Suche:the gestures

Full of shimmering guitars, opulent harmonies, and good ol' rock 'n' roll, the band was limited to a handful of singles before going their separate ways. Here you'll find a full LP's worth of The Gestures on vinyl, all killer no filler!

In California, The Gestures were especially well- received, maybe because "Run, Run, Run" had the lightness, the hook, and infectious drive of the California surf and car band hits. Record World's hot picks column called it a surf-like sound that should endear them to teens. The slice is a hard-driving ditty. Cash Box said The Gestures bow was a hard- rock- ing, Liverpool- sounding affair... powerhouse instrumental support on this haunting entry. There's a complete change of pace in the soft-sounding uptempo undercut.

"'Run, Run, Run' hit #1 in the Twin Cities, #3 in Los Angeles, #1 in New York and #3-5 in Oklahoma City. It reached the top of the local C&N Sales jukebox charts, cracked Billboard Magazine's top 40, and as I mentioned before, was even played on Bandstand. It was right up there with records by the Hondells, Gene Pitney, Jay & the Americans, and all the early British bands - including the Beatles."
- Dale Menton (of The Gestures)

Crush is Delian League’s debut release on Causal Chain, presenting a tightly constructed yet
exploratory take on contemporary club music. The record recontextualizes a range of dance music traditions – electro, grime, UK bass, techno and dub – through a controlled, megamix-like approach that prioritizes flow and transformation over genre fidelity. Tracks shift between lopsided rhythms, club motifs and washed-out pads, creating a sense of constant motion and tension. Unified by themes of intimacy and unpredictability, Crush reflects an
outsider’s perspective on club music and gestures toward possibilities beyond current trends.

Essential. A flawless and wonderful release from a true veteran. Fort Romeau has spent years sharpening his craft, and "Be With U" hits with the polish to show for it. Pulled from his own imprint Romantic Gestures, this is deep, hypnotic house at its most refined: immaculately produced, crisply mastered, and unmistakably his. Pressed on 180g black vinyl.

2026 Repress

'Quiet Pieces' initiates Abul Mogard’s personal imprint Soft Echoes with a definitive self-portrait of calm, contemplative, and discreet inner landscapes made audible. It is the first solo album on vinyl in four years. RIYL Alessandro Cortini, William Basinski, The Caretaker.

While sifting through archived material left idle from earlier projects, a chance encounter with a late uncle’s trove of beloved 78rpm classical and opera records prompted the reworking and completion of what would eventually become the album. Spinning dusty records at 33 and 45rpm, Abul Mogard recombined their enduring spectres with unfinished sketches from his archive. The resulting soundscape blurs distinctions between his memories and those of another, exquisitely short-circuiting the senses with its waking, dream-like lucidity.

This was a process I hadn’t explored in my earlier works. I began sampling brief moments from these records, altering them with studio effects and playing them at slower speeds. In many cases, I wasn’t entirely sure how the original music sounded. These fragments, once further processed, became a source of inspiration for my new compositions. Over time, I realised that the old pieces from the archive and the new material derived from the samples naturally complemented each other.”

The resulting pieces hover over a threshold, a liminal space that harmonises the old and older material. Voluminous waves of quiet and loud undulate between consonance and dissonance, conjuring imagery of a decaying grandeur that humanity’s decadence has surrendered to the elements. Abul Mogard’s seemingly abandoned yet vast landscapes are nevertheless intimate with timbral frissons of red-lined distortion. Elusive, yet as tangible as sea spray or smog, they affect the olfactory senses with a rarified, synesthetic quality that modestly engages one’s emotional register – a hypnotic, distinguishing feature long hailed as one of the hallmarks of his work. A fidelity to memory and dream recall is sensitively probed in the journey from the stately symphonic stasis of 'Following a dream' to the almost industrial, untethered brutality evoked by a looming silhouette that’s never fully visible in 'Constantly slipping away', culminating in the foreboding coda of 'Like a bird'. Those pieces appear to shield the album’s sentimental core, where the tempestuous play of light and shadow of 'In a studded procession' escalates to breathtaking, panoramic climax, while 'Through whispers' evokes an out-of-body-like experience encountered with visceral poignancy.

Looking back, Mogard notes an unexpected influence: “I realise being inspired by Phill Niblock, whose work I had barely known at the time but explored after his passing in 2024. His album 'Boston Tenor Index' changed the way I approached dissonance. It encouraged me to push my sound further, to the edge of a space where I began to feel uncomfortable.”

The album artwork, created by longtime collaborator Marja de Sanctis, features a photograph taken at the Temple of Jupiter Anxur, an archaeological site overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. Captured with an iPhone, the image traces the residual presence of construction techniques and architectural forms of the Romans, where material history is transcribed through contemporary tools. The convergence of ancient and modern technology aims to reverberate the site’s lasting spiritual presence – an echo persisting in what is now perceived as a quiet, emptied space. The spiral gestures towards infinity and light. Past and present dissolve into one another, reflecting 'Quiet Pieces' meditation on sound, memory, and time.

RIYL Alessandro Cortini, William Basinski, The Caretaker

Marcal has emerged as one of the most distinctive voices of a new generation of techno producers, combining rhythmic precision with an instinct for detail, tension and movement. On Four Small Escapes, he delivers four tracks built around subtle shifts and carefully placed moments of surprise, where intricate sound design and groove remain in constant dialogue. Opening with Smoke from Respawn, Marcal immediately establishes the record's character. Syncopated rhythms, intricate percussion work and subtle sound design details unfold within a streamlined framework, creating a groove that feels both spacious and forward-moving. Wooden rimshots and glassy textures interact across an open arrangement, giving the track a fluid and trippy quality. Arapuca shifts into darker territory while maintaining the same sense of control. Organic percussion, rolling low-end momentum and sharply placed accents continuously reshape the groove, creating a track that feels alive through movement rather than dramatic intervention. On Ultimamente, Marcal introduces one of the record's most immersive moments. Fleeting sonic details appear and disappear throughout the arrangement, while a carefully integrated vocal element adds depth and emotional weight without disrupting the flow. The result is a track that invites complete immersion while remaining firmly focused on the dancefloor. Closing the EP, The Surprise Test delivers its most direct statement. Rough and driving without leaning into industrial aesthetics, the track is powered by rolling energy, syncopated claps and a series of subtle electronic details that continuously animate its surface. The contrast between rawness and precision gives the record a powerful closing moment. Across all four tracks, Four Small Escapes highlights Marcal's ability to create tension through detail rather than excess. Reduced yet expressive, the EP balances functionality with a strong sense of character, allowing small gestures and unexpected shifts to leave a lasting impact.

Teal return on October 2 with Love Comes Thru, the trio's nine-track debut album. Expanding their emotionally resonant blend of downtempo trip-pop, the record reaches into street soul, dub, and experimental grooves, marking a confident new chapter for the group.

At its core, Love Comes Thru is a reflection on the quiet strength of love—not through grand gestures, but through the steady presence that carries us through uncertainty, change, and connection. Written over the course of a year of bi-coastal collaboration, the album became a testament to the bond Teal share as artists, friends, and family.

From the lush synth landscapes of "Aries Moon" to the footwork-inspired pulse of "Time Is Blind," the album explores themes of patience, vulnerability, longing, and intimacy. Standout singles "Kissing in a Dream" and the title track lean into left-field street soul, while stripped-back, 808-driven tracks like "Change Your Mind" and "Anomaly" demonstrate the power of restraint without sacrificing momentum. Building on the group's love of ambient improvisation, Love Comes Thru also features instrumental pieces with percussion by Brandon Valdivia (Mas Aya/Lido Pimienta).

The album closes with the sensual "Bubbling," bringing the journey full circle with a reminder that love ultimately comes through in its most embodied, physical form. Love Comes Thru is presented in a deluxe, limited-edition matte-finish, double-embossed jacket with a printed inner sleeve. Available on LP and digitally through Rubadub, In Sheep's Clothing, and Forced Exposure beginning October 2.

YARN welcomes René Audiard for its tenth release with "Makes Me Feel", a four-track EP from one of underground electronic music’s most singular voices.

