Search:a new line

Koichi Shimizu's contribution to the Holotone Catalogue 002 sounds like journeys from a ticket that exploded. Self organizing bodies without organs laying the blueprint for a soft machine spreading and fizzling towards available spaces or trickling downwards towards new spaces through fissures and gaps, eroding what is in its way. Drawing the tonal line from a cube to a tesseract, entering the Holotone realm.

finally repressed !

After a lengthy break Mark Henning returns with his new label Swing and four on-point tracks. 'Stash House' kicks things off with a crisply produced groove with snatched male vocals and rounded bass keeping the swing high. 'Exit Acid' ups the energy levels with an acidic tinged b-line proving a grimier feel whilst flip side's 'James Hughes Blues' is all about the breakdown; a neat synth line and huge bass tones lending it a more anthemic edge. Lastly 'The Horror' opts for a lower key ride, fuller male vocal imbuing the track with a sleazier feeling.

Ark & Pit Spector continue their inspired journey with an extended EP full of groovy jams and absorbing rhythms for Hold Youth. The Frenchmen have formed a potent alliance with a series of expertly-crafted, high-quality releases dropping over the last couple of years. On this new EP they go deeper into their sound explorations with five original works and a remix from their Parisian buddy and Hold Youth member, Le Loup. First up, we go into bumping jazzy territory with 'Chauffage Central', a mesmerising cut with swirling pads, soulful vocal clips and a jaunty b-line. Straight up after that, Hold Youth rudeboy Le Loup gives 'Chauffage Central' a funky little rework, throwing live sounding percussion, Nubian vocal clips, trumpet parps and a pumping bassline into the mix which gives a totally different identity. The final track on side A, is a cheeky teaser called 'Petite Ondée'. Rolling out for just under two minutes the track has a muffled, jazz-esque feel to it with a warm rolling bassline and bright, sparkling piano keys.

On the flip we kick off with 'Air Conditionelle', a lush, retro feeling with those oh-so-familiar heavy-hitting eighties snare licks. The bassline takes you to a New York City street and the whole atmosphere is that of an old school NYC neighbourhood, while a spoken-word sample adds a human touch just before the track comes to an end. 'Sub Tropical' goes a little leftfield with an unusual combination of sounds in tandem with a pulsating low end, occasional sax licks and punchy percussion to give it plenty of energy. 'Averse Et Contre Tous' closes out the EP with a slothish ride into the sunset - Ark and Pit Spector show their experimental side presenting an odd union between blues samples, gruff electronic sounds and piano keys.

Another triumphant effort from Ark and Pit Spector, in fact, some of the finest work to date. Make sure you check it out!

Midgar is proud to introduce a newcomer for the third release. A great debut for the maltese Cloned, delivering Sapphire 1990 E.P. The record, way more straightforward and groove centered than the previous Midgar outputs, opens with - Sapphire 1990 - , track that sounds like very nostalgic memories from a timeless rave. On the same side, a live out-take from Cloned's repertory, - The Pendulum - swinging synth-lines which dominate pretty direct rhythmics over a costant background noise. - Belgassem - as the first cut on the B side, is an absolutely heavy one for the label's standards, empowered by a really strong and obsessive acid-line. Closing the vinyl, the slow - Submerging - , groovy drums embraced by very brights heavenly pads.

Following up from the stunning 'You Will Soon Find That Life Is Wonderful' 12' on Phonica's Special Edi- tions imprint, Sad City returns to the label with his new EP 'Introduction To Lisboa/ Sloe'.

Glasgow-based producer Gary Caruth has evolved a highly original sound; deep, lush and widescreen electronics, from melancholic to ecstatic. Sonically, he continues where his last record left off and feels like the perfect companion to that well-received debut for Phonica. The record as a whole is composed of field recordings, with the basis for the first half of the EP, 'Introduction to Lisboa,' utilising sound recorded in and around Lisbon. He explains, 'I wanted the music and field recordings to meld at times, to obscure what was conventionally the musical element and what were field recordings, blurring the line between found sound and composition in the creation of a whole other.'

Opening track 'Introduction To Lisboa' builds and builds from near silence to a cacophony of field record- ings and looped horns. It melds into 'Baixa Saxaphone', where carefully paced percussion patiently enters over a wash of synth. From then on a delicate balance of restrained percussion and spine-tingling atmos- pherics interplay before descending into a blissful outro.

As with the previous EP, the 12' is packaged in technicolour artwork by acclaimed London designer Jack Featherstone.

Having been a fan of Reelow for, well, as long as we care to remember, we are really proud to present you his new outstanding EP on Cellaa Music. Now residing on Ibiza, Reelow has enjoyed yet another successful year. With the talent taking a back seat, its the music hogging the spotlight and rightly so. Two new Tracks and two massive Remixes that look to the past whilst sitting firmly in the present.

- Leave Me Alone' riding on massive percussion and a tough house beat, with this tough Drums and drunken, wubby Sounds it is running right through its core. Plenty of sonic details flesh out the languorous but slightly groove and you'd imagine this Track is to be the sort of many Artits will love.

