Friday, August 23, 2024

• Dulal Roy & Himangshu Biswas, Santoor & Flute
• Éliane Radigue, Occam Ocean 1 (disc 1)
• Jim O’Rourke, Steamroom 56 (disc 2)
• Margaux Oswald, Dysphotic Zone
• Sylvie Courvoisier, Chimaera (disc 1)
• Albert Ayler, More Lost Performances Revisited
• Albert Ayler, European Recordings Autumn 1964 Revisited (disc 2)
• Josephine Davies, How Can We Wake?
• Sticks & Stones, Shed Grace
• Dean Roberts, Moth Park/Soundtracks to Utopia
• Material, Temporary Music
• The Residents, Duck Stab / Buster and Glen
• Shrimp Boat, Speckly
• Eurythmics, In the Garden

Albert Ayler’s discography is bewildering. The same recordings have been issued and re-issued over and over again with the album titles, song names, cover art, and sound quality always changing.

But in recent years it got a lot easier to have a reasonably complete Ayler collection with best available sound quality, thanks to the efforts of Hat Hut’s ezz-thetics imprint and their sound engineer Michael Brändli.

Here’s what you need:

• the Impulse!s (mainly Love Cry and the Greenwich Village 2CD, but feel free to check out the later R&B recordings too)
• all the recent ezz-thetics reissues; most of them are on Bandcamp at https://albertayler-ezz-thetics.bandcamp.com/music
• Revelations: The Complete ORTF 1970 Fondation Maeght Recordings

And that’s it, you're set, with everything in highest available sound quality, as best I can determine without getting maniacal about it.

In some cases, recent versions have dramatically better sound than past issues. This is especially true of Prophecy (1964) and Revelations (1970).

You’ll be missing a few obscurities from the Revenant box (you can scoop those up here if you like), some pre-maturity stuff like Something Different!!!!! and Swing Low Sweet Spiritual, some random live stuff (not very much), and that’s about it. You can ditch all your ESPs, Freedoms, etc, it’s all covered by the ezz-thetics series. You’ll have everything I’d painstakingly accumulated, often in multiple confusing versions, over the past 30 years.

It’s fantastic this finally all got sorted out.