Across years of dub techno, minimal and leftfield electronic experimentation, René has developed an approach to stripped-down music that feels anything but limited. Where minimalism can often become an exercise in taking things away, his work finds possibility in what remains. "Makes Me Feel" is a particularly fitting example: immersive, at times strange, but always full of feeling.

‘Lovin’ opens the EP in familiar Audiard territory: murky low-end, locomotive groove, reduced rhythmic compositions and an understated framework swimming in a pool of detail. 'Possession' lets in more light. Vocal echoes, persistent rhythms and occasional string phrases give it a cinematic quality, while a groove that seems to circle endlessly takes on an almost shamanistic pull. The EP’s 11-minute behemoth, 'Flesh', fills most of the release’s B-side while making a convincing case for patience and sophistication. There are echoes of minimal’s golden age here, but Audiard never mistakes repetition for standing still. Tiny rhythmic fragments sit alongside expansive orchestral gestures, with samples working at every scale of the arrangement. Warmth and cinematic drama run through the track, but it's the playful programming underneath that keeps it moving. 'Night' closes the record on a different note, recalling Audiard’s work with Ali Çakır in Düve. Percussive samples, accordion and Middle Eastern guitar phrases bring a more acoustic character to his reduced 808-infused broken beats, making for a playful, occasionally melancholic ending with a distinctly microtonal feel.

What makes René Audiard’s music so rewarding is how readily you recognize his hand in it. There is a particular grain to the sounds, a way of placing details within a groove, and a willingness to follow an idea wherever it leads. Across “Makes Me Feel”, those instincts give four quite different tracks a shared identity. Even when working within familiar forms, Audiard makes them sound entirely his own. It’s the holy grail of music production: a personal sound signature. And a thoughtful addition to YARN’s growing repertoire of reduced, sophisticated dancefloor music.

A quick scan of the world’s favourite crowdsourced discography reveals that Sonic Youth co-founder Lee Ranaldo was not a total stranger to crackling electric experimentation in the years following his songwriting turns of the 20-teens. Yet »The System«, ingeniously culled and sequenced from Ranaldo’s soundtrack work for Dutch filmmaker Joris Postema’s ›eco-doc‹ of the same name, nonetheless feels like a reawakening. Quietly released in a vastly different (and much more ›filmic‹) form by Doxy Music/Riva Media Records in 2025, this LP reimagines and reconfigures the initial release, including unreleased material written and recorded for the film, to lend it new stature as both a return to drone-improv form and a reunion with introspective Downtown angst.

Given the state of the world, it’s not surprising that the film Ranaldo scores – a documentary on three climate activists bruising their fists on the black iron prison of techno-fascist deathkultur – is a study in despair and futility. But rather than wallowing in navel-gazing doom and gloom, the film documents the unstoppable spirit that has animated human resistance since the time of the Pharaohs.

As it turns out, the gorgeous scope of Lee Ranaldo’s guitar palette is a perfect manifestation of the hope and despair that animates the film. But like other high-water marks in the guitar-centric soundtrack canon – the high plains raga of Bruce Langhorne’s »Hired Hand«, Neil Young’s sparse and ghostly solo transmissions on »Dead Man«, or the monolithic mantras of Popol Vuh’s »Nosferatu« – its devotion to spectral gestures and meditative song forms launches it firmly outside of the OST orbit into a universe fully its own.

It might seem like a long journey from the Lower Manhattan rhythmic grime of the album’s opener »Tajikistan (Nice to Meet You)« (reminiscent of guitar opuses like Robert Quine and Jody Harris’s »Escape«) to the ringing cowboy chords of the final track, but the narrative logic of the LP pulls the listener along as solidly as a pack horse. As the LP unwinds, and collaborators like Jim Jarmusch, cellist Leila Boudreil, Yeah Yeah Yeahs snare shaman Brian Chase, and guitarist Yonatan Gat take their places, new vistas unfurl: the ritualistic thrum of »Berlin Blockade«, the haunted overtone palaces of »Bergelmir«, and the cavernous acoustic strumming of »Instruments of Violence«. It all winds up with the high lonesome standard »Cool Water«, each unhurried note trailing off into long-tail reverb, layers of shifting vocal harmonies pulling everything skyward – a hopeful note in an album where existential dread never lurks too deeply below the surface.

In the end, »The System« functions both as a film score and a hallucinatory (mostly) instrumental guitar record, revealing a sensibility not too often spotted in the 21st century – a liminal space where the song, the jam, and the meditation merge into a blurred whole. »The System«’s expansive fabric, emerging from a collective sound circling around Ranaldo’s signature tones, envelops and ampl amplifies the contributions of its community of creators – the perfect antidote to narcissistic despair. Much like the subjects of the film light the way towards intra-generational resistance, the music of »The System« reveals a path through gathering darkness. The world could be yours if you follow.

– Tom Carter

A quick scan of the world’s favourite crowdsourced discography reveals that Sonic Youth co-founder Lee Ranaldo was not a total stranger to crackling electric experimentation in the years following his songwriting turns of the 20-teens. Yet »The System«, ingeniously culled and sequenced from Ranaldo’s soundtrack work for Dutch filmmaker Joris Postema’s ›eco-doc‹ of the same name, nonetheless feels like a reawakening. Quietly released in a vastly different (and much more ›filmic‹) form by Doxy Music/Riva Media Records in 2025, this LP reimagines and reconfigures the initial release, including unreleased material written and recorded for the film, to lend it new stature as both a return to drone-improv form and a reunion with introspective Downtown angst.

Given the state of the world, it’s not surprising that the film Ranaldo scores – a documentary on three climate activists bruising their fists on the black iron prison of techno-fascist deathkultur – is a study in despair and futility. But rather than wallowing in navel-gazing doom and gloom, the film documents the unstoppable spirit that has animated human resistance since the time of the Pharaohs.

As it turns out, the gorgeous scope of Lee Ranaldo’s guitar palette is a perfect manifestation of the hope and despair that animates the film. But like other high-water marks in the guitar-centric soundtrack canon – the high plains raga of Bruce Langhorne’s »Hired Hand«, Neil Young’s sparse and ghostly solo transmissions on »Dead Man«, or the monolithic mantras of Popol Vuh’s »Nosferatu« – its devotion to spectral gestures and meditative song forms launches it firmly outside of the OST orbit into a universe fully its own.

It might seem like a long journey from the Lower Manhattan rhythmic grime of the album’s opener »Tajikistan (Nice to Meet You)« (reminiscent of guitar opuses like Robert Quine and Jody Harris’s »Escape«) to the ringing cowboy chords of the final track, but the narrative logic of the LP pulls the listener along as solidly as a pack horse. As the LP unwinds, and collaborators like Jim Jarmusch, cellist Leila Boudreil, Yeah Yeah Yeahs snare shaman Brian Chase, and guitarist Yonatan Gat take their places, new vistas unfurl: the ritualistic thrum of »Berlin Blockade«, the haunted overtone palaces of »Bergelmir«, and the cavernous acoustic strumming of »Instruments of Violence«. It all winds up with the high lonesome standard »Cool Water«, each unhurried note trailing off into long-tail reverb, layers of shifting vocal harmonies pulling everything skyward – a hopeful note in an album where existential dread never lurks too deeply below the surface.

In the end, »The System« functions both as a film score and a hallucinatory (mostly) instrumental guitar record, revealing a sensibility not too often spotted in the 21st century – a liminal space where the song, the jam, and the meditation merge into a blurred whole. »The System«’s expansive fabric, emerging from a collective sound circling around Ranaldo’s signature tones, envelops and ampl amplifies the contributions of its community of creators – the perfect antidote to narcissistic despair. Much like the subjects of the film light the way towards intra-generational resistance, the music of »The System« reveals a path through gathering darkness. The world could be yours if you follow.