- Your Crowd' is again about little tiny details and how they evolve with time. This one take you on a voyage of natural rhythms and big Drums. Developing from harmonic FX Sounds and a infectious groove, the track is full of surprises as it twists and turns into different sounds that come and go to take it further than the dancefloor.

The first of the remixes comes from the in form, Massimo Cassini. He team up with a hypnotic rework of - Leave Me Alone' that demonstrates just why he is one to keep a close eye on as he gears up on the production front. Massimo is delivering a muscular house bomb, carefully placed FXs and a nice and catchy line to make this a dancefloor mover.

Next we have Cellaa Music Co Founder Martin Heyder providing a soulful tech house surrogate to the original of - Your Crowd'. His remix has a deeper houseier twist with a smooth 303 pad sound and a concrete percussive arrangement to convey a fantastic production.

We'll meet you on the Dance Floor!!!

Art Fine was the duo of Fabrice Bellini (electronics, vocals) and Rush Blakemann (guitar, synthesizer) from Tuin, Italy. They met in art school and became friends, inspired by New Wave, dance and electronic music. They recorded their only single 'Dark Silence' in November of 1984, which was released by Discomagic in 1985. It is now remastered for vinyl by George Horn at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley. The vinyl is housed in the original jacket featuring a photo of the duo and that Art Fine logo in puzzle pieces. Each copy includes a double sided postcard insert with lyrics and liner notes by Fabrice Bellini

Cute Heels is the solo project of Bogota´ born, experimental producer Victor Lenis. Since the early 2000's Lenis has been working on a myriad of electronic projects, including the management of the labels Black Leather Records and Romance Moderne, in his current home of Brussels. Drawing on the influences of the radical punk scene that surrounded him growing up in Columbia while nurturing his passion for synthesizers and drum machines, Lenis developed the broody, gloomy brand of electro-techno that is Cute Heels. Deemed by Juan Atkins as ''the new blood and spirit for the next step in techno music'' Cute Heels has released various digital only releases over the years, as well as his first vinyl release, an EP on Gooiland Elektro. His debut album Spiritual, rides the line between cold electro-techno and left field electronic body music. Inspired by equal parts Liaisons Dangereuses and Drexciya, Spiritual takes the listener on a journey over 8 tracks and 40 minutes of music. Listening to "Spiritual" you can see why. The songs on this full length reveal a sublime influence from Detroit techno, early Chicago house and new wave; advanced electronics for the dance floor, pumping and sophisticated. The album was recorded and mixed by Victor at Sensorium Studio in Zagreb, Croatia in November 2013. Each song has been mastered for vinyl at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley by George Horn. Each LP is packaged in a custom-made jacket by our in-house designer Eloise Leigh and incorporates the geometry of analog synthesizers and celestial rose patterns. 

Every coastline develops its own rhythm. The Adriatic is no exception.

For decades, Italy’s eastern coast has been shaped by funk, Cosmic Disco, Balearic sounds, Italo Disco, House, Latin rhythms, Brazilian music and countless other influences. Rather than blending into a single style, these musical worlds have lived side by side, constantly inspiring new generations of DJs, musicians and dancers. For more than fifteen years, Soul Fingers and Funk Rimini have explored that landscape from different perspectives. Founded by Claudio Cavallaro in 2013, Soul Fingers grew into a vinyl-driven community where groove matters more than genre. Its philosophy has always been simple: if the groove is right, genres stop mattering. Brothers Ricky and Francesco Cardelli developed Funk Rimini into a project rooted in funk, disco, live performance and electronic production. Anima Adriatica is where these two journeys meet.

The project didn’t begin with the ambition of making an album. It began behind the turntables. As DJs, Claudio Cavallaro and Ricky Cardelli found themselves constantly searching for records capable of connecting distant musical worlds inside their sets; from Afrobeat into disco, from hip hop into Latin, from Brazilian grooves into boogie, from cosmic electronics into deep funk. Sometimes those records existed. More often, they didn’t. So they stopped searching and started writing them. Not records designed to belong to one genre, but records designed to travel between genres. That space between musical worlds became Anima Adriatica.

The music grew through spontaneous jam sessions with Ricky and Francesco Cardelli, drummer Enrico Mao Bocchini and, gradually, a wider circle of musicians, singers and longtime friends, making Anima Adriatica less a traditional band than the beginning of an open collective. Recorded at SynthPosio Studio, founded by Ricky and Francesco Cardelli inside Rimini’s iconic skyscraper, the project also carries a symbolic connection to the building itself, where many Italo Disco classics (including records by Betty Miranda, The Creatures and many others) were recorded decades earlier.

Betty Miranda returns not as a nostalgic guest, but as a bridge between generations. On the title track she performs a spoken-word text written by Claudio Cavallaro, reflecting on the invisible thread connecting the Adriatic dancefloor across time. From Baia degli Angeli to Cocoricò, from the legendary clubs of Riccione to today’s independent communities gathered around projects such as Soul Fingers and Funk Rimini, the places have changed, but the dancefloor continues to tell the same story. Much like Pier Vittorio Tondelli’s Rimini captured the Adriatic through literature, Anima Adriatica imagines its soundtrack.

