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Price reduced. This is a rare one to find - only 500 copies made and released in Japan in 2015. And there are only 4 copies currently for sale on discogs and none from a U.S. Seller. See discogs link below. This one is not for the faint of heart...free jazz, avant-garde jazz, crazy noise, whatever you want to call it, it is definitely a sonic experience. Recommended for fans of Sun Ra and other celestial beings. Hartmut Geerken/Michael Ranta - The Heliopolar Egg 5 CD, Art Into Life, 2015 Japanese import. Limited to 500 copies All is in Mint minus (M-) condition: CDs, CD sleeves, booklet, outer box. https://www.discogs.com/release/7490770-Hartmut-Geerken-Michael-Ranta-The-Heliopolar-Egg $41 Media mail shipping is $6 extra U.S. shipping only Payment by pay pal friends/family.

To me the Plugged Nickel sessions operate on a number of levels.  On the one hand this is a band playing mostly some standards.  You can just enjoy the performances as such.  From another point of view there is a sort of meta message: a commentary on the playing of standards.  This way of playing a standard is different from before.  Previously the time might change once, into double time or something like that, and back again.  Here tempo and time change suddenly at will.  Instead of theme, solos, restatement of theme in five minutes, the pieces wander around and stretch boundaries for 15 or 20 minutes.  This is already exploding the way that standards were mostly played at the time.  Now some inexperienced listeners will take the whole thing as it comes to them and enjoy the performance without any awareness of how this is a development in the genre and I have no quibble with that.  Others are aware of groundbreaking aspects of the performances in the context of the development of jazz.  Just as a young person might read something that satirizes another piece of literature and only see the surface story, others who are familiar with what is being satirized might see deeper meanings and humor. As far as the request to define noodling - this is asking the wrong question.  If you are reading this discussion, 'noodling' is not really part of your critical vocabulary.  'Noodling' is a term typically applied by people who are not jazz aficionados.  My friend used this term when confronted with Plugged Nickel.  I suppose I understand it to mean soloing in way which is casually playing around with notes that fit, conventionally, but are idle and do not cohere into a bigger pattern that feels like a story.  Dinking around, fooling around, exploring as you might in practice.  I am trying to explain what I believe people mean when they use this term, not how I approach the Plugged Nickel Sessions.  To me they are revolutionary, serious music which is exhausting, like the over-stimulation of spending a lot of time in a big museum or art gallery.