Outer Dark displays Bill Laswell's penchant for working out compositional ideas at great length, breaking the 20-minute barrier on both of the album's instrumental pieces. Entirely a studio creation, the music is the result of Laswell's (sounds) collaboration with Robert Musso (engineering, treatments) at Brooklyn, NY's Greenpoint Studios. The duo attempts to shape a composition out of the dark ether on the opening "Chakra." It begins with a buzzing sitar drone (providing the Eastern flavor common in Laswell's music) and strummed guitar emerging from the murk. Disappearing and returning throughout, the elements take on a sort of dizzying paranoia at song's end through their repetition. As for the ether itself, the musical backdrop is a drift of throbbing, amorphous ambience comprised of mildly chilling keyboard washes and tube-like breezes…

The 'Outland' album series was a collaborative endeavour by the visionary US bassist-producer Bill Laswell and the late German musician Peter Namlook that pushed the boundaries of dark ambient and electronic music. Spanning five albums released over a thirteen year period from 1994, this new boxset serves as a testament to the creative synergy between the two masterminds.

Psychonavigation is a trip and a half. Pete Namlook and Bill Laswell have created a set of sonic hallucinogens that permeate the psyche. These sequences and atmospheres are full of experimental sounds, strange samples, and overt space music riffs. There is nothing earthly about this music. The atmospheres are inhuman. The evocations are metallic and robotic. The flow, however, is smooth and fluid. Namlook and Laswell are visiting the ultimate oxymoron – fluid metal. The answers are as mysterious as quicksilver itself. This is one of the best Namlook/Laswell collaborations. It will appeal to fans of Amani, Tales, and Dweller at the Threshold. It is essential space music.

Version 2 Version: A Dub Transmission finds the veteran bassist/producer offering yet another dose of his intriguing neo-dub experimentation. Instead of giving an exact replica of grooves from dub's classic era, a 49-year-old Laswell combines dub with modern electronica and takes it to a trippy, hypnotic, atmospheric place - a place where the reggae beat interacts with ambient club/dance grooves. Version 2 Version doesn't cater to dub purists by any means; anyone who expects this 2004 release to sound exactly like King Tubby circa 1971 is bound to be disappointed. But then, anyone who is familiar with Laswell's history knows that expecting him to offer a carbon copy of old-school dubwise would be like expecting Ornette Coleman to play "Ornithology" exactly like Charlie "Bird" Parker played it in the late '40s…

Deep growling drones get this sixty two minute epic underway. It really sounds like the beast from the deep or some alien from outer space. Its dark ambient picture music of the very highest order. There's something out there to get you in every dark corner. In the ninth minute extra detail is added in the form of some faint vocal effects with a slight metallic quality to them giving a brighter edge to the sonic landscape. Ghostly wails are heard at about the fifteen minute mark making the whole proceedings seem even spookier. Around the eighteenth minute more detail starts to be added , oh so slowly. Its as if we are entering some subtly different area of space, the atmosphere is still dark but things seem sparser and maybe slightly less threatening…

Nicky Skopelitis: guitar; Bill Laswell: bass; Graham Haynes: cornet; Amina Claudine Myers: Hammond B3; Hamid Drake: drums; Aïyb Dieng: percussion. Recorded at Fabrik, Hamburg, Germany, Wednesday, April 22, 1998.

There's an old saying that one is only as good as the people with whom one collaborates. Judging by the list of musical contributors to Hector Zazou's Sahara Blue, Zazou is quite good indeed. Among many others, those adding their own touch to Zazou's album include Bill Laswell, Dead Can Dance, John Cale, David Sylvian, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Tim Simenon. Zazou devised the album as a mix of musical styles set to lyrics/vocals taken from the pen of Arthur Rimbaud. While it might appear like a pretentious undertaking on paper, the album is a cohesive slice of eclectic music-making. Jazzy spoken word songs such as "Ophelie" intermingle with throbbing dance-oriented numbers like "I'll Strangle You" and quiet, peaceful piano-based meditations such as "Harar et les Gallas." Dead Can Dance duo Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard work their particular magic on "Youth," exchanging vocals, and on "Black Stream," where Perry's dark, somber synth weeps around Gerrard's stunning vocals and yang chin. Zazou himself mostly stays in the background, providing production and electronic sounds, allowing the players to showcase their abilities.

Since the days of Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the guitar/bass/drums trio has been convened by visionary tone scientists as a laboratory for music of primal power and tonal subtlety. ON COMMON GROUND features three such players. Mike Sopko has explored the frontiers of the guitar with Los Lobos and Dosh, Thomas Pridgen. Laswell, like Sopko a Midwesterner, here transmutes the industrial crash and hum of the region into music of muscular authority. Even followers of the protean career of composer, instrumentalist and conceptualist Tyshawn Sorey might be surprised by the oceans of primal rhythm he conjures here. Together, the sounds brought into being by these 3 improvisors are at once grounded in a deep inquiry of traditions that span space and time while cracking open a window onto eternal radiance. This is fearless music, the kind that can only be made when master musicians meet ON COMMON GROUND.

Guitarist Skopelitis' dustpan approach to world music sweeps various ethnic instrumental grit and grime into the whirling blades of co-producer Bill Laswell's shop-vac. Contributing to the unholy mess are Foday Musa Suso on kora, oudist/violinist Simon Shaheen, gospel organist Amina Claudine Myers, percussionists Zakir Hussain, Aiyb Dieng and Guilherme Franco, drummer Jaki Liebezeit, bassists Bill Laswell and Jah Wobble, and, consistently providing the most bracing moments, Bachir Attar (leader of the Master Musicians of Jajouka) raising hell on the plague-of-locusts vernacular oboe, the rhaita. When Ekstasis's free-floating anxiety is at its peak, it could almost be the disc that Can fans have been waiting for since Ege Bamyasi.

Zorn and Laswell have been friends and musical compatriots since they first met in 1978, and have been responsible for some of the most intense and memorable music in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Recorded in early 2021, near the end of the year’s pandemic lockdown, it marks the first time Zorn had touched the saxophone in over fifteen months. Laswell had spent most of the year locked in his apartment. Something special was happening that day—and after the session Laswell felt rejuvenated—as if all the toxins and poisons had left his body. Soulful and essential, The Cleansing is an historic meeting—and the first recorded duo project by these two Downtown magicians.