The Squid's Ear Magazine
The Squid's Ear Magazine


Moss, David: Dense Band (Remastered) (Yatak Records)

David Moss leads a remarkable cross-section of New York's 1980s Downtown scene with Fred Frith, John Zorn, Tom Cora, Arto Lindsay, Christian Marclay and Jules Moss, merging percussion, theatrical vocals, electronics, turntables and improvisation with tightly constructed rhythmic forms in a volatile collision of experimental rock, noise, free improvisation and infectious groove, newly remastered for its 40th anniversary.
 

Price: $17.95



Quantity:

In Stock

Quantity in Basket: None

Log In to use our Wish List
Shipping Weight: 3.00 units

Sample The Album:





Product Information:

Personnel:



David Moss-drums, percussion, voice

Fred Frith-guitar, bass, effects, voice

John Zorn-alto saxophone, voice

Tom Cora-cello

Arto Lindsay-guitar, voice

Christian Marclay-turntables

Jules Moss-drums

Click an artist name above to see in-stock items for that artist.



UPC: 4255712500188

Label: Yatak Records
Catalog ID: CD23515
Squidco Product Code: 37709

Format: CD
Condition: New
Released: 2026
Country: Germany
Packaging: Digipack - 3 panel
Recorded at Martin Bisi Studio, in Brooklyn, New York, in February and March 1985, by Martin Bisi.
Originally released in 1985 as a vinyl LP on the German Moers Music label with catalog code MoMu 02040.
Descriptions, Reviews, &c.

Artist Biographies

"David Moss: Drumming and singing have shaped his musical life.First, his father's drum-set, Bertoia sound sculptures, duos with dancer Steve Paxton.

Later, singing: at Berlin Philharmonie, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Salzburg Festival.

2018/19: received the German Music Authors Prize for experimental voice; sang in Olga Neuwirth's opera, Lost Highway (Yuval Sharon, director); sang Frank Zappa's music at the Venice Biennale; visited Taipei, Seattle and Bogota with Heiner Goebbels' Surrogate Cities; worked with video artist Lillevan.

Moss received Guggenheim and DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Fellowships. He directs the Institute for Living Voice (and teaches).

In 2019 he made his debut at the ElbPhilharmonie, Hamburg as the baritone soloist in Xenakis ÄIS; with the Rundfunk-SymphonieOrchester Berlin under Peter Rundel

Moss has sung works by Luciano Berio, Carla Bley, Uri Caine, Johann & Richard Strauss, Gershwin, Neuwirth, Oehring, Bach and Coltrane. He is currently touring with the groove-trio Denseland, and with a solo program, Vox Paradiso.

Moss lives in Berlin, Germany."

-David Moss Website (https://www.davidmossmusic.com/bio/)
9/4/2026

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Though the point of reference for many remains the iconic band Henry Cow, which he co-founded in 1968 and which broke up more than 30 years ago, Fred Frith has never really stood still for an instant.

In bands such as Art Bears, Massacre, Skeleton Crew, Keep the Dog, Tense Serenity, the Fred Frith Guitar Quartet, Eye to Ear, and most recently Cosa Brava, he has always held true to his roots in rock and folk music, while exploring influences that range from the literary works of Eduardo Galeano to the art installations of Cornelia Parker.

The release of the seminal Guitar Solos in 1974 enabled him to simultaneously carve out a place for himself in the international improvised music scene, not only as an acclaimed solo performer but in the company of artists as diverse as Han Bennink, Chris Cutler, Jean-Pierre Drouet, Evelyn Glennie, Ikue Mori, Louis Sclavis, Stevie Wishart, Wu Fei, Camel Zekri, John Zorn, and scores of others.

He has also developed a personal compositional language in works written for Arditti Quartet, Asko Ensemble, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Ensemble Modern, Concerto Köln, and ROVA Sax Quartet, for example. Fred has been active as a composer for dance since the early 1980s, working with choreographers Bebe Miller, François Verret, and especially long-time collaborator and friend Amanda Miller, with whom he has created a compelling body of work over the last twenty years.

