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LP
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DOT 006LP
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$28.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 4/17/2026
"The residents of Scandinavia and those of coastal regions of Canada have more than a few commonalities. For one thing, they love seafood as well as the act of gathering it. And while this briny lust was not the sole rationale behind this, Mats Gustafsson's third visit to the city of Nanaimo on Vancouver Island off the coast of British Columbia, I am certain it was on his mind. After all, his second visit to the city, with his band Fire!, was designed around a fishing trip envisioned by promoter/label head Jack Tieleman as a sure way to lure those salmon-hungry Swedes to town. That such a gambit was not conjured up again must mean that either Kjetil Moster (a Norwegian rather than Swedish musician) had no overwhelming lust for fin or that their schedule was just too tight. I have asked about this several times, and the lack of response makes me wonder if it is a touchy topic. Maybe there's some kind of law against anti-piscatorial activity in Norway, so things have to be kept hush-hush. But that's just a guess. Regardless, this duo LP is totally great, savage and funny in equal measures. Whether there's sea salt on his lips or not, Mats is one of the great saxophonists of his generation, playing everything from traditional post-bop sax to explosive experimental electronics and many many things in between. The other half of the duo, Kjetil Moster, plays with Mats in a wild quintet called The End, and has a vast array of other projects and ensembles with whom he plays and records. Together, they form and exciting unit, employing a vast array of techniques (freaky and otherwise) to create music ranging from elegantly floating reed interactions to full-on fire music form-tussles. The music at times recalls everything from Eric Dolphy's backyard birdcall practice to rusty electronics worthy of Lasse Marhaug. That Mats and Kjetil are able to flow back and forth between such distant poles during their first-ever appearance as a duo speaks to an excellence in communication as well as lightning-fast response time. It is a gas and a blast from start to finish. How I wish I'd been there!" --Byron Coley
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DOT 005LP
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"Although it is true that the Nanaimo concert hall known as 'The White Room' has been eradicated by real estate greedheads, Jack and Dave (who ran the place and its documenting record label) have decided to keep the label going because why the hell not? The first fruit of this divine union is the Belfort Strasse LP by Eugene Chadbourne's Contemporary Rock Band (whose name was copped from an otherwise anonymous Pismo Beach cover band). Under this exquisitely generic banner you'll find Eugene Chadbourne on vocals, guitar and banjo, Schroeder on drums, Jan Fitsjen on bass and baritone guitar and occasionally Titus Waldenfels on lap steel. Unlike their namesake, this Contemporary Rock Band only plays a couple of covers -- Johnny Paycheck's 'The Cave' and Willie Nelson's 'Wake Me When It's Over.' These are also the tracks on which Waldenfels's lap steel adds musical width, while on 'Prisoner' (recorded for Bulgarian National Radio), the ensemble features solely Chadbourne and Schroeder. The material here was recorded in 2018-19 in a basement studio on Belfort Strasse in Freiburg-im-Brieslau, Germany or in taverns within walking distance of the studio, using a mobile recording facility. A few of the tunes have appeared on some of Eugene's recent CDRs, but this the first vinyl appearance of the music, and a damn fine appearance it is. Unlike his more 'purely' avant instrumental records, Belfort Strasse is a suite of Eugene's sometimes-straight/sometimes-bent lyrics, spiced up with experimentally-canted musical flourishes that fuck with time, melody and harmonics in equal measure and at their own cruel pace. Eugene's approach is so amazingly advanced it can often be head-spinning to try and unravel its intent, but the overall effect kinda destroys the perceptual barriers between sounds deemed 'inside' and 'outside.' This is a trick Chadbourne has long been working at, but as much as I loved many of his early efforts at this syncretic mode of creation, over the years his tactics have become a bit less manic, which seems like a good thing in terms of making the lines blurrier than ever. Eugene is an artist whose aesthetic has long seemed to be dictated by Duke Ellington's statement, 'if it sounds good and feels good then it is. Good. There's no art when one does something without intention.' And to my ear, Belfort Strasse, is Eugene's most adamant exemplar of this dictum yet. If you can't dig it. I'm not certain you can dig." --Byron Coley
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BLACK 001X-LP
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"Although The Black Dot/White Spot performance space in Nanaimo, BC has now passed into legend, The Black Dot label continues apace. To prove this we off¬er you The Twain, an extraordinary album helmed by BC-based string maestro Gordon Grdina, whose Square Peg combo's debut LP was The Black Dot's first release. This new project came about when Gordon encountered Michiyo Yagi's Trio, the Far out East-Improv Japan at the 2016 Jazztopad Festival in Poland. With Yagi on koto, Takahiro Honda on drums, and Koichi Makagami on vocals, the sound was beyond belief. Yagi and Honda regularly play as the duo DOJO, and their communication happens on a molecular level, giving their music a wild sense of freedom while maintaining clarity and forward-moving power. The vocals of Makagami (whose avant credentials stretch back as far as the Tokyo Kid Brothers) added an absolutely otherworldly