Buscar:sometimes with others

Bruce Hornsby’s newest album, Indigo Park, is a concept album of sorts, an extended multi-dimensional inquiry into the nature of aging and memory, often with a lightness of tone – the ways certain scenes linger placidly while others balloon into imagined catastrophe, the ways we remember and the ways we forget. Throughout, Hornsby contemplates moments from his deep past, sometimes trying to “resolve” them, other times looking for clues about his present-day outlook. “It's just an old bastard looking back, while hopefully pushing forward to adventurous and new musical & lyrical areas,” Hornsby says of his new songs, with a smile of characteristic self-deprecation. “To be honest, I've found a way, a path to….grow old gracefully, with help from some newborn friends of mine.” The album is produced by Tony Berg, Will Maclellan and Bruce Hornsby with contributions fro

Few artists can conjure up the sort of spirituality that Fred P manages whenever he turns on his machines - and this brand new label from the artist means we'll be getting a shedload more of it. Sometimes it's deep, muggy, insular, at others more outward-looking and cosmic. And that's what we have here - emotionally dense sounds on 'Galaxy Walk (Journey mix)' with jazzy motifs off in the distance, spoken words in the foreground and dancing percussion that is optimistic and hopeful. 'Modern Art Talk' is just as balmy as you journey through a sound world that feels as infinite as space itself, while Fred himself muses on his art. 'Inner Channels (edit 4)' is a dusty shuffler marbled with muted chords and brighter melodic stars that feel impromptu and layered in live.

Death Is Not The End release a second part collecting pre-partition film music, compiled by Gary Sullivan of Bodega Pop.

As the 1940s began, South Asian cinema entered a transformative phase. Playback singing, still a new idea in the previous decade, quickly became standard practice. Actors no longer had to sing, and singers no longer had to act, opening the door to a wave of dedicated vocal talent that redefined the sound of the industry.

Voices like Noor Jehan, Shamshad Begum, and Suraiya rose to prominence, becoming household names across the subcontinent. Behind them, composers like Naushad, Anil Biswas, and Ghulam Haider were expanding the sonic palette of film music, blending ragas with Western orchestration, folk tunes with jazz-era instrumentation. Harmoniums, sarangis, violins, accordions, and clarinets filled out increasingly complex arrangements, while ghazals and qawwalis continued to influence mood and structure.

Although the post-Partition years are often considered to be Bollywood's "Golden Age," thanks to filmmakers like Raj Kapoor, Bimal Roy, and Guru Dutt, the music started its peak just before the divide. By 1947, Naushad and others were producing some of the most emotionally rich and musically intricate work in the industry's history, compositions that would prove challenging to surpass in the decades that followed.

Yet this high point came during a time of immense upheaval. The Second World War, the Bengal famine, and the crumbling of colonial rule all loomed large. Film songs often reflected the uncertainty, sometimes mournful, sometimes romantic, sometimes defiant. And when the Partition finally came, it fractured the world that had created this music. Artists became refugees, studios were split, and careers were thrown into flux. Noor Jehan, who would go on to become Pakistan's most iconic singer, recorded many of her most beloved songs in Bombay. Khursheed, another major star, faded from public life after migrating. K.L. Saigal, a towering figure of the 1930s and '40s, died in Lahore just months before the split.

This collection spans those final years before Partition, a time of creative flowering and looming catastrophe. Like Part 1, these songs were sourced from immigrant-run music shops in New York and New Jersey. They are fragments of a vanishing world, each one a snapshot of the art, longing, and resilience that defined this extraordinary era.

Chris Ryan Williams (trumpet & electronics) and Lester St. Louis (cello & electronics) work together as HxH (H by H). Their skills have seen them move smoothly across various situations, constantly carving out new terrain and working in new configurations of musicians at a rapid pace. While worth reading, their biographies capture only a part of their complex rhizome.

HxH started about three years ago. The project is a direct response to all their activity with others and more importantly all their future leaning sonic desires. Their debut album STARK PHENOMENA is both their first studio recording and their first physical release. The album is appropriately set to be released by KMRU on his growing label OFNOT. It’s an ideal introduction to their sound world and their approach.

HxH describe their music as “electroacoustic,” but until recently the presence of Black musicians in this field has been greatly overlooked and largely ignored, making this phrase only partially appropriate. What HxH do really is to always be unpredictable. Every gig is a new soundscape. Sometimes you might hear echoes of Autechre or Robert Hood but then the sound-field will open up into a new terrain all their own. Chris and Lester bring together techniques from across the sound spectrum of electronic music and also draw on their deep backgrounds in Jazz, Improvisation, Classical and Noise scenes to create a sound that is true to them. After all, these two have worked with the likes of Bennie Maupin and the music of Black Fluxus artist Ben Patterson. Their rhizome is deep.

One of the ways that their unique approach manifests is in their merging of both acoustic instruments and electronic instruments in real time. This is something few have managed to do – but their spontaneous leanings work in both complex and accessible ways because of their deep understanding of landscape crafting. You can hear this clearly on the track “Pyrex Vision.” Their approach makes it tempting to compare their music to Sun Ra jamming with Laurel Halo – a comparison that would be only partly accurate.

Chris and Lester note that the sounds on STARK PHENOMENA are “imbued with such hopeful, gracious care; one that is far flung from obsessive carefulness or fuck the world carelessness, but more a caring embrace without the fuzziness of nostalgia.”

They note that when they began working together, they would “always come back to speaking on our concepts of an architecture of the expanse,” noting that their live sets often take on the joyfully noisy task of “dreaming big.” For HxH it was essential that STARK PHENOMENA have a quality that is “almost sculptural.” They consider the album “an object to be viewed from all sides.” This kind of thinking has resulted in them directly engaging with numerous sculptors and artists including Torkwase Dyson. Shape wise HxH’s sound fields work in a parallel to Dyson’s black architectural works.

They also note that the opening cut “BEACH” (the opening and longest track from the album) was “written weeks after our first gig in a studio session donated to us by our dear friend jaimie branch.” And that Pyrex Vision “was continually being edited months after sending our ‘final mixes’ to KMRU.” Their sound sources and samples come from studio sessions, live gigs, durational installations, 3am improvised downloads and more.

KMRU notes: "I think there is an in-between layer on this record. I was first caught by the Pyrex Vision track which organically flows between monologue, subtle field recording, and instrumentation. It's such a beautiful track, evoking deep emotion through simplicity. STARK PHENOMENA effortlessly glides in between imaginative mosaics of sounds — free yet complex — unlocking memories within its layers."

While they’ve been active for more than two decades, it’s only been in recent years that the Berlin and New York based contemporary sonic arts platform, Soundwalk Collective, has begun to gather the accolades and attention that they rightfully deserve. Firmly rooted within a multi-disciplinary practice that engages the narrative potential of sound within the contexts of visual art, dance, music and film, as well as tapping anthropological, ethnographic, and psycho-geographic research, they’ve gained great note for collaborations with Jean-Luc Goddard, Nan Goldin, Sasha Waltz, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and numerous others.

Building on the back of 2023’s brilliant “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”, Soundwalk Collective now returns with “Khandroma”, one of their most fascinating and singular endeavours to date, which re-engages their enduring creative partnerships with Patti Smith. Issued by Ubi Kū, a brand new imprint founded by the Italian Buddhist Union dedicated to the relationships between Buddhist cultures, music, and sound, across the album’s stunning two sides this incredible ensemble draws inspiration from and conjures Tibetan deities, the Himalayan Plateau, the valleys of Nepal and the highest peaks where the most ancient Buddhist temples reside, culminating as a sprawling sonic tapestry like little else. Issued as a beautifully produced, limited edition vinyl LP and CD, mixed and mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi, complete with a booklet featuring liner note essays penned by Chiara Bellini and Filippo Lunardo, and images by Stephan Crasneanscki, it’s hands down among our favourite releases by Soundwalk Collective to date and not to be missed!

An international experimental sound art collective founded in 2001 by the artists Stephan Crasneanscki, who was joined in 2008 by producer Simone Merli, Soundwalk Collective is a contemporary sonic arts platform, featuring a rotating constellation of artists and musicians, that, in vastly varied number of ways, has continuously explored the remarkable potential of sound within the contexts of visual art, dance, music and film, offering particular emphasis to anthropological, ethnographic, and psycho-geographic research, examining conceptual, literary or artistic themes. In addition to their many collaborations and accolades that attend to an increased ambitious catalog of releases, they scored Laura Poitras’ film, “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”, which won the Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice Film Festival, as well performed and exhibited at Berghain, CTM Festival, documenta, Manifesta, New Museum, and Centre Pompidou, where they notably opened “Evidence”, a exhibition with Patti Smith comprising an audio-visual journey from the work of French poets Arthur Rimbaud, Antonin Artaud and René Daumal. While Soundwalk Collective’s output and use of sonority - sometimes original composition and others manipulated archival recordings - and context is varied, the project’s endeavours are unified by a focus on sound as material that is both tactile and poetic, pursuing layered narratives that address ideas of memory, time, love and loss. Their latest, “Khandroma”, enlisting Patti Smith’s contribution on one of its tracks, stands among the most exciting and rich of these explorations yet.

Perhaps the best way of approaching “Khandroma” is through Soundwalk Collective’s longstanding focus on the discipline of psycho-geography - a practice that interrogates the impact of an environment’s embedded histories and meanings on the psychology of the present - as well as the group’s integration of observations of nature, and uses of non-linear narrative, as a vehicle for recording and the synthesis of meaning. Like previous projects that have encountered them traveling extensively across the world, occupying diverse environments for long periods of investigation and fieldwork, during which they source materials for subsequent works, the material roots of “Khandroma” are a body of field recordings made by Crasneanscki, Francisco López, and Merli at altitudes between 2,760 and 4,500 meters, in varying locations across Upper Mustang during 2016.

Drawing the album’s title from the Tibetan feminine deity who reigns the skies, the album’s two compositions weave a stunning sonic tapestry from collaged sounds of nature, bells, drones, unplaceable tones and vocals, and in the case of its second piece, “Chasing the Demon”, the voice of Patti Smith, culminating as a deeply emotive and imagistic expanse that taps something far more profound than any of its single parts. As the collective states: “the album traces the continuous morphing of the wind into sound expressions. The Himalayan Plateau seems designed to amplify and echo the encounter of the breaths, the prayers, and the chants emerging from around and within those temples; amid the sounding of bells, the turning of prayer wheels, and the billowing of flags. A resonant musical body that we recorded so as to capture its boundless mutations; an unstoppable force that cries, whispers, and blows through and over stones, wood, empty halls and monastic robes, etching an ever-changing sonic landscape onto the surfaces it encounters.”

Immersive, stunningly beautiful, and haunting, “Khandroma” draws the ancient and distant into the consciousness of the present, close to home, bordering on the profound. Issued by Ubi Kū as a beautifully produced, limited edition vinyl LP and CD, mixed and mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi, complete with a booklet featuring liner note essays penned by Chiara Bellini and Filippo Lunardo, and images by Stephan Crasneanscki, we can’t recommend it enough.