His film soundtracks (for award-winning films like Thomas Riedelsheimer's Rivers and Tides and Touch the Sound, Peter Mettler's Gambling, Gods, and LSD, and Deborah Kaufman and Alan Snitow's Thirst, to name a few) won him a lifetime achievement award from Prague's "Music on Film, Film on Music" Festival (MOFFOM) in 2007. The following year he received Italy's Demetrio Stratos Prize (previously given to Diamanda Galas and Meredith Monk) for his life's work in experimental music, and in 2010 was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Huddersfield in his home county of Yorkshire.

Fred currently teaches in the Music Department at Mills College in Oakland, California (renowned for over fifty years as the epicenter of the American experimental tradition), and in the Musik Akademie in Basel, Switzerland."

-Fred Frith Website (http://www.fredfrith.com/biography.html)
9/4/2026

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"John Zorn (born September 2, 1953) is an American composer, arranger, producer, saxophonist, and multi-instrumentalist with hundreds of album credits as performer, composer, and producer across a variety of genres including jazz, rock, hardcore, classical, surf, metal, klezmer, soundtrack, ambient, and improvised music. He incorporates diverse styles in his compositions which he identifies as avant-garde or experimental. Zorn was described by Down Beat as "one of our most important composers".

Zorn established himself within the New York City downtown music movement in the mid-1970s performing with musicians across the sonic spectrum and developing experimental methods of composing new music. After releasing albums on several independent US and European labels, Zorn signed with Elektra Nonesuch and received wide acclaim with the release of The Big Gundown, an album reworking the compositions of Ennio Morricone. He attracted further attention worldwide with the release of Spillane in 1987, and Naked City in 1989. After spending almost a decade travelling between Japan and the US he made New York his permanent base and established his own record label, Tzadik, in the mid-1990s.

Tzadik enabled Zorn to maintain independence from the mainstream music industry and ensured the continued availability of his growing catalog of recordings, allowing him to prolifically record and release new material, issuing several new albums each year, as well as promoting the work of many other musicians. Zorn has led the hardcore bands Naked City and Painkiller, the klezmer/free jazz-influenced quartet Masada, composed over 600 pieces as part of the Masada Songbooks that have been performed by an array of groups, composed concert music for classical ensembles and orchestras, and produced music for opera, sound installations, film and documentary. Zorn has undertaken many tours of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, often performing at festivals with many other musicians and ensembles that perform his diverse output.

Zorn's compositions cross many genres and he has stated "All the various styles are organically connected to one another. I'm an additive person-the entire storehouse of my knowledge informs everything I do. People are so obsessed with the surface that they can't see the connections, but they are there." For Zorn "Composing is more than just imagining music-it's knowing how to communicate it to musicians. And you don't give an improviser music that's completely written out, or ask a classical musician to improvise. I'm interested in speaking to musicians in their own languages, on their own terms, and in bringing out the best in what they do. To challenge them and excite them." "

-Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Zorn)
9/4/2026

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Thomas Henry Corra (September 14, 1953 - April 9, 1998), better known as Tom Cora, was an American cellist and composer, best known for his improvisational performances in the field of experimental jazz and rock. He recorded with John Zorn, Butch Morris, and The Ex, and was a member of Curlew, Third Person and Skeleton Crew.

Tom Cora was born in Yancey Mills, Virginia, United States. He made his musical debut as drummer on a local television program and in the mid-1970s he played guitar for a Washington, D.C. jazz club house band. He took up the cello while an undergraduate at the University of Virginia and studied with cellist Pablo Casals' student Luis Garcia-Renart and later with vibraphonist Karl Berger. During this time he formed his own group, The Moose Skowron Tuned Metal Ensemble and began constructing instruments for it.

In 1979 Cora moved to New York City where he worked with Shockabilly guitarist Eugene Chadbourne, introducing the cello to the honky tonk circuits of North America. He performed at improvising clubs and venues in New York with John Zorn, Fred Frith, Andrea Centazzo, Butch Morris, Wayne Horvitz, David Moss, Toshinori Kondo and others. Cora also collaborated with George Cartwright and Bill Laswell which led to the formation of the art rock band Curlew in 1979 . Cora remained with Curlew for over ten years and appeared on five of their albums.

