Since launching Burning Ambulance Music in 2021, I’ve put out six fantastic albums and one digital-only compilation. I’m going to be releasing two more albums in October, but before I officially announce those, I want to talk to you about the music we’ve already put out, and make you a special, Substack-only offer.
The deal is this: Any CD in our catalog for $10 plus shipping. (If you buy them from Amazon, or via Bandcamp, they’re between $13 and $15 each.) Order as many as you want of any title listed below, and yes, international shipping is available, though it’ll cost you — I apologize in advance for that.
Our first release was Alkisah, by the Indonesian ritual art-doom duo Senyawa. Their music is absolutely unearthly, made on custom-designed and -built instruments and sung in their native language. It’s impossible to say “if you like this, you’ll like Senyawa,” because there’s nobody else doing what they do. They wanted to break up the traditional music distribution system, so they contracted with labels in something like 40 different territories to release the record, and BA was one of two that put it out in the US, and one of the few CD editions (most people put out vinyl versions). It was written up in the New York Times and reviewed all over the place (Pitchfork, The Wire, the Quietus). It’s an incredible record that deserves all the attention it’s gotten and much more.
At the same time (we do our releases in pairs), we put out Polarity, a duo album by tenor saxophonist Ivo Perelman and trumpeter Nate Wooley. Perelman has well over 100 releases to his name at this point, and Wooley has done a lot of work in all sorts of contexts, but Polarity was a unique record for both men, a really intimate conversation that occasionally rises to ecstatic heights but just as often allows you to hear them thinking and passing ideas back and forth. It’s part free jazz, part pure improvisation, and just extraordinarily beautiful music.
Later in 2021, we released Reels, a duo album by pianist Matthew Shipp and drummer Whit Dickey. They had been friends and collaborators since the late ’80s; Dickey was the drummer in the David S. Ware Quartet in the mid ’90s, with Shipp and bassist William Parker, and the three of them, minus the saxophonist, also performed as a trio, making the albums Circular Temple and Prism. Shipp’s playing can sometimes be quite heavy and forbidding, especially when he has an equally forceful drummer, but Dickey is an almost Zenlike dancer behind the kit, creating little zephyrs of sound that allow the pianist to express his romantic, lyrical side. This album shimmers.
Along with that, we put out Echolocation, a collaboration between cornet player Graham Haynes and electronic musician Submerged. They’d worked together before, in a live lineup of Bill Laswell’s Method of Defiance, but this was something entirely new. Haynes recorded his parts in Brazil, where he was living at the time, and sent them electronically to Estonia, where Submerged lives and works. He constructed tracks around the horn parts, and the results are amazing, a blend of styles ranging from floor-shaking hip-hop to industrial dub to explosive drum ’n’ bass. Fans of Kevin Martin, DJ Krush, or Submerged’s own earlier work will definitely want to hear this one, good and loud.
Last year, we released the debut album by Breath Of Air, a trio featuring guitarist Brandon Ross (who’s worked with Henry Threadgill and Cassandra Wilson, and is also a member of the post-rock power trio Harriet Tubman) alongside violinist Charles Burnham and drummer Warren Benbow, both of whom were members of James “Blood” Ulmer’s Odyssey. It’s a mostly live recording of psychedelic improvisation that blurs the lines between rock, jazz, and Black string band music, with an almost Native American rumble to Benbow’s free drumming. It doesn’t sound like anything any of the three have done in other contexts, and it floats around you like a storm cloud.
Finally, we put out Inner Voices by Portuguese saxophonist José Lencastre, a collaboration with producer and electronic musician Ary. Lencastre overdubs multiple tracks of sax on most of the pieces, creating a sound somewhere in the neighborhood of the World Saxophone Quartet or the Julius Hemphill Sextet, while Ary adds echo, sound design, and on some tracks live synth to give it a dubby, remixed feeling. If you’re a fan of Hemphill, of Autechre, or of Anthony Braxton’s collaborations with the late synth wizard Richard Teitelbaum, Inner Voices is an album you need to hear.
Each of these records represents a unique and vital statement by their creators. They have made no concessions to a perceived or imagined market — this is the music they felt they needed to make, which is exactly why we decided to release it. We have worked to honor their creativity with the packaging; our CDs don’t come in jewel cases or digipaks, they come in heavy cardboard gatefold mini-LP sleeves designed by I.A. Freeman (who is available to design album and/or book covers for you at very reasonable rates, so get in touch).
So like I said up top, we’re offering a special deal only through this newsletter. All six of these releases are available now for $10 per CD, plus shipping. Just email us at burningambulance@gmail.com and tell us which ones you want, and where they’re going, and we’ll get back to you with a total price.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for listening.
flamme en el l'obscurité . . . https://cwspangle.substack.com/p/flamme-en-el-lobscurite