– Tom Carter

The title of Ghost Bridge, the East-Coast-spanning chamber ensemble Hour's fifth record, is less metaphorical than one might expect. Bandleader Michael Cormier- O'Leary repurposed it from an unrealized movie concept about a bridge that inexplicably starts disappearing. On the nearly-ten-minute title track of this richly imaginative suite of songs_written for a 13-piece ensemble that includes woodwinds, strings, and vibraphone as well as a rock rhythm section_Hour conjures up this central image with spectral string harmonics and free-time percussion gestures. While writing the keyboard pieces that became the takeoff point for the album, Cormier-O'Leary also found himself reflecting on the loss of loved ones or even his own mortality. The six kaleidoscopic instrumental pieces on Ghost Bridge, though, feel more cosmically inquisitive than straightforwardly elegiac, sketching a progression from existential doubt toward understanding and acceptance. Ghost Bridge forms a contrast with Hour's art-rock-informed, more improvisatory early releases, representing a step further into intricate chamber orchestration. Known for his work with Friendship, Wendy Eisenberg, and 2nd Grade, Phillybased multi-instrumentalist and Dear Life Records founder Cormier-O'Leary has made Hour a home for increasingly cinematic instrumental compositions since the mid-2010s. With dazzling production by Lucas Knapp, Ghost Bridge delivers plenty of the live ensemble's trademarks, especially cyclically developing guitar and keyboard melodies. However, even more than on Hour's last studio album, unconventional harmonies and sophisticated counterpoint take center stage here. These emotionally multifaceted compositions feel as rooted in contemporary classical and film soundtrack music as in indie rock. One of the most striking elements of Ghost Bridge is the more significant developmental role the orchestral instruments assume in each piece. Instead of underscoring Cormier-O'Leary's central hooks, there is a new mesmerizing level of detail to the group's conversational interactions and kinetic energy. "Centralia" is a stately and idiosyncratic fugue built from repeated and overlapping phrases, while Ghost Bridge's compositions are full of unexpected pivots in harmony that allow recurring melodic motifs to sound continually reshaded. On "Pearls," the chords modulate drastically around Cormier-O'Leary's inviting central melody in a way that emulates cuts in a film telling several parallel stories. There is an unsettled quality to the chords on Ghost Bridge, with Cormier- O'Leary's progressions avoiding firm grounding in either clearly sunny or melancholy tonalities. This mood is made more concrete by the record's sole vocal track, the jazz-inflected "Sky is Blue," featuring an uncannily gorgeous performance by Heeyoon Won. The song seems to be a communication from a person who has departed, offering consolation or perspective to someone left behind. Though its sonic palette is often tranquil, Ghost Bridge explores heartbreak, grief, anger, and helplessness in a distinct and pretense-free way. The project represents a bold step forward for Cormier-O'Leary as a composer and arranger, and on Ghost Bridge Hour reaches its most fully realized form to date, connecting soaring themes with an inventiveness that perfectly suits the searching nature of the subject matter.

Discrepant presents Fantarombo, a new album by Giovanni Lami.

While his previous works often moved through memory, residue, degradation, and dialogue with existing materials, Fantarombo takes shape as an unstable, bodily gesture.

Sound is not recalled or reconstructed, but triggered, pushed, and set in motion as an active force. Lami approaches modular synthesis as a physical, hands-on practice rather than a technical exercise or display of system mastery. The modular setup becomes a responsive body: something to be nudged, listened to, and occasionally resisted.

The pieces unfold through slow accumulations, unstable feedback paths, and carefully misaligned sequences. Rather than driving toward resolution, the music lingers in states of suspension, allowing small shifts in voltage, timing, and texture to reshape the whole. Chance and duration play a central role, with structure emerging gradually from repetition and drift.

There is an unmistakably organic quality to the sound: porous, tactile, and quietly resonant. A sensitivity to space, grain, and micro-movement, where subtle changes carry as much weight as overt gestures. On Fantarombo, process takes precedence over control, and the circuitry is allowed to speak back, resulting in music that feels intimate, unstable, and quietly insistent, revealing itself slowly through sustained attention.

A music of unresolved behaviours, suspended somewhere between obsolete digital optimism, imaginary systems and malfunctioning computational folklore.

Compiled onto one vinyl album for the first time, Landlocked (Numbers, 2026) presents Hallucinator’s 1999 debut album originally released under Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald’s label Chain Reaction. Writing much surrounding the culture of what would be later considered ‘Dub Techno’ and its’ primary distribution center, Hard Wax, leads one down roads of shifting primary sources and decades old overheard smoke break recollections. Maybe brevity primes the listener to the paralinguistic to approach the sound on its terms; focusing on how things are uttered and not what.

This theory will remain unconfirmed. Hallucinator original press release left us with three or so gestures to consider over the years since:

“A new act on CHAIN REACTION”s distinct productional thesis. HALLUCINATOR are 3 people from he UK/London and this their first release ever- that’s all what the artists want to let us know…. This record is dedidacted to the memory of Stephen Lawrence!”

The first gesture is one of personnel. Since ’99, we’ve gotten to learn a bit more about the artists behind the Hallucinator project. All London-based, all writers, composers, and sound-designers— Anna Piva, Edward George, Trevor Mathison. These three seem to flow between parameters as aesthetic tactic and tacit structure to the work itself. For example, other collaborative shapes have come from this lineup including Flow Motion (Piva, George and Mathison) as well as the now defunct Black Audio Film Collective of which George and Mathison are founding members.

The second gesture is in the second line of the previous press release, “distinct productional thesis.” Much of Landlocked’s affect and sequencing seems to suggest an emotional study of entropy at the level of sediment. Rhythms play with space and capacity through polyvalence. The production chose subtractive vertigo, often switching and bringing back in elements that vanished from the track 6 minutes ago. Dubbing out so much of a track, one begins to associate sound akin to memories held in the experience of running your hand across a concrete block as a child. Felt (re)memberance in lieu of narrative tale. Using textures that flicker between colour and percussion, Hallucinator’s 12-tracker of loudspeaker perception music might be a mediation on the psychic wake of the Cold War. Intermittent strata of ambience and groove convects an active margin rifting event underneath a scorched geology of power in Western Europe. Again, this is all grapevine hearsay.

But it’s silence that voices the third gesture. The album’s sparse application of the written word touches on the ennui paradox of being landlocked on an island. Stuck. Trapped in the psychosis of occidental hypercentricism. A looping silence of Black British tragedy: “to the memory of Stephen Lawrence”. 18 year-old Lawrence was stabbed to death at a bus stop in southeast London by six white men in 1993. The rift of grief and implicit reiteration of modern subordination left by this hate act went legally silent for almost two decades until Lawrence’s killers were ultimately sentenced to virtually life in jail in 2012. Only six years removed at the time of Hallucinator’s initial invocation of rememory, the mind-numbing accretion of what Black Studies Professor Denise Ferreira da Silva might call “unpayable debt”, finds demonic ground across Landlocked, forming an aural sense of what continues to be refused.

The album ventures through spaces of overactive non-happenings: ‘Red Angel’’s factory floor dub flashes between smokestack and jungle visions, or the halfway mark’s stilted breath of ‘Dusk’ lending its mood to the sort of sedated dreams built from daily life under colony rule for instance. That linked rhythm links us back to our linked fates across Black and Brown folk is real, thus the syncopated signals through this work behave on the level of transnational radiotelegraphy, sounding out its windswept tension of a body negotiating a meat-grinder schema of linear production and wage for others to know that unspeakable thing can be broadcast in every drum tongue.

As the silence continues to reverb, we return to the sort of meaning-making that cannot be told but felt. Soothing to some, disturbing to others. Landlocked, a Rorschach test for a crumbled empire.

2026 Repress

Rhythm by Nature is back with Somefink Old, Somefink New, a three-tracker from seasoned producer Grant Dell that bridges past and present: sketches first laid down in the mid-2000s rediscovered and reworked alongside a brand-new cut, forming a dialogue between memory and renewal.

The EP opens with Feel Me?, a deep tech construction driven by a heavy low-end, its groove unfolding patiently while flashes of disco glimmer through the framework. On Light of Day, Dell shifts into full deep house territory — spacey pads and floating strings suspended across open structures until acidic stabs break through, twisting the track into brighter, playful directions. Closing with Death Disco in Dub, Dell channels the hallmarks of his Tribalation project: dub-infused atmospherics, light percussion and echo-drenched fragments circling around a hypnotic core, equally suited to open or dissolve a night.

