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viewing 1 To 13 of 13 items
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ICTUSRE 012LP
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$28.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 2/7/2026
In the summer of 1976, a peculiar album appeared in Italian record shops, its cover bearing no artist name, only the cryptic moniker Elektriktus. For the handful of listeners who encountered it before it vanished from circulation, the music posed a question that wouldn't be answered for decades: who had created this strange hybrid of jazz sensibility and kosmische synthesis, this music that seemed to emanate from somewhere between Cologne and Calabria? The answer was hiding in plain sight. Andrea Centazzo, by then a recognized figure in European free improvisation -- a percussionist who had shared stages with Steve Lacy, Evan Parker, and Derek Bailey -- had been leading a double life. Between 1973 and 1976, in the intervals between touring with Giorgio Gaslini's quartet (Gaslini would soon co-compose Dario Argento's Profondo Rosso with Goblin), Centazzo retreated to his farmhouse in Moruzzo and to studios in Pistoia, where he conducted experiments with Minimoog, Davolisint, and the GEM Rodeo 49, an Italian-manufactured synthesizer that had become essential equipment in the country's progressive rock underground. What emerged from these sessions was music that occupied a peculiar position in the taxonomy of 1970s electronic experimentation. PDU Records -- owned by the pop icon Mina and by the mid-seventies functioning as Italy's primary distributor for German avant-garde labels like Ohr, Brain, Kosmische Musik, Pilz, and Kosmische Kuriere -- recognized the value of what Centazzo had created. But there was a commercial calculus at work: the label's executives worried that Centazzo's established identity as a jazz percussionist would confuse the market for cosmic electronics, then in the process of consolidating as a genre distinct from both progressive rock and academic electronic music. The solution was to create Elektriktus -- a pseudonym that functioned as a conceptual portmanteau, fusing "electronic" with "Ictus," the name Centazzo would soon give to his own label and to his series of percussion works. The name suggested both electronic impulse and percussive attack, a synthesis that accurately described the music's character. For where German kosmische musik tended toward the infinite and the abstract, Centazzo's electronic music retained a tactile, almost physical quality.
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ICTUSRE 013LP
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$28.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 2/7/2026
In 2019, Andrea Centazzo discovered unlabeled tape reels in his mother's attic in Udine -- boxes assumed lost seven years earlier. What emerged from these deteriorating reels, transferred by engineer Sergio Tomasini during COVID lockdowns, was unexpected: unreleased recordings from the original Elektriktus sessions of 1973-76, alongside other archival materials including previously unknown collaborations with Steve Lacy and Evan Parker from the same period. Centazzo's solution was conceptually elegant: add contemporary digital electronics to the original analog Elektriktus recordings, creating temporal palimpsest in which the seventy-something composer engages in dialogue with his younger self. Crucially, his fundamental approach hasn't changed. "Making a 10-minute loop meant playing and overdubbing for 10 minutes!" This rejection of computer automation, this insistence on the hand-played and physically executed, links 2025 to 1975 through continuous methodology. Electronic Mind Waves Volume 2 operates in complex registers: contemporary electronics don't "update" the original recordings but exist in conversation with them. By overlaying 2025 digital work onto 1975 analog recordings, Centazzo creates proof that affinities between cosmic drift and percussive grounding were present in the original conception, waiting to be heard. This temporal doubling produces music that is neither nostalgic recreation nor radical revision but something more complex -- a conversation between past and present, between the composer who created these sounds in the mid-1970s and the artist who now understands their full implications.
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ICTUSRE 010LP
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$28.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 1/30/2026
Real Time is an extraordinary example of interaction between musicians coming from different worlds of new music. "I had the chance to perform with those two great musicians on other occasions: in duo with Alvin Curran and in duo, trio and sextet with Evan Parker. Alvin came from the American school, full of minimalist references, melodic structures and open to all kinds of contamination. Evan had left jazz to accomplish his own instrumental language, aiming at total improvisation. The idea of getting them to put together a trio that would perform several concerts and recording was one of the most exciting moments of my career. Our three languages found a common ground of expression where different musical backgrounds came together and created a unique blend for that period of time." --Andrea Centazzo Andrea Centazzo: percussion, percussion synthesizer; Alvin Curran: synthesizer, piano, trumpet; Evan Parker: soprano & tenor saxophones. Recorded live in concert Rome, Italy December 13, 1977. Engineer: Nicola Bernardini. Remastered from the original tapes by Matt Bordin at Outside Inside Studio.