element to the whole, as anyone who has seen him perform will surely attest to. Gordon was blown away, and knew he wanted to figure out a way to collaborate with this crew. Plans were laid, and eventually a session came together at Tokyo's GOK Studio in 2019. Three hour-long sets were recorded. One with Gord and DOJO, another with Gord and Koichi, and a final one with all four. These three hours were boiled down and edited into shorter segments. So what we have here is la creme de la creme. Things are blazing from the very start. Gord and Michiyo's work together the way Larry Coryell and Sonny Sharrock's did on the wilder parts of Memphis Underground. It's like a Vulcan Mind Meld style jam, conducted by the ghost of Jimi Hendrix. Honda's drums are tucked in there with a kind of free rock mass so huge it's hard to get your head around. And Koichi's vocals -- ranging from gibbered sound poetry to the peeps of twenty happy babies -- are akin to instructions being beamed in from alien galaxies. Taken together, these four musical voices all manage to remain distinct while at the same time conjoining for a kind of Fifth Mind synergy that will blow your mind for good." --Byron Coley
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DOT 001LP
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Originally released in 2020. "Gorgeous live debut LP by an extremely flexible quartet put together by Vancouver based string-monster, Gordon Grdina. Grdina plays both electric guitar and oud. His guitar work here recalls a couple of very different players -- the clean angular scramble of Boston's Joe Morris, and also the more lyrical passages played by the master of power-distortion, Sonny Sharrock. On oud (an instrument most often associated with traditional music of Northern African and Western Asia) he creates a new approach to the instrument, perhaps parallel to what Chicago's Joshua Abrams is doing with the guimbri. Grdina's fellow travelers in Square Peg are all similar in their multi-directional tactics. Players unafraid to go deep into uncharted territory, with wide discographies on which they play with legends and neophytes with equal power. Brooklyn-born violinist Mat Maneri has collaborated with everyone from Cecil Taylor to Robin Williamson, and is known for his totally open approach to both violin and viola. Maneri's playing here most often reminds me of '70s Leroy Jenkins, shifting from dark sonorities to light-drenched obliquity in the blink of an eye. New York-based Shahzad Ismaily plays bass and synth here, although I've seen him at festivals where he played six different instruments in six different groups. Ismaily can pretty much do anything, but here he creates a flowing, near-constant foundation effectively holding everything together. German drummer, Christian Lillinger, has also played in myriad formats, generally jazz-based, but also those involving avant-garde rock and experimental composition. His playing here is tightly focused and highly propulsive. Not unlike what Chris Corsano does when he goes right down the middle. The pieces on this album are numbered rather than named, but they are not lacking identity. From the first burst of bent notes, Square Peg is boiling. Without horns or reeds or even prominent keys to hang melodic laundry, the music feels like blocks of harmonic interplay shifting around like tectonic plates. Some of the parts where Ismaily plays synth make me think of the communion between Larry Young and John McLaughlin in Tony Williams Lifetime, but the when Grdina is on oud, the sound is unlike anything I've heard. And it is cool as hell, way beyond what little I know of non-trad oud players (Sandy Bull, John Berberian, Solomon Feldthouse). The textures the ensemble creates are hard to give name to as well. Some parts are definitely jazzoid, others are more like free-rock, still others have an almost avant-folk heft (not unlike the Wall Matthews-led Entourage LPs on Folkways). In all, it's a great LP on a great new label. And I'm looking forward to what everyone comes up with next." --Byron Coley, 2019
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DOT 002LP
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Originally released in 2020. "Welcome to the second release in the Black Dot LP series. Black Dot albums are all recorded live at the White Spot performance space in beautiful downtown Nanaimo BC, a venue which Mats Gustafsson visited on June 23, 2019. Mats is many things to many people -- a doting father, a fancier of fine bourbons, an enthusiastic sport fisherman and a record collector of unparalleled passion. But he is probably best known as a musical performer/composer/explorer with world-gobbling intentions. On this evening in June, Mats was in extremely fine solo form. Playing baritone sax, fluteophone and three 'vinyl killer' record players (containing three copies of his own Hockey 10" on Gaffer), Mats began the evening with the sounds of tabletop hockey. The hockey sounds were courtesy of the 'vinyl killer' (which look like Hot Wheels versions of VW mini-buses driving around a record), and this madness was soon intercut with insanely fleet breath manipulation on the baritone. Gustafsson is one of the few players (along Anthony Braxton, Peter Brotzmann and the late Hamiett Bluiett) who has managed to bend the baritone sax to his will. Even the tenor is a big horn, requiring some real meat/lung duality for successful wrangling, but the baritone is a monster. Although Mats handles it as though it were a baby otter (albeit a large baby otter.) His click-stop playing shows he has darn nice tongue control, with grumbles of mutated melodic construction poking up and then hiding again, burrowing deep into the fabric of pure sound. As the set continues, the sax gets more aggressive -- inflating and inventing new strategies of sonic architecture, tearing up the air, sometimes inhabiting the so-called freak register like it was born there, at others playing melodies as though Coleman Hawkins' ghost was haunting its bell. Sometimes when he's playing, Mats gets an expression on his face that suggests he's revisiting the entire history of jazz music (something I know he carries around in his head at all moments). And I suspect those spirits were visibly passing across his visage this night in British Columbia. Although he is revered as an avant-gardist, Gustafsson is much more than that. He embodies a tradition that connects all kinds of seemingly unrelated segments of the music, creating unexpected combinations of sound and technique that span a variety of theoretically unbridgeable gaps. The force of his playing and personality create a furnace in which everything must melt and combine." --Byron Coley