Brazilian musician Daniel Plentz (Selton) expands that vision on Açúcar and Alegria, bringing another coastline into the story. Across its four tracks, the EP moves naturally between analogue funk, boogie, Brazilian music, underground disco, cosmic textures and the wider Black musical tradition, with All Down The Line paying tribute to the Paradise Garage era.

Released by Bordello A Parigi, the project found its natural home through a shared love of adventurous dance music, records and club culture. More than the title of an EP, Anima Adriatica marks the beginning of an open collective; a meeting point where musicians, DJs, producers and friends continue building bridges between genres, generations and communities.

Because Anima Adriatica doesn’t live inside a genre. It lives between genres. If soul music has always reflected the places where it was born, Anima Adriatica is simply our own Adriatic Soul.

1982 4-Piece Demo' is the first official, fully-licensed and unreleased material to be released under the name Strawberry Switchblade in 30 years. Since disbanding amid major record label acrimony and personal differences in 1986, the already-cult band have since grown in stature and legend. Trailblazers in many ways, the band's mythology justifiably centers around the charismatic duo of Jill Bryson and Rose McDowall, but that isn't a complete picture. Bryson and McDowall's growing friendship, having met some years earlier on the punk scene, became a creative partnership: Bryson's art school background and McDowall's history in avant-punk group The Poets meant Strawberry Switchblade was a band pitted against many established norms. The band's very first incarnation, an all-female 4 piece, recorded one demo at Glasgow's Hellfire Club and played a handful of gigs. Friends Janice Goodlett and Carole McGowan completed the line up on bass and drums respectively. Strawberry Switchblade would eventually pair down to a duo and go on to chart success but it's in these raw, passionate recordings that the songwriting and vocal elements were being hammered out and explored in real time.


Spanish Song' is a previously unreleased song. With Rose McDowall's instantly recognizable lead vocal dovetailing with Bryson's harmonies and lead guitar, it's the first glimpse at an alternative history of Strawberry Switchblade. This incarnation could easily have been featured on a Nuggets compilation or a precursor to the indie-pop revolution that would take over British bedrooms a couple of years later. "Trees & Flowers" is instantly recognizable, a bona fide classic that would earn the band its first record deal. Here it's given a more forceful rhythm section: Goodlett and McGowan's playing is in fact accomplished and doesn't hint at the bands' youth. "Go Away" would also surface later on the band's debut LP but here it is a moody-garage stomper with a psychedelic, haunting refrain. These 3 songs point to a tantalizing future of the band that was never realized.


Remastered and restored by Sean Pennycook from the original cassette, with artwork based on a single photographic contact sheet (the only visual evidence of the band in this form) and with a booklet of photographs and new text. Pa

The unconscious element to the conscious process.

The practice of dub techno and its tendrils is a fundamental for me, both aesthetically and from an engineering perspective.

I start every recording session with a dub inspired jam, the first piece I ever recorded in 1996 was an effort to recreate Phylyps Trak with only a Korg X3 and an Ibanez PUE5 (borrowed from Gary Howell). It was an awesome introduction to jamming, and the footing stones of noise, delay and saturation were explored with my foot hard on the enthusiasm pedal.

These practice jams are in some sense cathartic, the first step taken again & again, which helps me move forwards each session and additionally helps to 'warm the circuits' both of myself and the machines.

After realising the genius of Basic Channel is akin to the genius of peasant food, using every ingredient with nothing left to waste, (up to and including the oft maligned working noise of the machines themselves), this was a watershed moment for my own subjective progression. No longer tied to just emulation of something inspiring, but taking these learned tools into other areas of music helped to break free from a strong current of influence and also to progress into other areas with the new toolbox.

Dub:

The importance of the dub pioneers should never be understated, in modern music and my own practice. Yet with my initial inspiration being two german dudes issuing extreme techno variants with obscured label designs, who then signposted their listeners to their own inspirations (via their Wackies re-issues or nodded to on their Rhythm & Sound/Burial Mix sub-labels), meant that I started late and travelled backwards.

Learning to notice the live mixing of Mikey Dread or Lee Perry when the faders are bleeding through even when turned down, (echoed in BC's Quadrant Dub), or the brash send effects literally thrown into the mix also taught me that 'rough' mixing can inject a recording with life, uniqueness and the most right wrongness. Looking back Basic Channels very few elements helped me realise that the rules to be understood, are also the best ones to be broken.

Push the mixer into the red.

Amp that noise up from the tape delay cos it sounds sick.

Pseudo side-chain effects cos the kicks are way too loud and the mixer can't sum it nicely.

Spam the send knob into the delay units now, now and now.

Carelessness.

Noise:

Once I wrapped my head around the intrinsic 'noise' element that set those records apart, this became a torchlight into the alt noise movements which I was tentatively exploring at the time, and also is evidently a connection or thread into them.

Whether the Industrial/Post Punk UK scene (This Heat, TG, A Tent, F.E.) or the prolific output of the US Noise scene (Wolf Eyes, Live & Shave in LA, and subsequently following the lineage all the way back to Chrome's Alien Soundtracks), I had finally discovered a connection from techno to this 'free for all' corner of music.