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ICTUSRE 011LP
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$28.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 1/30/2026
"It was a magical evening. Not only did the trio burst with a creative energy that was homogeneous and interactive, but the acoustics, usually inadequate, of the half-empty sports pavilion with a capacity of 10,000 people, gave the music an ethereal transparency and crystalline purity that the recording captured in all its singular beauty." --Andrea Centazzo Andrea Centazzo: percussion, percussion synthesizer; Alvin Curran: synthesizer, piano, trumpet; Evan Parker: soprano & tenor saxophones. Recorded live at Teatro Comunale, Pistoia, Italy December 14, 1977 by Carla Lugli. Remastered from the original tapes by Matt Bordin at Outside Inside Studio.
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ICTUSRE 009LP
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$28.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 1/30/2026
Live in Padova 1977, unreleased. This album is a historical document in several respects: echo of a creative season in its early, vigorous blossoming. It serves as a testament to the initial opening of the emerging Italian free music scene to Northern European experiences, which had already been in communication for years. The collaboration between Evan Parker and Andrea Centazzo had begun a few months before this concert held in Padova on December 12, 1977. In July, Parker came to Italy, specifically to Tuscany, for a series of concerts, including a duo performance with Derek Bailey in Pisa. Then he joined Centazzo, who had organized a seminar with him (likely the first of its kind in Italy) in San Marcello Pistoiese. At that time, Centazzo lived and worked in the countryside between Pistoia and Montecatini. On that occasion, Centazzo recalls recording studio material, which, along with material collected during the concert in San Marcello, became the album Duets 71977 (2016). Shortly after, the duo temporarily expanded into a trio with Alvin Curran, who recorded Real Time (ICTUSRE 010LP). By then, the Centro d'Arte had existed for more than thirty years as an association connected to the University, presenting seasons with a very open and research-oriented profile. In 1973, the Centro d'Arte started an autonomous jazz series, favoring contemporary and avant-garde artists such as the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Sam Rivers, Anthony Braxton, and musicians from the emerging European free jazz scene. The Centazzo/Parker duo was indeed one of the most experimental episodes presented by the Centro d'Arte in those years. The musical material heard on this album does not correspond to the entire concert but is a selection that emphasizes some particularly intense long sequences. It is worth remembering that about twenty minutes into the actual concert, some voices from the audience began to howl and even mock what they were listening to. Parker expressed his irritation through the music, but also with words in which he ironically described himself as a gladiator in the arena. In this portion of the concert, which is not included in the album, spoiled as it is by annoying distortions, you can hear him addressing the audience: "Bring back bullfighting, Bring back bullfighting... whoa... Bullfighting on ice!" and later shouting, "Bring on the lions!" In 2000, Stefano Bassanese converted the tape into a digital file (44100 Hz/16 bit) in his home studio. This forms the basis of the current restoration process, conducted at Outside Inside Studio by Matt Bordin, who is also responsible for editing and mastering.
