GRM Works, by France-based Argentinian composer Beatriz Ferreyra, is perhaps a key new entry in the wonderful Recollection GRM series by Editions Mego, which represents an important documentary move towards producing a new set of archival materials of one of the birthplaces of electronic music, the Groupe de Recherches Musicales as founded in 1958 by Pierre Schaeffer. The history traced by the collection is one of differing voices for the context under which we usually place the GRM in the development of electroacoustics, in the sense that it becomes a beacon for a modernism that is not fully dedicated to the machine. Its serialist, more formally avant-garde counterpart, best exemplified by composers like Milton Babbitt, Karlheinz Stockhausen and later Pierre Boulez, set out for the conquest of sound in a scientific approach intimately compatible with that geared towards the dominance of nature, a mechanical environment to be transcended…

Coin Coin Chapter Three is one of the best albums of 2015.  How do we know this already?  Because in the modern era, there has never been a year in which ten albums were better than this one.  Matana Roberts is a true original, and this album is a true original; there’s nothing else like it on the market.  It’s not even like the last two installments of the 12-chapter series.  This may confound recommendation engines, which may pick up hints of Gil Scott-Heron or The Last Poets, but otherwise be thwarted.

The deep, bluesy jazz of Coin Coin Chapter One:  Gens de Couleur Libres (2011) is nearly absent here, sublimated into hints and mirages.  But gone also are that album’s plaintive, out of control screams (“Pov Piti” – ouch!), reduced to a single, soft, off-key “come away with me” late in the album.  The big band that made…