Ab Baars / George Dumitriu / Ig Henneman / Pau Sola

 Masafrets

2021

""Romanian George D wanted to know more about the viola and so became ig h's viola friend. she heard the catalan pau s play a cello solo set and invited him to play duo improvisations. he suggested to do a string trio session another time. a date was set with d s and h. the neighbor upstairs ab b was invited to join on shakuhachi for the last hour. the absolute joy of improvising on wooden instruments... a quartet was born.
in the summer of 2019 george and pau spontaneously organized a recording session in the bernard haitink hall of the amsterdam university of the arts. this culminated in the album aforismen aforisme aforismes. all track titles are named after the various soil types from the countries we are born in: holland romania spain.
" -Ig Henneman"

Columbia Icefield

2022

""This album is dedicated to those who recognize living as a heroic act: the occupiers of sunup barstools; the cubicle-planted; the ghosts of Greyhounds; the reasonably sketchy. A burlap hero is one who marches—consciously or not—back to the sea in hopes of making no splash, who understands and embraces the imperfection of being, and in that way, stretches the definition of sainthood to fit." - Nate Wooley, February 2022"

Large Unit

2022

"In the autumn of 2021 a 15-piece strong Large Unit reunited at Studio Paradiso in Oslo to record two new albums: “New Map” and “Clusterfuck”. These two albums can be seen as twin releases, recorded and released in conjunction with each other, yet they are also different to each other. Both albums follow the previous “More Fun Please” album from 2018, with Nilssen-Love working within the field of new music composition, taking inspiration from composers like John Cage, Morton Feldman and Cornelius Cardew. For “New Map” Nilssen-Love provided the band with open-form “cells” of concrete ideas/notes/directions that the musicians had to respond to. On “Clusterfuck” the approach was graphic notations. Both approaches gave the musicians more responsibility on how to shape the music. The compositional guidelines are balanced with blocks of improvisation, with the band veering from subtle passages to bursts of explosive blowouts. Two exciting new additions to the Large Unit catalogue at the end of 2022, which sets the tone for the band’s ten- year anniversary in 2023."

Barbara Ellison

2023

"CyberSongs is a 'transhuman song cycle for human-like computer voices' by composer/artist Barbara Ellison. She delves in this work into the sonic intricacies of voice avatars and the ‘musicalisation’ of TTS (Text-to-speech), a type of speech synthesis application that is used to create a spoken sound version of raw text in a computer document. In the 13 tracks of this album, she creates hypnotic textures of vocal utterances through the intensive and extensive use of repetition, as tools and materials to give rise to surprising audible phenomena of a fascinating and odd musicality. Words, morphemes, phonemes, phrases and speech particles acquire constantly-shifting new aural meanings, turning into the rhythmic, melodic and harmonic patterns of the obsessively phantasmatic trans-human song cycle of the ‘CyberSongs’."

Paul Lytton & Ken Vandermark

2023

""Distant Cousins," a brand new duo album by the legendary musician, Paul Lytton and Ken Vandermark. On this recording Paul plays drums and percussion and Ken is on Bb clarinet, tenor and baritone sax."

Dave Rempis / Elisabeth Harnik / Fred Lonberg-Holm / Tim Daisy

2023

"When these four combine as Earscratcher, we sometimes end up with swirling spirals of sound that twist up ribbons of tension into a cyclone, and sometimes find ourselves in the eye of that storm, swaddled in a wash of patient and centered calm. Two poles that in this context have an endless set of routes in between, conjured up during an outing that was definitely worth the wait. "

Perch Hen Brock & Rain

2023

"Perch Hen Brock & Rain featuring Ab Baars, Ig Henneman, Ingrid Laubrock and Tom Rainey is an improvising quartet drawing on myriad experiences and backgrounds. Each member is conscious of their own weight and power to add to the communal conversation, understanding silence and restraint can be as powerful a contribution to the whole as density. Ingrid Laubrock and Tom Rainey represent the best of the New York scene while Ab Baars and Ig Henneman are key members of the idiosyncratic Dutch improvised music community. Either duo showcases the kind of telepathic interplay that comes from years of dedicated playing. Together, the wealth of experience allows limitless possibilities."

Joakim Rainer Trio

2023

"This exciting and young piano trio lead by Joakim Rainer Petersen consists of some of Norways most active young jazz musicians. They play with their eyes directed forward while being rooted in the classic piano trio format. The music is spontaneous and playful, and rhythmically captivating. The compositions build complex shapes and asymmetric loops. The trio draws lines to composers and musicians such as Andrew Hill, Paul Bley and Kris Davis! A particularly exciting mix of expressions that are combined with listening, playing and focused interaction."