Since its founding back in 2014, Blume has carved a unique place in cultural landscape, issuing free-standing works, spanning the historical and contemporary, that represent singular gestures of creativity within the field of experimental sound. Joining their broad efforts in building networks of context and understanding that already includes the works by Werner Durand, Sarah Hennies, Bruce Nauman, John Butcher, Jocy de Oliveira, Mary Jane Leach, Valentina Magaletti, Alvin Curran, Julius Eastman, Alvin Lucier, and others, Blume return with the first ever vinyl release to attend to James Tenney’s legendary “Postal Pieces”, Marking the first ever appearance of five of the suite’s works - “Maximusic, for Max Neuhaus” (1965), “Having Never Written a Note for Percussion, for John Bergamo” (1971), “FFor Percussion Perhaps, or... Night, for Harold Budd” (1971), “Cellogram, for Joel Krosnick” (1971), and “Beast, for Buell Neidlinger” (1971) - on vinyl, drawing upon recordings made in 2003, by the Amsterdam based ensemble, The Barton Workshop, under the direction of James Fulkerson. Among the most important and highly regarded efforts in Tenney’s canon of compositions, as well as within the history of 20th Century music, these five pieces represent a crucial bridge between Fluxus-oriented conceptualism, minimalism, and the microtonal complexities that would emerge in their wakes. Issued in a highly limited vinyl edition of 300 copies, it includes exact replicas of the original postcard graphic scores, and features newly commissioned liner notes by Bradford Bailey, Blume’s brand new edition takes great steps to centring Tenney at the eye the storm during some of experimental music’s most important years.

A student of composition under Carl Ruggles, John Cage, Harry Partch, and Edgard Varèse - remaining close to all of them, and later performing in both Cage and Partch’s ensembles - as well as acoustics, information theory, and tape music composition under Lejaren Hiller, James Tenney carved a wide path within the contexts of experimental and avant-garde music during the second half of the 20th Century. Not only was he a tangible bridge between the generations of composer’s who laid much of the groundwork and the later movements of Fluxus, Minimalism, and the broader practices of experimental music, but Tenney is credited as having contributed one of the earliest applications of gestalt theory and cognitive science to music in 1961, before helping to pioneer the field of computer music at Bell Labs, during the following years.

Over the course of his career, Tenney produced music of such complexity and sophistication - paying little mind to the seductions of taste or dominant tropes of its own moment - that his work and legacy have largely remained under-recognised by the broader publics that have attended to most of his peers. Perhaps more pertinently, the body of work he produced can be perceived as too varied and complex to fit neatly within standard creative histories or critical frameworks, comprising harmonically complex works for acoustic instrumentation, musique concrète, the groundbreaking 1961 “plunderphonic” composition, “Collage No.1 (Blue Suede) (for tape)” - sampling and manipulating a recording of Elvis Presley - as well as algorithmic and computer synthesized music. Even here, within this single decade, a clear image of Tenney’s endeavours remains elusive. In addition to penning important theoretical texts, he collaborated and / or played with Max Neuhaus, La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Michael Snow, Terry Riley, and numerous others; was an active member of Fluxus; starred in and composed music for Stan Brackage’s films; regularly worked with the Judson Dance Theater; co-founded and played in the ensemble, Tone Roads, with Malcolm Goldstein and Philip Corner; was a vocal advocate of the works of Conlon Nancarrow and Charles Ives, playing a significant part in the revival of both of their legacies; and regularly collaborated as a composer, musician, and actor with his then-partner, the artist Carolee Schneemann, notably co-starring in her film, “Fuses” (1965) and her legendary 1964 performance, “Meat Joy”, as well as creating sound collages for her films “Viet Flakes” (1965) and “Snows” (1970). Curiously, for a relatively absent figure in the historical and critical narratives, Tenney seems to have been the thread that bound multiple generations and disciplines of avant-garde practice in New York during this period.

Tenney was deeply invested in the quality and perception of sound. By 1970, this led him back to composing exclusively for acoustic instrumentation (though sometimes processed with tape delay) - in most cases utilising non-well tempered tuning systems to explore harmonic perception - a practice that he would remain steadfast to for the remainder of his life. This development roughly corresponded with his relocation to California, at the outset of the 1970s, following an invitation to teach at the newly founded music department at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Valencia. Finding himself in regular contact with the harpist Susan Allen and the artist Allison Knowles, as well as at a great distance from many of his friends, in 1971 he completed (with the assistance of Knowles and Marie McRoy) “The Postal Pieces”, a project he had begun in 1965.

A suite of eleven compositions, “The Postal Pieces”, stands among Tenney’s well known and celebrated compositions, and illuminates the dualities embraced by the composer, notably his use of sound to develop consciousness in and of others, and his willingness to draw on elements and observations of everyday life; citing his strong dislike of writing letters as being the primary inspiration for their inception. In lieu, he conceived to send his friends - John Bergamo, Allison Knowles, Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young, Harold Budd, Philip Corner, Joel Krosnick, Buell Neidlinger, Susan Allen, Max Neuhaus, and Malcolm Goldstein - short scores on the back of postcards. The suite is composed around three themes: Tenney’s concept of swell form (utilizing repetition and progressing through a structurally symmetrical arch), intonation, and the desire to produce “meditative perceptual states”.

A hugely important addition to Blume’s ever expanding efforts in context building and networks of creative practice, James Tenney’s “Post Pieces” is issued in a highly limited vinyl edition of 300 copies, which includes a exact replicas of the original postcard graphic scores, and features newly commissioned liner notes by Bradford Bailey.

T4T LUV NRG presents “Call Me G”, the new album by Brooklyn’s Russell E.L. Butler, their first full length LP since the release of 2018’s critically acclaimed “The Home I’d Build For Myself and All My Friends” on Left Hand Path. In the intervening years, Russell has experienced an accumulation of personal subjective experiences which are explored through captivating musical modalities and expressions on this sprawling, gorgeous, and deeply emotional album. Russell’s work on “Call Me G” can be described as a unique amalgam of early NY house music, dub techno and poetry. The album’s title track, as well as its instrumentals, are a kind of storytelling for histories that continue to exist without observation as well as for secrets and the power they hold in spite of their truth being obscured and sometimes lost.

Storytellers like Russell have the ability to collapse the past and future into discrete experiences of non-linear time through the emotional landscape of music and voice. Each song contains a palatable loneliness and hurt to which many in this modern world can relate, but each track also suggests the possibility of genuine connection and the formation of the self through communing and reintegrating with the natural world. These parallel concepts are the subject of “Accumulation”, a writing by Russell which accompanies the release of the album. The emotions, conflicts and resolutions that accompany Russell’s storytelling are felt acutely on tracks such as “I’m Dancing No One Is Watching” and “Stare Into The Light Beam”, among others.

On the title song, which closes the album, Russell sings “Can you call me? Will you call me? All that I want is for you to call me by my name...My name is G.” Context is part of interpretation and thus it is left to the listener to feel in the music and lyrics the concept that what may seem erased never truly dies, the traces still exist in the thing that takes its place. The T4T LUV NRG label is in part a continuing effort to facilitate the documentation of true stories that don’t get told—rather than representing a singular vibe or genre. Russell’s album is a stunning and profound entry in this evolving catalog of music and art. The beautiful cover of “Call Me G” is based on a hand drawn portrait of the artist by Diego Guzman.

Olo Yegussa presents its first release with a record that comes from a
distant tribal exploration. Through four long tracks, a mystical
atmosphere arises. Semifull Soft presents us a unique universe tinged
with the spirit’s voice that has enchanted his nights. Composed
between Lyon and Reunion Island, “Tribe Corridor” is a sensitive blend of sounds resonating between bewitching dub, electronica and a radically slow, travelling trance. A universal eclecticism that will
immerse every listener in a world oscillating between sensitivity and
brutality. the Olofones’s kingdom : “The slow and rigorous walk that
embraces all the Olofones through rivers, plateaux and mountains in
search of dreamlike destination. A few beings close off the line, far
behind, it would seem like they are the most talkative and curious.
They are always the ones found at the back. While some are looking at
the horizon and remain far ahead, others have their glance towards the crests . A complementarity that can only be created through time, just like a meticulus plait weaving several souls. A daily ritual gives rhythm to this eternal trip. The first to arrive raises a flame, « la phorie », each place will reveal its particularity, its curve, its elegance. Still in our days, she allows our « Pas Latents » to find back the path in the heart of this wide mountain corridor, with its delicate relief. We can hear on both sides the adjacents forests, their steps and their songs resonating.
Upon their arrival, the recognition is a custom for this brief instant, in
constant development. The Lanterns are the first explorators. They
build a moving background, looking after a neutric zone for the night.
Time metamorphoses. And it is now the moment for « Les Pas Latents
» to share tales and stories taken for their own adventures. Their
voices rise up , the stars shine, the earth trembles of strange
sensations. A common vibration. The souls intertwine, the «
chaosmose » operes. Sometimes the « âmoniale » wave curves and
gets linked around the central heat, luminescence and clarity. A few
words escape from the rhythm and leave slumber and reverie take
control of the spirits.”

Percussionist Jamie Muir was a member of King Crimson during the recording of Larks' Tongues In Aspic, in 1973. Staying less than a year with Robert Fripp, the Scot had already cut his teeth with another master guitarist, Derek Bailey, as part of the Music Improvisation Company, along with Evan Parker, Hugh Davies and Christine Jeffrey, whose eponymous 1970 album was one of the first releases on ECM. Muir and Bailey recorded Dart Drug eleven years later, in 1981.There's no shortage of great percussionists in the brief history of free improvised music but on the strength of Dart Drug alone Jamie Muir deserves a place at High Table. Unlike for example Han Bennink and John Stevens, though, you can't hear echoes of any particular jazz drummer in Muir's playing, even if he has expressed appreciation for Milford Graves (who himself sounded like nobody else who'd come before him).What on earth did Muir's kit consist of Some instruments are clearly identifiable (bells, gongs, chimes, woodblocks); others could be... well, anything. Old suitcases thwacked with rolled up newspapers Tin cans and hubcaps inside a washing machine Who cares It sounds terrific - but if you're the kind of person who faints at the sound of nails scraping a blackboard, you might want to nip out and put the kettle on towards the end of the title track.Dart Drug is consistently thrilling, and often very amusing - but it's certainly not easy listening. In music we talk about playing with other musicians, whereas in sport you play against another opponent (or with your team against another team). Why not play against in music, too That's precisely what happens very often in improvised music, and Bailey was particularly good at it. How can a humble acoustic guitar hope to compete with a Muir in full flight Sometimes Bailey's content to sit on those open strings, teasing out yet another exquisite Webernian constellation of ringing harmonics and wait for the dust to settle in Muir's junkyard, but elsewhere he sets off into uncharted territory himself.'The way to discover the undiscovered in performing terms is to immediately reject all situations as you identify them (the cloud of unknowing) - which is to give music a future.' Bailey evidently concurred with this spoken statement by Muir, including it in his book Improvisation.Derek Bailey is no longer with us, of course, and Muir gave up performing music back in 1989. All the more reason for seeking out this magnificent, wild album.

