February 5 street date. Like worms through an hour glass, so are the days of our live recordings-such as JIM SAUTER, DON DIETRICH, and DONALD MILLER's final concert of their 2009 tour of Europe. Performing at Instants Chavires in the land of la vache qui fond, the trio celebrates thirty goddamn years of impossibly loud and uncompromising screech, pioneering unique strategies such as bells together, extended, flexible mouthpieces, open mouth wah wah, and never ever conserving a single volt of energy. "You know that bit at the end of the Monterey concert where Hendrix sets his guitar on fire?" guitarist Donald Miller famously asked. "That's what we do. For a whole hour." With BORBETOMAGUS, bigger is bigger, better is better. It's not up for debate.
May 14 street date. Jim Sauter (tenor saxophone), Don Dietrich (tenor saxophone) and Donald Miller (guitar); recorded live at Instants Chavires Montreuil, France, December 19, 2009. "What is there to say about Borbetomagus, apart from trotting out all those tired old lines about high-octane, earwax-melting balls-on-the-line free improvisation at cow-rending volume (thanks to Byron Coley for those last two)? If you want meat, details of the history of the group and their various escapades during the past three decades, generously seasoned with Messrs Sauter, Dietrich and Miller's wry humor, I respectfully suggested you go to paristransatlantic.com. But the chances are you've been there, or someplace like it.... So let me assume instead you know precious little about the Instants Chavires in Montreuil, just outside Paris, where this concert took place on December 19th 2009, and the last leg of a tour organized by the Instants' Jean-Francois Pichard to celebrate 30 years of Borbetomagus.
October 15 street date. Recorded on October 13, 1984 at Rote Fabrik in Zurich, Switzerland. Originally released in 1985 as a double LP. "What is best about Sauter, Dietrich and Miller is that they are playing what jazz should be and not just emptying the tradition through some plastic-sounding fusion of jazz as a 'universal language.' They expand the frontiers of the trance-state without resorting to formulaic repetition and take the expressiveness so natural to jazz to new heights, turning over the conventions common to European improvised music. In short, they are a cleansing experience and force us to readjust our ears to a new sonic landscape. Borbetomagus is one of the best things to come out of the United States in a long time" --Gustave Cerutti, Editor; Jazz 360° No. 73, November 1984. Borbetomagus is: Donald Miller (guitar, alto saxophone), Jim Sauter (tenor saxophone, alto saxophone, baritone saxophone), and Don Dietrich (tenor saxophone, alto saxophone, guitar).
December 10 street date. Originally released in 1995. The trio of Jim Sauter (reeds), Don Dietrich (reeds) and Donald Miller (guitar) are practically an American institution at this point. For the better part of two decades they have raised the mantle on intense improvisational sound parameters into one of the most unique sound configurations heard on planet earth. Heavy noise, deeply coiled feedback manipulation, hair-raising electronic squeal, and the ultimate in air propulsion explosiveness, all initiated by humans. Pretty much every home could use at least one Borbetomagus recording; this CD is a reissue of their debut album from 1980, with the addition of Brian Doherty on electronics. Includes a previously-unreleased track.
December 10 street date. 1990 reissue of the trio's self-titled third LP. "There's something very exhilarating about music that revels in its own sheer noisiness. Borbetomagus sustain their caterwaul of sound with admirable stamina. The trio's interplay, as Jim Sauter has explained, is aimed at a total group sound in which individual parts merge into the whole. They get it. The bent notes, thick textures and quasi-feedback squeals of the saxophonists blend with Donald Miller's industrial strength electric guitar. Miller apparently gets his rough and grainy sound by severely overloading his amplifier and using controlled feedeback. The result is distortion so radical it makes individual notes all but impossible to pick out. You can trace some of these sounds back to conventional guitar techniques, but to list them would miss the point." --Kevin Whitehead
February 18 street date. CD reissue of what was the fourth Borbetomagus album, originally released on LP by Agaric way back in 1983. The trio of Jim Sauter (reeds), Don Dietrich (reeds) & Donald Miller (guitar). Recorded at In-Roads, NYC, May 7, 1982. "Recorded at In-Roads on Mercer Street, Barbed Wire Maggots documents a gorgeous evening of extreme sonic dialogue. Sauter and Dietrich's reeds skinny-dip into virtual classicist free mode at times (think 'Trane having an erotic dream of Frank Wright), but more often they tangle like electric eels dropped like tampons from the poop hatch of a 747. Upper register bowel tingling never felt so good. Miller's guitar joins them up in the stratosphere, plugging raw current into metal bowls, sizzling like a wok full of stewardess jiz, just creating and distorting and worrying the fabric of the cosmos like some idiotic terrier-god from a lost part of the Upanishards. Everything just moves so beautifully here. All of the early Borbeto hallmarks are on display: the ducks-attacked-by-lawnmowers thing; the Wilhelm Reich Busts Another Cloud scenario; the angel-wire-thimble connection ; the part about the cop car getting crushed by a bulldozer inside a maelstrom in a sewer drain -- it's all here. What is most remarkable about the music on BWM is how fresh it still sounds. There're no clichés brunted about here, nothing that's time-coded in the least; it's even difficult to really categorize the music inside any genre. Jazz, industrial, rock, free...there are elements of all of those here. And they are blended and/or smashed together in ways that will make yr hair feel lighter than feathers, lighter than maggots, lighter than anything." --Byron Coley
