Restock arriving early May
Free Jazz Now! Absolutely essential reissue of the final Don King recordings, first released on cassette in 1987 by the lesser known Spanish imprint, 4 Sellos. Led by Mars' Mark Cunningham and Lucy Hamilton, with contributions from both Linsday brothers and Sonic Youth affiliate Jon Erskine, Don King are an archetypal 80s downtown New York act, a supergroup performing and recording sporadically, mostly unknown aside from their feature on No New York and certainly short-lived, yet highly inquisitive and wide reaching in their sonic ambitions. If Mars were flagship no-wave, then Don King are its evolved second phase, doubling down on the free jazz impulses that characterised those early incarnations and extending them into more heat-soaked environs, less primal and more sensuous, investigative of space rather than simply seeking to tear it apart. These ten tracks were all recorded live while the band toured southern Europe (the clue's in the name, right?), the background rabble of the various rooms adding a little more chaos to the searching intersections of brass and woodwind, something like the iconoclastic mutant energy of Lol Coxhill or Peter Zummo making a grab for their own Arkestra. No-wave began as an art damaged energy flash, but Don King, like Sonic Youth, existed long enough after its initial communications to prove it could be something a little extra too, loose-limbed, free-ranging, as in touch with the body as the mind, and actually kinda limitless in its potential. Shame they ran aground after this, but what a document we have of their final expressions.