Embrace The Abandon is the new project by THE MON, the solo vision of Urlo, vocalist, bassist, and founding member of the Italian heavy-psych veterans Ufomammut.
Structured in two complementary chapters - Songs of Abandon (November 7th, 2025) and Songs of Embrace (March 6th, 2026) - the project tells a journey of duality: loss and surrender on one side, acceptance and rebirth on the other.
“
Songs Of Embrace” is the second chapter of “Embrace The Abandon”, expanding its emotional landscape rather than closing it.
Where the first part explored abandonment and loss, “Songs Of Embrace” focuses on presence, proximity, and the physical act of staying.
It is the answering breath, the inner voice.

The album avoids resolution and comfort, embracing slowness, repetition, and bodily tension.
It is not just music, it is a stream of consciousness, an inner search, a way of inhabiting what weighs without letting go.
While “Songs Of Abandon” is a collection of songs, nine tracks written in nine days, Songs Of Embrace is a continuous musical flow.
It is a movement that changes, grows, erupts, slows down, settles, and rises again.

It feels like the sea: calm and still one moment, then moved by a simple breath of wind, suddenly breaking into a storm.
“Songs Of Embrace” was conceived more like a ritual, a work of classical music, a suite.

Different parts unfolding one into the next, each a continuation of the previous one, finding meaning only as a whole.
The pieces are deeply interconnected, like embraces: some bring comfort, others carry pain.
These are compositions meant to be listened to in one continuous breath, allowing yourself to be held, rocked, and sometimes pushed away, just like in an embrace.

Stoop Kid is the jangly indie rock project of Diest-born Jens Rubens. After Camp Careful (2021) and Mount Cope (2023), Stoop Kid returns with his third full-length album Office Overdue, a ten-song collection that captures the quiet fatigue, flickering humor, and
fragile hope of keeping it together in a world that won't slow down.

'Office Overdue' is a collection of songs Jens made at home in his modest home studio. For this album, he wanted to let go of pressure and expectations more than ever, and only work on music when he genuinely felt like it.No fancy studio, no producer, just walking upstairs and messing around. The result doesn't always sound perfectly polished: the drums are sometimes clumsily programmed and more than a few wrong notes made it onto the record. The guitars were allowed to hit a bit harder this time, with the '90s slacker vibes coming through more prominently. The result is a record that feels raw and honest, and above all, was made purely out of enthusiasm.

Office Overdue explores the attempt to keep functioning in everyday life while the world around us feels on the verge of collapse. The songs move between mental exhaustion and self-reflection, carried by a dry, sometimes bitter humour that helps lighten the weight. The album focuses on repetition and routine, and on the tension between wanting to care for others and being trapped inside one's own head. Themes of anxiety, guilt and dissociation recur throughout, but are always accompanied by small moments of connection, gentle resistance and acceptance. Office Overdue embraces the mess, the doubt and the false notes, without drawing grand conclusions. Not everything is resolved, but the persistence remains.

STANDFIRST Titanic, the project spearheaded by Mabe Fratti and Hector Tosta (aka I. la Católica), return with a sumptuous and life-affirming new album.



In her sensational 1929 biography Tiger Woman, dancer and socialite Betty May claimed her ‘coster’s eye’ meant she liked to wear as many colours as possible. “Colours to me are like children to a loving mother. Each is my favourite, yet I can never bring myself to deny the others by preferring one.” May’s bold and inclusive strategy is one that manages to transfer itself, almost a century later, to Hagen, the new record by Titanic.


Many will know Titanic as the Mexico City-based brainchild of cellist and singer Mabe Fratti and multiinstrumentalist Hector Tosta who is now operating under the pseudonym, I. la Católica, (taken, rather unusually, from the name of the street the pair live on). With Hagen, and their previous release, Vidrio, (2023), the pair are creating a distinctive signature sound in modern alternative pop music. Nobody else sounds quite like them. Both records have an open hearted nature and simple, winning melodies that play off against a taste for drama, spectacular orchestration and a feeling of otherworldly mystery. Hagen is the more ambitious, sometimes more mystical effort. From the opening handclaps of ‘Lágrima del Sol’, (a wonderfully uptempo playground chant translating as a tear from the sun but, surely, not referencing the brand of pineapple wine?), the record dances its way through various mid-to-late-eighties inspirations, lush and widescreen passages of melancholy and vertiginous contrasts.


Mystery is often found in the simple but slightly odd song titles. English translations of various track titles give, ‘you swallowed the gum’, ‘leak’, ‘a tear from the sun’, ‘raising the trophy’ ‘digging dimensions’, ‘the owner’, ‘the decapitated hen’ and ‘the trap is exposed’. All denote striking images, metaphysical hints and emotional cues or simple, even childlike actions. Though Fratti and Tosta don’t reveal its provenance, the album’s title could even be a crafty play on words: the listener would be forgiven in thinking the moments of brash contrast and eyebrow raising theatricalism in the music constitute a musical nod to German punk chanteuse, Nina Hagen.


On Hagen, singer and cellist Mabe Fratti once again displays her brilliant knack of speaking to us directly. There is never the suspicion of her playing to the gallery, and the directness of many of the lyrics don’t allow it. Parallel to this, Fratti has an almost magical ability to give Hector Tosta’s melodies, and her and Tosta’s lyrics ones imbued with an insight and meaning that feels otherworldly. Tosta admitted it was “pretty wild to hear Mabe take the interpretations to a different place” and the listener can pick up on the delight Fratti takes in (literally) adding a voice to the many narratives.


Two examples can be shown here: ‘Gotera’ (Leak) uses harsh slashes of cello and tough, gunfire-like guitars and drums and multiple vocal lines that could be acting as a Greek chorus. They play off brilliantly against Fratti’s soft, slightly baleful vocal take that delivers lyrics such as: ‘nobody knows where the leak is / but I know where it is / they fight in front of the door and / nobody can go in’. With ‘La Gallina Degollada’ the somewhat blithe melody melody line, sung with what could be sarcastic brio by Fratti, plays against an itchting rhythm and rasping guitar part. The punch comes when you see that the song is about a chicken that has been decapitated and read lyrics such as: ‘I already saw it, it moved, the decapitated chicken’ / ‘could it be that I'm broken’ and ‘Two people hurt each other by thinking that they no longer agree’/ ‘Hours pass and the chicken represents what scares me’.


There may be death and fights to deal with, but there is also a quality of chirpy self-reliance about Hagen that is a key part of its nature. Like Betty May and her colourful outfits, Hagen’s sound often revels in its own sense of richness. Throughout, the record delivers vaulting string sections or glutinous guitar squeals that could, like the powerful, driving ‘Escarbo Dimensiones’ (Digging Dimensions) have come directly from a glossy 1980s TV series. Fratti sees this “glam sound” developed by Tosta on the aforementioned track and ‘Te Tragaste el Chicle’ (You Swallowed The Gum), as moments that were truly “revealing” for the album as a whole during its making.


What else? The thud and thump of ‘La Trampa Sale’ (The Trap is Exposed), and its sudden change of tempo and mood betrays a monstrously ambitious piece of music, the players almost greedily creating the sounds. Other moments are heart wrenching: ‘Libra’ ends on a poppy chord switch that cleverly ramps up the emotion inherent in the music’s notation. You could almost imagine a teenager in a bedroom forty years ago, rewinding the track over and over on a small, cheap cassette player, unable to get enough of that sugarsweet switch. Elsewhere, Oneohtrix Point Never adds stardust and an unearthly sense of space on the changeable, slightly moody meditation, ‘Pájaro de Fuego’ (Firebird). The record ends with ‘Alzando el Trofeo’ (Lifting the Trophy), a track that could soundtrack a state wedding, what with its beautiful cascading piano parts, a sugary vocal and short triumphal guitar riffs that add a rich patina to the overall sound. Fratti: “When I doubled those vocals on ‘Alzando el Trofeo’ I felt there was an epiphany happening, right at that moment.”


Making a good record is a team game. Tosta and Fratti recall seeing Randall from Circular Ruin Studios in NYC “tweak the drums in ‘Libra’ to make that amazing effect of the gated reverb”, or the shaping of ‘Gotera’, “when (recording engineer) Nate Salon added some synths to the track.” Drummer Eli Keszler, “an amazing and versatile player” had the songs down pat in a couple of days” and, according to Tosta, Oneohtrix Point Never “just came to one of the sessions and we hung out, and after all the recordings he and Nate were together in some studio and out of nowhere they sent us some beautiful tracks for ‘Pájaro de Fuego’! Fratti concurs. “He decided that he wanted to record because he was listening to the record (Nate works closely with him) and he really liked it! It was a total honour, indeed!”


Bedazzled by the playing, the skyscraping ambition in the arrangements and the giddy moments of contrast thrown up by Hagen, we could allow ourselves a brief moment of flippancy and state that Titanic’s new record is Yacht Rock meets Aeschylus, full-on. It’s also worth speculating that, in this hyper-sensitive, intemperate age, Titanic’s music has the power, however fleetingly, to heal hurts. Hagen is a brilliant showcase for a fresh and enriching form of pop music: displaying a magpie eye for what glints and plundering what has gone before.


Like Vidrio, Hagen was partially and additionally recorded at Fratti and Tosta’s house, aka Tinho Studios in Mexico City, as well as Golden Girl Studios & Circular Ruin Studios in New York City. Mixing was done by Santiago Parra in Pedro y el Lobo Studios, Mexico City and mastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri at Black Knoll Studios, New York City. The recording engineer was Nate Salon.


Hagen featured Mabe Fratti on cello, vocals & backing vocals, I. la Católica on guitar, keyboards, prepared piano, bass & backing vocals, drums by Eli Keszler and synths in ‘Pájaro de Fuego’ from Daniel Lopatin and Nate Salon.


All compositions on Hagen are written by I. la Católica, except ‘Escarbo Dimensiones’ & ‘Pájaro de Fuego’, which were composed by I. la Católica and Mabe Fratti. The record was produced by I. la Católica and co-produced by Nate Salon & Mabe Fratti. And all lyrics are by I. la Católica except ‘Escarbo Dimensiones’, ‘Gotera’, ‘Gallina degollada’ & ‘Pájaro de Fuego’, which were written by I. la Católica & Mabe Fratti.

STANDFIRST Titanic, the project spearheaded by Mabe Fratti and Hector Tosta (aka I. la Católica), return with a sumptuous and life-affirming new album.



In her sensational 1929 biography Tiger Woman, dancer and socialite Betty May claimed her ‘coster’s eye’ meant she liked to wear as many colours as possible. “Colours to me are like children to a loving mother. Each is my favourite, yet I can never bring myself to deny the others by preferring one.” May’s bold and inclusive strategy is one that manages to transfer itself, almost a century later, to Hagen, the new record by Titanic.


