The Baltic Opera in Gdańsk, an evening during the second edition of the Futurofonia Festival, which I have the pleasure of co-curating with Antoni Michnik. The hall is packed with people who have come to hear something one cannot hum on the way out. On stage: Maggie Nicols, the Scottish vocalist, alongside Mark Wastell. Nicols does not sing in any conventional sense of the word, she builds the architecture of the moment with her voice, moving in a split second from a whisper to a scream, from a phrase straight out of the Great American Songbook, honed since her teens, to pure, non-verbal, sound-matter. And it is not extravagance without substance. Nicols distinguished herself as part of John Stevens’s Spontaneous Music Ensemble which she joined in 1968. She sang in Keith Tippett’s monumental fifty-piece Centipede, and in 1977, she co-founded, with Lindsay Cooper, the Feminist Improvising Group – one of the first collectives in history to consciously wield improvisation as a tool of emancipation. Her voice is an instrument carrying the memory of five decades of free improvisation, jazz, theatre and activism. All of it can be heard in every phrase, even one that lasts half a second. I am writing these words before the concert which will take place on September 5, 2026. However, knowing both artists, I sincerely believe this is exactly how it is going to be like.
That meeting is no accident. A few months earlier, I met Mark Wastell in person at Café OTO in London, during a three-day event celebrating Mats Gustafsson’s sixtieth birthday. The lineup that night speaks for itself: a Wastell / Gustafsson duo, Roger Turner with Mariam Rezaei, a reading of Jayne Cortez’s poetry by Joachim Nordwall and Gustafsson, and to close, Thurston Moore, Gustafsson and Rezaei as a trio. A room where a Sonic Youth guitarist, a Swedish free jazz and noise saxophonist, and a British drummer of Roger Turner’s calibre share the same stage is the best proof that genre boundaries have long since become fiction.
It is in that context that Confront Recordings deserves to be seen. The label that Mark Wastell has run since 1996 celebrates its thirtieth anniversary this year. Thirty years in a world of independent music, based on grants, hand-to-hand record sales and sheer individual stubbornness, amounts to an eternity. Wastell performs many roles in this venture, being a cellist, a percussionist, an electronics artist, a curator, a producer and a distributor. He has played and recorded with Derek Bailey, Keith Rowe, Evan Parker, John Tilbury, Tony Conrad, David Sylvian and Thurston Moore – a list of collaborators that reads like a table of contents for the last thirty years of European free improvisation. Yet few remember, that in the 1990s Wastell was among the instigators of what became known as New London Silence – a strand that redefined free improvisation as an art of silence, of the gentlest sound-attack and extreme quietness, long before “reductionism” turned into a fashionable word to be put on record sleeves. That episode, rarely spoken of today, explains much of the aesthetic sensibility that shapes the Confront label, where silence can carry as much weight as sound.
And its catalogue is formidable. Confront runs several parallel series: the Core Series, its flagship CD and vinyl releases featuring, among others, Tony Oxley, Joëlle Léandre, Paul Dunmall and Maggie Nicols; the EP Series; the Vinyl Series; and finally the Collectors Series, now closing in on its hundredth number, a run of limited, often handmade editions documenting individual gigs and sessions, from Derek Bailey and Simon H. Fell to Keith Rowe to young improvisers from California and Sardinia. It is a publishing model that openly rejects the logic of scale – every release is a discrete artistic decision, not a mass-market product.
Which brings us to a question that is not rhetorical: in this age when streaming algorithms boost whatever is already popular, and the music market is dominated by content engineered for a fifteen-second attention span, do small, independent labels devoted to contemporary improvised music still stand a chance, and do they have any purpose left to serve?
The answer, based on my own experience of Café OTO, Futurofonia Festival, and of the improvised music scene in Tri-City, is: YES. And that purpose matters more today than ever. Firstly, there is documenting: without such labels as Confront Recordings, hours upon hours of unique musical encounters would not have been preserved for future listeners. Improvisation, by definition, happens once. A recording made at Café OTO or Iklectik is not a commercial product in the traditional sense of the word; it is more an act of rescuing something fleeting from oblivion. Secondly, there is the community. Confront Recordings is not a drawer filled with records, but it is a network of relationships, collaborations, shared projects. Café OTO, where events tied to the label happen regularly, is the model case: a place where you can buy a record right after the gig, chat with the artist at the bar, hear the premiere performance of a piece that won’t reach vinyl for another year. It is the music industry’s usual logic turned on its head: community first, product second, never the other way round. A small digression here: not long ago I discussed this community-building function, using the Tri-City Electroacoustic Scene as a case study, with Marcin Dymiter (known as Emiter), and a few days later with Katarzyna Podpora, a multidisciplinary artist and my musical partner in the PODPORA / KOHYT duo. Both of them arrived, independently, at the same conclusion concerning the order of things.
Thirdly, and finally, there are live performances and promotional function, which the label performs deliberately, not as an afterthought. Confront has spent years organising or co-organising concerts for its artists, treating the stage as a natural extension of the catalogue. I have seen this up close, and not only in London. A few months ago I visited the City Culture Institute in Gdańsk for three days of boisterous celebrations marking the sixtieth birthday of another great saxophonist, Mikołaj Trzaska, who needs no introduction to any wider audience. The City Culture Institute staged a music marathon that brought together the leading names of Polish improvisation (Marek Pospieszalski, Raphael Rogiński, Olo Walicki) alongside several outstanding musicians of the British scene: Olie Brice, Per-Åke Holmlander, and Mark Sanders – a drummer who has recorded for Confront as part of such albums as “Affretando”, with the pianist Georg Graewe, and in a trio with Yoni Silver and Tom Wheatley. I met Sanders there, at this event entirely different from the one in London, which perhaps represents just how small this international scene really is, and how labels like Confront Recordings form the connective tissue between London, Gdańsk, Berlin and Paris.
Which is why, the thesis I am putting forward here is not wishful thinking but a conclusion drawn from observation: we need such labels as Confront Recordings to exist, and to be consciously supported in Poland too, perhaps above all in Poland. Initiatives such as Bocian Records or Gusstaff Records – having released, among others, Trzaska’s latest recordings with John Edwards and Mark Sanders taped at Café OTO, show that the same model: small scale, deep commitment, a tight link between releasing records and staging concerts works on our own turf too. Amid the glut of algorithm-optimised music, in the age when “virality” has become the measure of artistic worth, labels of this kind are not trying to out-compete anyone on their catalogue size or stream counts. They distinguish themselves differently: through the quality of their relationship with listeners, through loyalty to a small but genuine community, and by treating the listener as someone who wants to hear something new, not someone who needs to be handed what they already know.
Thirty years of Confront Recordings is not an anniversary steeped in nostalgia, it is rather proof of a working model where a cellist, a percussionist and a curator, rolled into one and the same person, can keep an entire ecosystem alive for three decades – artists, listeners, venues, record shops, friendships struck up at the bar in Dalston. So, next time someone asks: what’s the point of yet another CD pressed in a a hundred copies, recorded live in a Shoreditch basement?; the answer might run like this: so that Maggie Nicols’ voice, Mark Wastell’s silence and Mark Sanders’ drumming have somewhere to land before it all dissolves into the air, the way free improvisation does.
Max Kohyt
Translation: Katarzyna Podpora
The FUTUROFONIA Festival will take place on September 5–6, 2026, at the Baltic Opera in Gdańsk