In 1982 Tom Cora and Fred Frith formed Skeleton Crew, an improvising rock and jazz band best known for their live performances where they played various instruments simultaneously. Cora and Frith were each one-man bands on stage and for their act, Cora constructed musical contraptions he could play with his feet. The band existed for five years during which time they toured Europe, North America and Japan extensively. They made two studio albums, Learn to Talk (1984) and The Country of Blinds (1986), the latter with Zeena Parkins who had joined the band in 1984. In October 1983 Skeleton Crew joined Duck and Cover, a commission from the Berlin Jazz Festival, for a performance in West Berlin, followed by another in February 1984 in East Berlin.

Cora was also a member of the improvising trio Third Person, formed in 1990 as a live collaboration with percussionist Samm Bennett and a "third person" who changed from concert to concert. Two CDs of some of their performances were released, The Bends in 1991 (with "third persons" Don Byron, George Cartwright, Chris Cochrane, Nic Collins, Catherine Jauniaux, Myra Melford, Zeena Parkins, and Marc Ribot) and Luck Water in 1995 (with "third person" Kazutoki Umezu).

Cora performed with a number of other bands, including Nimal with Momo Rossel and post-rock quartet Roof. In 1990, he played two concerts with Dutch anarcho-punk band, The Ex, and the success of this collaboration resulted in Cora performing hundreds of concerts with The Ex and appearing on two of their CDs. In 1995 in The Netherlands, Cora and Frith collaborated, as Skeleton Crew, on Etymology, a CD-ROM sound sample library of sonic sounds and wire manipulations.

Tom Cora died of malignant melanoma at the age of 44 in a hospital in the south of France, where he lived with his wife, singer Catherine Jauniaux, and their son, Elia Corra."

-Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Cora)
9/4/2026

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Arto Lindsay (b. 1953) has stood at the intersection of music and art for more than four decades. As a member of DNA, he contributed to the foundation of No Wave. As bandleader for the Ambitious Lovers he developed an intensely subversive pop music,a hybrid of American and Brazilian styles.. Throughout his career, Lindsay has collaborated with both visual and musical artists, including Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Animal Collective, Matthew Barney, Caetano Veloso and Rirkrit Tiravanija. Having been involved with carnaval in Brazil for many years in 2004 he began making parades."

-Arto Lindsay Website (http://artolindsay.com/bio)
9/4/2026

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Christian Ernest Marclay (born January 11, 1955) is a visual artist and composer. He holds both American and Swiss nationality.

Marclay's work explores connections between sound, noise, photography, video, and film. A pioneer of using gramophone records and turntables as musical instruments to create sound collages, Marclay is, in the words of critic Thom Jurek, perhaps the "unwitting inventor of turntablism." His own use of turntables and records, beginning in the late 1970s, was developed independently of but roughly parallel to hip hop's use of the instrument.

Christian Marclay was born on January 11, 1955 in San Rafael, Marin County, California, to a Swiss father and an American mother and raised in Geneva, Switzerland. He studied at the Ecole Sup�rieure d'Art Visuel in Geneva (1975�1977), the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston (1977�1980, Bachelor of Fine Arts) in the Studio for Interrelated Media Program, and the Cooper Union in New York (1978). As a student he was notably interested in Joseph Beuys and the Fluxus movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Long based in Manhattan, Marclay has in recent years divided his time between New York and London.

Citing the influence of John Cage, Yoko Ono and Vito Acconci, Marclay has long explored the rituals around making and collecting music. Drawn to the energy of punk rock, he began creating songs, singing to music on pre-recorded backing tapes. Unable to recruit a drummer for his 1979 performances with guitarist Kurt Henry, Marclay used the regular rhythms of a skipping LP record as a percussion instrument. These duos with Henry might be the first time a musician used records and turntables as interactive, improvising musical instruments.