Many will know Titanic as the Mexico City-based brainchild of cellist and singer Mabe Fratti and multiinstrumentalist Hector Tosta who is now operating under the pseudonym, I. la Católica, (taken, rather unusually, from the name of the street the pair live on). With Hagen, and their previous release, Vidrio, (2023), the pair are creating a distinctive signature sound in modern alternative pop music. Nobody else sounds quite like them. Both records have an open hearted nature and simple, winning melodies that play off against a taste for drama, spectacular orchestration and a feeling of otherworldly mystery. Hagen is the more ambitious, sometimes more mystical effort. From the opening handclaps of ‘Lágrima del Sol’, (a wonderfully uptempo playground chant translating as a tear from the sun but, surely, not referencing the brand of pineapple wine?), the record dances its way through various mid-to-late-eighties inspirations, lush and widescreen passages of melancholy and vertiginous contrasts.


Mystery is often found in the simple but slightly odd song titles. English translations of various track titles give, ‘you swallowed the gum’, ‘leak’, ‘a tear from the sun’, ‘raising the trophy’ ‘digging dimensions’, ‘the owner’, ‘the decapitated hen’ and ‘the trap is exposed’. All denote striking images, metaphysical hints and emotional cues or simple, even childlike actions. Though Fratti and Tosta don’t reveal its provenance, the album’s title could even be a crafty play on words: the listener would be forgiven in thinking the moments of brash contrast and eyebrow raising theatricalism in the music constitute a musical nod to German punk chanteuse, Nina Hagen.


On Hagen, singer and cellist Mabe Fratti once again displays her brilliant knack of speaking to us directly. There is never the suspicion of her playing to the gallery, and the directness of many of the lyrics don’t allow it. Parallel to this, Fratti has an almost magical ability to give Hector Tosta’s melodies, and her and Tosta’s lyrics ones imbued with an insight and meaning that feels otherworldly. Tosta admitted it was “pretty wild to hear Mabe take the interpretations to a different place” and the listener can pick up on the delight Fratti takes in (literally) adding a voice to the many narratives.


Two examples can be shown here: ‘Gotera’ (Leak) uses harsh slashes of cello and tough, gunfire-like guitars and drums and multiple vocal lines that could be acting as a Greek chorus. They play off brilliantly against Fratti’s soft, slightly baleful vocal take that delivers lyrics such as: ‘nobody knows where the leak is / but I know where it is / they fight in front of the door and / nobody can go in’. With ‘La Gallina Degollada’ the somewhat blithe melody melody line, sung with what could be sarcastic brio by Fratti, plays against an itchting rhythm and rasping guitar part. The punch comes when you see that the song is about a chicken that has been decapitated and read lyrics such as: ‘I already saw it, it moved, the decapitated chicken’ / ‘could it be that I'm broken’ and ‘Two people hurt each other by thinking that they no longer agree’/ ‘Hours pass and the chicken represents what scares me’.


There may be death and fights to deal with, but there is also a quality of chirpy self-reliance about Hagen that is a key part of its nature. Like Betty May and her colourful outfits, Hagen’s sound often revels in its own sense of richness. Throughout, the record delivers vaulting string sections or glutinous guitar squeals that could, like the powerful, driving ‘Escarbo Dimensiones’ (Digging Dimensions) have come directly from a glossy 1980s TV series. Fratti sees this “glam sound” developed by Tosta on the aforementioned track and ‘Te Tragaste el Chicle’ (You Swallowed The Gum), as moments that were truly “revealing” for the album as a whole during its making.


What else? The thud and thump of ‘La Trampa Sale’ (The Trap is Exposed), and its sudden change of tempo and mood betrays a monstrously ambitious piece of music, the players almost greedily creating the sounds. Other moments are heart wrenching: ‘Libra’ ends on a poppy chord switch that cleverly ramps up the emotion inherent in the music’s notation. You could almost imagine a teenager in a bedroom forty years ago, rewinding the track over and over on a small, cheap cassette player, unable to get enough of that sugarsweet switch. Elsewhere, Oneohtrix Point Never adds stardust and an unearthly sense of space on the changeable, slightly moody meditation, ‘Pájaro de Fuego’ (Firebird). The record ends with ‘Alzando el Trofeo’ (Lifting the Trophy), a track that could soundtrack a state wedding, what with its beautiful cascading piano parts, a sugary vocal and short triumphal guitar riffs that add a rich patina to the overall sound. Fratti: “When I doubled those vocals on ‘Alzando el Trofeo’ I felt there was an epiphany happening, right at that moment.”


Making a good record is a team game. Tosta and Fratti recall seeing Randall from Circular Ruin Studios in NYC “tweak the drums in ‘Libra’ to make that amazing effect of the gated reverb”, or the shaping of ‘Gotera’, “when (recording engineer) Nate Salon added some synths to the track.” Drummer Eli Keszler, “an amazing and versatile player” had the songs down pat in a couple of days” and, according to Tosta, Oneohtrix Point Never “just came to one of the sessions and we hung out, and after all the recordings he and Nate were together in some studio and out of nowhere they sent us some beautiful tracks for ‘Pájaro de Fuego’! Fratti concurs. “He decided that he wanted to record because he was listening to the record (Nate works closely with him) and he really liked it! It was a total honour, indeed!”


Bedazzled by the playing, the skyscraping ambition in the arrangements and the giddy moments of contrast thrown up by Hagen, we could allow ourselves a brief moment of flippancy and state that Titanic’s new record is Yacht Rock meets Aeschylus, full-on. It’s also worth speculating that, in this hyper-sensitive, intemperate age, Titanic’s music has the power, however fleetingly, to heal hurts. Hagen is a brilliant showcase for a fresh and enriching form of pop music: displaying a magpie eye for what glints and plundering what has gone before.


Like Vidrio, Hagen was partially and additionally recorded at Fratti and Tosta’s house, aka Tinho Studios in Mexico City, as well as Golden Girl Studios & Circular Ruin Studios in New York City. Mixing was done by Santiago Parra in Pedro y el Lobo Studios, Mexico City and mastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri at Black Knoll Studios, New York City. The recording engineer was Nate Salon.


Hagen featured Mabe Fratti on cello, vocals & backing vocals, I. la Católica on guitar, keyboards, prepared piano, bass & backing vocals, drums by Eli Keszler and synths in ‘Pájaro de Fuego’ from Daniel Lopatin and Nate Salon.


All compositions on Hagen are written by I. la Católica, except ‘Escarbo Dimensiones’ & ‘Pájaro de Fuego’, which were composed by I. la Católica and Mabe Fratti. The record was produced by I. la Católica and co-produced by Nate Salon & Mabe Fratti. And all lyrics are by I. la Católica except ‘Escarbo Dimensiones’, ‘Gotera’, ‘Gallina degollada’ & ‘Pájaro de Fuego’, which were written by I. la Católica & Mabe Fratti.

The Modulator, AKA Freddy Fresh is back in town !

LTD 100 COPIES !!!


To share this event in the best way i asked him a few questions...
Official Interview now begins :)

Tool : The last Analog Records USA was in 2000... Why did you stop it and why do you wish to realese vinyls again ?


Mr Fresh : Ii actually never stopped I just made alot of other styles of music that I do not think were proper for my Analog and E.M.F. labels (Analog is now run by Mike McLure of SAuto Kinetic we work together on that label and Electric Music Foundation is all my label.. we did some great digital releases on E.M.F. recently with ADSX / Scott Radke/Dave Olson / Poor Boy Rich etc.. and can be found here

for me my last Techno Analog vinyl 12” Release was in 1997 Quiver 12"


But I did release a few Techno/Electro style tracks on my Electric Music Foundation labels as 12” singles
in 2003 I made these
Black Out

Orange Krush


I always continue to make music and have hundreds of unreleased songs that I think some are not worth putting on 12” single as I fear to weird, experimental etc.. I try to isolate myself and make unique music hopefully not sounding like what others are making but try to be my own self




Tool : What are you favourite machines or software to make music these days ?


Mr Fresh : I still use many vintage synths like my Jupiter 8, Arp 2600, Roland System 100M, 303’s etc.. but now I also use some Eurorack Modules E950, Clouds, Metropolis Sequencer etc.. also TR8, Twisted Electrons Acid 8, Teenage Engineering Factory, PO Calculators, Korg Volca Sampler, Electrix Filter Factory, Space Echo (Boss) and MPC 4000 controlling Hardware and I usually record random ideas to a flash recorder and sometimes import into ableton tracks etc.. then use Reaktor or some other soft synths but I always start Analog. I also use Critter and Guitari Looper to record organic sounds to use for percussion.




Tool : What are your forthcoming projects on vinyl in the near future ?


Mr Fresh : I have a remix electro style for New Zealand Independent Cardboard and Computers soon on 12” single

I have COMACID EP coming out of Belgium on 12” single very soon which features some older tracks (Binder, Scared, Slow Death, Spacefunk) mainly re-release of Techno/Acid stuff all analog of course

Then I have two releases with Toolbox Records and possible new stuff with Acid.Paris and hopefully we start a nice relationship with Toolbox for a long term ha ha! My daughters start school next month so I am preparing new Eurorack Modules and getting Syncussion to really hit it and spend some serious time in the studios. I am really inspired to do the more electronic vibes now and feeling the A.C.I.D. alot lately with the newer technology

John Calvin Abney rises again from the Oklahoman prairies with his latest album Transparent Towns. The ten songs focus on how we remember, and ultimately accept, though he is not always certain the memories we carry adequately mark the moments that make us. "This record is wrapped around the passage of time, whether or not we can trust the memories that we swear on, how we forgive ourselves and others as seasons turn, and how we define what is important as we roll the boulder back up the hill," Abney says of Transparent Towns. "We build these routines and live our stories, we rely on our histories and our memories - spoken and recorded. Now, we're relying on copies of copies, memories of memories, all packed like sardines into our phones, and we're losing the ability to tell our own stories. I have to constantly remind myself, as well as redefine what matters at the end of a day." Transparent Towns is the seventh studio album for Abney, and his first since 2022's Tourist, which he crafted after spending the pandemic as an itinerant writer. In contrast Abney penned most of the album's 10 tracks during a period of introspection and convalescence while recovering from vocal cord surgery in 2023. The time to himself - "I didn't sing for nearly a year, and after surgery, I couldn't talk for a month, and couldn't sing for over three months," he says, left him contemplating how to trace his experiences in the silence. The album's title track is Abney's take on the inaccessible past, witnessing loss and grief through the years, damning the "days we let go left unsaid", and accepting the uncontrollable circumstances we are sometimes placed in. "The troubles and the joys exist vibrantly in your memory, but you're wondering if you remember correctly," Abney remarks. "I've sometimes had this sort of confusion between memory and dreams - you crafted this ideal in your head of how things were or might be, in order to soften the blow of a harsher reality." The places we inhabit dictate how our memories form, and for Abney, there is one place to which he is constantly drawn: Oklahoma. Although he was born in the biggest little city in America, Reno, Nevada, he grew up learning guitar and piano in Tulsa, playing bars and DIY spaces from Norman to Stillwater. His affinity for the land that raised him is evident in the production of Transparent Towns. Abney self-produced the record, tracking most of it at Cardinal Song outside of Oklahoma City, with Michael Trepagnier handling mixing and engineering. The band was comprised mostly of Sooner State musicians too, along with Lydia Loveless and John Moreland contributing harmony vocals. His signature vulnerable voice and lyrical handiwork comes through in each of the songs, along with his penchant for alternative pop melodies set against colorful chords and subtle soundscapes. Having toured for years backing up artists like Moreland, Wild Child, Ben Kweller, and S.G. Goodman, Abney embraces a lead role again, as he presses forward with the loving lament and defiant joy throughout Transparent Towns, calling us to leave behind the pressures we place on our ourselves and recognize that just because there is an ending, it doesn't mean it's the end.