With Somefink Old, Somefink New, Rhythm by Nature traces the arc of an artist deeply embedded in the underground, reuniting past forms with present gestures in a release that reaffirms the label’s consistency in quality and commitment to timeless club music.

Phenomena begins with two artistic voices that seem to speak different languages. Barcelona-based producer R-010 (Lucas Rojo) approaches composition through rhythm, space and electronic transformation; Madrid-born vocalist and multidisciplinary artist Venerandi through texture, breath and the expressive possibilities of the human voice. By the time the album reaches its final moments, that distinction has quietly disappeared.

Rather than functioning as a meeting point between two individual practices, Phenomena gradually
becomes a third language—one that belongs to neither artist alone. Voice no longer sits above the music
but moves inside it, dissolving into layers of synthesis, percussion and guitar until performance itself
becomes another malleable sound source. Likewise, electronic production never behaves as a fixed
environment; it constantly adapts, absorbs and responds, allowing acoustic gestures and digital
manipulation to reshape one another in real time.

This continuous transformation defines the record more than any particular genre ever could. Echoes of trip hop, bass music, psychedelia and experimental electronics drift across its surface, yet they are never
presented as stylistic markers. Instead, they appear as temporary states within an ecosystem that remains
in constant motion, where dense rhythmic passages collapse into suspended atmospheres and moments
of stillness carry as much weight as those driven by pulse.

The presence of Matteo Caro (guitar and percussion), Pablo Gorostiaga (guitar) and Alessio Rodolico
(percussion) further expands this dialogue. Their contributions are not decorative additions but structural
ones, gradually dissolving the distinction between composition, improvisation and production. Instruments
emerge, mutate and disappear inside the same sonic fabric, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish
what was performed from what was transformed.

With Phenomena, Lapsus Records presents a work that feels less interested in crossing genres than in
questioning the borders between artistic identities themselves. The album never asks the listener to decide
where the human ends and the machine begins. Instead, it quietly suggests that, after enough careful
listening, the question itself may no longer matter.

After the storm of their self-titled debut, Geneva duo Bound By Endogamy return to Pinkman with an album that trades brute force for precision. The rage remains, but it's sharpened, disciplined, and driven by melancholy rather than rupture. Their minimal synth and industrial instincts rise to the surface, carving out room for melody without softening their confrontational edge. Angular basslines coil beneath Kleio Thomaides' voice, at times detached and at times devastating, while Shlomo Balexert's drum programming and synth work build a taut metallic tension. The result is both intimate and mechanical: love songs for disenchanted souls, post-punk electronics stripped to the bare wire. Bound By Endogamy have always blurred the line between performance and survival, and here they do it with minimal gestures and maximum impact.

*TIP* Previously released on Low Company in 2023, now back... a weirdo lo fi gem

Naturestrip, Naarm, Australia write:

"purely physical teeny tapes perform an invaluable public service in exhuming static cleaner lost reward’s ‘breathing under honey from the heady year o’ 2023’, a slack-jawed riddle within the all-consuming enigma that is thee world of tarquin manek™.

few records command a reissue so soon after their release, the soil heaped atop the (sainted) low company corpse still remaining more than a little damp, but this one’s discreet-to-the-point-of-fury initial release justifies the flogging of the proverbial carked horse, boiled back down into glue for a fresh round of rollicking mucky. arriving as the last release on that fine imprint, ‘breathing under honey’ represents (obliquely, natch) something of a convenient summary of that aforementioned elegantly sloshed world™, condensing as it does the artist’s proclivities exercised among the sweetest of contemporary depth-dwellers, articulated alongside/within y.l. hooi, bum creek, carla dal forno, f ingers, kallista kult, under endless solo monikers…the fun never ends.

let loose here in a suitably gonzo/spellunked mood, the second full-length under the static cleaner moniker (see debut $mile$ from 2013 thru altered states) is compiled of delirious half-thoughts & riddimic gestures accumulated between 2013 & 2020, everything wet & awash with a fine sprouting of lysergic mush between its digits. the implication thereof might suggest something schlonky or amateurish, but fear not, prospective listener, for your ears are in the sticky hands of one of the finest shit-savant prodigies these times have known, crud-caked technoid shapes & blissed pop-glob nous submerged in sublime dubbed-out grog, the resulting sonar-pong shards positively chemical in their ability to simultaneously slant + seduce.

think: martin denny face-deep in a paper bag at the black ark, graciously fucked tropicalia, liquid dub techno housed in vat of spiked quaff, the skaters infiltrating urban tribe, lopsided + caked to the nines in glitter for the gutter.

utterly tranced, sumptuous/sweet & patently ill. a classique of this modern horror epoch if there ever was one."

Battle of Clontarf collects a remastered series of late-90s guitar jewels by Loren Connors, most appearing on vinyl for the first time. At its center is an unrealized double 7" from 1996, Battle of Clontarf, named after the bloody battle fought outside Dublin in 1014. Gestures of blistered guitar billow, but underneath a defiant elation prevails. Loren’s partner Suzanne Langille composed and performed the poem in Part II and the song in Part V of the Clontarf sequence. The six pieces are followed by a curated circlet of recordings from around the same period, including the complete 1994 EP The Five Points (originally issued by Table of the Elements) and several other short works from the years surrounding Connors’ notable albums Airs (1999) and Lullaby (2001). These recordings occupy only a few minutes at a time, but manage to convey such vulnerability. Each seems to find its way toward the next, like a chain of small amulets.

The collection continues with the Star of Bethlehem suite from 2000, and concludes with Connors’ arrangement of Gershwin’s “I Love You, Porgy.” The latter is a personal favorite, with a breathtaking cadence that shares the beauty of Billie Holiday’s version, but transmitted from the solitude of a dream. Battle of Clontarf gathers all these scattered parcels of Connors’ work into one fluent LP, released on Recital alongside Connors’ new art book Wildweeds Vol. II in celebration of his 77th birthday in late October.

Al Wahem (“The Illusion”) is the new full-length release by PRAED, the Swiss–Lebanese duo of Raed Yassin and Paed Conca. Recorded between Beirut and Berlin, the album returns to the group’s central aesthetic: a rhythm-driven weave of Egyptian shaabi, electronics, improvisation and the gritty pulse of street-level sound. Nearly twenty years into the project, PRAED have distilled their approach into four pieces that subtly shift the listener’s bearings, reordering grooves and fragments until familiar elements take on new identities.
The twenty-minute title track sets the tone. A tightly interlocking two-drum foundation from Pascal Semerdjian and Ayman Zebdawi shapes a structure that expands steadily: synth figures branch outward, clarinet and bass lines act as internal guideposts, and brief vocal calls from Yassin and guest singer Mayssa Jallad sit inside the texture rather than leading it. PRAED’s shaabi keyboard language is present, but the duo stretch it outward, building tension and movement through patient accumulation.

“Al Hathayan,” at 4:46, tightens the focus. Conca’s clarinet moves between melodic arcs and clipped rhythmic gestures, threading through electronic loops that surface and disappear. Zebdawi’s percussion adds a raw, tactile quality, placing acoustic patterns and electronics in direct conversation. The piece acts as a bridge between the album’s two long-form compositions.
Side B begins with “Al Maraya,” a thirteen-minute piece that relies on electronic, bass and clarinet interplay. The atmosphere nods to the breadth of PRAED Orchestra!, but remains anchored in the duo’s rhythmic foundations. Rather than building mass, the layering creates a sense of depth, as if new spaces were opening inside the groove.
The album closes with “Assarab,” featuring keyboardist Amr Said. Semerdjian and Zebdawi again form a dual percussive axis, while synths hover between melody and pulse, and themes recur in widening circles rather than building vertically. The porous boundary between electronic and acoustic sources — processed clarinet mistaken for a sequencer, rhythmic figures springing from live drums — is where the album’s theme of “illusion” shows itself most clearly.

