Good for strangely slurred syllables and eerie spells of ghostly deliverance, Lunapark 0, 10 (Sub Rosa) compiles spoken-word recordings from 17 old writers and artists whose work rarely comes with voices attached. A 1912 reading by French poet Guillaume Apollinaire starts off in typical grainy fashion, celebrating simple word-sounds that scan as musical in a number of different languages. Kurt Schwitters sings a clipped bit of comely Dada nonsense. Marcel Duchamp wanders through a clearing in "the labyrinth beyond time and space." Poet e.e. cummings slowly intones an ode to "the blessed eachness of all beautiful selves." And Gertrude Stein repeats herself until repetition turns into something otherwise unutterable…
Part of a welcome resurrection of all things Brian Eno, a reissue of Cluster & Eno (Water) grants new hearing to a transporting 1977 collaboration between the conceptual thinker and the German band Cluster. It's ambient and soft, but the gentle echoes and plinks run at swift speed, grouping into piles of notes that throb. Can member Holger Czukay lends a bassline to one track, but the rhythm seeps more than steps, like funk sunk in water…
Angling the current "era of the producer" back a few decades, a pair of conjoined compilations gather the kind of lustrous tracks that make funk and acid-jazz DJs swoon. The Edge: David Axelrod At Capitol Records 1966-1970 (Capitol) traces Axelrod's expansive work for David McCallum, Lou Rawls, Cannonball Adderley, and himself, featuring immaculately orchestrated productions that court the cosmic while answering to earthly soul. Mizell: The Mizell Brothers At Blue Note Records 1972-1976 And Beyond (Blue Note) focuses on a pair of brothers who grew out their Motown roots as jazz wandered into elaborate, baroque directions in the '70s. Strings swell and horns cry over rhythms that cook at proto-disco pace, sounding overstuffed yet airy. Songs by trumpeter Donald Byrd feature heavily, but all the tracks boast a distinctive Mizell stamp that sounds all the more impressive in the aggregate…
An excellent two-disc set mixed by German DJ/producer Dominik Eulberg, Kreucht & Fleucht (Mischwald) scans the most skittery extremes of techno. Timely artists like Luciano, Mathew Jonson, and Michael Mayer show up in incarnations that are hard to track down, but the set is anchored by itchy, sensuous mixes by Robag Wruhme and his group Wighnomy Brothers, all of which inflate minimalism out of scale with smallness. Imagine a thousand zippers zipping seams sewn by a tailor with binocular eyes.