***Gerald Cleaver’s newest album, 22/23, journeys through genre, exploring the future and recalling history, in his most place-based album yet. Born and raised in Detroit, Cleaver is a product of the Motor City’s rich musical history. Long the manufacturing capital of America, Detroit citizens have never been afraid of imagination: technological innovation, a strong labor movement, techno-utopianism or afrofuturism. This spirit of innovation is felt on Cleaver’s newest album, particularly on songs like ‘31 Julys’ which builds on dynamic house beats, or ‘Cake’ which employs saxophone to compose a careening jazz track. This marks Cleaver’s third record with 577 Records (and its sub-label Positive Elevation, dedicated to electronic experimentation and avant soul), following 2020’s Signs, and his second album, Griots. Here, Cleaver deftly combines his talent for electronic composition with a curious ear for the unpredictable, occasionally accompanied by singer Jean Carla Rodea. Cleaver has performed and recorded as a jazz drummer with a wide variety of artists, including Tommy Flanagan, Daniel Carter, Bill Frisell and more, contributing as a musician for nearly 20 years before exploring his own electronic-forward projects.
LP $31.95
05/26/2023
***In The Wilderness opens with textured drums, a muted bass, celestial sound, like stars breaking into puddles. Confident engineering and gentle instrumentation invite the audience to wander into the unknown. The project draws from an experimental performance by drummer Gerald Cleaver and bassist Brandon Lopez, at 577 Records’ Forward Festival, which was later deconstructed and rebuilt by hip-hop producer Hprizm of the Antipop Consortium. All three musicians were involved in visioning the project’s many stages, lending itself to an easy give-and-take between the artists, despite its improvisational, temporally disconnected structure. This is Hprizm’s second record (following Signs Remixed) on 577’s sub-label, Positive Elevation, which is dedicated to electronic experimentation and avant soul.
LP $21.95
02/17/2023
Musician A.M. Frison, known mononymously as Coultrain, is well-known for his experimental, psychedelic and world-building music. Coultrain is an esteemed experimental artist and active member of 577 Records’ sub-label, Positive Elevations, which is dedicated to electronic experimentation and avant soul. On MUNDUS, Coultrain overlays spoken word performance and his honeyed voice over smooth soul-inspired instrumentation, gentle snare and electronic melodies. The result is a lyrically-focused album that emphasizes Coultrain’s singularity as a musician and poet in equal parts. Considered by the artist to be a natural sequel to Phantasmagoria (577 Records, 2021), it's a further demonstration of his far-reaching talent.
CD $13.75
11/18/2022
LP $21.95
02/17/2023
***Ravens is the fourth release by electronic live trio N/UM, released by Positive Elevation, the newly launched sublabel of 577 Records, a record company with a nearly two-decade-long history of releasing groundbreaking free improvisation and experimental recordings. The four-track release is a marvel of playful ingenuity, balancing, with unwavering confidence, on the outer limits of the minimal house and techno spectrum while remaining loaded with dance floor appeal and teeming with energetic groove. The thematic material is in rich supply with ethereal vocal loops, uniquely hypnotic guitar work, driving melodic bass lines and percussive hooks and twists that stretch the imagination and shine through with energy and spontaneity that can only really come about in a live setting. Ravens is not a gradually conceived production, pasted together piece by piece, but rather the immediate burst of energy of a band, experienced instrumentalists turning their collective creativity and craft onto the realm of electronic music. There is an almost Perlon-Esque flair to the sound, although ‘Ravens’ very much carries its distinct fingerprint and steers miles clear of tired clichés and predictable formulae.
12" $22.00
10/22/2021
***In this album, legendary New York electronic music producer Hprizm (Antipop Consortium), also known as High Priest, reworks Gerald Cleaver’s acclaimed ’Signs’ (577 Records, 2020). Throughout, Hprizm expands the sonic boundaries of the original work through dream-like, transcendent electronic manipulations. Hprizm’s album is an innovative rework of Gerald Cleaver’s debut electronic project, building off of Cleaver’s long career as an accomplished Jazz percussionist. Born and raised in Detroit, Cleaver was influenced by both traditional jazz percussion and the Motor City’s electronic music scene. Both artists were inspired by forward-thinking electronic arrangement, and reinterpretation, first reimagining jazz and then reworking electronica, offering an inventive, complex and spacey album.
LP $22.00
07/16/2021
CD $13.75
06/25/2021
***Expanding on 2020’s ‘Signs’, his electronic debut, ‘Griots’ sees Cleaver diving further into the spider’s web of modular electronics, further exploring the electronic history of his Detroit roots. Combining his unique talent for composition with a curious ear for the unpredictable, Cleaver delivers another outstandingly dense and sprawling LP for a split release by Brooklyn-based Positive Elevation and Belgium’s Meakusma. Sonically, the LP takes in a wide range of ideas and influences, blending them in a flurry of unruly synthesis, FM tones, and muted drum machines. From the growling experimentation of opening track and lead single ‘Cooper-Moore’ to the glitchy 8-bit nods of the second single ‘Galaxy Faruq’, through to closing track ‘Buena Vista’, unusual scales, modes, and meters reign supreme across ‘Griots’, making for a thrilling, engaging, and challenging listen.
LP $22.00
06/25/2021
CD $13.75
06/25/2021
***Coultrain’s Phantasmagoria is firmly embedded in the Soul tradition, built on muted keyboards and overlaid with his assured, smooth voice—but departs with re-worked percussion and fresh, electronic experimentation. The title refers to a sequence of images reminiscent of a dream, and captures the hazy state of mind that drove the process behind this album, as well as its dreamy effect. A.M. Frison, the poet-filmmaker-musician behind the one-man band Coultrain, explores his innermost self through these compositions, drawing from the wide variety of musical influences that have shaped his creative sensibility who he describes as “the illustrious composers of jazz, the soul singers who own 'soul' in itself, the funk that resonates in dark times.” Phantasmagoria, a masterful interpretation of Frison’s most influential genres and his own introspective reflection, is avant soul at its best.
LP $22.00
06/25/2021