Al Wahem follows a long arc: early releases on Annihaya, a key appearance on Ruptured Sessions Vol. 5 – Live at Radio Lebanon (2013), later albums on Akuphone, and the large-scale PRAED Orchestra! documented on Morphine Records. This new Ruptured/Annihaya co-release brings the duo back to a concentrated format, reorganizing their familiar materials with renewed clarity and intent.

ORUMA is a trio formed by Ola Rzepka (drums, zither, percussion), Artur Rumiński (electric guitar) and Mat Barski (electric guitar). At its foundation is the musical dialogue previously developed by Rumiński and Barski as a guitar duo and documented on the albums “On the Margin” and “At the Junction”. Their encounter with Ola Rzepka during Kraków’s Kakofonie series opened this music to a new sense of dynamics, pulse and
collective form.
ORUMA’s music exists at the intersection of free improvisation, noise, experimental postrock and post-kraut repetition. It avoids the conventional division between soloist and accompaniment. Instead, two electric guitars and drums gradually abandon their individual roles to form a single, constantly shifting sound organism — moving from silence, open space and isolated gestures towards dense masses of sound.
The trio’s debut album consists of five pieces: “Satellites”, “Stranger”, “This Mountain Is Alive”, “A Rough Plan For Nostalgia” and “Hyperborea”. Together, they form a coherent journey: from distant signals and the first moment of contact, through friction and increasing physical intensity, to an expansive fourteen-minute finale.


Ola Rzepka
Drummer, pianist, composer and performer. She graduated from the Karol Szymanowski Academy of Music in Katowice, where she studied at the Faculty of Composition, Interpretation, Education and Jazz. She was also a scholarship student at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen, studying piano and percussion. She teaches piano improvisation at the Wojciech Kilar State Music School Complex in Katowice and runs her own music lessons and workshops. As a composer, she collaborates with acclaimed theatre directors in Poland, Germany and Switzerland. Her musical collaborators have included Raphael Rogiński and Antoni “Ziut” Gralak. She has performed her original music at numerous avant-garde, popular, jazz, improvised and contemporary music festivals across Poland and Europe. In Jazz Forum magazine’s 2024 Jazz Top critics’ poll, she was named among Poland’s leading drummers.

Artur Rumiński
Guitarist and member of bands including Furia, Thaw and ARRM. He also composes and improvises under his own name and performs in the experimental duo Marmur, which he co-founded with Macio Moretti. He has released several solo albums on labels including Antenna Non Grata, Gusstaff Records, Zoharum and Szara Reneta.

Mat Barski
Guitarist associated with the Kraków and Tricity music scenes. His projects include the duo Ekotonika, the Rumiński / Barski duo. He has released albums through Gusstaff Records and Antenna Non Grata. Alongside music, he works in motion design and visual postproduction. He is a member of the Kraków-based Skład Solny Association, where he coorganises concerts and exhibitions.

Truths and secrets often reveal themselves at night, under the freedom of shadowy darkness, away from prying eyes. In creating Given to the Night, sisters Valentine and Clementine Nixon have crafted a world that drifts through the in-between: between dream and reality, between day and night and the undefined, and ultimately a world that embraces the discomfort of being untethered. A process that follows simplicity and intuition rather than pre-determined narratives. “We recorded songs as they appeared, which sometimes felt like catching light. Before we realised it we had a record”, the duo explain.

While making the record Valentine and Clementine gently pushed away from the world- deleted social media, retreated into the trees of their native New Zealand - and only invited a couple of people in during the recording process. From that space, the album came together in an eerily easeful way.

There is a dream-like drift and sonic timelessness to the the record, as reflected in its nocturnal title, which can be read in two ways:

“Being taken by, or being inclined towards nighttime, preferring its blurry cloak of shadows to the harsh light of day; or giving oneself up to night, in sacrifice, letting go of fear and melting into the darkness.”

Written during a time of personal transition there was “a sense of finding the light in the shadow” they add. Guitar lines float, synth lines entwine, tapes hiss and vocals stream creating a kaleidoscopic montage of transient memories and emotions. A spectrum of feelings arise - isolation and joy, insomnia and manic highs, confusion and fleeting clarity, grief and healings. In the record, these feelings all merge and fade into one another in a nonlinear manner, as life tends to do; creating something deeply human that simultaneously gestures towards the transcendental.

There are records that do not so much belong to an era as they pass through it, leaving traces rather than statements, circulating in the margins where function outweighs discourse. World Cup, written at the end of the 1990s by Kiko, emerged in precisely that way — as a techno track whose presence was felt less through promotion than through repetition, carried from booth to booth, absorbed into the working vocabulary of DJs who recognized in it something immediate and self-evident. Its architecture is minimal yet insistent, driven by tension and release, a form of clarity that resists ornament and instead privileges duration, pressure, and movement.

When it resurfaced in 2006, it did not return as a revision but as a continuation, reaffirming its role within the ecology of the dancefloor. The same internal logic remained intact, allowing it to re-enter circulation without friction, as though it had simply been waiting to be picked up again. In both instances, the track operates less as a fixed object than as a tool — something to be used, extended, and recontextualized in real time.

Bringing together these two versions alongside Tainted Life, the release traces a subtle but telling trajectory. If World Cupdefines a certain techno functionalism, Tainted Life reveals another dimension: a proto-Italo sensibility that gestures toward what would later coalesce as electroclash, not through stylistic declaration but through texture, tone, and attitude. Long absent from digital circulation and largely confined to obscurity, it appears here not as a rediscovery, but as a piece whose relevance has simply remained latent.

Nothing has been added, nothing has been altered beyond what was necessary to restore presence. The recordings are allowed to exist in their own continuity, detached from the temporal markers that might otherwise confine them.

The artwork, conceived by H5, extends this approach into the visual field. Its restraint is not aesthetic minimalism for its own sake, but a form of structural clarity, where composition and absence articulate a space in which the record can be encountered without interference, as if resurfacing from a parallel timeline that never fully closed.

Nothing Under Heaven is the third full-length album from Scottish ambient and drone multi-instrumentalist Yulyseus.

It follows 2022’s In the Dark Palaces of Both Our Hearts, an introspective and immersive work shaped by travel, displacement, and unfamiliar surroundings. Where that release explored darker and more inward-looking terrain, Nothing Under Heaven opens outward into broader, more expansive soundscapes. Drawing on years spent moving between Glasgow, Berlin, Mexico City and Valencia, Niall Gahagan’s compositions here feel patient and quietly luminous, built from layered electronics, bowed strings and subtle field recordings.

Rather than seeking dramatic gestures, the album unfolds slowly, allowing atmosphere and emotion to emerge over time. Working within a crowded and ever-evolving ambient landscape, Yulyseus continues to focus on texture, weight and gradual movement.

Across eight carefully shaped pieces, Nothing Under Heaven explores how sound can hold both stillness and momentum, inviting attentive listening rather than functioning as simple background music. The opening track, Veillands, sets the tone with a quiet intensity that gently draws the listener inward. From there, the album develops as a continuous, immersive experience, rich in detail and emotional nuance. Nothing Under Heaven reflects an artist still in motion, responding to change, uncertainty and new surroundings with humility and care. It stands as a thoughtful and deeply considered addition to Yulyseus’s growing body of work which is rooted in patience, deep listening, and a continuing search for meaning through sound.

How do losers dance? According to Helmut, almost weightlessly, with soft feet, warm gestures, sometimes alone, sometimes together. Content Creatures, Helmut's fourth album, evokes the pop archetype of the "beautiful loser", who had almost disappeared from view in so-called late capitalism. In a present in which even suffering is often similarly instrumentalised and tailored to clicks like a competitive sport, this album sets a counterpoint: those who listen to it suddenly want to be enchanting losers again, useless and joyfully messing up, losing something beloved, having their hearts broken, giving up a dream, sinking into beauty.
You don't sink alone. Comforting harmonies envelop you, the voices of friends appear, accompany you for a while and then disappear again. Warm grooves, floating synths and delicate guitar lines characterise an indie sound that remains open and breathes.
Self-produced for the first time in his home studio in Neukölln, 'Content Creatures' sounds thoughtful and light at the same time. The album will be released digitally and on vinyl on 10 April 2026 on Berlin-based label St.Vladimir. There are four songs on one side and four songs on the other. The cover is adorned with an exceptionally pretty guinea pig. Helmut shows the special in the seemingly ordinary: a child's pet, the most ordinary of all, is his cover star and headstrong protagonist.

