I schlepped up to Cafe Oto yesterday after many months of being away. Their in-house label Otoroku just dropped The Quartet (2025), a box set of German saxophone titan Peter Brötzmann’s final shows, recorded there months before his death. It is a mega recording: John Edwards and Steve Noble maintain the chaos on bass and drums, while Brötzmann plays with a vigour that I was surprised to find out hadn’t been dampened by a COVID stint. When watching footage back of the show, you can see him contemplating the players many times between brash howls on the tenor, hunched in that Far Side stance he wears so well, his moustache seeming to meld into his shoulders. In that way, the show almost plays like a marriage between two duos: Edwards and Noble, and Brötzmann and vibraphone player Jason Adasiewicz. The latter is really the key to this set, I think: the instrument has a natural ring to it, like a bubble floating over a river. Rugged though the rhythm section may be, Adasiewicz anchors the mood in a way Brötzmann, despite his vim on the horn, appears to be spiritually entwined with. Naturally, I picked up his record as bandleader, a soundtrack for the film Roy’s World (2023), at the Café.

What with Repeater Books also releasing the first Brötzmann biography in English this month, I thought I’d go and grab some of his older records at Oto, which stocks an enviable collection. Some records of his dropped on Otoroku anyway, including one with the same quartet featured on The Quartet, meaning they’re always in the shop. Others - Machine Gun (1968), Nipples (1969), some live albums, some solo albums, and my eventual purchase, Alarm (1983) - have been reissued and restocked fairly recently. Alarm drew me in partly because it featured killer artwork, partly because the title carries a sense of fear and excitement, and finally because I was reliably informed by Otoroku’s own Abby Thomas that the label releases are always in stock, but the other Brötzmann records go fast.

Chatting to Thomas was delightful. She noticed I had picked up Still House Plants’ Fast Edit (2020) as well, and we got to talking about their strange upward trajectory, happening in spite of their steady commitment to an eternally odd sound. As much as we hope they are able to continue playing and making music, and a big record deal would certainly accomplish that, the big questions were, “Who would take them as they are?” and, relatedly, “Who would take them without forcing them to change?” Even so, I was reminded of their ICA show last April, the same weekend if i don’t make it, i love u (2024) dropped, and how it felt like the kind of triumphant moment mostly reserved for sports.

We also talked [Ahmed], Astrid Sonne, Brötzmann’s collaborators, and some of the live shows at Oto I keep meaning to book myself for. Maher Shalal Hash Baz was the top recommendation. Performing in the UK for the first time in 15 years, this is also apparently a major coup for Oto’s programming team in that Reiko Kudo, wife of bandleader Tori, had indicated she would not be making music anymore. Thomas was excited by the prospect of Reiko coming back on the scene, most especially because it is indicative of the group’s larger practice: no rules. Who exactly makes up the group on any given performance is subject to change, and their music is a protean mix for which Kudo has only ever settled on one descriptor: punk. Tori had had his family trade of ceramics passed down to him through tradition, and reportedly hates it, purposefully making pots and bowls that are intentionally misshapen, “shit but beautiful” as Thomas described them.

After a bagel and a long bus ride home, I finally cracked out £1.00 CeX find In the Electric Mist (2009), a Louisiana policier. Bertrand Tavernier adapts James Lee Burke’s novel, the second time Burke’s primary hero Dave Robicheaux made it to screen: the first was 1996’s Heaven’s Prisoners, with Alec Baldwin as Robicheaux. Here, Tommy Lee Jones takes over, traipsing the bayou post-Katrina and coming across all manner of hallucinatory gothicisms: colour-saturated hate crime flashbacks, Civil War ghosts, the indelible bayou setting with attendant weather extremes. As Burke’s long-time protagonist, Jones, like Adasiewicz on The Quartet, is a great centre for this movie, mooring some of its literary-noir impulses towards digression, offhandedness, dream logic, and so on. Despite reservations from Tavernier, who was incensed that Jones would not eat on camera according to Scout Tafoya’s obituary for the French director, it’s an exceptional performance.

Tavernier worked as a PR man on films by Godard and Melville before becoming a director, and actually adapted a Georges Simenon novel years before. Having recently torn through Simenon’s Night at the Crossroads (1931), Inspector Maigret was certainly on my mind. Like Simenon’s prose, Tavernier’s direction makes the material feel distant. The film often cross-dissolves between scenes and buries reveals in simple shot-reverse-shots - all the more interesting given that the version I saw appears to have been the theatrical cut, stripped of ten minutes of material from when the film showed in Berlin that year. As a matter of fact, the film was never formally released theatrically in the US, only screening in Burke’s hometown, New Iberia. As a 00s Euro-American crossover, I suppose its energy is counter to at least the more juiced multiplex fare around at the time. Even so, it’s hard to draw any particular conclusions from its burial. Bad luck, perhaps.