Long-time since we heard from Japanese underground saxophonist Mochizuki Harutaka but this is a very welcome return: a stunning multi-region DVD that features a classic convulsive, high-wire performance. Filmed in a shady gallery the set sees Harutaka play harmonica, alto saxophone and small percussive metal balls. It starts out in typically gripping style with Harutaka bent double, hunched with a harmonica in his mouth and a bowl full of metal beads that he alternately pours, throws and kicks around the room, generating the kind of cyclonic Industrial/psych sound of the Mukai/Urabe duets or even aspects of Hiroshi Kawani. When he switches to saxophone the results are devastating, playing with all of the tortured, pent-up energy of the late Kaoru Abe, contorting his body in order to tear whole new alphabets from his horn, sounding single screaming tattoos and mournful bugle calls alongside phantom feedback tones and lonely late-night laments. In the tradition of Abe, Masayoshi Urabe and Keiji Haino this is intensely physical and iconoclastically powerful free improvisation at some kind of organic apex. Numbered edition of only 100 copies, highly recommended!

Beautiful limited live album of space/folk songs from Mr Dan Ireton aka Dredd Foole, with a close-up acoustic guitar style that functions as a mainline to his vision of classic rock/balladeer forms (Dylan/Laughner/Reed/Buckley) lubricated by time/space slippage and new vectors of osmotic tongue pressure, all topped off with those amazing vocals. Dan revisits a bunch of previously recorded tracks and subtly alters their co-ordinates and the way he implies a whole universe of freedom with simply a buncha guitar chords and an elastic delivery is nothing short of astounding. I’ve said it before but there ain’t nothing that more approximates the whole ‘idea’ of free folk as *the* form-destroying mode of liberated people outside of Dan’s back catalogue. And in a lot of ways, this might just be his most perfectly articulated side to date. Highly recommended.