Wie tanzen Verlierer? Wenn man nach Helmut geht, dann fast schwerelos, mit weichen Füßen, warmen Gesten, manchmal allein, manchmal gemeinsam. Content Creatures, Helmuts viertes Album, evoziert den Pop-Archetypus des "beautiful loser", der im sogenannten Spätkapitalismus fast aus dem Blick geraten war. In einer Gegenwart, in der sogar das Leid oft ähnlich durchinstrumentalisiert und auf Klicks getrimmt ist wie ein Leistungssport, setzt dieses Album einen Kontrapunkt: Wer es hört, möchte auf einmal gern wieder ein bezaubernder Verlierer sein, nutzlos und freudvoll abkacken, etwas Geliebtes verlieren, das Herz gebrochen bekommen, einen Traum aufgeben, in Schönheit versinken.
Man versinkt nicht allein. Tröstende Harmonien legen sich um einen, die Stimmen von Freundinnen tauchen auf, begleiten einen ein Stück weit und verschwinden wieder. Warme Grooves, schwebende Synths und feine Gitarrenlinien prägen einen Indie-Sound, der offen bleibt, atmet. Erstmals in seinem Neuköllner Homestudio selbst produziert, klingt "Content Creatures" bedacht und leicht zugleich.
Das Album erscheint digital und auf Vinyl am 10.04.2026 auf dem Berliner Label St.Vladimir. Es hat vier Songs auf der einen und vier Songs auf der anderen Seite. Das Cover ziert ein außergewöhnlich hübsches Meerschweinchen. Helmut zeigt das Besondere im scheinbar Gewöhnlichen: Ein Kinderhaustier, das normalste von allen, ist bei ihm Coverstar und eigensinnige Protagonistin.

Guests is the home recording project of Jessica Higgins and Matthew Walkerdine. Vaguely named as such to avoid any problems with the poster if they pull out of a gig (which has only happened once, about a year and half before any songs were actually written to be fair) but also to capture a sense of reverse hospitality. That is, arriving at your door with a bottle of good wine (can’t turn up empty handed) or a fist full of savoury or sweet snacks (time of day dependant); oversharing at the afters (and then passing out on your couch); reading to your toddler while you make their lunch or put everything back where it was meant to go (only to get torn apart again). So, something about what happens when private worlds meet each other, making or having been made a space for. But at times, it’s a different kind of intimacy, a temporal or material one, like the feeling of crisp fresh sheets, and abundant and soft, body-part appropriate towels in a hotel in a city you’ve been to before and love to go back to.

Their debut record, “I wish I was special”, was variously described as “a collage of concrète experiments and outerzone pop gestures, music that sounds as if it’s been written from the depths of a dream”; “music for people who love music but also hate it too”; “something like chasing ghosts or befriending a wild animal”; “pulling apart nervous sensations with haphazard ease and requisite humour”; and “a melody of refusal, of being all-in (…) finding the exact right WRONG sound to express the discontent”. Common Domestic Bird continues in this vein, layering synthesiser, keyboards and samples over rudimentary drum rhythms and field recordings, which are in turn sung or spoken with to create nine new songs.

Written and recorded between autumn 2024 and summer 2025 in Reading, Berkshire, the music has matured since its last outing, in a way, leaning less into collage and more toward structured composition and melodic depth, yet retains a healthy dose of indeterminacy and off-kilter rhythms for the forever-amateur. The songs on Common Domestic Bird hint at some “about”-ness through a series of discrete vignettes which sound a bit like architecture or end of year lists, gossip or over-thinking subjectivity, like disappearances and impressions, the support structure of the spine, letters and signs offs, things you could really do without and where they should go, hoping you’ll see something that isn’t there, pretences and performance. At times they feel kind of funny, others kind of sad or a bit angry and annoyed, a bit like you really.

Nitai Hershkovits and Daniel Dor return with Found & Found, their second collaborative album and a natural continuation of the musical dialogue initiated with The Garden Suite.

Born out of pure curiosity - "there was more to say, more to explore," explains Dor - the album expands the duo's sonic language beyond the synth-only framework of their previous work. While the Moog remains central, Found & Found introduces clarinet and acoustic guitar, gently dissolving the boundaries between electronic and acoustic sound.

Each composition unfolds through interlocking, mantra-like patterns. Repetition becomes a space for transformation: melodies circle, textures shift, and subtle harmonic movements invite the listener inward. The music is structured with care, yet it feels open and fluid. intimate, spacious and quietly immersive. If their previous record explored orchestral depth through synthesizers, this new chapter embraces air and clarity. Acoustic gestures emerge within electronic landscapes, creating a sound world that is both grounded and weightless.

Nitai Hershkovits brings with his fellow partner Daniel Dor a refined harmonic sensitivity shaped by both jazz and classical traditions. Together they continue to refine a shared language that moves between structure and freedom, precision and emotion.

Ayô Dele — which means "joy comes to me" in Yoruba — is neither a slogan nor a promised miracle. It is a breath of fresh air. That of an album born in the interstices, where the word find their way between shadow and light, between the disorder of the worldand the impulse to be .
At the heart of the project, Julien Gervaix and Damien Tesson, multi-instrumentalist beatmakers, share a groove language that is both dense and airy, where every detail breathes and finds its place.
With background in Afrobeat, Dub, Funk, Soul, Roots Reggae, and Electronic Music, they treat the studio to be their playground. Their music is a hybrid groove that speaks to the body: round or bouncing basslines, brass oscillating between melodic warmth and funk energy, textured guitars, arpeggios, enveloping Rhodes, clavinet that slides, presses, and embraces. Everything comes together with precision and flexibility, in an inventive and warm composition. The meeting of their experiences and sensibilities gives rise to open, generous music, made for dancing and vibration.
With Ayô Dele , Ireke is embarking on a new chapter: the duo is refining its style,allowing the voices to breathe. The groove remains the driving force but opens up to intimacy. This intimacy is carried by two unique female voices: Nayel Hoxo, a Beninese-Nigerian singer/rapper, and Agnès Hélène, who has already made a name for herself on Tropikadelic with "Petit a Petit". They don't sing side-by-side; they coexist, respond to each other, and sometimes intersect. But each follows her own path: Nayel, with the power of her words in Yoruba, offers songs of elevation, healing, and resistance — a light born in the cracks Agnès explores these cracks themselves: what wavers within us, what reinvents itself in bonds, glances, and gestures.
For one track, Olivya (Dowdelin) joins this dialogue in Martinican Creole. Her sunny soul sketches the contours of gentle resistance and celebrates rediscovered light.
Ayô Dele embodies a quiet yet radical determination: to smooth nothing over, to let plurality, contradictory emotions, and mixed heritage live. An album that moves forward through vibrations, that speaks of emancipation without slogans, love without clichés, anger without uproar.
Two women, two inner worlds: a sensitive complicity, a shared breath. Music that seeks not effect, but echo, weaving a living soundscape between reinvented traditions and contemporary textures. An alchemy faithful to the spirit of Underdog Records, where music unites and brings people together. Ayô Dele : "joy comes to me." A lucid joy, crossed by shadows, patiently regained. Music that welcomes, releases, gives, and in doing so, makes us feel good.
In a saturated world, Ayô Dele chooses nuance: transmission without emphasis, joy without naivety. An album that vibrates more than it demonstrates, that connects more than it imposes, and which, in its quiet clarity, resonates with a deep desire to be fully alive.

Xerrox Vol. 2 is the sixth studio album, released in 2009 by German electronic artist Alva Noto. It is the second installment of the Xerrox penthalogy, based on the concept of digital replication of source material.