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ICTUSRE 005LP
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2023 restock. Reissue, originally released in 1978. The Italian Ictus imprint was founded in 1976 by percussionist and composer, Andrea Centazzo, and his wife, Carla Lugli. Running for just under a decade, until relaunching during the mid-2000s, the label produced a couple of dozen highly celebrated releases, the majority of which loosely fall under the banner of free jazz. Ictus's second batch of releases from the label's historic archives logically begins with Andrea Centazzo's U.S.A. Concerts, out of print on vinyl for the majority of the time since. U.S.A. Concerts draws on the same rough period when Centazzo was working in the United States for Environment for Sextet, which was reissued in the previous batch (ICTUSRE 004LP), and features many of the same players -- Polly Bradfield on violin, Eugene Chadbourne on guitar, Tom Cora on cello, Toshinori Kondo on trumpet, and John Zorn on saxophone -- in different configurations. In fact, the first, second, and seventh tracks -- "Sextet Improvisation", "Duet Improvisation N. 1", "Duet Improvisation N. 4" -- were all recorded on the same day at the same location as the aforementioned album: WKCR Radio in New York on November 7, 1978. Beginning with the brilliant textural and tonal explorations of the full ensemble encountered in "Sextet Improvisation", the album quickly moves toward quieter and more restrained investigations of roughly similar ground, moving through a series of duo improvisations between the percussionist and Eugene Chadbourne, Tom Cora, and the under-celebrated saxophonist, Jack Wright, whose howling horn is transformed to otherworldly effect by the reverberance of the space within which he works. From here, Centazzo embraces the trio form with an improvisation with two more under-celebrated figures from the American scene -- Davey Williams playing guitar and banjo, and LaDonna Smith on violin, viola, and voice -- capturing a performance in Jackson, Mississippi on November 19, 1978, during which the three fire responsive statements that hang like barbs in the spacious air, before conceding the LP with a brilliant suite of duos with Toshinori Kondo, Williams, and Smith. Offering incredible insight into Centazzo's unique sensibility, as well as into the work of a new generation of stunning improvisers as they emerged at the tail end of the '70s, before going on to help define the '80s free jazz sound, U.S.A. Concerts is a crucial artifact of free music at the juncture; fire on the boundaries of outright noise.
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ICTUSRE 007LP
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The final two LPs in the latest Ictus batch, The Ictus Archives Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 (ICTUSRE 008LP), both draw on the same period that the veteran saxophonist produced Clangs and Trio Live, both recorded in 1976 during of two weeks that he was touring Italy with Andrea Centazzo, released in 1976 and 1977 respectively, and reissued in 2021's batch. Gathering four sides of material, issued as two individual LPs, here is an offering of incredible insight into that moment's striking collaborations with Centazzo and the bassist Kent Carter, forming in duo and trio configurations. The Ictus Archives Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 encounter Steve Lacy -- one of the giants of American free jazz -- already two decades into a career defined by brilliant collaborations with Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry, and Thelonious Monk, among others, as well as a sprawling body of visionary work as a leader. Like so much of his work leading into this period, it draws upon the saxophonist's belief that an artist should play what you feel, a position that Centazzo recalls as having torn down the curtain that separated his technique from his creativity. The first volume of Steve Lacy pieces from the Ictus Archives features five pieces: "Figment", "Coastline", "Swab", "Hooky", and "The Duck", encountering the saxophonist playing solo live renditions of some of his classic pieces from the period ("Coastline" appeared on his seminal FMP LP Stabs / Solo In Berlin) and in two duos with Andrea Centazzo, one of which, "The Duck" was previously issued as a solo piece (also on Stabs / Solo In Berlin) and now emerges in this new form. The recordings featured across the album's two sides were captured on February 18th 1976 in a concert in Udine Italy and have never before been issued in such a focus form. The lyricality of Lacy's playing sets them apart from the more brittle and textural temperance featured throughout much of the label's output. Crucial artifacts of the seminal saxophonist at the height of his career, never before encountered in these full concert formations, and thus pushing the historical importance of the Ictus reissue series to the next level. Cover picture by Roberto Masotti, courtesy of Lelli e Masotti archive.
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ICTUSRE 008LP
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The final two LPs in the latest Ictus batch, The Ictus Archives Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 (ICTUSRE 008LP), both draw on the same period that the veteran saxophonist produced Clangs and Trio Live, both recorded in 1976 during of two weeks that he was touring Italy with Andrea Centazzo, released in 1976 and 1977 respectively, and reissued in 2021's batch. Gathering four sides of material, issued as two individual LPs, here is an offering of incredible insight into that moment's striking collaborations with Centazzo and the bassist Kent Carter, forming in duo and trio configurations. The Ictus Archives Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 encounter Steve Lacy -- one of the giants of American free jazz -- already two decades into a career defined by brilliant collaborations with Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry, and Thelonious Monk, among others, as well as a sprawling body of visionary work as a leader. Like so much of his work leading into this period, it draws upon the saxophonist's belief that an artist should play what you feel, a position that Centazzo recalls as having torn down the curtain that separated his technique from his creativity. The lyricality of Lacy's playing sets them apart from the more brittle and textural temperance featured throughout much of the label's output. Three tracks on Vol. 2 -- "Name", "The Way", and "Bone" -- recorded on December 5th, 1976, in Udine Italy -- were two duos with Centazzo, and the trio ("Feline") on the second side, stands distinct, with each player issuing rapid fire interventions within an airy sense of space. Crucial artifacts of the seminal saxophonist at the height of his career, never before encountered in these full concert formations, and thus pushing the historical importance of the Ictus reissue series to the next level. Cover picture by Roberto Masotti, courtesy of Lelli e Masotti archive.