This input from the Noise arena of sound is, in my experience, an all important step for a sonic artist, taking it's roots and extending out from Stockhausen/Pierre Henry and utilised/warped/mangled by thousands of adventurous pioneers ever since, I now see the line separating the high brow and the low brow is actually an artery carrying information from the head to the heart.

Vault is a selection of these jams that precede each of my solo recording sessions, for 30 years I've recorded hundreds of these 'workouts'. They are never intended as serious statements, just moments of naive enjoyment, yet most importantly they are time & space captured as practice.

The objective is always a warm up exercise, but sometimes those exercises turn a different corner, with a certain focus or direction dependent on what random samples are left in my machines from the previous session, instead of conscious choices, these unconscious elements can facilitate those 'positive mistakes' that make a piece of sound retain a different feel or colour and thus become special, or at least special to the creator.

I am quite conscious that the 'record everything' aspect of my ethos has been invaluable in cataloguing and saving these jams, while the attitude of carelessness during this process (after all, it's only a warm up jam) invites more enjoyment than seriousness ever could. Even if you don't feel the piece at the time, record it, because some years later it may well fit, or become relevant in a way you never intended.

-Miles

opo’s 666ridims (2020 - 2026), compiled by J.TRIPP, brings together tracks from his 666ridims netlabel, reflecting on the singular sound worlds of some of his solo work. Like a discovery made by neutrino sensors, opo’s tracks research the transformation of rhythm, swing, and structure, aiming for a new grid. Sketchy and raw, processing emotions and experiences, regaling stories, and asking questions, opo relates in trance verse. All tracks here breathe his focus on improvisation, experimentation, and collaboration. Some of the beats featured on 666ridims (2020 - 2026) are outlines for freestyles and songwriting ideas, a practice formed during a long-distance music conversation with illustrator, printmaker, painter, designer, and maker Billy Bigwood. Other tracks are more club-oriented, like speculative genres programmed in odd meters. Japanese Barcelona-based DJ Hanakito contributes to one track, using samples and chops sourced from her vinyl imports.

Through Afroelectronic experimentation and diasporic narratives, opo encodes his soul's past and future through his music. Encoded, activated, returned. Initiate only when you receive permission from all your mental fragments. Keep transmissions in mind and dislodge and follow the command cluster's trail. Strongly influenced by sci-fi, ancestral afro musics, jazz, performance art, and food, as musical lines and shards of meaning cascade, 666ridims (2020 - 2026) is a minimalist dive into strange meters, polyrhythm, and the transcendence of ideas. Fast, slow. Exhilarating. We don’t discover physical laws; we just collaborate on them.

The Yummy Fur’s first album of new material in over 25 years is seductive and ambiguous; a fast-paced flip through scenes from art, myth, life and fantasy; a witty whole made from glittering scraps. The band’s original incarnation – fronted by singer, songwriter and guitarist John McKeown from 1992 to 1999 – morphed from making quick-hit cartoon-art songs to Eno and Cale-influenced creepers, populated by characters from McKeown’s life in Glasgow and the films, books and poetry that he lived a parallel life through. Everybody Talks About The Weather delights in using every past iteration of the band as potent collage material: a melee of sounds and ideas existing at once, revealing themselves then dipping back into hiding.
Recorded by the original core trio of McKeown, Brian MacDougall (guitar) and Paul Thomson (drums), Everybody Talks About The Weather comes 17 years after the band reformed for sporadic live shows, and seven years after the release of their sorta-greatest hits compilation Piggy Wings (Rock Action). Ten tracks long with nothing to spare, it is as condensed and vital as their best songs, with a new clarity of sound that allows their ambiguities to come into the light.
The album begins with “Cogs”, a taunting inquisition from within. As McKeown stages a fight between his id and ego, the tension heats up between conversational guitar lines and minimalist repetition; threatening sing-song melody and real, palpable menace. The band members are forced in tandem only to break apart, sustaining a genuine sense of just-hidden danger throughout the whole record – except, arguably, “Headphones”, a looser moment which sees McKeown make an existential something out of nothing while waiting for someone in the car (“I should have brought a book.../My ears are bleeding from the compression on your album”)
The songs are riots of reference: “Unity Over Europe” is a slyly complex two act play about the Mitford sisters – Diana, Unity, and Nancy, in a wink to the YF canon – smashing tragic biographical detail together with allusions to Thomas Pynchon and Francis Bacon. Pynchon is also lifted to serve “Blue Sunshine”, a collision of school shooters, serial killers and fictional fuck-ups (“Fast forward to Compton/Fast forward to Pynchon/Fast forward to Columbine'”) whose buzzy guitar lines are taunting and confrontational like a smarmy teenager. The innocuous title of “My Lasagne” belies a song that exists in several time periods at once: a visit to see Guernica, 50 people with their backs to the portrait of Dora Maar; the time that Picasso painted from; the Reina Sofia and the dirty streets of the Malasaña; myth-making musicians and the myths they’re riffing off overlapping and leering at each other.
All this could be laboured in lesser hands, but cultural verbosity is second nature to The Yummy Fur, who transform all this source material into songs that are weird, sexy, funny and absurd. Meaning is not happily understood or flattened. Susan Sontag's essay Against Interpretation accompanied McKeown as he wrote this album, and she’s paraphrased in “Semolina Ballerina”, the album’s justification of artistic ambiguity. Thomson’s motorik beat leads a gathering of back-and-forth instrumental phrases – including a wiry contribution on saxophone – embodying the futility of trying to parse something definitive from repeated action. “Listen to the very first thing that’s in your head,” Sontag-via-McKeown commands directly, then slinks sideways: “Interpretation is a conversation in an unmade bed”
The album features two more focused portraits, or at least The Yummy Fur’s version of such a thing. “Wanda” merges the life of filmmaker Barbara Loden and the title character of her semi-autobiographical 1970 feature film, with Loden’s then-husband Elia Kazan joining the fray of no-good men in her film. It’s a mix of adaptation and avant-criticism, with McKeown’s wordplay and mannered pronunciation mirroring the way that non-fiction and fiction twist around each other in the song. The title track is a series of vignettes and impressions from the lives of the band’s ‘90s inner circle, positing painter Mac McNaughton as a kind of Falstaffian ringleader. As with Piggy Wings and the recent single “New T-Shirt”, McNaughton painted the cover of Everybody Talks About The Weather – like the album’s music, the image of a coy girl in a white dress is an uncanny amalgamation of styles, suggestions and references just out of reach, as though seen in an art museum in a dream.
The album ends with two reads of the same frustration. “King of Nothing” is the closest The Yummy Fur will ever get to sludge-rock: the band melts together into a dusty, dreary haze as McKeown drowns in a drudgery of personal struggle (“Two jumpers on in Babylon/And only cats to talk to”) and the rhythmic toppling of heroes (Rowlands, Duvall, Munro). The majority of visible dirt is cleaned off for “Say Hello”, an uncharacteristic depiction of throwing the windows open after a dark night of the soul. Here, the situation is still cold and hard (“When the sun burns gold, but the heat never reaches your fingertips”) but it feels surmountable. Everybody Talks About The Weather is an unpredictable album from an unpredictable group, but ending on a moment of almost uncomplicated light is maybe its biggest surprise. - Claire Biddles (2026)

