Here's Your Links: March 21, 2025

Submerged, Ivo Perelman, and more...

Yeah, the clouds just look like that here.

Last Saturday — March 15 — marked my second Montanaversary. On that day in 2023, my wife and I watched a moving truck drive away with all our furniture and belongings, sat in an empty apartment for a few hours, then left for Newark Airport and a flight to Salt Lake City followed by a transfer to Kalispell. We’ve been out here under the Big Sky ever since, and it’s been one of the best choices we’ve ever made. Some of it is the direct result of living here, while a lot more just feels like the universe smiling on me/us in an overall vibe-shift/“scared money don't make none” way, but some major professional and creative opportunities have fallen into my lap over the last two years, including some things related to Burning Ambulance that there will be major announcements about soon. So marking the anniversary of our arrival is a happy occasion for me every year.

I wholly support the proposition that if you feel like your life would be better lived someplace else, take the leap. A friend of mine and of BA, Kurt Glück, used to be a New Yorker — he now lives in Estonia, where he continues to run his label, Ohm Resistance, and work with me every once in a while. (He mastered the next two Burning Ambulance Releases, the Ava Mendoza/Gabby Fluke-Mogul/Carolina Pérez album Mama Killa and the Cecil Taylor/Tony Oxley album Flashing Spirits, and they both sound amazing. I can’t wait for you to hear them.)

Back in late 2020, I reached out to Kurt with a vague idea — I wanted to produce (in the logistical “I will put up the money and this thing will come into existence” sense) an album of trumpet and electronics. After some discussion, it was decided that it would feature him under his drum ’n’ bass nom de guerre, Submerged, and cornet player Graham Haynes. They knew each other from playing as part of the project Method Of Defiance, which Kurt co-founded with Bill Laswell, so a reunion was easy and friendly. Kurt cooked up tracks in Estonia, sent them to Graham who was living in Brazil at the time, and over a period of a couple of months the album Echolocation came together. We credited it to Graham Haynes vs Submerged like an old-school dub record, and released it in summer 2021. It received some great reviews on PopMatters and the Rock and Roll Globe. Here’s an interview with both men, and here’s another with Graham talking about improvisation.

Most Burning Ambulance Music releases arrive pretty much how you hear them. The artists, all people I admire, get in touch with a project either ready to go or thoroughly conceptualized, and I just say, “Yes, please.” Echolocation and the forthcoming Mama Killa are the two records that I have done the most to shepherd into existence: in the former case, by proposing it to Kurt and Graham, and in the latter, by introducing Ava Mendoza and Gabby Fluke-Mogul to Carolina Pérez. Once that part’s done, though, it’s out of my hands. I say, “Go make a record”, and I wait to hear the results. So far, it’s worked out great.

In other news: Ivo! As part of the ongoing Leo Records digital reissue campaign, we’re releasing 20 albums by saxophonist Ivo Perelman on Friday, April 4. You can pre-order them here.

Perelman made 68 albums for Leo between 1997 and 2019, and they’ll be reissued in batches of 20 in April, May, and June, with the last eight titles going up in July. The first set includes:

Sad Life (w/William Parker and Rashied Ali)

Geometry (w/Borah Bergman)

Strings (w/Joe Morris; Perelman plays cello)

Seeds, Vision and Counterpoint (w/Dominic Duval & Jay Rosen)

The Alexander Suite (w/the C.T. String Quartet)

Brazilian Watercolour (w/Matthew Shipp, Rashied Ali, Guilherme Franco & Cyro Baptista)

Sieiro (w/Tomas Ulrich, Dominic Duval & Jay Rosen)

The Hammer (w/Jay Rosen)

The Seven Energies of the Universe (w/Joseph Scianni & Jay Rosen)

The Ventriloquist (w/Louis Sclavis, Christine Wodrascka, Paul Rogers & Ramon Lopez)

Introspection (w/Rosie Hertlein, Dominic Duval & Newman Taylor Baker)

Mind Games (w/Dominic Duval & Brian Willson)

The Apple in the Dark (w/Gerry Hemingway)

The Stream of Life (w/Brian Willson)

Family Ties (w/Joe Morris & Gerald Cleaver)

The Hour of the Star (w/Matthew Shipp, Joe Morris & Gerald Cleaver)

The Passion According to G.H. (w/the Sirius Quartet)

The Foreign Legion (w/Matthew Shipp & Gerald Cleaver)

The Clairvoyant (w/Matthew Shipp & Whit Dickey)

Living Jelly (w/Joe Morris & Gerald Cleaver)

Listen and pre-order them here.

That’s it for this week, unless you’re a paying subscriber. If you are, keep reading — we’ve got links to articles about a competition to design new musical instruments, the value of nudes in art, a wild cult of murderous trans futurists, and much more! Read on!