2003 recording of electric bass/vocal dunt.

2004 bass/vocal album from Jandek, with three long tracks including the 30 minute title track: “Jandek plays bass again, claims to 'no longer exist,' sings about drinking ‘mechanically produced beverages,’ and announces plans to 'think about breathing.' Recently he took a walk. The music seems improvised but is satisfyingly varied and tracks the varying moods of the vocals closely. During the long piece, moments of abjection or desperation occur, but they pass; mostly the voice we hear is lucid. He's levelling with us. When he sings 'I won't drive my car for the rest of the day,' it's a fact. The most harrowing moment comes during the last track, a love song that turns threatening: 'please take my bait... I want to eat you up... you'll never get away, you won't want to... you don't have a life, you live in me.' The music plunges down to the bottom of the bass' range, but by the last line, the point of view has pulled back again to encompass 'the grand scheme of things.'” - Seth Tisue.

Stunning looking DVD of the first solo acoustic/vocals London show from Jandek, as close as you’re gonna get to a live version of a ‘classic’ stripped down Jandek performance. Recorded at St. Giles In The Fields, London, October 18th 2005. There’s an undeniable thrill in being able to see Sterling Smith perform alone, it’s like having alla those early records laid a little more bare. Excellent.

DVD edition featuring both sets from this trio show with Sterling Smith on guitar and vocals, Chris Corsano on drums and Matt Heyner on bass, live at Issue Project Room, Brooklyn, New York, September 7th, 2005. The sound is closer to the 'classic' Neilson/Youngs live blats but with a more straightahead garage/punk feel, with Sterling playing some of his oddest electric guitar downs while Heyner moves from groaning electric bass monoliths across the first set to quiet, semi-audible acoustic bass on the second. The second set is consequently the weirdest, with the extra space generated by Heyner fully inhabited by very minimal guitar work from Sterling and some oddly dramatised lyrical set-ups. Corsano plays it pretty straight for the bulk, riding behind Sterling's guitar like a steamroller, and at points the vocal delivery combines with the overall bounce of the rhythm section to birth something that seems to owe more to The Minutemen than any sort of avant blues tradition. The songs are great, moving from devastating emotionally wrought confessionals through to funny situational set pieces and Sterling really stretches out on vocals and is obviously enjoying the performance.

A landmark recording in every way: the last recording of the ‘classic’ Jandek line-up of Sterling Smith, Richard Youngs and Alex Neilson and the first Corwood release to bear the 0800 catalogue number. Great cover art too that looks back to one of the most enigmatic Jandek cover shots, The Gone Wait, via a 60s/70s portal that finds its echo in a track titled “Gone Waiting”.  Sterling’s guitar has a hypnotic metallic resonance while Neilson gets more tangled up in elemental tones than actually driving the thing backwards or forwards. Youngs’ bass playing works as the centre of gravity between the two, triggering vertical ascensions from dense barbed wire tones and clipped chords. Sterling’s vocals are a little more declamatory and aura-less than on earlier live sets but this is a guitar record the whole way, with some of his wildest demolitions of the limits of six strings.

Raging free jazz duo blat from saxophonist Paul Dunmall (here doubling on border pipes) and drummer Chris Corsano, marking Corsano’s first –fated! - appearance on ESP Disk. Following in the tradition of ESP’s first classic free jazz run, Identical Sunsets is an ass-blasting high energy side. The title track is a particular monster, with Dunmall’s ululating border pipes conjuring the ghost of Albert Ayler’s bagpipes with psychedelic overtones and raw folk passion. Corsano is, of course, amazing. One of the first releases from the revived ESP Disk that feels worthy of the label. Highly recommended. 