The Yummy Fur’s first album of new material in over 25 years is seductive and ambiguous; a fast-paced flip through scenes from art, myth, life and fantasy; a witty whole made from glittering scraps. The band’s original incarnation – fronted by singer, songwriter and guitarist John McKeown from 1992 to 1999 – morphed from making quick-hit cartoon-art songs to Eno and Cale-influenced creepers, populated by characters from McKeown’s life in Glasgow and the films, books and poetry that he lived a parallel life through. Everybody Talks About The Weather delights in using every past iteration of the band as potent collage material: a melee of sounds and ideas existing at once, revealing themselves then dipping back into hiding.
Recorded by the original core trio of McKeown, Brian MacDougall (guitar) and Paul Thomson (drums), Everybody Talks About The Weather comes 17 years after the band reformed for sporadic live shows, and seven years after the release of their sorta-greatest hits compilation Piggy Wings (Rock Action). Ten tracks long with nothing to spare, it is as condensed and vital as their best songs, with a new clarity of sound that allows their ambiguities to come into the light.
The album begins with “Cogs”, a taunting inquisition from within. As McKeown stages a fight between his id and ego, the tension heats up between conversational guitar lines and minimalist repetition; threatening sing-song melody and real, palpable menace. The band members are forced in tandem only to break apart, sustaining a genuine sense of just-hidden danger throughout the whole record – except, arguably, “Headphones”, a looser moment which sees McKeown make an existential something out of nothing while waiting for someone in the car (“I should have brought a book.../My ears are bleeding from the compression on your album”)
The songs are riots of reference: “Unity Over Europe” is a slyly complex two act play about the Mitford sisters – Diana, Unity, and Nancy, in a wink to the YF canon – smashing tragic biographical detail together with allusions to Thomas Pynchon and Francis Bacon. Pynchon is also lifted to serve “Blue Sunshine”, a collision of school shooters, serial killers and fictional fuck-ups (“Fast forward to Compton/Fast forward to Pynchon/Fast forward to Columbine'”) whose buzzy guitar lines are taunting and confrontational like a smarmy teenager. The innocuous title of “My Lasagne” belies a song that exists in several time periods at once: a visit to see Guernica, 50 people with their backs to the portrait of Dora Maar; the time that Picasso painted from; the Reina Sofia and the dirty streets of the Malasaña; myth-making musicians and the myths they’re riffing off overlapping and leering at each other.
All this could be laboured in lesser hands, but cultural verbosity is second nature to The Yummy Fur, who transform all this source material into songs that are weird, sexy, funny and absurd. Meaning is not happily understood or flattened. Susan Sontag's essay Against Interpretation accompanied McKeown as he wrote this album, and she’s paraphrased in “Semolina Ballerina”, the album’s justification of artistic ambiguity. Thomson’s motorik beat leads a gathering of back-and-forth instrumental phrases – including a wiry contribution on saxophone – embodying the futility of trying to parse something definitive from repeated action. “Listen to the very first thing that’s in your head,” Sontag-via-McKeown commands directly, then slinks sideways: “Interpretation is a conversation in an unmade bed”
The album features two more focused portraits, or at least The Yummy Fur’s version of such a thing. “Wanda” merges the life of filmmaker Barbara Loden and the title character of her semi-autobiographical 1970 feature film, with Loden’s then-husband Elia Kazan joining the fray of no-good men in her film. It’s a mix of adaptation and avant-criticism, with McKeown’s wordplay and mannered pronunciation mirroring the way that non-fiction and fiction twist around each other in the song. The title track is a series of vignettes and impressions from the lives of the band’s ‘90s inner circle, positing painter Mac McNaughton as a kind of Falstaffian ringleader. As with Piggy Wings and the recent single “New T-Shirt”, McNaughton painted the cover of Everybody Talks About The Weather – like the album’s music, the image of a coy girl in a white dress is an uncanny amalgamation of styles, suggestions and references just out of reach, as though seen in an art museum in a dream.
The album ends with two reads of the same frustration. “King of Nothing” is the closest The Yummy Fur will ever get to sludge-rock: the band melts together into a dusty, dreary haze as McKeown drowns in a drudgery of personal struggle (“Two jumpers on in Babylon/And only cats to talk to”) and the rhythmic toppling of heroes (Rowlands, Duvall, Munro). The majority of visible dirt is cleaned off for “Say Hello”, an uncharacteristic depiction of throwing the windows open after a dark night of the soul. Here, the situation is still cold and hard (“When the sun burns gold, but the heat never reaches your fingertips”) but it feels surmountable. Everybody Talks About The Weather is an unpredictable album from an unpredictable group, but ending on a moment of almost uncomplicated light is maybe its biggest surprise. - Claire Biddles (2026)