Belgian drummer and composer Jelle Van Giel presents All I Hear, the first full-length album of his new band, Close Distance.

All I Hear unfolds in ten chapters - nine on vinyl, with an additional track on CD. Each track depicts its own world. Some burst to life, driven by energy that draws you in and melodies that linger. Others take their time, emerging like landscapes through morning mist, shaped by shifting textures and quiet detail.

Subtle soundscapes and cinematic colors blend with improvisation and groove, creating an immersive listening experience that speaks to both head and heart. This is music that paints with sound, drawing the listener deep into the world of Close Distance: a quartet in which Jelle invites his fellow musicians Roeland Celis (guitar), Ewout Pierreux (piano/rhodes) and Yannick Peeters (double bass) to join him on his journey and sometimes lead the way.

3XL boss and scene hyper-connector Special Guest DJ (aka uon, shy, Caveman LSD) lands on their own label with a debut album of hazed ambient noise and aquatic club anarchitextures, with a patented, heady style bent into new shapes.

For nigh on a decade, Berlin-based American producer, label boss, promoter and DJ Shy has operated at the centre of a scene that's still not fully defined. Their mythical DJ sets, where you're likely to hear precision-tweaked dubstep, dreampop, decelerated rap and dubwise ambient blended into vapour; gives some sense of the vibes at play, and a comb thru their spiderweb of a catalog - as Caveman LSD or uon, as part of Ghostride the Drift, Hoodie, crimeboys, virtualdemonlaxative and Cypher, or as the figurehead of 3XL, Experiences Ltd, xpq? and bblisss labels - further blurs that gist.

They've been caught in the crossfire of Big Ambient, sure, but there's always been something scrappier, sexier and more present going on under the hood. Shy and his network of associates - Huerco, Ulla, Perila, Ben Bondy, Naemi/Exael, Ponteac Streator and Arad Acid, among others - have asserted the interrelatedness of their discrete approaches. So-called "ambient" music doesn't exist in a vacuum, it un-focuses elements that undergird so many more corporeal sounds, and for Shy, their music reflects the druggy, DIY, genre-agnostic ethos of a trans-Atlantic neo-punk underground that exists in some liminal zone between the club, the bedsit and the basement.

Concerned with themes of “anger, sensuality, and dreaming”, the 40 minute roil of ‘Our Fantasy Complex’ frames Special Guest DJ at their most unapologetically oblique and illusive, expanding and contracting between whorls of shoegazing dynamics and extended portions of quasi-speed D&B x dub tech smeared on the mind’s-eye, with a vivid sense of bruised lushness that’s perfused all shy’s work thus far.

Joined by kindred collaborators Ben Bondy, Arad Acid and mu tate, and suspended in agitated bliss by Rashad Becker’s lucid mastering, the results feel out some of 2025’s most considered and distinctive within an amorphous zone that’s become a world unto itself. Ambient music’s fluffier signifiers are swapped out for a sort of sublime tension that, like the sound’s original ‘90s explosion, can be heard to reflect states of altered consciousness - both individual and collective.

Shy's layered, undulating productions are more like the chewed remnants of a thousand mixtapes cooked into a stream-of-consciousness hex. Save for the glistening, zoomed-out parting piece ‘Dream’, it all mostly avoids pretty melodies in favour of a spatio-textural sensuality that wraps us up, sometimes uncomfortably intimately, in shy’s thoughts. That oneiric closer is one of three gritty palate cleansers that swirl around its peaks, where elements of Reese-bass are suspended, writhing below looming atmospheric pressure in ‘How Long Can I Burn?’, emerging charred and flecked with rattled percussion on ‘Yoro (pt I & II)’, as though K-holing thru a blazing summer’s day.

In step with Perila’s notably darker turn of events on her ‘Omnis Festinatio Ex parts Diaboli Est’, album, or the unexpected ferocity of recent Space Afrika live shows, it’s not hard to hear a darkside gravitational pull on this one, where ambient music is no longer just a balm for troubled souls, but also suggestive of humanity’s most frightful odours.

Signing with FatCat Records in 2022, and having released four singles to date, Nottingham-based Midnight Rodeo have now delivered their debut album, “Chaos Era”.

Extensive, relentless touring (sold-out hometown shows,The Great Escape, Dot To Dot, and Kendall Calling) created a tight-knit family, their pleasure in playing as an ensemble is instantly evident on the album. When asked about this they’ll explain, “We want people to tap into why we are always smiling on stage.”

The songs are collaborative efforts. Their different musical backgrounds result in a genre criss-crossing and totally unique creative collisions. Bassist Harry says, “What we do is Dada-istic. The drums play hooks, the bass plays parts usually taken by brass, the guitar’s playing West Coast psyche over disco rhythms.”

Written over a prolonged period of time, the songs on the album can be viewed as a kind of coming-of-age “suite”, as the unit of 20-somethings wrestle with subjects such as relationships, shifting social dynamics, changing hopes and dreams. The LP’s title refers to tumultuous personal events they’ve helped each other through. Reinforcing their bonding. With no pointed political agenda, the album is about “escape”. “We want people to dance”, they say.

The band recorded the album with Samana’s Franklin Mockett. Making full use of the acclaimed duo’s residential studio, located deep in the Welsh countryside, during an Indian summer heatwave. The aim was to remove all distractions, and, with Mockett’s assistance, capture the group as live, and as analogue, as possible. For 10 days, in sometimes 16 hour sessions, music, incense, and whiskey flowed, while vintage amp valves glowed.

Just like the band’s live performances, “Chaos Era” is packed with a palpable joy. The exhilaration of creation in each others company. Its punchy production is most definitely meant to be played loud.

Black Truffle is pleased to announce a new edition of Kassel Jaeger’s Fernweh, returning François J. Bonnet’s electroacoustic project to the label five years after the acclaimed Meith (BT069). Originally released on Giuseppe Ielasi and Jennifer Veillerobe’s impeccably curated Senufo Editions in 2012, Fernweh stands near the beginning of the gradual expansion of Bonnet’s approach after the austere acoustic textures of Aerae and Algae (both released on Senufo), leading to the lush, layered environments of recent solo works on Shelter Press and the epic electronic expeditions undertaken in duo projects with Stephen O’Malley and Jim O’Rourke.

A major work in the Kassel Jaeger oeuvre, stretching over two LP sides, Fernweh draws together synthesized and musique concrète materials into a drifting assemblage. Its title’s meaning is close to the concept of ‘Wanderlust’, fitting for this music that moves freely and unexpectedly between what Bonnet calls ‘climates’. Beginning with fizzing electronics whose rhythm of gradual approach suggests breaking waves, the clinical atmosphere is soon haunted by intangible traces of lived reality. Textures call up wind, water, insects, the crunch of feet on sand or the clinking of glasses, yet they can never be identified with any certainty. At times these concrete elements possess a vivid ‘closeness’; at others, the sounds shade into a formless distance. Though the listener forms no clear picture from the concrete sounds, these elements aerate the music, lending it their space.

Drawing from the rigorous formal language and conceptual apparatus of the French musique concrète tradition—with which Bonnet, as director of the GRM and researcher into its deepest archival recesses, is intimately familiar—the music of Kassel Jaeger is equally informed by how underground experimental music has rethought electroacoustic techniques, with Fernweh at times calling up the grit and grime of para-industrial eccentrics like Maurizio Bianchi or the Toniutti brothers, and at other moments suggesting the slow-moving grandeur of early Olivia Block. Subtle features of dynamics and rhythm act as connective tissue between the numerous ‘scenes’, with wave-like envelopes, rapid pulsations, and short, tape-loop patterns all recurring throughout the piece, shared ambiguously between electronic and concrete sounds. Amid these shifting, often inharmonic textures, the electronic elements sometimes cohere into melodic shapes and chordal patterns, cutting through the fog in distorted arcs or underpinning the layered surface with slow-moving harmonies. Like his friend and collaborator Jim O’Rourke, Bonnet displays a radical openness at odds with academic tradition, allowing unabashed emotion to coexist with rigorous experimentation. As Fernweh dies away with mysterious shudders, listeners are left at once moved and unsure of exactly what they just heard.

Mannequin Records reissues "My Government Is My Soul", a searing 1989 statement from Bourbonese Qualk, one of the UK’s most defiant and politically engaged experimental acts. Originally released on the group’s own label, this LP captures the uncompromising spirit of a band deeply embedded in the resistance movements of 1980s Britain.

Recorded during a turbulent period of social unrest, "My Government Is My Soul" stands as a fierce response to authoritarianism, surveillance, and the neoliberal decay that defined the Thatcher era. Bourbonese Qualk fused industrial rhythms, minimal synth, distorted tape loops, and spoken-word polemics into a sound that was both confrontational and deeply physical—a weaponized form of music rooted in activism and direct action.

Widely regarded by fans as one of the band’s strongest works, "My Government Is My Soul" has earned a near-mythic status in underground circles. Fans have praised the album’s stylistic breadth—“sometimes it kisses the hem of rock, at others it bows towards the likes of Steve Reich & Philip Glass".

This reissue, fully remastered by Rude 66, reintroduces a critical work of post-industrial dissent to a new generation. Still as urgent and unflinching as ever, the album resonates with today’s climate of mass disinformation and systemic control. It is a timely reminder that sound can still be a form of resistance.

"Max Knouse’s voice feels like laughter that follows a well-loved joke. Only afterward, it dawns on you that you don’t fully understand the punchline. Or for that matter the set up. In fact, you’re not even sure what language the joke was told in. What to make of such a laugh—inexplicable, delightful, surprising, seemingly nonsensical? And what to make his voice, at once comforting, beguiling, and just beyond the bounds, like a blues moan or a Mingus lick or some ancient guttural holler? It’s the kind of haunt that lingers long after the record fades, echoing back in your imagination, laden with cryptic possibilities and occulted meanings.

