When the new year hit, and the dust had settled on our online TUSK Virtual festival, which we presented over two weeks last September and October, we realised we needed to find a way to continue working/existing in the face of our cashflow running aground and the world being turned upside down. So TUSK Editions and TUSK TV were rapidly conceived and born and launched by April, our associated members scheme actually coming to life in the previous month.

TUSK Editions is a merging of the old school idea of a monthly subscription record club and the current possibilities offered by digital publishing. For a nominal fee, once a month everyone signing up for it receives around two hours of exclusive new music by artists that have associations with the festival, a digital magazine containing articles on all the artists contributing music, as well as all those featured in that month’s episode of TUSK TV, and more. This playlist features tracks and excerpts from the six albums released as part of the first three issues of TUSK Editions.

Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble
“This Is What I Went To The Shop For”
From Ian McMillan/various artists, A Tyke In Tusks

We’re on a continuous mission to bring supposedly difficult music to more mainstream situations and we recently found an ally in Yorkshire poet and owner of a beautifully mellifluous voice, Ian McMillan. Ian agreed to record a track for us and let us send it out to a number of people who we invited to respond. We got eight responses from musicians such as Claire Rousay, Yol, Charmaine Lee and Matt Dalby and it came together really nicely as an album. Ali and Collette Robertson and Joe ‘Posset’ Murray did most of the legwork on this, and Ian was a pleasure to work with, and we hope it’ll lead to some more interactions with him later this year.

Bishop/Rezaei
“Bulgar Rose”
From Veil

Our work with TUSK has always been double-edged in that we want to bring every artist in the world to Tyneside but also send every beloved artist from the region on a journey to much greater recognition. Of course to do that you have to have some local artists that merit such attention and in the North East I’d say we’re relatively blessed on that front. Stephen Bishop not only runs the juggernaut that is Opal Tapes but is an amazing producer as Basic House, Lacrima, etc. Similarly Mariam Rezaei is a constant whirr of activity – brilliant turntablist, educator, writer and of course ruler of The Old Police House, who produce TUSK Fringe among many other things. Like our new ventures, this album seemed to develop very quickly in the manic uncertainty of the new year, though this track couldn’t be more serene.

Grupi Lab
“Tepelena-Tepelena”
From Live At TUSK 2019

We’ve been lucky enough to develop a relationship with our core audience where they trust us when we present artists they’ve never heard of – which is lucky because we do that a lot. The most exciting moments at the festival for us are when we bring someone unknown and they get a rapturous reception, as was very much the case with Grupi Lab and the uniquely Albanian form of isopolyphonic singing: massed voices soaring to the heavens on a bed of heavy vocal drones, magnificent to hear in the flesh. For the album we kept in the translator’s comments between each track as he gives so much information on the songs and the culture. Definitely one of the festival’s most magical moments.

Jim O’Rourke
Excerpt from Apollo House

We’ve been trying to drag Jim O’Rourke over from Japan for a decade now and he’s been very nice about it, especially when you think how much he must be in constant demand. He and Eiko Ishibashi did a set for us for TUSK Virtual and then he very kindly donated this archival recording to aid our fight for survival. It feels like a piece of musical history – it’s from a time when Jim was basically wandering Europe in his early twenties and getting gigs where he could (Zoviet France also put him on in Newcastle the following year). The sound of a young mind growing into its genius.

Sarah Hennies
“Falling Together Part 2”
From Falling Together

We began talking to New York based composer Sarah Hennies in 2019 and hoped to bring her to Newcastle for our 2020 festival to work with a group of festival goers who would sign up to learn and perform one of her pieces. Of course that never happened, but we’ve become increasingly in awe of Sarah and her trajectory musically. This is the first performance of her first piece for orchestra so we are very honoured to be able to include this in our catalogue.

The Rolling Calf
Excerpt from Live At TUSK 2019

A coming together of three frankly incendiary UK musicians – Neil Charles, Elaine Mitchener and Jason Yarde – as the trio The Rolling Calf. I can’t think of many more exhilarating voice artists than Elaine, and Neil and Jason’s speed and proficiency on bass, sax and loop pedals means this goes from menacingly minimal to sounding like it must be a tentet and then back again while barely breaking sweat. An incredible group, and we hope this is the first of many more recordings by them because more people need to experience them live.

The July issue of TUSK Editions will include a recording of Otomo Yoshihide’s live turntable and guitar set from TUSK 2018 mixed and mastered by Sam Grant of Pigsx7, a new album by Northumberland’s St James Infirmary, the audio of Tina Krekels and Becky Mahay’s ‘blind improv’ set for TUSK TV, Giant Tank’s “Pot Luck” mix, and a new mix from the French label Pagans. You can subscribe to TUSK Editions here, and join TUSK’s members scheme here.

The most recent episode of TUSK TV is reviewed in The Wire 449. Subscribers to the magazine can also read the review in our online archive, where they will find reviews of earlier episodes of TUSK TV and the TUSK Virtual festival.