Jason Dungan (aka Blue Lake) and Johan Carøe find beauty in the rhythms
and repetitions of domestic life for collaborative album, 'Routine' - out September 25

Copenhagen-based multi-instrumentalists Jason Dungan and Johan Carøe didn't set out to make an album. Instead, as the title 'Routine' suggests, they found their way there through a process of habitual making and listening, developing an intuitive musical language to reflect the dreamlike meanderings and creative play of life's quiet moments. 'Routine' blends pop orientated sounds, Avant-garde minimalism, folk and new age with the emotive depth of film-score.

Their meeting was not entirely coincidental. Previously in bands such as Squares and Triangles, Jason Dungan has since recorded multiple albums under the moniker Blue Lake, including the lauded 'Sun Arcs', pursuing his passion for self-built percussion and multi-string instruments. Johan Carøe meanwhile is a composer whose film soundtrack work has seen him collaborate with Angelo Badalamenti, Arp, and Sofie Birch, at whose Andersabo residency (curated by Dungan) the pair first met, resulting in the highly praised album 'Repair Techniques' written by Birch and Carøe.

'Routine' emerged organically over many years against the backdrop of great personal change. As Carøe said goodbye to his father and welcomed his first child, the pair sent each other fragments of melodies and patterns, working up responses when time allowed to assemble a sonic palette that combined acoustic instrumentation of zither, clarinet, cello, saxophone (among others) with the textures of tape, drum machine and Yamaha DX7 synth. Inspired by the vulnerability and DIY ethos of Arthur Russell's home recordings, the vision of labels like Disques de Crepescule, and the art pop, experimentation inherent to late '70s and early '80s recordings from NYC and Japan alike, Dungan and Carøe conjured new forms for their folk, leftfield pop and avant garde influences from the low-lit living rooms of Copenhagen and rural Sweden. "I'm very interested in the ways in which music and art emerge from our wider experiences as people, workers, parents and in the daydreaming activity of making music," Dungan explains of a process which allowed the duo's individual styles to drift apart and merge together seamlessly. "I think the process was definitely capturing moments in time, but over a long time," Carøe adds. "It was a bit like improvisation, but with time stretched."

The music floats with grace and humility, remaining sophisticated yet acutely introverted.
Whether on 'Clouds', where soft layers of zither and clarinet are moved along by a featherlight bass riff and the hypnotic clip-clop of the primitive groovebox, or the gentle grandeur of cello rising and falling through 'Routine 1', the album reveals itself over 10 instrumental tracks, evoking the ineffable calm that descends when the light changes and the world turns inwards. The act of time passing became a key creative ingredient to the evolution of the album, enriched with the exciting challenge to transform their passing rounds of home recordings via a slow release musical dialogue. Jason found creative moments in the twilight hours to lay down zither, melodica, acoustic guitar to name but few, while Johan utilising "line-in and headphones" would manipulate, stretch and pitch Jason's melodic pathways during newly born naptimes.

Carøe rhythmically plucks and slides the stringed cello instrument, leaving palpable foundations on 'Hymn' and 'Chords', in a treated, stylistic approach akin to Mabe Fratti, while 'Silence' draws to a close with a gospel touch. Dungan's harp-motion zither flourishes reveal more classical connotations on 'Reunion' with inspiration of Bedroom Community's Nico Muhly as organs rise with Moogs, culminating with a climatic choral outro from friend, mezzo-soprano Anna Caroline Olesen.