Jailbreak is the duo of pedal steel/vocalist Heather Leigh and drummer Chris Corsano. The name foregrounds the kind of outlaw violence with which the two reformulate rock/roll instants by bringing free jazz fire power to amp-humping sex beats. Their musical alliance goes all the way back to the legendary Brattleboro Free Folk Fest, the birthplace of the ‘New Weird America’, where Corsano and his long-term saxophone partner Paul Flaherty joined Leigh and Christina Carter for a quartet show that took the roof off the building and the skin off their fingers. Since then Corsano and Leigh have worked together as part of Taurpis Tula and as members of Thurston Moore’s Dream/Aktion Unit. Jailbreak play improvised music that dispenses with traditional notions of call and response or dialogue in favour of a profound simultaneity that would birth instant forms from the application of high energy strategies. Leigh’s steel mainlines sanctified slide guitar sources and deforms them with overdriven electricity, playing a form of future-blues exploded by super-charged currents. Corsano detonates time, literally blows it to pieces, in favour of a profound polyrhythmic feel that would confuse past and future. Yet the whole thing rocks like it hasn’t a braincell to spare, re-connecting avant garde tactics and ass-whooping rama-lama with alla the revolutionary fanfare of the most radical counter-cultural two-chord punk. Their debut LP is called The Rocker. It’s all you need to know.  “For those of you who've been worried that the Free Power Noize scene has become a little too tame, (and seriously who isn't somewhat concerned about that), a new screamin' creamin' duo -- Jailbreak --explodes to the rescue. The world's wildest free drummer (Chris Corsano: Cold Bleak Heat , duos with Mick Flower, Bill Nace etc.) and the world's wildest free steal pedal guitarist, (Heather Leigh:, Dream Aktion Unit, Jandek, etc.), pits two of the landscapes most intense pyromaniacs against each other in -- "The Rocker" -- a blast-furnace of blisteringly joyous witch-howling assaults on the essence of whips and chains and repressive injustice gone legal.  Both of these magisterial musicians are capable of extreme dynamics and subtleties, but those concepts don't get in the way of this monster-truck of a record. And why should they when drums and guitar can slash and burn in a riotous electric smash fest like this crazed merry madcap of an album.  Over the top ... Way! As the full frontal music rips through my naked and defenceless eardrums, images emerge of an old and demented grandmother, strapped into her rocking chair by disciples in heat. (ooooohhhhh yyyeeeaaahhhh!!!)  The more she violently rocks and chants with insane exhilaration, the more the treacherously imprisoned souls of Hell claw at their walls of liquid fire, desperately trying to free themselves from chains of Human and Sub-human limitations.  It sounds like 100 pall-bearin' viciously possessed drummers lifting 100 gone-bonkers zombie lovin' guitarists into another realm of escape, one that reality hasn't presented as a release, until now. The 1st time Heather & Chris played together, (a first meeting improve 4tet performance -- Babes on the Loose), I watched in disturbed horror as Heather crashed her steel pedal to the stage and sliced her hand while trying to play upside down. Then she passed out.  Corsano rushed to her aid, but had to stop and bandage his own bloodied digits, as rivers of crimson soaked the frightened platform.  (They obviously survived).  This recording picks up where that chaos and bedlam left off, and if possible, lifts the ante higher, into a maelstrom of American psychotic pandemonium gone-a-hunting in Scotland. A catch-and-release band for sure that attacks the jailers and frees the innocents ... just before the death penalty can be brutally administered. I liked it.” – Paul Flaherty. Highly recommended!

New limited edition self-released album from the greatest drummer on the planet, Chris Corsano. Chris Corsano Band is Corsano’s solo visioning of a free rock group, playing drums, bass and guitar all himself and overdubbing to create a now sound take on the rock/roll instants of Vampire Belt. His playing here is closest to his work with Rangda and as if to cement the umbilical he throws in a raging cover version of Sun City Girls’ classic “Esoterica Of Abyssynia” from Torch Of The Mystics. Recorded over the space of three years in the USA and Scotland, High And Dry sees Corsano channeling the kind of epic out of focus string work of Jutok Kaneko and Rudolph Grey while levitating the whole deal into space with some of his most fucked-up drum sounds. The guest appearance from The Wizard on bongos, still ‘hot’ from Frank Lowe’s epic Black Beings ESP-Disk date, is just too much gravy. Handmade covers, every one unique. Highly recommended.