Joe Morris & Jeremy Brown

2022

""Free Music often defies association. Unless there is a specific programmatic intent, finding words to fit as titles sometimes means avoiding exactitude. Magnitude is used as a kind of poetic marker, a signifier that suggests proportion, depth, density, or the absence or measurement of whatever. The puzzle is for pondering, reflecting on phenomena as a meditation. Or maybe the name considers the many indefinable things that go into making music like this." -Joe Morris"

TOG

2023

"Tog - the trio of Steinar Heide Bø (drums & percussion), Vetle André Skåli (baritone guitar) and Brede Sørum (soprano & tenor saxophones, moog) - is an unstoppable engine, powered by rhythmic outbursts, crunching riffs, saxophone scurries and wails, the kind of playing that teases and herds the listener towards an unrelenting frenzy, a breathless sonic assault on the senses."

Large Unit

2022

"In the autumn of 2021 a 15-piece strong Large Unit reunited at Studio Paradiso in Oslo to record two new albums: “New Map” and “Clusterfuck”. These two albums can be seen as twin releases, recorded and released in conjunction with each other, yet they are also different to each other. Both albums follow the previous “More Fun Please” album from 2018, with Nilssen-Love working within the field of new music composition, taking inspiration from composers like John Cage, Morton Feldman and Cornelius Cardew. For “New Map” Nilssen-Love provided the band with open-form “cells” of concrete ideas/notes/directions that the musicians had to respond to. On “Clusterfuck” the approach was graphic notations. Both approaches gave the musicians more responsibility on how to shape the music. The compositional guidelines are balanced with blocks of improvisation, with the band veering from subtle passages to bursts of explosive blowouts. Two exciting new additions to the Large Unit catalogue at the end of 2022, which sets the tone for the band’s ten- year anniversary in 2023."

Tim Daisy & Erez Dessel

2023

"Open Spiral documents a set of duo improvisations between new to Chicago pianist and composer Erez Dessel and veteran percussionist Tim Daisy. Six open ended tracks exploring a wide range of sounds and gestures from intricate textural landscapes to full force free jazz cacophony. Recorded one sunny afternoon in December at The Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago."

Joe Morris / Agusti Fernandez / Brad Barrett / DoYeon Kim

2022

"The great pianist Agusti Fernandez and I have had a strong musical connection and friendship for many years. We first worked together on a recording project led by the drummer Ramon Lopez in Valencia, Spain. After that we corresponded and eventually began our performances together during a residency of mine at The Stone in New York—the first of what is now, many other performances here and in Spain. We share many interests in music."

Kyle Bruckmann, Tim Daisy, Phillip Greenlief & Lisa Mezzacappa

2023

"Semaphore is a new band organized jointly by Chicago drummer and percussionist Tim Daisy and long-time friend and collaborator Kyle Bruckmann (oboe, English horn, electronics.) Rounding out the quartet are two pillars of the San Francisco Bay Area contemporary music scene: bassist Lisa Mezzacappa and tenor saxophonist Phillip Greenlief."

Frode Gjerstad / Kalle Moberg / Paal Nilssen-Love

2022

"At first glance this new CD on PNL looks like familiar territory – a trio recording with two known collaborators of Nilssen-Love: Accordionist Kalle Moberg have become a steady and important voice of the Large Unit sound over the last ten years, and Frode Gjerstad truly needs no introduction – him and Nilssen-Love have played together for 30+ years. And while this trio is a new constellation, a combination that is good news in itself, “Time Sound Shape” offers another, bigger surprise: this is the first album where Nilssen-Love does not play any drums. The set-up instead is seven gongs – which are prepared and played with a selection of objects, like Styrofoam, Ping-Pong balls, and sheets of paper. Gjerstad also adds the alto flute to his more commonly used Bb clarinet and alto saxophone. The album was recorded in Gamle Aker Kirke in Oslo, a 900-year-old church from the Middle Ages that has a very distinct acoustic character. This location, in combination with the instrumentation, and the fact that the three musicians were getting together after a year of not playing because of the lockdown, creates a very unusual album in the PNL catalogue. The music is often slow moving and transparent, with explosive and bombastic passages, held together with a subtle and intense undercurrent that drives everything forward throughout its 49 minutes."