As with the first Xerrox album, the starting point is a set of samples culled from external sources. This time, snippets and recordings from Sunn O))) collaborator Stephen O'Malley and composer Michael Nyman are featured, as is an excerpt from the 2004 Insen tour with Ryuichi Sakamoto.

While Alva Noto's oeuvre is predominantly affiliated with pristine sound design, the Xerrox series holds more intimate gestures and emotional sensibility. This volume moves further from the conceptualism and orderliness of prior musical outputs, ranging from heart-warming elegies to mind-bending sci-fi projections in extrasolar territories.

This remastered version will be reissued on NOTON in 2026


Tracklisting
---------------------------------------------------------
Medium: 1 // Side: A // Track: 1

Artist: Alva Noto
Title: Xerrox Phaser Acat 1
Playtime: 00:12:11
Explicit Lyrics: No
ISRC: DE1N62500015
(P): 2025 NOTON
Country: Germany

Composer: Carsten Nicolai
---------------------------------------------------------
Medium: 1 // Side: A // Track: 2

Artist: Alva Noto
Title: Xerrox Rin
Playtime: 00:00:51
Explicit Lyrics: No
ISRC: DE1N62500016
(P): 2025 NOTON
Country: Germany

Composer: Carsten Nicolai
---------------------------------------------------------
Medium: 1 // Side: A // Track: 3

Artist: Alva Noto
Title: Xerrox Soma
Playtime: 00:07:11
Explicit Lyrics: No
ISRC: DE1N62500017
(P): 2025 NOTON
Country: Germany

Composer: Carsten Nicolai
---------------------------------------------------------
Medium: 1 // Side: B // Track: 4

Artist: Alva Noto
Title: Xerrox Meta Phaser
Playtime: 00:06:23
Explicit Lyrics: No
ISRC: DE1N62500018
(P): 2025 NOTON
Country: Germany

Composer: Carsten Nicolai
---------------------------------------------------------
Medium: 1 // Side: B // Track: 5

Artist: Alva Noto
Title: Xerrox Sora 1
Playtime: 00:06:54
Explicit Lyrics: No
ISRC: DE1N62500019
(P): 2025 NOTON
Country: Germany

Composer: Carsten Nicolai
---------------------------------------------------------
Medium: 2 // Side: C // Track: 6

Artist: Alva Noto
Title: Xerrox Monophaser 1
Playtime: 00:08:04
Explicit Lyrics: No
ISRC: DE1N62500020
(P): 2025 NOTON
Country: Germany

Composer: Carsten Nicolai
---------------------------------------------------------
Medium: 2 // Side: C // Track: 7

Artist: Alva Noto
Title: Xerrox Monophaser 2
Playtime: 00:05:31
Explicit Lyrics: No
ISRC: DE1N62500021
(P): 2025 NOTON
Country: Germany

Composer: Carsten Nicolai
---------------------------------------------------------
Medium: 2 // Side: D // Track: 8

Artist: Alva Noto
Title: Xerrox Teion
Playtime: 00:02:03
Explicit Lyrics: No
ISRC: DE1N62500022
(P): 2025 NOTON
Country: Germany

Composer: Carsten Nicolai
---------------------------------------------------------
Medium: 2 // Side: D // Track: 9

Artist: Alva Noto
Title: Xerrox Teion Acat
Playtime: 00:05:26
Explicit Lyrics: No
ISRC: DE1N62500023
(P): 2025 NOTON
Country: Germany

Composer: Carsten Nicolai
---------------------------------------------------------
Medium: 2 // Side: D // Track: 10

Artist: Alva Noto
Title: Xerrox Tek Part 1
Playtime: 00:05:27
Explicit Lyrics: No
ISRC: DE1N62500024
(P): 2025 NOTON
Country: Germany

Composer: Carsten Nicolai
---------------------------------------------------------
Medium: 2 // Side: D // Track: 11

Artist: Alva Noto
Title: Xerrox Monophaser 3
Playtime: 00:06:14
Explicit Lyrics: No
ISRC: DE1N62500025
(P): 2025 NOTON
Country: Germany

Composer: Carsten Nicolai

"Recorded in Naples historic recording studio Auditorium Novecento ‘notes from the air’ is the second Ciro Vitiello full-lenght album, that turns around the ambiguous figure of the seagull, a coastal apparition both ridiculous and divine, foolish and sacred, graceful in flight yet uneasy on land, something that knows more than it shows, carrying both wonder and threat in its gaze.

The album breathes through that tension, the desire to fly and the fear of falling, the suspicion of having already crashed somewhere unseen.
Wind, creaking ropes, invisible currents: these become signals from another uncoding state, reminders that air can be both home and haunting. The record lingers in suspension. Each track feels like a fragment carried by wind, a message blurred, a memory misplaced, something approaching meaning but never arriving.

The record drifts between orchestral gestures and dream-pop/post-rock shadows, guided by Ciro Vitiello’s fascination with shoegaze textures and cinematic atmospheres, and features contributions by Heith, Renato Grieco, Stefano Costanzo, Caraluce and Daniel Kinzelman. Vocal features include Martyna Basta, Heith and Antonina Nowacka, alongside Ciro’s own voice."

Following the reissue of The Pocket of Fever, Ambient Sans presents the second chapter in Masahiro Sugaya’s visionary work for the avant-garde performing arts company Pappa TARAHUMARA.

Founded by Hiroshi Koike in 1982, Pappa TARAHUMARA blended dance, theater, music, and visual art into abstract, immersive stage worlds. Sugaya’s compositions became the sonic counterpart to this radical aesthetic—minimal yet deeply evocative, combining electronics, ambient textures, and delicate melodic gestures into a sound language both intimate and expansive.

Music From Alejo marks his first original stage score for the company: a work where repetition and silence intertwine with shimmering synthesizers and dreamlike motifs, conjuring atmospheres that feel suspended between reality and reverie. More structured than The Pocket of Fever yet equally poetic, the album reveals Sugaya’s gift for translating movement into sound, balancing modern composition with subtle echoes of Japanese tradition.

Reissued for the first time on vinyl, Music From Alejo includes a printed insert featuring an exclusive interview with the artist, alongside photographs from our visit to his home in Japan. Essential listening for anyone drawn to the ambient minimalism of Hiroshi Yoshimura, Midori Takada, or Brian Eno—reimagined here through the lens of Tokyo’s experimental scene of the 1980s.

a1. Straight Line Floating In The Sky
a2. Oldfashioned
b1. An Afternoon When Fish Appeared
b2. Mistral
b3. Alejo's Theme

Emily Jeanne returns with Past Through Desire, the second release on her quỳnh imprint. Four advanced experiments in tripped-out rhythms, kinetic crossroads through the lunar-lit abyss.

What blossomed with quỳnh’s debut Call Of The Sea, now further develops with follow up Past Through Desire. The second edition on Emily Jeanne’s imprint truly clarifies her sound, an emblematic swirl of experimental nodes bunched tight into a nocturnal bouquet.

Twice Not Nice shimmers within its percussive hive, a psychedelic wormhole that furrows taut towards the circular infinite. Vague Gestures cuts sharper, a snarling stepper etched finely into its minimalist holding pattern for a proper skank-out. On the flip, Fire Lily marches a stranger; a psychoactive chant summoning the percussive half time with an eerie glint. Closer Traversal returns to the dimly lit dancefloor path, writhing around in slippery configurations until the broken loop reaches its end. A mesmerising second instalment from Emily Jeanne and her quỳnh stable.

WVLT is the newest sonic addition from WNDFRM (Portland-based, Tim Westcott), an album of eight distinct explorations exploring the many facets of experimental IDM.

Tim Westcott’s practice is rooted in an acute, nearly forensic attention to sound. Subtle tones, sculpted drones, and lean percussive gestures, always pursued with a patient ear and obsession with sound design. 

With previous releases on Prologue, Home Normal, and Dragon’s Eye Recordings, and several live performances at Mutek, a new album from Tim is a rare yet welcome occurrence. The conceptual approach for WVLT began in 2021, mixing synths with drum machines and granular processing. Lightly arced structures slip between gates of rhythm, shifting pulses, translucent washes, and disquieting residue. There’s a precision to the hesitation and an insistence in the space between notes, a deft balance of raw improvisation and sculpted quietude.