'Routine' then is their first collaboration, an album of deep and sincere reflection with inviting overtones that gesture with unrushed authenticity. A document of a new-found friendship that opens a window into the most personal of spaces, where the daily practices of music and life exist side-by-side to wondrous effect.

The mastering was done from the master tapes from the studio recording of the album. The cover is a reproduction of the original. The LP includes a printed sleeve. The cover includes a Glossy finish in order to respect the original edition as much as possible.

Released in 1981, "Sibou Odja" is Orchestra Baobab's second studio album produced at the Golden Baobab in Dakar by the young producer Ibrahima Sylla. After their masterpiece "Mouhamadou Bamba" recorded the same year, "Sibou Odja" would once again mark the history of Senegalese music by propelling the group's success into a new musical decade. Under the direction of the hard-hitting saxophonist Issa Sissokho and the irremovable guitarist Barthélémy Attiso, it is notably the young singer future icon of Senegalese salsa Médoune Diallo who will deliver one of his masterpieces with the irresistible "Autorail", song locomotive which celebrates the opening of the railway line connecting Dakar to Niamey. The Baobab symbolizing both rooting in traditional Senegalese values ​​and the tree's ability to reach new heights, the group's sound is a perfect syncretism of Senegalese and Afro-Cuban imaginaries in which the montunos of electric guitars and the Vocal improvisations in the Wolof language subtly blend with the rhythms of Cuban sound and other boleros.

Over the years, Faust has become many things, distinct as fingers, yet united as the hand that forms the fist. This series of new LPs on Bureau B sees each living member of the legendary 1971-1974 line up present their own interpretation of the Faustian myth, working alone or with collaborators to create new material that reflects their contemporary vision of what Faust can be.

Over the years, Faust has become many things, distinct as fingers, yet united as the hand that forms the fist. This series of new LPs on Bureau B sees each living member of the legendary 1971-1974 line up present their own interpretation of the Faustian myth, working alone or with collaborators to create new material that reflects their contemporary vision of what Faust can be.

Over the years, Faust has become many things, distinct as fingers, yet united as the hand that forms the fist. This series of new LPs on Bureau B sees each living member of the legendary 1971-1974 line up present their own interpretation of the Faustian myth, working alone or with collaborators to create new material that reflects their contemporary vision of what Faust can be.

Over the years, Faust has become many things, distinct as fingers, yet united as the hand that forms the fist. This series of new LPs on Bureau B sees each living member of the legendary 1971-1974 line up present their own interpretation of the Faustian myth, working alone or with collaborators to create new material that reflects their contemporary vision of what Faust can be.

Over the years, Faust has become many things, distinct as fingers, yet united as the hand that forms the fist. This series of new LPs on Bureau B sees each living member of the legendary 1971-1974 line up present their own interpretation of the Faustian myth, working alone or with collaborators to create new material that reflects their contemporary vision of what Faust can be.

Over the years, Faust has become many things, distinct as fingers, yet united as the hand that forms the fist. This series of new LPs on Bureau B sees each living member of the legendary 1971-1974 line up present their own interpretation of the Faustian myth, working alone or with collaborators to create new material that reflects their contemporary vision of what Faust can be.

Over the years, Faust has become many things, distinct as fingers, yet united as the hand that forms the fist. This series of new LPs on Bureau B sees each living member of the legendary 1971-1974 line up present their own interpretation of the Faustian myth, working alone or with collaborators to create new material that reflects their contemporary vision of what Faust can be.

Over the years, Faust has become many things, distinct as fingers, yet united as the hand that forms the fist. This series of new LPs on Bureau B sees each living member of the legendary 1971-1974 line up present their own interpretation of the Faustian myth, working alone or with collaborators to create new material that reflects their contemporary vision of what Faust can be.

Acclaimed harpist and songwriter Mikaela Davis’ new album, Graceland Way (due TK via Kill Rock Stars), builds an expansive, kaleidoscopic neo-western dystopia from the cozy origin point—that duality compounded by a subtle exploration of light and dark, grace and struggle, rose and thorn, as well as the mystical power found at their meeting points. The “canyon country” epic born of that work is indebted to the titular street in Chevy Chase Canyon where she recorded the album, the lineage of Laurel Canyon, the mythos of Elvis’s Graceland, and Paul Simon’s restless reinvention. “At the end of the journey, the place you were destined for all along isn’t even a place, it’s a state of mind: Graceland Way,” Davis says. Featuring an unreleased Cass McCombs track (Mizmoon) as well as contributions from Karley Hartzman (Wednesday), Tim Heidecker, Madison Cunningham, Neal Francis, James Felice (The Felice Brothers), Clay Finch (Mapache) & Hannah Read.

On his new album Chott, German-Tunisian producer and composer Taroug confronts his origins. Named after the Chott El Djerid, a vast salt lake in southern Tunisia, the ten-track album revolves around personal history and the search for identity. Chott is a conceptual work shaped by contrasting atmospheres, from minimalistic melancholy to raw, bass-heavy intensity. It blends traditional instruments with contemporary electronic text- ures, drawing lines between past and present.