Chipmunk’d Away is his third album. Known for his sessions and live shows with artists like Califone, Jolie Holland, Adan Jodorowsky, Psychic Temple, Simon Joyner, Alex Dupree, and others, Knouse has established himself as an essential factor in the West Coast indie pop underground, brandishing guitar chops that mirror the rawness of his voice; he treats his instrument like a divining rod of spiritual tension and joyful racket, pushing and pulling on it with affection and sometimes something darker.

From the swelling cosmic folk of “Mint and Tobacco,” which features Knouse intoning apocalyptically over engineer Michael Krassner’s washing guitars, “Your breathing ain’t so deep,” to the jazz standard swooner-meets-West Coast psych-pop title track, to the nightmare-scape blues of “Clumsy Hunter,” to the concluding audio collage sway of “Banana, Orange, and Something Else,” Chipmunk’d presents the range and scope of Knouse’s style: bold, adventurous, frightening, and then frequently, when you least expect it, heartbreakingly lovely, like a joke that clarifies your feelings before you could actually verbalize what those feelings even are. They had been hidden from you, chipmunk’d away, but now Max Knouse has revealed them."

“Trustworthy”. is the meaning of “danama”, this Bambara word from Mali. Believing in oneself, in others, in the word given, in desirable futures. Advocating optimism, momentum towards the future, collective strength and the wise magic of cultural blending… especially during these troubled times of endless wars, of nationalist withdrawals or the abundance of naturals disasters, all encouraged by a carnivorous capitalism?

So confidence, we need tons of it. Maintained by the flame, the phlegm and the stratagem of these afro-groove scientists, without ignoring their sorrows nor the scandals of History. This is the athletic art of Arat Kilo, who remain without question the best ethio-jazz orchestra in France, on the trail of this fifth album recorded in the Spring of 2024. Confidence was also needed to change the way things worked. For all the previous albums, the band came together in the studio to play each track together, all in the same room, in the romantic idea of a warm, lively, organic gesture, in the manner of the great Ethiopian masters of the 60s and 70s.

For Danama, the music was initially collected in tandem: guitar/bass, drums/percussion, saxophone/trumpet, and the two voices. A few new instruments were added along the way : dark synthesizers, a bass clarinet, a tiny guitalélé (similar to the ukulele) and a Malian n'goni (sometimes described as ‘the griot's lute’). Then, and above all, there was the question of experimenting with real sound production, using sound design, multi-track exploration and effects applied to the textures collected over eight days at the Gong studios in Montreuil and OneTwoPassIt in Bagnolet just outside Paris.

In this way the band, all growing up influenced by the hip French Radio Nova's ‘Grand Mix’, were completely free to express their natural taste for fusion between genres. Borrowing from the frantic rhythms of Newark's jersey club, English 2-step or New Orleans brass bands, grafted onto Arat Kilo's musical base: tezeta, the famous minor pentatonic scale typical of Ethiopian jazz, melancholic to perfection. The result is layers of sound, collages of emotions, like the album cover, created by artist Clément Laurentin from multicoloured fragments of posters torn up in the street.

So Arat Kilo are back: The same band, the same collective strength, the same fight for values, their new album “Danama” carries the demand for a better world even further, with words of hope from singer Mamani Keita and the social critique of American MC and poet Mike Ladd ! The result is this luminous voyage down the Danama canal. In all, eleven songs and an instrumental, mixed by Mathieu ‘Gib’ Gibert - one of French band La Fine Équipe's beatmakers - set to drive the crowds wild and remind us how to stick together again.

Kneading dough is tricky – you should know how it’s supposed to feel. If you try too hard you could make it worse. It’s a beautiful practice – creation with a gentle touch, to work at something so it can be left alone. “If it’s too drawn out it’s awful. It’s easy to give too much.” Dance in the mirror. Contemplate your veiny hands. Who do they remind you of?

You begin by mixing flour and water. “What happens when your people die? Why’d they move the rock to the other side of Ulster Park?” Eliza Niemi asks two seemingly unrelated questions in a rising melody with guitar accompaniment, like fingers playing spider up to the nape of your neck. Gentle pressure. Strands of gluten form to bind the mix. A new question lingers in the binding. When she admits “but I don’t know how to tell if I’m feeling it or not,” that question surfaces through the text. It is reiterated throughout the album. When I’m working with dough I think the same thing to myself.

On Progress Bakery, her second album as a solo artist, Eliza knows to leave some questions alone – to let juxtaposition and tension be the proof. It doesn’t have to be hard. The feelings and revelations they provoke rise in the heat. The smell is sweet. Crispy on the outside and soft all the way through. She playfully slip-slides through words and sounds and images, delighting in surprise, skimming ideas like stones cast across clear water, touching down briefly with uncommon grace.

The question provoked between those opening lines resurfaces in the strands between songs – “Do U FM” is fully formed and beautifully layered, while “Novelist Sad Face” is a short, acapella rendering of gentle curiosity. What is holding these ideas together? Some songs demand more, seem to carry a whole load – eventually the skipping stone will halt to sink and resume its idle duty – while others drift in and out of focus, the way thoughts and dreams become interwoven before the mind is sunk into true sleep.

Music and words don’t always have to interact. Where she decides to keep them apart gives a new contour to where and how she puts them together. The kind of thing you’re supposed to take for granted with songs and their singers comes alive in Eliza’s hands – the little miracle of mixing, kneading, stretching, and stopping.

So often on Progress Bakery, Eliza teases out truth and meaning by asking questions. “Do I wanna be crying?” “Do you want me good or do you want me bad?” “Do I need an eye test?” “I’m writing songs in my head while you’re going over stuff with me — is that cruel??” In “Pocky” Eliza ends with a question that feels to me like the actual biography, succinct and revealing:

I don’t wanna be made to see
I just wanna ask “what’s that?”

Grace that ought to be rare, but in its care and precision is offered humbly, with great generosity, and without announcing itself. Eliza’s simple, miraculous music is given further form and shape by a group of collaborators – invaluable guest musicians Jeremy Ray, Evan Cartwright, Steven McPhail, Kenny Boothby, Ed Squires, Carolina Chauffe, Dorothea Paas, Louie Short, and Avalon Tassonyi. Together with Louie Short, who recorded, mixed, and produced the album along with Jeremy Ray and Lukas Cheung, Eliza has cultivated a richness in sound and texture that prods and provokes the ticklish ear. Barely audible guitar tinkering, a brief lo-fi field recording of trumpets, the harmonic clicking of a looped synthesizer, a flourish of reeds, a child’s conversation, each uncanny sound perfectly placed, rippling out under a soft breeze.

Lay in bed alone at night and ask aloud to the stillness,

“What were you doing at the Albuquerque Airport?
What were you doing there??”

And hear your question answered by a dream of swelling, undulating cellos. Try to grasp at the melody and structure. It’s not an answer (if there could be one), but it moves deeper, closer to the weird layer of fleeting moments and disconnected images, barely perceptible at its core. Wait for the dream reel to click into place.

Eliza took me for a ride in Nicole (her beloved Dodge Grand Caravan) and told me she’d been thinking of the album as an embodiment of transition – and I think every transition, known or unknown, carries the weight of new meaning, skittering off the surface tension of life as you know it, creating ripples, sometimes bouncing off and sometimes breaking through. There is a trick you can use to tell if a dough is glutinous enough. You’re supposed to stretch it out as thin as you can without breaking it and hold it up to the light. If you can see through, even if it renders the world murky and uncertain, you should leave it alone. I love this trick. It’s one that Eliza seems to know intuitively: work gently and ask questions and don’t always expect answers, and when you can, take a glimpse at something new, and then leave.

Kneading dough is tricky – you should know how it’s supposed to feel. If you try too hard you could make it worse. It’s a beautiful practice – creation with a gentle touch, to work at something so it can be left alone. “If it’s too drawn out it’s awful. It’s easy to give too much.” Dance in the mirror. Contemplate your veiny hands. Who do they remind you of?

You begin by mixing flour and water. “What happens when your people die? Why’d they move the rock to the other side of Ulster Park?” Eliza Niemi asks two seemingly unrelated questions in a rising melody with guitar accompaniment, like fingers playing spider up to the nape of your neck. Gentle pressure. Strands of gluten form to bind the mix. A new question lingers in the binding. When she admits “but I don’t know how to tell if I’m feeling it or not,” that question surfaces through the text. It is reiterated throughout the album. When I’m working with dough I think the same thing to myself.

On Progress Bakery, her second album as a solo artist, Eliza knows to leave some questions alone – to let juxtaposition and tension be the proof. It doesn’t have to be hard. The feelings and revelations they provoke rise in the heat. The smell is sweet. Crispy on the outside and soft all the way through. She playfully slip-slides through words and sounds and images, delighting in surprise, skimming ideas like stones cast across clear water, touching down briefly with uncommon grace.

The question provoked between those opening lines resurfaces in the strands between songs – “Do U FM” is fully formed and beautifully layered, while “Novelist Sad Face” is a short, acapella rendering of gentle curiosity. What is holding these ideas together? Some songs demand more, seem to carry a whole load – eventually the skipping stone will halt to sink and resume its idle duty – while others drift in and out of focus, the way thoughts and dreams become interwoven before the mind is sunk into true sleep.

Music and words don’t always have to interact. Where she decides to keep them apart gives a new contour to where and how she puts them together. The kind of thing you’re supposed to take for granted with songs and their singers comes alive in Eliza’s hands – the little miracle of mixing, kneading, stretching, and stopping.

So often on Progress Bakery, Eliza teases out truth and meaning by asking questions. “Do I wanna be crying?” “Do you want me good or do you want me bad?” “Do I need an eye test?” “I’m writing songs in my head while you’re going over stuff with me — is that cruel??” In “Pocky” Eliza ends with a question that feels to me like the actual biography, succinct and revealing:

I don’t wanna be made to see
I just wanna ask “what’s that?”

Grace that ought to be rare, but in its care and precision is offered humbly, with great generosity, and without announcing itself. Eliza’s simple, miraculous music is given further form and shape by a group of collaborators – invaluable guest musicians Jeremy Ray, Evan Cartwright, Steven McPhail, Kenny Boothby, Ed Squires, Carolina Chauffe, Dorothea Paas, Louie Short, and Avalon Tassonyi. Together with Louie Short, who recorded, mixed, and produced the album along with Jeremy Ray and Lukas Cheung, Eliza has cultivated a richness in sound and texture that prods and provokes the ticklish ear. Barely audible guitar tinkering, a brief lo-fi field recording of trumpets, the harmonic clicking of a looped synthesizer, a flourish of reeds, a child’s conversation, each uncanny sound perfectly placed, rippling out under a soft breeze.

Lay in bed alone at night and ask aloud to the stillness,

“What were you doing at the Albuquerque Airport?
What were you doing there??”