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ICTUSRE 006LP
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Reissue, originally released in 1979. On the same trip to the United States that produced U.S.A. Concerts and Environment for Sextet, Andrea Centazzo also connected with the San Francisco-based ROVA Saxophone Quartet, formed the previous year by Jon Raskin, Larry Ochs, Andrew Voigt, and Bruce Ackley (all playing various saxophones). While not as well-known now as they once were, over the last 40+ years the ensemble has produced dozens of albums and collaborated with diverse figures like Anthony Braxton, Alvin Curran, Terry Riley, and Henry Kaiser. The first of those collaborations captured on tape was The Bay, recorded in California during December of 1978. In Centazzo's own words: "At the end of the 1970s this group (R.O.V.A.) of four saxophone players appeared on the scene of improvised and jazz music, bringing with them a gust of fresh air in their unusual approach to themes, technical dexterity and daring choices of language contamination". Launching in with the almost symphonic piece, "Trobar Clus", which takes up the majority of the first side and deploys complex clusters tones and rhythms to startling effect, the album progresses through a series of pieces that follow Centazzo's disposition toward working across diverse arrangements of players, breaking down into trios, duos, and full ensemble works, each composed by the quartet, Centazzo, or in collaboration between the two. Utilizing compositional structures that allow broad spaces for improvisation, while highlighting each player's highly individual skill set within various ensembles, trios, duets, and solos, to underline the soloist skills of the musicians, and organizes the sound situations into ensembles, trios, duets and solos, The Bay is a stunning piece of much neglected creativity, riding the American and Italian scenes, from the mid to late 1970s, as well as drawing the ear back toward the origins of The ROVA Saxophone Quartet.
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ICTUSRE 002LP
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2022 limited repress. Reissue, originally released in 1977. In the history of free improvised music, there has been arguably no greater advocate for the idiom's power and potential than the English guitarist Derek Bailey. Fiercely principled, between his emergence during the 1960s and his death in 2005, he cut a wide path, positioning this music at the height of creativity, transpiring in real time, and a means through which people from diverse backgrounds could come together, express, and commune. For Bailey, "playing is about playing with other people... Improvisation is a process that gets relationships sorted out." Among many great examples of this within Bailey's sprawling discography, a stand out is his 1977 duo LP Drops -- originally issued as the third album on Ictus -- recorded with the Italian percussionist/drummer Andrea Centazzo. Capturing the guitarist during one of his most prolific and creatively visionary periods -- overflowing with explosive clarity, dialogic energy, and imagination -- he clearly found a perfect foil in Centazzo, who recalls of the sessions: "The kaleidoscopic quality of Drops was created by this restraint of performing limits, i.e. the choice of instrumental timbres, dynamics and metronome speeds to suit each piece. We explored some aspects of our improvisational art, gleaned the best elements from our baggage of music memories and exposed them clearly and confidently." Comprising nine individual improvisations, Drops encounters each of its players at their best, finding a strange middle ground between the intuitive logics of their instruments; Bailey's tones taking on decidedly percussive approaches, while Centazzo's fractured polyrhythms and beats often veer toward the presence of a notable tonality. Remarkably expressive and diverse in the approach of each piece, Drops presents creative interplay at its most striking and challenging, rethinking the terms of musicality and collaboration every step of the way. Flurries of rattle back and forth, sculpting barbed and pointillistic landscapes of texture, stripped of reference and precedent, and abstract as real time organized sound comes.
