‘An overview of his earliest works, gathering selections from his 1978 debut Celestial Vibration and six additional studio sessions from the era. Full of discovery and wonderment, Glimpses of Infinity is a miraculous chronicle of new age’s most fabled artist.’

Thirteen feeling, liquid synth explorations, rooted in ambient, Balearic and Kosmische; melodic, tremolo waves and rhythmic, organic vibrations, attuned to the more blissed-out, ambient fall-out from E2-E4… and of course to Ruscha’s own paintings.
“I really love when music forces you to forget,” he says. “There’s this beautiful moment where everything coalesces, and you just don’t think about anything.”
Refreshing, transporting music.

The Intercommunal Free Dance Music Orchestra was created in 1971 by the legendary pianist François Tusques. L’Inter Communal compiles extracts from concerts given between 1976 and 1978, revelling in the political engagement which lit up free jazz and popular music in that period.
According to Tusques, the Spanish singer Carlos Andreu was a griot ‘who created of new genre of popular song improvised with our music, based on events going on at the time.’
The opener Blues Pour Miguel Enriquez invokes Thelonious Monk in an uproarious homage to the Chilean revolutionary. Another song is entitled L’heure est à la lutte’... The time to fight is now.

From 1981, the further excursions of ‘the people’s jazz workshop’, in the words of founder Francois Tusques.
Le Musichien is an Afro-Catalan adventure, free as a bird, headed for the outer spaceways. Tusques sings together with the Spaniard Carlos Andreu, riding the grooving bass-playing of Jean-Jacques Avenel, percussion from Kilikus, the saxophones Sylvain Kassap and Yebga Likoba, and Ramadolf playing trombone.
Les Amis d’Afrique was recorded the following year, at the Tombées de la Nuit festival in Rennes. Tusques and bassist Tanguy Le Doré weave the backdrop of an explosive new brotherhood of breath, in the tradition of John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders: Bernard Vitet on trumpet, Danièle Dumas and Sylvain Kassap on saxophones, Jean-Louis Le Vallegant and Philippe Le Strat on… yes… cannons.

‘A disciple of mambo innovator Perez Prado, the Cuban-born Modesto Duran was a pivotal figure in Latin dance music’s transitionary mid-century period. His gentle slaps can be heard across dozens of 1950s mega-sellers, from Esquivel to Belafonte, Eartha Kitt to Lena Horne. On his 1960 solo debut, Duran gathers a who’s who of conga-men, including Mongo Santamaría, Willie Bobo, and Juan Cheda, delivering a cinematic and percussive melange of afro-cuban, cha cha, and exotic jazz styles.’

‘Masses is an utterly unexpected, and utterly gripping, collaboration between the East London duo, Spring Heel Jack, and a group of top-flight improvisers, drawn largely from New York’s ascendant free jazz network but also including Evan Parker and microtonal violinist Matt Maneri.
‘If there are precedents for this particular mix, in which studio-processed audio environments are played back in real time as the triggers for, and fixed components in, a series of group improvisations, they feel few and far between. George Rusell’s 1967 Electronic Sonata For Souls Loved By Nature, Bob Ostertag’s Say No More Project, and some of Evan Parker’s explorations in the realm of synergetic electroacoustics provide three possible and very different models. But as Matthew Shipp points out, Masses ‘creates its own space and time’.
‘Masses opens a tunnel on a space where matter and anti-matter can co-exist without the vernacular power of either state being compromised or diminished. It is a total triumph.’
(The Wire).

Recorded in 1999 in NYC, with Matt Shipp, Roy Campbell, Matt Manieri, William Parker, and co.

Five years into the project, Yermande announced a thrilling new phase for this Dakar-Berlin collaboration; a giant step forward.
The group of players was boiled down to twelve for recordings, eight for shows; sessions in Dakar become steeply more focussed. ‘This time around I was better able to specify what I wanted right from the initial recording sessions in Dakar,’ says Ernestus; ‘and further in the production process I took more freedom in reducing and editing audio tracks, changing MIDI data, replacing synth sounds and introducing electronic drum samples.’
Right away you hear music-making which has come startlingly into its own. Rather than submitting to the routine, discrete gradations of recording, producing and mixing, the music is tangibly permeated with deadly intent from the off. Lethally it plays a coiled, clipped, percussive venom and thumping bass against the soaring, open-throated spirituality of Mbene Seck’s singing. Plainly expert, drilled and rooted, the drumming is unpredictable, exclamatory, zinging with life. Likewise the production: intuitive and fresh but utterly attentive; limber but hefty; vividly sculpted against a backdrop of cavernous silence.
Six chunks of stunning, next-level mbalax, then, funky as anything.

From 1969, with Harold Land, Stanley Cowell, Reggie Johnson, and Joe Chambers, coolly charting a path all their own, out of the tumultuous decade.

His debut, from 1976; emerging from the tutelage of Gary Burton. Lovely, out-in-the-wide-open Americana Jazz, with dazzlingly lithe bass-playing by Jaco Pastorius. Bob Moses nails it, too. It’s never sounded better than in this iteration as part of the Luminessence Series. Hang about for the Ornette cover, wrapping things up.

Sublimely beautiful, emotionally wide-open meditations on a wonky piano, exploring the same spare, enraptured equivocacy — getting lost in order to find or recover something — which you hear in Satie, Mompou, Cage, Duke, Monk, Masabumi Kikuchi…

‘Mashu leaves nowhere to hide, his playing is poised and coolly controlled, focusing on the beauty of simplicity and purity. 
‘The lo-fidelity plays a part too, these recordings are clearly diaristic, caught close up, granular and beautifully blown out in places, adding a level of cohesion to a genuinely special suite of music that melts so effortlessly into the everyday.’

Very warmly recommended.