And hear your question answered by a dream of swelling, undulating cellos. Try to grasp at the melody and structure. It’s not an answer (if there could be one), but it moves deeper, closer to the weird layer of fleeting moments and disconnected images, barely perceptible at its core. Wait for the dream reel to click into place.

Eliza took me for a ride in Nicole (her beloved Dodge Grand Caravan) and told me she’d been thinking of the album as an embodiment of transition – and I think every transition, known or unknown, carries the weight of new meaning, skittering off the surface tension of life as you know it, creating ripples, sometimes bouncing off and sometimes breaking through. There is a trick you can use to tell if a dough is glutinous enough. You’re supposed to stretch it out as thin as you can without breaking it and hold it up to the light. If you can see through, even if it renders the world murky and uncertain, you should leave it alone. I love this trick. It’s one that Eliza seems to know intuitively: work gently and ask questions and don’t always expect answers, and when you can, take a glimpse at something new, and then leave.

SYML is the solo venture of artist Brian Fennell. Welsh for “simple”—he makes music that taps into the instincts that drive us to places of sanctuary, whether that be a place or a person. Born and raised in Seattle, Fennell studied piano and became a self-taught producer, programmer, and guitarist. Says Fennell about his album Nobody Lives Here, "We change, the world changes, and there is so much unknown. About a year ago I started writing songs that represent the change that is happening in front of my face, a group that have emerged to become the third SYML album. Many of these songs are about getting older, and the intimate, and sometimes frightening, passing of time. Some are about how getting older revolves around looking forward to things happening, and when they don’t happen, or they feel different than anticipated, we can be left with surprise and sadness. I’m actually reminded of this watching my 2 year old! We learn to live with disappointment. I recorded some of these songs with kids and dogs making noise in the background, and others in silent studios with musicians I’ve listened to and admired for many years. These songs are meant to be pieces of clothing to wear as you need (or I need). Some are bright and bold and others are gentle, but they were all made with a sense of comfort in mind, even when things feel bleak. My wife jokes that when our friends hear some of these songs, they might think we are not “ok”. Thankfully, putting myself inside a sad song is still a good place to feel happy. There's this generally unspoken feeling that musicians don’t listen to their own music. That isn’t true for me. I love living with my songs because their meaning changes as I change. There is as much fear and beauty in the big questions as there is wonder and possibility in the simple, everyday shit we live through.”

Kneading dough is tricky – you should know how it’s supposed to feel. If you try too hard you could make it worse. It’s a beautiful practice – creation with a gentle touch, to work at something so it can be left alone. “If it’s too drawn out it’s awful. It’s easy to give too much.” Dance in the mirror. Contemplate your veiny hands. Who do they remind you of?

You begin by mixing flour and water. “What happens when your people die? Why’d they move the rock to the other side of Ulster Park?” Eliza Niemi asks two seemingly unrelated questions in a rising melody with guitar accompaniment, like fingers playing spider up to the nape of your neck. Gentle pressure. Strands of gluten form to bind the mix. A new question lingers in the binding. When she admits “but I don’t know how to tell if I’m feeling it or not,” that question surfaces through the text. It is reiterated throughout the album. When I’m working with dough I think the same thing to myself.

On Progress Bakery, her second album as a solo artist, Eliza knows to leave some questions alone – to let juxtaposition and tension be the proof. It doesn’t have to be hard. The feelings and revelations they provoke rise in the heat. The smell is sweet. Crispy on the outside and soft all the way through. She playfully slip-slides through words and sounds and images, delighting in surprise, skimming ideas like stones cast across clear water, touching down briefly with uncommon grace.

The question provoked between those opening lines resurfaces in the strands between songs – “Do U FM” is fully formed and beautifully layered, while “Novelist Sad Face” is a short, acapella rendering of gentle curiosity. What is holding these ideas together? Some songs demand more, seem to carry a whole load – eventually the skipping stone will halt to sink and resume its idle duty – while others drift in and out of focus, the way thoughts and dreams become interwoven before the mind is sunk into true sleep.

Music and words don’t always have to interact. Where she decides to keep them apart gives a new contour to where and how she puts them together. The kind of thing you’re supposed to take for granted with songs and their singers comes alive in Eliza’s hands – the little miracle of mixing, kneading, stretching, and stopping.

So often on Progress Bakery, Eliza teases out truth and meaning by asking questions. “Do I wanna be crying?” “Do you want me good or do you want me bad?” “Do I need an eye test?” “I’m writing songs in my head while you’re going over stuff with me — is that cruel??” In “Pocky” Eliza ends with a question that feels to me like the actual biography, succinct and revealing:

I don’t wanna be made to see
I just wanna ask “what’s that?”

Grace that ought to be rare, but in its care and precision is offered humbly, with great generosity, and without announcing itself. Eliza’s simple, miraculous music is given further form and shape by a group of collaborators – invaluable guest musicians Jeremy Ray, Evan Cartwright, Steven McPhail, Kenny Boothby, Ed Squires, Carolina Chauffe, Dorothea Paas, Louie Short, and Avalon Tassonyi. Together with Louie Short, who recorded, mixed, and produced the album along with Jeremy Ray and Lukas Cheung, Eliza has cultivated a richness in sound and texture that prods and provokes the ticklish ear. Barely audible guitar tinkering, a brief lo-fi field recording of trumpets, the harmonic clicking of a looped synthesizer, a flourish of reeds, a child’s conversation, each uncanny sound perfectly placed, rippling out under a soft breeze.

Lay in bed alone at night and ask aloud to the stillness,

“What were you doing at the Albuquerque Airport?
What were you doing there??”

And hear your question answered by a dream of swelling, undulating cellos. Try to grasp at the melody and structure. It’s not an answer (if there could be one), but it moves deeper, closer to the weird layer of fleeting moments and disconnected images, barely perceptible at its core. Wait for the dream reel to click into place.

Eliza took me for a ride in Nicole (her beloved Dodge Grand Caravan) and told me she’d been thinking of the album as an embodiment of transition – and I think every transition, known or unknown, carries the weight of new meaning, skittering off the surface tension of life as you know it, creating ripples, sometimes bouncing off and sometimes breaking through. There is a trick you can use to tell if a dough is glutinous enough. You’re supposed to stretch it out as thin as you can without breaking it and hold it up to the light. If you can see through, even if it renders the world murky and uncertain, you should leave it alone. I love this trick. It’s one that Eliza seems to know intuitively: work gently and ask questions and don’t always expect answers, and when you can, take a glimpse at something new, and then leave.

"Flowerdust" is a very classic gothic rock album with all its gothic rock attributes, yet with
a very dynamic sound. Catherines Cathedral managed to combine very aggressive rock
(hardcore punk almost) hand in hand with piano and acoustic guitar ballads. Because of the
sometimes massive use of keyboards there is also a New Age feel and the urge to make
intelligent and thoughtful music, almost poetry is ever present.
Catherines Cathedral was formed by M. Valley, S. Morgana and D. Hansevi in 1992 with the
plan to play gothic rock. They almost immediately recorded what would later become
"Flowerdust", the album that Preachers Cath Records would release in 1993 and then again
digitally in 2015. The album impressed many others and they moved to House Of Kicks
Records and Noxious Records.

Theresa Stroetges returns to Karaoke Kalk with her second album for the Berlin-based label, her fifth solo full-length with her Golden Diskó Ship project in total. Having released records with the Indian-German band project Hotel Kali as well as Painting, a group dedicated to audio-visual concepts, »Oval Sun Patch« sees her embrace influences from club culture, advanced electronic music, and pop more firmly than ever before. Over the past 15 years, Golden Diskó Ship has served a vessel with which the Berlin-based multi-instrumentalist has traversed a variety of genres and circumnavigated all conventions in the process. With »Oval Sun Patch,« Stroetges again sets sail into unknown waters with what is perhaps her catchiest album so far—beat-driven, playful, atmospheric, and at times thoroughly anthemic. This is the sound of Golden Diskó Ship moving forward.

A life lived in transit, the vastness of bodies of water and the isolation of islands as well as more generally notions of processes and progress have been recurring motives throughout Stroetges’ previous records and also mark »Oval Sun Patch.« In fact, the foundation for the six pieces was laid when she was working abroad and at times close to the sea. The massive three-part album closer »Earth Before The Space Race« was conceived as a multi-channel audio-visual performance piece during a 2021 residency at Zaratan Arte Contemporânea in Lisbon. The others were written in the following year during two other residencies when Stroetges first spent time in Austria at the sound art festival Klangmanifeste in Lindabrunn and then visited Portugal once more for a stay at Goethe-Institut in Lisbon. With the help of Shelley Barradas, who lent her a guitar, and Julia Klein, who helped her setting up a temporary studio in the Goethe-Institut Portugal’s auditorium, she made the preliminary recordings of what would later become this album.

»Oval Sun Patch«, later refined in Berlin and mixed in close collaboration with London-based engineer Hannes Plattmeier, is a direct result of Stroetges having to work with what was available to her at the time of writing and recording. While her distinct guitar playing—evocative yet funky, complex but catchy—once more features heavily and she uses her voice in manifold ways to sometimes harmonise with herself or creating complex canons as counterpoints to her her own lead vocals, the electronic gear she worked with dominates the album both compositionally and sonically. Stroetges’ music has always displayed a passion for club culture and advanced electronic music, but on »Oval Sun Patch« she proves once and for all how well these influences can be integrated into her unconventional approach to songwriting.

However, the punchy beat and Moroder-like bassline that form the backbone of »Dolphins With Soft Helmets,« the throbbing house and techno grooves underneath »Ephemeral Carnivores« and »Well-Oiled Machine« as well as the jittery IDM rhythms of »Google Your New Name« and her nods to trip-hop with »Tiny Island« do not so much follow established formulas as they use them as a starting point for wild experimentation instead. Stroetges juxtaposes complex rhythms with interlocking melodies and rich harmonies in ways that continue to surprise throughout and still leave enough space for the occasional wistful guitar or vocal passage. Nowhere does this approach feel more epic than on the 12 ½ minutes long »Earth Before The Space Race,« which takes its time to unfold, changing its pace and mood throughout.

»Oval Sun Patch« is an album about change. The lyrics describe constant transformations of sceneries, relationships, physical and emotional states as well as the climate throughout its running time. Stroetges in the meanwhile leads the way as a singer, songwriter and producer who lets her music evolve constantly. This is sound, moving forward.

Out of the murky, mystic world of Komodo Kolektif slides the Gamma Knife.

In the corner of a dank, dark mind, a nebulous notion condenses and solidifies, featureless and blind...and from that Komodo Klay a new kreature is hacked, molded and (mal)formed.

