E' un gran bel traguardo - forse insperato - quello di trent'anni di incessante attività per la coraggiosa e tenace etichetta Confront Recordings, da sempre dedita a promuovere e documentare musiche e protagonisti dell'area dell'improvvisazione radicale britannica con pubblicazioni, concerti e varie iniziative (tra le quali, solo per nominare le più recenti o imminenti, la rassegna su Tony Oxley dello scorso giugno e una spettacolare Company in programma a metà dicembre). La guida da sempre Mark Wastell, quasi con le sue sole forze, e contro ogni avversità. Ne dà conto Max Kohyt per la rivista polacca Anxious: "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." Auguri!