An exercise in immediacy and response, each track builds and unspools, like form in fleeting motion, driven by the moment’s tonal contrasts, micro‑rhythmic interplay, and slight gestures that alter entire planes of listening. It’s minimal without sparsity, intense without density.

On Biotope, Valentino Mora ventures even further from the dancefloor, delving into a rich, psychoacoustic realm shaped by modular and spectral synthesis. Built primarily around the Rossum Panharmonium, a module that analyzes and re-synthesizes audio into evolving harmonic clusters in real time, the album conjures an imagined ecosystem, where sound behaves with the logic and fluidity of organic life. Eschewing traditional field recordings, Mora instead sculpts textures and gestures that feel deeply natural yet are entirely synthetic. Inspired by elements such as soil composition, air, humidity, light, temperature, and the chemical properties of both land and aquatic environments and the living creatures that inhabit them, the soundscapes emerge as a kind of sonic biology. The result is a collection of slow-moving, tension-laden compositions that blur the boundaries between physical sensation and abstract design. Biotope unfolds like a closed ecosystem: modular synthesis treated as a breathing entity, shaped by resonance, friction, and organic motion. It embodies a kind of mystical biology, where textures mimic living forms, and frequencies pulse with intent. This is music to be felt as much as heard, Biotope invites you to listen with your skin, not just your ears.

microCastle’s second offering of 2024 welcomes Upercent back to the label for a new EP. Since first appearing in 2011, Valencia based sound architect Upercent has developed a distinct brand of electronic futurism. An enthusiastic attitude towards experimentation, coupled with extraordinary creative vision has made the Spaniard one of the more unique artists to emerge in the last decade. Upercent’s first microCastle project, 2018’s 'Vuit', not only served as the imprint's second ever vinyl release, but continued the Valencia resident’s mission to create contemporary club tools and destabilizing sound explorations. Seemingly in constant motion moving forward, Upercent would go on to record projects for Diynamic, Kompakt and Watergate, amongst others, firmly establishing his place amongst the underground’s premiere talents. Now more than five years on from this elusive string of projects, it has been Habitat, Innervisions, Sum Over Histories and TAU which have been vehicles for his creative swell over the last two calendar years, reminding us of the niche he carved out during his initial rise, as he continues to maneuver himself through the confines of electronic music. With 2024 being highlighted by ‘Falling’, a two-track collaborative project with Germany’s Adana Twins, Upercent now returns to microCastle with ‘Persevere’.

Beginning with the organic monochromes of ‘Oracle’, Upercent’s craftsmanship reveals itself across the slow-burning piece, one where funked-up beats and rubbery basslines get peppered with skittering rhythms, thought provoking vocal samples and glitched-out electronics. Its subdued yet swing-heavy suspense while perfect for an astute dancefloor, also acts as an ideal segue into the hopeful qualities of ‘As It May See’. Paul Brenning’s vocals feature here, falling like raindrops atop woody kick drums and clustered sonics, eventually giving way to an interlude of soulful phrasing, coaxing beautifully with granular textures and ghostly swirls of wind, before tastefully moving forward as panoramic arps emerge for a mesmerizing finale.

Upercent’s distinct aesthetic continues on the fourth selection ‘Cult’. Perhaps the most direct composition on the EP, its six-minute running time quickly sets you adrift in a techno-inspired wasteland of deconstructed vocals and retro chord stabs. Both intimate and wide-ranging, it's a series of crystal-like drones which engulf your attention whole, creating a sombre, ceremonial backdrop for misty glitches and fog-like swells to create a scenic storyboard. Reverberating hits and twitchy rhythms fill the space of closer ‘Blau Cel’, a production where Upercent crafts a trek through mountainous dancefloor trails. Unbound by gravity, orchestral gestures sweep across mossy plains and frost-filled sighs, offering listeners another immersive journey into the uncharted realms of musical expression.

Their newest release “For Barney, Who Was A Bad Dog, But A Good Boy, And Very Much Loved” comes from Brooklyn-based Dekalb Works (debut ‘Duologue’ on Where To Now? Records), the collaborative project of Austin Peru (Vision Fortune) & Daniel Creahan (Sweat Equity / Alien D).

The release summarizes a series of experimentations between live performance contexts and sample-heavy collage work. Since starting their residency on Radio alHara, Dekalb Works found themselves drawn to the act of performing, whether as a live act or DJing, and the space between these two often overly rigid modes.

“For Barney…” draws heavily on the sonic palette of American country and western music, treated through the lens of heavy studio processing and the production techniques of dub, ambient, and trip-hop. Recording hours-long live improvisations with guitar, piano, or drum machines and samplers, they pillaged these sessions as source material. Whereas previous work focused on the voice and the interaction of text, voice and music, these recordings pulled from the sounds of musicians playing together in a room. The arrangement process remains the same, chopping and manipulating small samples and momentary gestures into dense, rhythmic collages.

AI-36 comes from Ear to Ear - the debut collaboration between label regular Samuel van Dijk (Multicast Dynamics) and Ukrainian artist Yevgen Chebotarenko. Taken from a series of live recording sessions, the album explores in four parts a markedly darker realm of soundscape music. A cornucopia of abstract morphing scenes and heady synesthesia, the album brims with rich sonic detail and evocative gestures. Deftly blending organic sound textures with an experimental austerity, ‘Live Recordings’ displays potent and accomplished storytelling.

The album opens to a grey overcast vista, a natural landscape that slowly melts into a descending chasmic dysphoria. The mood transitions to a drone-based piece on the B-side, characterised by a more psychologically suspenseful framework and exotic blend of sound design. The atmosphere lightens, yet equally pensive as side C takes on a more elemental form, invoking water and its array of microbial and metabolic ecosystems. Brief cathartic moments in the final section pave the way for deeper wayfaring on the D-side. Stray signals and unknowable artefacts skitter across a vast subaqueous domain, a fathomless womb of potentialities that ebbs into eternity.

Intergenerational trio Dry Speed is one of the best-kept secrets of the Belgian free jazz and improvisation scene. Formed in the early 2000’s, trumpet player Joachim Devillé and saxophonist Thomas Olbrechts were in their twenties at that time, while drummer – their teacher at the art school in Brussels - Dirk Wauters was already in his fifties. Logically, twenty years later the first one are in their forties and the third one in his seventies. They only released a couple of CDs before “Indium” but never stopped to play, for themselves and for audiences, in concerts.

'Too often we describe music using classifications; genres like “jazz,” “experimental,” “avant- garde” are an easy shorthand to relay the rough parameters of the music to another person who may not have heard it. But these words are useful because they’re so vague, and they are most often used when the impression the music makes is equally vague. But when a group makes sounds that move the listener, these terms don’t hold up.

Dry Speed has released a record that is, at turns, futuristic and organic. It feels alien and new, like plastic or titanium, but at the same time as if it is shrouded in the natural, growing like moss or amplifying the sound of a great tree’s roots. ‘Indium’ gives the listener multiple entry points into the trio’s music: from a broad soundscape to a densely knitted series of minute and exacting musical gestures.'
- Nate Wooley

After successful releases on Transatlantic and Monnom Black, German FM synthesis wizard Luca Daniel Schwarz (aka LDS) presents his latest record ‘algo5’. The EP captures a wide range of sonic ground with innovative and futuristic edge.

’nbdfoil’ the opening track starts the voyage with mesmerising awe before sliding into ‘kizzt_VF’ where reality distorts and mind-warping events unfold. Closing out the A side the interlude ‘<13’ stumbles along with playful weirdness and explorative sonic gestures. Back in more familiar territory the B-side’s ‘fl+’ and ‘Vone’ propel dynamic rhythms through the ether until arriving at the final track, ‘mfäg’ where fragmented arps and cinematic ambience give an emotional sense of closure.

LDS’s ability to compose to a high level of depth and intrigue is unmistakably a significant feat for any electronic dance music producer and testament to the possibilities of modern sound design.