Three from Confront Recordings

By Kenneth Blanchard

Stuart Wilding / Mike Adcock – Apophony (Confront Recordings 2025)

One of the joys of Bandcamp (may its name be praised!) is that I get notices for new recordings almost every day. This week three new releases were brought to my attention. Taken together, they provide a good sample of the audio appetites that set our writers and readers apart from other jazz fans.

The title Apophony is a term indicating a change in the pronunciation of a vowel that carries some grammatical information. For example: blood, bleed, and bled. It also produces a nice resonance in English with epiphany, which my spell checker was more comfortable with.

One of the most significant indicators of free jazz is that the texture of sounds is as important, if not more so, than the narrative or emotional content of a recording. It’s a pretty good bet that if the list of instruments includes table tennis balls, Villahe hall parquet floor (Wilding) or “tuned roof slates” (Adcock), texture and percussive expressionism is going to be a major focus. That the former also plays drums and the latter piano means that the artists have not completely severed their ties to more traditional composition.

The title cut marries high pitched bell-like sounds (think of Christmas ornaments being poured into a soft bag) to mostly low-pitched, evocative notes from the keyboard. “Pipes for Paul” wraps a silky, tubular sound around electronic, almost space-jazz vibes. You have to love song titles like “Doublefish,” and “Reverse Antelope,” which begins with an angelic sound followed by bird chirps.

Dominic Lash / Mark Wastell – Polyvalent Creativity (Confront Recordings 2025)

This recording is more conventional only because the instruments are limited to electric guitar (Lash) and drums, percussion (Wastell). The opening cut, “potential” sound like the artists started tuning up and never got around to playing anything else. The sound is so rich that you will be perfectly happy with that, if genuine free jazz is your thing.

The subtitles of the five cuts (e.g., “2. commitment, 3. activation, and 4. Fulfilment”) appear to be references to Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. I need to listen to this several more times to see if it holds.

Steve Beresford / Pierpaolo Martino / Mark Sanders– Be S-Mart (Confront Recordings 2025) 

All three of these releases are worth the investment in time that they invite. By far my favorite is the last. Beresford (prepared piano, electronics, objects) Martino (double bass, electronics) and Sanders (drums). Unlike the Apophony and Polyvalent Creativity, there is a definite, if mostly one-dimensional melody. Be S-Mart consists of two parts (Dark Materials, 1 and 2). It is a high-energy expedition into a land populated with lots of unfamiliar but unmistakenly organic voices. I found myself wanting to look up to see what was perched in the branches of the next alien tree. If this is a fair sample of Confront Recordings catalog, it would pay to keep an eye on that enterprise.