“The foundations of some of these pieces were laid almost a decade ago, others more recently. All of them came into being as sketches intended as Komodo Kolektif tracks to develop but for various reasons this didn't happen. The Seven Heavenly Elements was first presented to the group in 2019 but partly through personal differences in musical taste as well as COVID throwing a spanner in the works it was put aside and never worked on collectively. The two Disciple of the Drum 'dubs' are essentially rhythm tracks using the rhythm and percussion of Disciple Of The Drone, also from 2019, stripping away the drone, the gamelan melody and finally, even the bass line, which was initially intended to be the fundamental driving force of at least one of these dubs. In the end neither of these two tracks became anything like the idea that I had in mind, but that's how creativity works sometimes. The vocal parts in Cantation Dub were added most recently, just a few months ago. Fire Dub is just an exercise in me trying to rein in some insane delays and barely managing. The Ghost of Water is an anomaly because many of the fundamental parts are taken from the same jam session recorded in 2015 that led to Djakarta 3001 from the first EP. If you listen closely you'll hear Graeme Miller on guitar (back when guitar was still featured in our weekly jam sessions). I discovered this unedited hour-long jam session on an older hard drive in late 2023 and decided to fashion something from it until what became Ghost of Water materialised: the heavily delayed saron instruments, the jaw harp, the percussion and so on. What makes the track an anomaly is that it is in some ways both the oldest and newest piece of the five. The Seventh Element takes one of the seven elements of The Seven Heavenly Elements (in this case the Mopho synth tuned to the Indonesian pelog scale and ran through the Boss DE-200's depth modulator) to which I then added some gong parts and field recordings from Bali.

Once complete, I realised with an album's worth of material sitting there which was more “Komodo Kolektif” than anything I would normally produce solo, there came the problem of trying to work out what to do with this distinctly Komodo-esque, non-Komodo material. I came up with the idea of releasing it under the name Komodo Kuts...but a part of me felt I'd be cashing in on the Komodo name so ditched that part entirely...but the kuts remained, which seemed appropriate when used alongside my Gamma Knife moniker (which has a long story of its own...in a nutshell I had a benign brain tumour which only 1 in 10,000 people get and which is most frequently removed with a gamma knife (radiation). In medical parlance the device used in this treatment is often shortened to GK machine. I had been using the DJ name GK Machine, which came from my signature GK Mackinnon, since 1994, in other words long before this diagnosis. In the end I had brain surgery in Spain without use of gamma radiation...but the synchronicity of the name connection fascinated me nevertheless. Sometimes the world works in mysterious ways).

Lastly, now that I've sent these tracks out into the world, I feel somewhat liberated and can move on from this fairly niche and specific sound. The gamelan instruments have been returned to Gamelan Naga Mas, from who we'd borrowed them, and the masks hung up. This does not mean that Graeme Miller and I won't work together again in future...I'm sure we will...it just means we won't be tied to working within the constraints of gamelan, synths, percussion and dub that we became known for. So stay tuned...surely something lurks around the corner” GKM, November 2024

The prolific, virtuosic original Bjarki Sigurðarson returns to the concept album format, with ‘A Guide To Hellthier Lifestyle’. It’s the first LP to be released on Differance.

‘A Guide To Hellthier Lifestyle’ explores the psychological landscape of contemporary social issues, offering a sideways rumination on lifestyle dilemmas and wellness obsessions, presenting itself as a response to the modern condition. It combines storytelling with innovative sound textures – encouraging listeners to pause and contemplate the absurdities of contemporary life. Neither a critique nor an endorsement, it represents an honest exploration of our world through Bjarki’s sonic lens, gleaming a heart of darkness, but eventually finding light.

The album utilises hyper-stereo techniques, soothing melodies, complex audio structures, AIgenerated voices and sampled vocals – influenced by Coil, Genesis P- Orridge, and Paul Lansky. Bjarki investigates how specific frequencies can impact consciousness, awareness, mood, and mental state, thereby influencing our perception of reality. His vaporous sound design provides a listening experience that bridges the physical and imaginative realms; sometimes placing the listener in contemplative sanctuary, and at others making them lost – somewhere strange, uneasy, disconnected.

Bjarki on his Guide To Hellthier Lifestyle

“This new album has been two years in the works. It’s sort of my take on all the social weirdness and wellness obsessions happening right now. It kicked off with a track I started in California – the story of a soul that got born into the wrong womb. During that time, I was noticing more and more of this whole ‘wellness religion’ everywhere – people trying to sell you ‘good vibes’ and random people offering you life coaching sessions on Instagram who maybe have less life experience than a houseplant. All these apps that track our every move; it’s like they’re repackaging control and calling it ‘self care’. Capitalism in yoga pants. Thats when I started putting ‘A Guide To Hellthier Lifestyle’ concept together. A never ending, self improvement rabbit hole. We are all being sold this idea that we are not quite enough and we need to buy our way out to being better.

At one point, I took a break from the album and started working on another album full of satirical speeches, AI generated voices, where I create my own voices and type in some ideas of speeches, taking the piss out of wellness gurus and life coaches. I messed a lot with these AI voice generators, creating these deep, faux serious monologues. Proper weird stuff, but it cracked me up. Reminded me of the early days, when I was 13, making tracks on Fruity Loops, mucking around with text-to- speech generators. After the break I came back to finish ‘The Guide’ on a much deeper level.

I moved part of my studio to Latvia and continued in the countryside for few months. I realised that I just wanted something beautiful. So, yeah, this album is all of that. It’s spiritual, bits and pieces from the past, all these weird cultural moments, and whatever strange places my head goes. It’s a reflection, a rebellion, a bit of a piss take. But mostly, it’s just me, doing what I do.” - Duncan Clark

The album will be released only in its entirety, December 13th digi, with no advance singles.

Denovali presents the new album of the prestigious Swedish pianist and composer Matti Bye. Matti is well-known for his regular performances at various silent film festivals and screenings worldwide, where you can see him perform solo and with artists such as Lau Nau. Bye has been involved in several collaborations, including Hydras Dream, where he recorded and released an album with Anna von Hausswolff. Additionally, Matti is recognized for his scores in projects like ”Young Royals," ”Tove," „The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared,“ and "A Traves de tu Mirada” among many others.

Matti Bye's third album, "Capri Clouds", moves through the element of the air and further into space. A lone piano sounds, echoes - sometimes like a waltz. We have the sound of the wind with us and the sound of the sea below us as we fly, and above we hear the stars and planets spinning. A piano from the past, as if Satie met space - as if Spiritualized and Satie talked to each other across timeand space.These songs go straight to the heart and to the senses, and create images in your head. Stories from your own memory bank, as well as new visions – music to lean into, meditatively and hopefully longing. But there is also an undertone of something dark and desolate. Musically, Matti Bye moves within the realm of neo-classicism, but he is also approaching romanticism. References to composers suchas Schubert and Beethoven are to be found here, as well as to post-romantic bands such as Kraftwerk and The Cure. In this third album of a trilogy – the first was "Bethanien", the second "The Forgotten Land" – Bye continues his musical journey. Here we encounter a brighter and lighter production. Anders af Klintberg has brought "Capri Clouds" up from the underworld and the dreamscape, towards clouds and skies.

Hope and Sorrow is the 2nd album by French artist Wax Tailor. With this album he established himself on the international scene with a world tour, an Indie Music Award in the United States and a nomination at the Victoires de la musique 2008 as "best electronic artist”

Waxwork Records is proud to present BARBIE Score From The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack composed by Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt! The score is featured in the juggernaut film Barbie, directed by Greta Gerwig and starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as Barbie and Ken.

On composing the score, Ronson says, “Greta’s Barbie overflows with emotion in a way that inspires us to no end, not just with harmony and melody but also textures, sonics and rhythms. Sometimes Greta wanted us to elicit tears, sometimes she wanted it to feel like a disco. Sometimes she loved the warmth of vintage analogue synthesizers, sometimes she wanted the richness of the orchestra. Often, she wanted both.

“The late nights and crazy hours we put into Barbie were all worth it to us, because we were so in love with this film. And we truly hope listening to our score from beginning to end will give others the same emotional, whimsical experience they had watching this magical film.”

The highly anticipated film score vividly brings Gerwig’s vision to life and adds the perfect layer to the film that immerses fans into the Barbie Universe.

Tracklist:Creation of Barbie , Pink ("Barbie" Opening Theme) *Lizzo Cover , Beach Off , Ken Thinks , Stairway to Weird Barbie , Thoughts of Death , Send Me Through the Portal , Ken Makes a Discovery , Bus Stop Billie *Billie Eilish Cover , Mattel , Meeting Ruth *Billie Eilish Cover , You Failed Me! , Alan vs Kens , Deprogramming , Warmth of Your Gaze , An Ending , I Don't Have an Ending , What Was I Made For? (Epilogue) *Billie Eilish Cover

Moondog's jovial H'art Songs was the first release not to incorporate his name in the title, but the record that forever proved his genius. A rare vocal album recorded by Moondog when he was in his sixties, these ten art songs blur the boundaries between classical and pop music. Moondog called this series of art songs "H'art songs" - Hardin's art songs. The musical content is on a higher level than most popular music, but has an appeal to a wide range of tastes, from the pop to the classical listener. This collection of piano pop songs written and recorded in 1977 made Moondogs' stunningly eclectic discography even more chaotic musically. It also featured some of his most mesmerizing wordplay. Telling tales that can be interpreted as metaphors for how to live - sometimes political, sometimes autobiographical, sometimes nature loving - they are always intriguingly poetic, and helped push this album to the very top of all Moondog'sreleases. "My singing style is without vibrato, as is the singing style of most of the people in the world. The voice part I have kept simple, intentionally, so that I and many others who like to sing such songs, including the barbershop quartet people, would be able to sing them. As I did on the record, the voice part should be sung by one voice or in unison, but not in harmony, because the harmony is exclusively in the piano parts, which are more complicated than the voice parts, especially in the canons and the obligati, which carry the main melodic burden." "Moondog singing Moondog? Really! even goodness knows, Moondog doesn't sing a song; he shows you how it goes." - Louis T Hardin aka Moondog. First time on Vinyl since 1978. Inner sleeve with lyrics to sing along to. Album liner notes by Moondog.

2024 repress


The immobile odyssey. For a long time before the success of Nôze led him to discover the rest of the world, Ezechiel Pailhès remained a prophet in: his country. For a long time as well, he worked on creating what became his first solo album, waiting for the right moment when he could no longer contain all the melodies that populate this 14-leg epic. A voyage in a free world, where creation knows no formal constraints, where everything mutates according to the determined inspiration of the moment. Transforming the original pieces without knowing in advance how they will end up, disguising the instruments so that they are mistaken for others, nothing frightens this intrepid sailor whose ship is nevertheless securely moored at home, Ezechiel composes and plays at home in Paris. Sole master on board, the tinkerer illusionist prepares his piano with mechanic's tools (scotch tape, rubber, percussion, wooden claves adrift over the strings), obtaining instruments that do not sound where we expect them. This adventure is, he says, a fiction he wants to believe in.The result is equal to the creator and his character.14 captivating melodies like siren songs, sometimes dressed in a simple lala or lyrics by David Lafore, 14 ports of call offering a sweetness that is at times extremely melancholy, 14 pieces whose implacable refrains take root the first time you listen to them.