Marclay sometimes manipulates or damages records to produce continuous loops and skips, and has said he generally prefers inexpensive used records purchased at thrift shops, as opposed to other turntablists who often seek out specific recordings. In 1998 he claimed never to have paid more than US$1 for a record. Marclay has occasionally cut and re-joined different LP records; when played on a turntable, these re-assembled records will combine snippets of different music in quick succession along with clicks or pops from the seams � typical of noise music � and when the original LPs were made of differently-colored vinyl, the reassembled LPs can themselves be considered as works of art.

Some of Marclay's musical pieces are carefully recorded and edited plunderphonics-style; he is also active in free improvisation. He was filmed performing a duo with Erikm for the documentary Scratch. His scene didn't make the final cut, but is included among the DVD extras.

Marclay released Record Without a Cover on Recycled Records in 1985, "...designed to be sold without a jacket, not even a sleeve!" Accumulating dust and fingerprints would enhance the sound. A review in Spin at the time cited Marclay's "coolest theatrical gesture" in his live performances of phonoguitar: the artist strapped a record player onto himself and played, for example, a Jimi Hendrix album. In Five Cubes (1989), he melted vinyl records into cubes. In the 1980s and early '90s, he invented album covers. The Sound of Silence (1988) is a black-and-white photograph of the Simon & Garfunkel single of the same title. In a series of cyanotypes (2007�09), white negatives against a blue background, he unspooled cassette tapes.

Thom Jurek writes that "While many intellectuals have made wild pronouncements about Marclay and his art � and it is art, make no mistake � writing all sorts of blather about how he strips the adult century bare by his cutting up of vinyl records and pasting them together with parts from other vinyl records, they never seem to mention that these sound collages of his are charming, very human, and quite often intentionally hilarious."

Marclay has performed and recorded both solo and in collaboration with many musicians, including John Zorn, William Hooker, Elliott Sharp, Otomo Yoshihide, Butch Morris, Shelley Hirsch, Flo Kaufmann and Crevice; he has also performed with the group Sonic Youth, and in other projects with Sonic Youth's members."

-Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Marclay)
9/4/2026

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

Jules Moss is an American drummer whose career spans jazz, rock, funk, experimental music, studio work, and Broadway performance. He began playing professionally at age 13, studied at Berklee College of Music in Boston, and later moved to New York, where he became active across the city's jazz, pop, rock, and recording scenes.

During the 1970s he performed with the New York-based East Coast Band, a jazz-funk-pop group combining arranged material with improvisation, and by the 1980s his stylistic breadth had led him into more adventurous settings. Modern Drummer profiled Moss in 1986 for his work with the Graham Moses band, describing his playing as drawing simultaneously on jazz, rock, avant-garde music, funk, and other idioms.

Moss also participated in drummer and vocalist David Moss's 1985 Dense Band, recorded at B.C. Studio in Brooklyn, appearing alongside figures central to New York's Downtown experimental scene including Fred Frith, John Zorn, Tom Cora, Wayne Horvitz, Arto Lindsay, Christian Marclay, and Tenko. His three appearances on that album place him directly within the cross-pollination of improvisation, noise, art rock, and experimental composition that characterized the scene during the period.

After roughly two decades as a professional musician, Moss shifted much of his attention toward education and children's music, becoming an early-childhood educator, songwriter, singer, guitarist, and performer while retaining percussion as a central part of his musical background.

-Squidco 9/7/2026

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.


Track Listing:
Related Categories of Interest:

September 2026
Improvised Music
Free Improvisation
Electro-Acoustic
Electro-Acoustic Improv
NY Downtown & Metropolitan Jazz/Improv
Jazz
Unusual Vocal Forms
Septet recordings
Frith, Fred
Zorn. John
Jazz Reissues
New in Improvised Music
Recent Releases and Best Sellers

Search for other titles on the label:
Yatak Records.


Recommended & Related Releases:




The Squid's Ear Magazine

The Squid's Ear Magazine

© 2002-, Squidco LLC