April 29 street date. Reissue of this classic Purge/Sound League LP by Borbetomagus, recorded 12/6/1987. "Seven Reasons for Tears beautifully documents the most simultaneously fierce and accessible periods of the band's history. Converts and heathens can both bathe luxuriously in the radioactive improv-beauty-stream that lights up a room when the record is played at 'special' volume. Tears is the living spirit of Borbetomagus' numbered days as a quartet with bassist Adam Nodelman. Days to be cherished. The brobdignagian wall-motion of Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich's free-roving horns and Donald Miller's evil-minded guitar-abuse have always had a tendency to hit me above the belt. The textured furrows their howl historically carved into my flesh began at the navel and trailed bloodily up into the aether. Nodelman's terricolous presence gave them full access to listener's aesthetic genitals for the first time and Tears proves they can wreak remarkable damage in this area. It would be the height of irresponsibility for me to suggest that any of this disk's spontaneous outpourings might encourage some sorta social action. Not even the most extreme hippie-style derv-jerk includes a language of gestures explosive enough to coexist with the same incredible buckling of sonic structures here. Still, something like the intro to '7b' has the same semblance-of-approachability that makes even 'outside' rock music a relatively populist proposition. And you could certainly splice chunks of '3' and '6' onto a live tape of MC5 doing a Sun Ra cover without making John Sinclair roll over in his bathtub. So 'mere' rock fans have nothing to fear. Which isn't to say that Tears doesn't have spurts of unprecedented density. I thought they had closed the book once and for all on overtones and 'found' feedback harmonics with their previous record, New York Performances (Agaric 1986), but there are sections here that sound like a dozen distinct and angry zebra trying to burst out of Ed Koch's lower bowel. But it's only the four of them. And they're humans. They're just so goddam intent on what they're doing and so capable of transporting themselves through their hands and brains and lungs that their one beats yr three. It's a simple matter of shamanism -- a quality sadly lacking in most everything you hear today. Imagine this record as a log that's been sharpened by magic, hardened by fire and is just aching to drive itself through yr chest." --Byron Coley, Forced Exposure, 1987
May 13 street date. 2003 release from the trio of Jim Sauter (saxophones), Don Dietrich (saxophones) and Donald Miller (guitar). For over two decades, Borbetomagus have raised the mantle on intense improvisational sound parameters into one of the most unique sound configurations heard on planet earth. Heavy noise, deeply coiled feedback manipulation, hair-raising electronic squeal and the ultimate in air propulsion explosiveness, all initiated by humans. This CD features live performances in Glasgow and London 1999.
October 28 street date. Reissue of Snuff Jazz, a vicious installment originally released on LP in 1990, with one previously unreleased track and an untitled track previously released on COS tapes in 1990. Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich on saxophones, Donald Miller on guitar. The first three selections were recorded at the art gallery and performance space ABC No Rio in New York's lower Lower East Side on November 24, 1988. The occasion for the concert was the opening night of an exhibition of paintings by Carl George and Valerie Caris. The fourth selection was recorded at DC Space, in Washington, DC on August 25,1989. "It is hard to believe that it has been twenty years since my ass warmed a bench in the dungeon at ABC No Rio. Back in the day, it was dicey on the streets of the dank and decaying Lower East Side, streets riddled with drug dealers and abandoned buildings. A couple of drinks at the opening, and it was high time for a good aural irrigation. The boys gently ascended to their cruising altitude, and the sonic bursts pierced the damp masonry walls and every human eardrum in reach. The fans drooled, and the uninitiated, like the soccer players of Chernobyl, stared in awe of this enfolding, life-threatening disaster and grit-crunching ass-kick machine. The dogs were howling this night! Remove all other living critters from the house, pour yourself a double single-malt scotch, turn the volume of your stereo to twelve, and enjoy as your ears are acid-etched." -- Michael Hanke
Available now. 180 gram vinyl in an edition of 500. Dancing Wayang present a rare studio album by US noise legends Borbetomagus titled The Eastcote Studios Session. Recorded in the studio in 2014, it unites fire-breathing saxophonists Jim Sauter, Don Dietrich and face-flaying guitarist Donald Miller, whose releases over the last forty years have been taken from live recordings. The Eastcote Studios Session is a work by musicians who know their instruments and how much they can subvert, distort and reverse engineer them. Housed in customary hand-screenprinted wrap-around sleeve featuring artwork by Richard Wilson. Liner notes by Edwin Pouncey (Savage Pencil, The Wire).
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