Brand new album from the world-beating free music duo of Heather Leigh on pedal steel and vocals and Chris Corsano on drums, following on in style from their Family Vineyard LP. Once more recorded and mixed by Andreas Jonsson the sound is as dazzling as their debut, with three tracks that move from ferocious post-Sharrock power blues through new zones of smoky, spectral tone. The opener comes straight out of The Rocker, with Heather’s bad motor scooter guitar burning asphalt while Corsano plays in four directions at a time, ducking air raid warnings with an amphetamine dexterity. Second track, “White Spider” is a whole new bomb, with the duo navigating a kind of psychedelic giallo atmosphere with Corsano making like an orchestra of Max Roachs while Heather plays spectral strings and floating tones that are straight out of the Nicolai/Morricone songbook. The closing “Freezing Shark” might be the most radical recording they’ve nailed to the floor, with an unaccompanied vocal from Heather driven straight through the wall by Corsano before the guitar explodes like a heavy metal Masayuki Takayanagi playing future blues. This is such a great, invigorating shot from the source and it confirms a whole buncha things that are important in underground music: energy, passion, actual playing, speed-of-thought improvisation. Who else comes close? Hand-numbered edition of 297 copies. Highest possible recommendation!

Stunning new self-released album from free percussionist Chris Corsano: Cut is an all-acoustic series of settings for variously-augmented drum kit, with Corsano using metal, violin bows, bells, melodic, plastic tubing, various mouthpieces, triangles, funnels and metal racks to generate amazing kinetic compositions that touch on classic fire music strategies while factoring in all sorts of weird compositional gambits. Indeed, the set touches more on classic American musician/inventor traditions than anything that might pass for free noise, with an attention to subtly-coded rhythms and the tonal aspect of the skins that is almost Partch-ian. Still, Corsano can rock the bandstand like no one else and there are plenty of passages of ferociously detonated time-signatures as well as some spectacular heavy metal drone eviscerations. Indeed, there's more high-energy music on this solo drum set than in most groups' back catalogues. A stunning tour-de-force, an object lesson in the endless potential for sonic reduction that lies in the naked wrasslin' of one man and his instrument and easily the peak of Corsano's solo experiments to date - highly recommended!

Second duo album on Roaratorio from this inspired hook-up between veteran free jazz saxophonist Joe McPhee and drummer Chris Corsano: this is a major kick out the jams bomb, with a buncha titles dedicated to fellow heavy-hitters like Paul Flaherty, Kidd Jordan, Han Bennink, Muhammad Ali and Fred Anderson. McPhee moves between pocket trumpet, tenor and soprano saxophone throughout. The trumpet blats are particularly effective, pushing Corsano into a weird martial Don Ayler/Don Cherry vibe that he responds to by marching the whole damn deal to the edge of the precipice. But it’s McPhee’s tenor that really grounds the music, playing with a breadth of tone and the kind of interstellar logic of the late-Coltrane ensembles while making lightning strikes on the saxophone’s most phantom registers. A great, great side, one that could have sat as comfortably on Centre Of The World or ESP Disk back in the day while playing with the kinda fiery no-prisoners assault that is truly post-Noise. Comes with a download, highly recommended. 

Much-anticipated private press duo set from guitarist Bill Orcutt and drummer Chris Corsano: Corsano has made no secret of his total fucking awe at the kinda jaw-dropping breakthroughs in the logistics of time and space made by drummer Adris Hoyos in the few short years that she ruled the planet in Harry Pussy so it was pretty much a given that when Orcutt got back to string wrestling that Corsano was gonna be shooting for the drum stool. And what a hook-up. This is the closest to the full-bore Harry Pussy sound that Orcutt has come since reactivating, with that wild hiccupping style where it feels like the pair are just riding waves of buckling electricity. Corsano’s playing isn’t quite as, uh, blunt as Hoyos and there’s a fluidity to his pugilism that allows Orcutt to get a little slippy, exchanging well-oiled power chord blats with fast zig-zagging runs. And it’s not all breakneck speed-of-thought exchange either, there are long sections of tactile low level tension and some blues moaning from Orcutt that would spook Guitar Roberts. Edition of 500 copies in a cool gatefold sleeve with a snap of our heroes in full flight, immediately sold out at source, very highly recommended!

Album from this fantastic free jazz action trio featuring Matt Heyner (NNCK et al) on bass stunts, Matt Lavelle on trumpet and Ryan Sawyer on drums. Moves through great, pounding drums/trumpet face-offs that sound like a more martial take on Cherry and Blackwell's Mu to three-way time fluxing and wildly abstract silence/motion. Highly recommended.