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DOT 003LP
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Originally released in 2021. "crys cole is a Canadian-born composer, currently based in Berlin. She has a long history as a sound artist, both for performances and recordings that display a subtle approach to sound generation (often involving small gestures and the amplification of objects not necessarily designed to produce music). She also creates sculptural installations featuring sound as one element amongst others. This might suggest she possesses some of the mania associated with Fluxus, but crys's work generally eschews the antic, focusing on the slow build and accretion of sound layers. On this night in Nanaimo BC, Oren and crys sat at a pair of tables. Oren held a guitar and his table was covered with electronics. crys held no instrument in her hands, but her table contained a mass of objects, some clearly electric in nature, others looking more like random bits found in a kitchen drawer. Working with these tools and microphones to amplify their voices and/or gestures, the pair created the two pieces here -- wonderfully flowing soundscapes from imaginary vistas of otherness. The instruments they employ sometimes recall the essence of things you've heard before, but more often they are sonic events whose source can only be discerned (and then, only fitfully), by trying to see who is doing what with their hands. The interplay of gesticulation and the slow swaying of their bodies resembles a kind of slow-motion dance, almost like something taking place underwater. And at times there is a concordant submarine heft to the music. Drifting as though heard through a waving wall of water at 20,000 leagues beneath the sea. Other portions make you feel as though you are lying in a tent at night in a jungle filled with cyborg insects. It was a night of music that came and went like a dream state. Beautiful, familiar and utterly strange all at the same time. Sadly, this will be the last LP in this series recorded at the original White Room, upstairs at 4 Church Street in downtown Nanaimo. A new landlord wanted to do something different with the legendary performance space/gallery, and so it goes. We are assured, however, that a new venue will be secured in the Nanaimo area, and the shows (with concomitant live LPs) will continue once the plague has abated. For now, take the opportunity to take a trip with Oren and crys. You won't regret a moment of it." --Byron Coley
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DOT 004LP
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"Drummer extraordinaire Chris Corsano is one of the best-known percussionists of his era as well as one of the most peripatetic musicians this side of Mike Watt (with whom he sometimes collaborates.) Saxophonist Steve Baczkowski (aka 'Buffalo Steve') tends to travel less, favoring gigs within a few hundred miles of his base in upstate New York. So although he has a heavy rep (especially on baritone), his discographical count and overall profile is lower than Corsano's. That said, the two have been friends and collaborators for many years. I think I first saw them play together as part of Thurston Moore's nine piece Dream/Aktion Unit at the 2005 Victoriaville Festival. They have also recorded together regularly, often with Paul Flaherty and/or William 'Bill' Nace. That said, This Is Not a Prayer for You documents a February 2017 session, recorded in Steve's Buffalo NY living room, representing their first recording as a duo. Chris reports they listened to Dewey Redman & Ed Blackwell's 1980 duo set, Red & Black at Willisau, before they began to play, but the skronk they came up with belongs to no one else. Steve plays both baritone and tenor (sometimes with various things jammed into their bells) while Chris handles drums, percussion and slide clarinet. Between the two of them they conjure up a hell of a beautiful racket. Steve's baritone playing has a savage mass that makes me think of Frank Wright in terms of gnarly edge and sheer force, while Chris' drumming is an example of his fleetest 'straight ahead' action, displaying an approach that is without frills while still managing to be ten places at once. The opening cut, 'Slowly Getting Rid of Everything in the Middle of the Room,' is as gorgeous a piece of sax/drum dynamism as you could ask for. And the rest of the album follows suit. The sounds range from a epic sequence of the kind of blats Han Bennink sometimes managed to coax from Brotzmann when they played in duo, to a piece, 'Even the Chairs Look Like They Are Resting,' pairing slow freak register sax-slink with Corsano's slide clarinet for artistic results. But the meat of this matter is dark and red and has to do with the interplay between two musicians who know how to stay nimble even when their playing gets hard as hell, and who never falter in their ability to listen to each other. It's a deep, immersive and thoroughly wonderful spin. I'm just glad we're able to hear it at long last." --Byron Coley
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