Articles by John Eyles
Christoph Gallio: Stone Is A Rose Is A Stone Is A Stone
by John Eyles
Anyone approaching this album unawares needs to be warned that its playing time of 36' 34" is divided into sixty nine tracks ranging in length from six seconds to a minute and 41 seconds, and that the tracks are labelled as Roman numerals from one to 69 with 10 of the track titles being extended by dedications to unidentified individuals (for example, “XXXIV to Sisa Wandeler"). For anyone keen to know more, the track titles are printed on the rear ...
Continue ReadingGard Nilssen Acoustic Unity: Great Intentions
by John Eyles
Gard Nilssen was born in June 1983 in Skien, Norway, and raised in a musical family consisting of drummers. With a background of marching bands and big bands, it was no surprise that drums became his instruments of choice. He got his musical education on the jazz program at Trondheim Musikkonservatorium. Later on, he became a performer, composer, producer and bandleader and moved to Oslo, becoming one of the most sought-after and active drummers on the European scene. ...
Continue ReadingSol Sol: Oscillations
by John Eyles
Sol Sol is the name of a free-jazz quartet from Sweden that was formed in 2018. They recorded their first album, Unaccustomed Soil, at Atlantic Studios, Stockholm, on June 18th 2018, and had it released by Signal And Sounds Records on April 13th 2019. Elin Forkelid, who has played saxophones since she was fourteen, having been born in 1984 in southern Sweden, moved to Stockholm at the age of 20 to pursue saxophone and jazz studies at the Royal College ...
Continue ReadingTwo Great Composers From Decades Apart
by John Eyles
Although the Another Timbre label was originally set up in 2007 to release recordings of improvised music--its very first release was The Contest of Pleasures by John Butcher, Axel Dorner and Xavier Charles--it did not take long for it to be releasing recordings of modern compositions... The label's tenth release, Lost Daylight, was played by John Tilbury on piano and comprised five compositions by Terry Jennings and one by the late John Cage. It was not long until the label ...
Continue ReadingLuc Houtkamp: Frush
by John Eyles
The album Frush was recorded on November 17 2023, in concert at LOFT, Cologne, by German recording engineer and producer Stefan Deistler whose studio is based just outside Cologne. It was mixed and mastered by Luc Houtkamp, a band member who was born in The Hague, The Netherlands, in December 1953 and plays tenor saxophone and clarinet here. Incidentally, as far back as November 2017, at The Alternativa Festival in Prague, Czech Republic, Houtkamp had played in a ...
Continue ReadingHat Hut Records at Fifty
by John Eyles
The three albums below are some of the ezz-thetics and First Visit album releases that arrived in 2025 adorned with a sticker featuring a large 50 on it plus the explanation, “celebrating 50 years of Hat Hut records." Rewinding fifty years, we find that Hat Hut was founded by Werner X. Uehlinger in 1975, the first Hat Hut release being Black Magic Man by a Joe McPhee quartet which had been recorded live in concert at Vassar College, New York, ...
Continue ReadingKory Reeder and John Cage albums on Another Timbre set pulses running
by John Eyles
The two albums below have plenty in common with one another. Both feature compositions by Americans played by Apartment House, a UK-based ensemble who are featured on Another Timbre often enough to be considered the label's house band. The eight Cage compositions heard here were all composed between 1943 and 1951, earlier than Cage's 1952 silent composition 4' 33" which made him notorious across the world. For admirers of Cage's later works such as his number pieces, the selections here ...
Continue ReadingVilnius Mama Jazz 2025
by John Eyles
Vilnius Mama Jazz ran from Thursday May 22nd until Sunday May 25th 2025, featuring twenty different performances at the impressive Lithuanian National Drama Theatre, in the centre of Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. Nine of the twenty were designated as “festival concerts" the other eleven as “showcase stage concerts"; the distinction between them seems to be that “festival concerts" acts are better known and/or more experienced. This festival has taken place every year since 1988, making this one the thirty-eighth. ...
Continue ReadingSarah Hennies, Richard Valitutto: SOVT
by John Eyles
Composer and percussionist Sarah Hennies was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1979. She started playing drums when she was nine years old; in her teens she played drums with local college punk rock bands. She attended the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign before receiving a Master's degree from University of California, San Diego. After graduating from UC San Diego in 2003, she moved to Austin, Texas, and began collaborating with guitarist Aaron Rusell in the group Weird Weeds. ...
Continue ReadingJo David Meyer Lysne: For Renstemt Klaver
by John Eyles
For as long as it has existed, it seems as if the piano has been subject to opinions and experiments of various types. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the player piano was a popular self-playing piano with a mechanism that operated the piano action using perforated paper or metallic rolls to play popular tunes.Later on, it became more fashionable for pianists to play inside the piano lid, for example by striking or plucking strings, by ...
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