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ICTUSRE 004LP
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2022 limited repress. Reissue, originally released in 1979. Recorded live at WKCR Radio in New York City in 1978 and issued by Ictus the following year, Environment for Sextet encounters John Zorn at the earliest stages of his career, resting within a sextet of a new generation of stunning improvisers emerging at the tail end of the '70s who would go on to define a vast swath of the '80s sound -- Polly Bradfield on violin, Andrea Centazzo on percussion, Eugene Chadbourne on guitar, Tom Corra on cello, and Toshinori Kondo on trumpet -- it roughly builds on the series of collaborations that had featured on Centazzo's 1978 Ictus LP U.S.A. Concerts. Launching from a total wall of sound -- full throttle fire on the boundaries of outright noise -- Environment for Sextet takes the listening on an endlessly surprising journey through its players' inner world, shifting between airy open passages that feature endless combinations of one or more players, to furious moments of sonorous lashings where the group falls in together in brilliant dialogical periods of conversant texture and tonal intervention. An engrossing and relentless listen from the first moment to the last -- featuring two works built from two of Andrea Centazzo's earliest graphic scores -- Environment for Sextet is an absolutely stunning body of improvised work by what were then among the most important rising stars on the free music scene.
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ICTUSRE 001LP
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Ictus Records' reissue initiative fittingly begins with Clangs, the first LP issued by the label in 1976. Featuring Steve Lacy on soprano saxophone, bird calls, and pocket synthesizer (or "crack box"), with Andrea Centazzo on drums, percussion, whistle, and vocals, the album is the culmination of a couple of weeks that the two artists spent together while Lacy was touring Italy during that year. Clangs encounters Lacy -- one of the giants of American free jazz -- already two decades into a career defined by brilliant collaborations with Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry, and Thelonious Monk, as well as a sprawling body of visionary work as a leader. Like so much of his work leading into this period, it draws upon the saxophonist's belief that an artist should "play what you feel", a position that Centazzo -- roughly 15 years Lacy's junior -- recalls as having torn down the curtain that separated his technique from his creativity. Comprising a series of duets that investigate timbral relationships, the fragmentation of melody, and abrasive, provocative noise -- shifting from the sparse, airy, and restrained, to dance clusters of interplay and back again -- Clangs, for all its radicalism and forward-thinking gestures, rests firmly within the historic structures of jazz, deploying the idiom of theme/solo/theme. Lacy's playing is at the top of his form -- fluttering and dancing with a primal touch -- met by Centazzo's rattle and pattern of percussive interventions, the notes and polyrhythms of each respective player being the product of careful listening, response, and raising the bar. Edition of 250.
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ICTUSRE 003LP
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Originally issued in 1977, Trio Live was recorded in 1976, only a handful of days after Steve Lacy and Andrea Centazzo's Clangs (ICTUSRE 001LP) was laid to tape, presumably capturing another moment on the same two-week tour that had rendered the recordings for its brilliant predecessor. This time, the pair -- Lacy and Centazzo -- is joined by the American bassist, Kent Carter, a sinfully under-appreciated artist who had worked extensively in Steve Lacy's group, played on the two Jazz Composer's Orchestra LPs, and toured in the bands of Don Cherry, Alan Silva, Mal Waldron, Bobby Bradford, Max Roach, Roswell Rudd, Derek Bailey, John Stevens, Trevor Watts, Steve McCall, and many others. The previous year, he had also delivered the stellar LP, Kent Carter Solo With Claude Bernard, as Ictus's second LP, allowing Trio Live to be understood as a narrowing of an already tight circle, despite its slightly expanded ensemble. Arguably best defining the first two entries in the Ictus reissue series -- Clangs and Drops (ICTUSRE 002LP) -- is a sense of rigorous and artistry. While no less present across the length Trio Live, what takes the forward charge throughout its five tracks is a sense of joy and pure pleasure in playing together. The sounds and structural interventions are locked in and tight, feeling at ease and intuitively responsive in the ways that players with a history of collaboration are only able to produce. From swinging and chugging to stepped back and sparse combinations of rhythm and tone -- moving from the lingering sensibilities of straight-ahead jazz to radically out hard blow fire -- Trio Live is a cornucopia of brilliant artistry and improvised music. Edition of 250.
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