Scrapheap Challenge by Paul Lytton, Joker Nies, Richard Scott, Georg Wissel

Paul Lytton table-top bits and pieces
Joker Nies electro-sapiens
Richard Scott synthesiser, electronics
Georg Wissel prepared saxophone

This release is a follow-up to the electroacoustic quartet’s first album “Do they do those in Red?" which was recorded in 2017 and released in 2020:
https://soundanatomy.bandcamp.com/album/do-they-do-those-in-red
The music was recorded live in concert and is freely improvised.
The cover is a photograph of a DIY brewery urn, at one of Germany’s oldest microbreweries, which was made from repurposed scrap derived from a pharmaceutical factory.

Paul Lytton began playing drums at the age of 16. He played jazz in London in the late 1960s while taking lessons on the tabla from PR Desai. In 1969, he began experimenting with freely improvised music, working in a duo with the saxophonist Evan Parker. After adding bassist Barry Guy, the ensemble became the Evan Parker Trio. He and Parker continued to work together into the 2000s.
A founding member of the London Musicians Collective, Lytton worked extensively on the London free improvisation scene in the 1970s, and aided Paul Lovens in the foundation of the Aachen Musicians' Cooperative in 1976. Lytton has toured North America and Japan both solo and with improvising ensembles.

Joker Nies lives and works in the Spessart woods these days as a musician and recording engineer, photographer and editor for synth magazines.
Since the beginning of the 1980s, Nies uses all kinds of electronic devices, analogue and digital, for live improvisation and sound design. The instruments of choice are all modified, either through additional circuitry or programming against the intended purpose.
As a wave-guide, Electro Sapiens, Nies likes to introduce unexpected connections through the resistance of his body by connecting points on his open circuits.
http://www.klangbureau.de/Studio/Joker.html

Richard Scott ia an electroacoustic composer and improviser focused on modular synthesis. Collaborators include Axel Dörner, Thomas Lehn, Ute Wassermann, David Sylvian, Sidsel Endresen, Nicolas Collins and Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin. His work has been featured in the KONTAKTE Biennale für Elektroakustische Musik und Klangkunst, International Computer Music Conference and Moers Festival. Scott has recorded releases with Evan Parker, Bark!, Twinkle3, plus several solo albums.
https://www.richard-scott.net/home
https://soundanatomy.bandcamp.com/

Georg Wissel is a sculptor of compressed air, (prepared) saxophones, clarinets; improvisation, conduction, composition, and is primarily active in the field of contemporary freely improvised music. Inspired by collaborations with colleagues from electronic music, he began in the late 1990s to explore, alongside new playing techniques, the expansion of his instruments' sound palette through preparations, which have since become an integral part of his playing. Wissel performs solo, whilst maintaining several long-standing ensembles,.as well as working with many renowned exponents of improvised and contemporary music.
https://georgwissel.wordpress.com/
https://georgwissel.bandcamp.com/

Tracklist

1.	marine salvage	27:48

2.	blow football	13:32

3.	amphibious vehicle	23:17

4.	walking machine	8:09

5.	rock crawler	2:17

Credits

released October 5, 2025

recorded 01 October 2020 by Georg Wissel at The Loft, Cologne
mastered by Richard Scott

cover photograph by Richard Scott

Scrap heap: a pile of scrap metal like those you see along the railway tracks as you approach a "steel" city like Charleroi. The kingdom of sound bric-a-brac, metallic and electric vibrations, a frenzy of noisy sounds, sonorous noises, the crazy articulation of saxophonist Georg Wissel with perfect mimicry in this industrial jungle of crazy electronics: Joker Nies and Richard Scott. You put them together and it becomes disturbing. If you add the number one delirious percussionist of our youth, it's madness. Today, Paul Lytton covers two tables with various percussion utensils and suitable objects (scrapers, rods, tubes, metal pieces, bows) and a box of tricks assisted by a Meccano assembly bristling with culinary utensils and amplified etc… that he rubs and scratches, the sounds recycled via an electronic system.
Their five improvisations with appropriate titles (marine salvage, blow football, amphibious vehicle, walking machine, rock crawler) are in constant mutation in the integral noise tinged with a keen sense of dynamics and a very sharp mutual listening. It is the reign of instant imagination and the impossibility for the listener to identify who exactly is doing what and to guess what is the exact sound source of the sounds that parade, emerge, fade and collide or are buried in silence under the thousand sound samples, noisemakers, scrap, heap... which are amused, startled, whirled before our bewildered or confused senses. What seduces beyond this lively radicality and this disconcerting sonic diversity, is the capacity of these four improvisers to constantly renew themselves... without tiring the listener... nor overplaying or covering the sounds of the neighbour in a colourful sonic kaleidoscope - outrageous of mad scientists. And how the saxophonist Georg Wissel manages to navigate and wander in this teeming ribouldingue universe while integrating himself into it naturally. In fact, we can distinguish the nuanced, whispered sounds of Joker Nies and the incessant bounces of the modular synth and the colorful wiring of Richard Scott. From time to time, the energetic percussive bursts with a scalpel (what finesse in the savagery!). A strange team like no other. Challenge 100% successful.
Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg

orynx-improvandsounds.blogspot.com/2025/10/mirco-mariani-musica-fr-strangers-ivo.html

License