly lighthearted forms. A dilapidated piano that has settled into a beautiful microtonal tuning of its own accord, enthusiastic choral singing, a guitar whose three strings are tuned a quarter-tone higher, a saz (Turkishquarter-tone lute), a maddening guitar pedal, ...
"the dreams they were convicted for telling only lies reality came after for claiming to be wise what you don’t see is what you get just never light a spark I’m a crow in the dark”
“And… what if we work with a drummer?” Enter Karen Willems - dummer, extraordinaire, and ardent player in groups, projects and collaborations galore. One chance meeting and the deal was done. It was obvious before the start that Willems was the versatile and creative percussionist-in-a-toy-store necessary for this project. And in the studio, to our delight, she demonstrated an easy dexterity when switching quickly from one idea to the next.
At the reins behind the scenes was producer Rudy Trouvé, who – during previous sessions for ‘Badminton in Terhran’, when the classically trained guitarists went completely off the rails, staring deeply and forlornly into their scores, looking for answers – was able to pinpoint the problem and get the wagons rolling in the right direction again. Completing the team were Mark Dedecker (recording)and Joris Calluwaerts (mixing).
The results are in and it’s called ‘ Great Expectations’ – a title that, in several ways, fits perfectly with these strange times.‘Great Expectations’ goes wide! Zwerm is at its best when it can run along the borders between style and across traditions that otherwise would not necessarily intersect. The most straightforward rockers have a proggy tinge while the dreamy psychedelic songs lean more toward Richard Youngs. And if a nice melody dared come to close to becoming a ‘Kit-Katjingle’, then barbs-a-la-Pere-Ubu were trailed, tracked, found and promptly embedded. ‘Heavy Machinery’ sits neatly somewhere between Captain Beefheart and Richard Wagner, and ‘On My Way To Aguno’, set to an Iranian folk song chord progression, grew into a hyper-personal lullaby. Zwerm used the saz (Turkish lute) and the sinter (Moroccan gnawa bass instrument) without falling into pastiche psychedelia, but you can still sense the orient.

On The 50th Anniversary Of The Band's Inception At An Event In Harlem, Ny To Commemorate Malcolm X's Birthday On 19 May 1968, Influential Spoken Word Artists, Poets And Commentators The Last Poets Are Set To Make A Glorious And Relevant Return With Their First Album In Over 20 Years, 'understand What Black Is'.

Produced By Ben Lamdin (nostaglia 77) And Brighton Legend Prince Fatty, Whose Speciality Is Traditional Reggae And Dub Production's, 'understand What Black Is' Is A Ten-track Album Which Speaks Of A Revolutionary Struggle Defined By Both Race And Identity, That Has Never Sounded More Relevant. Released On Studio Rockers, There Will Also Be An Accompanying Single Featuring Remixes Of The Title Track "understand What Black Is" By Mala (south London Collective Digital Mystikz) And Uk Dance Music Innovators Dego And Kaidi.

Since The Initial Line-up Of Dahveed Nelson, Gylan Kain And Felipe Luciano Formed In East Harlem's Marcus Garvey Park, The Last Poets Have Produced Under Various Guises Over The Subsequent Years. However, It Was Their Seminal Output, Namely 1970's 'the Last Poets' Under Both Umar Bin Hassan And Abiodun Oyewole That Secured Their Legacy, Becoming One Of The Most Important Influences In Early Hip Hop.

Throughout The Last 20 Years, The Band Have Remained Largely On Hiatus. But Their Influence Could Still Be Felt With Their Tracks Being Sampled By The Notorious B.i.g, Nwa, A Tribe Called Quest, Dr.dre And Snoop Dogg. Umar Has Recorded Various Solo Albums And Featured On Common And Kanye West's Grammy Nominated 'the Corner'. Abiodun Appeared On The Red Hot Organization's Album, Stolen Moments Which Was Named "album Of The Year" By Time. He Also Conducts Weekly Open House Poetry Readings, Where He Constructively Critiques Upcoming Poets, Helping To Nurture Them. He Has Also Conducted Classes At Columbia University, Where He Teaches Creative Writing.

The Inauguration Of Donald Trump As Us President In 2016 Inspired Hassan And Oyewole To Resurrect The Group To Create A Brand New Record, Modern And Edgy, And Deeply Relevant And Reflective Of Our Times.

Tracks On 'understand What Black Is' Include 'how Many Bullets', Which Bridles With Defiance As Oyewole Works Through A Litany Of Injustices Suffered By Black People In The Us: " You've Tried

To Blow My Brains Out With Bigotry, Chopped Off My Wings, So I Couldn't Fly Free, And Dared Me To Be Me, Took My Drum, Broke My Hands, Yanked My Roots Right Up Out Of The Land, And Riddled My Soul With Jesus" 'what I Want To See' Describes A Utopia - A Refuge From Hurt And Those Who'd Make "our Vision Blurred, And Our Faith Obscure", Whilst The Title Track 'understand What Black Is' Aims To Transcend Ethnicity: "understand What Black Is....it's The Source From Which All Things Come...black Is A Hero, Not A Villain."

The Album Even Takes Reference From Prince's 2003 Album Of Instrumentals, 'news', Which Hassan Drew Comparisons From With His Own Childhood Experiences: "that Poem Took Me About A Year To Write....i Just Kept Writing And Writing But Not Getting Too Far And Then I Heard That Album And The Musicianship Was Amazing. I Was Left Wondering If It Was Jazz, Classical, Rock Or Maybe Something New But All Those Images That I Write About Came To Me From Listening To That Album. I Loved Prince In That Movie Purple Rain Because My Father Was A Talented Musician But He Was Into Brutalising Mama At Times And In The Movie There's A Jerome And My Name Is Jerome, So It Was Like He Was Telling My Life Story As Well."

The Album Acts As A Body Of Work Between Individual Members Each Speaking Of Their Own Personal Journeys, But Feeding Into The Much Larger Narrative Of Struggle And Oppression, Alongside A Fervent Hunger For Social Change. These Are Struggles And Tests Of Personal Resolve That Have Directly Shaped And Moulded The Bands' Unique Sound Over The Course Of An Impressive 50 Years, And Their Powerful And Influential Commentary Remains As Relevant As Ever.