Personal materials—such as vocal samples from family members—add layers of intimacy and cultural depth, most notably on the title track, featuring an original Arabic poem spoken by Taroug’s father, and on 1995,
a song reflecting on early childhood memories in Tunisia. Beyond these intimate dimensions, he works with sonic imagery that captures the sensory experience of heat and landscape in pieces like Saraab and Sirocco. In Nakhla, recordings of palm trees transformed into repetitive movements evoke scenes of southern Tunisia’s palm plantations, where organic and mechanical sounds converge.

For the artwork, Taroug once again collaborated with architect and designer Marie Brosius, assembling an experimental collage from old personal photographs of Tunisia that visually echoes the album’s themes of heritage and remembrance.

A classic album recorded in 1976, featuring a superb lineup including Sam Jones, Kazumi Watanabe, and Fumio Karashima, with expansive cello solos. Highlights include an exhilarating duo number with the seasoned bassist Sam Jones, as well as Kazumi Watanabe’s hip guitar solos throughout.



East Wind was a groundbreaking jazz label established in 1974 through the full cooperation of Ai Music, as it was then known, and Nippon Phonogram, as it was then known. Over a period of about five years, the label produced albums not only by Japanese musicians such as Masabumi Kikuchi, Sadao Watanabe, and Terumasa Hino, but also by musicians who were engaged in creative activity on the global jazz scene at the time. In addition to the quality of the performances, the artwork, created with leading designers and photographers, brought a fresh new image to jazz albums and had a major influence on later record production.

World-famous pianist Tsuyoshi Yamamoto’s second East Wind release, "Life," appears in the lineup for "Spin This Now!" Vol. 9. Backed by a golden rhythm section with Sam Jones on bass and Billy Higgins on drums, Yamamoto delivers a supremely swinging performance. His delicate ballad playing on "If You Could See Me Now" is also essential listening.

East Wind was a groundbreaking jazz label established in 1974 through the full cooperation of Ai Music, as it was then known, and Nippon Phonogram, as it was then known. Over a period of about five years, the label produced albums not only by Japanese musicians such as Masabumi Kikuchi, Sadao Watanabe, and Terumasa Hino, but also by musicians who were engaged in creative activity on the global jazz scene at the time. In addition to the quality of the performances, the artwork, created with leading designers and photographers, brought a fresh new image to jazz albums and had a major influence on later record production.

Founded in Germany in 2019, CONSVMER. have spent the last few years carving out a space that’s entirely their own: progressive metal, beatdown, and metalcore delivered entirely in German, with an unflinching focus on subjects most people would rather look past. Their 2024 record Seelenfrieden turned heads inside and outside the German metal scene, with coverage from outlets including Nik Nocturnal and a collaboration with Paleface Swiss that confirmed the band were operating at a level far beyond their years. Live, they have earned their place on stages at Summer Breeze, Core Fest and Bembel X Core Festival. Now, with new vocalist Jacques Gronert and a vision sharpened to a point, CONSVMER. return with Abgrund.
Where Seelenfrieden refined the template, Abgrund dismantles it. Across eleven tracks the band push further into territory that feels genuinely unique and uncompromising: the title track opens the record on collective collapse and a society steering towards the edge with no intention of stopping, while songs like "Gier" tear into systemic greed and exploitation with brutal clarity, "Willenlos" descends into dissociation and the erasure of identity, and "Sucht" confronts addiction and self-destruction with a rawness that is hard to shake. Closer "Gottverlassen" leaves the listener exactly where the title suggests. The collaboration with brutal deathcore veterans Acranius on "Sucht" hits like a freight train, their English-language verses locking into CONSVMER.'s German delivery to devastating effect. Fellow German hardcore outfit DOGBITE also appear, adding another dimension to a record that never loses focus.

Courant Zéro is the new moniker of Montréal multi-media installation artist and Kohlenstoff label co-founder Maxime Corbeil-Perron, signalling his return to purely recording-based electronic music production following several years focused on award-winning experimental film and audio-visual works. Solari channels his cinematic sensibility and decade-long exploration of sound art and electroacoustic counterpoint into deep cuts of maximalist ambient electronica. Drawing on his early background as a pianist and jazz drummer, Corbeil-Perron weaves a fabric of melodic and rhythmic vectors with his unique timbral palette, intersecting modern composition, IDM, ambient, glitch, and noise on a debut album brimming with sonic detail and emotive resonance. A fixture of Montréal's sound art community as both creator and curator since the early 2010s, Corbeil-Perron's work has ranged from "hypnotic A/V onslaught" (FACT Magazine) to the "richly nuanced acousmatic journey" of his 2018 EP Polychrome (Bandcamp Best Contemporary Classical Of The Month), with earlier electronic and techno-adjacent projects like Political Ritual, Dresden, and Le poisson d'argent garnering accolades from avant-music outlets A Closer Listen, Silence and Sound, and Musicworks, among others. Courant Zéro mobilizes this cumulative wealth of explorative sonic experience in the service of distinctive compositional architectures and electronic music pathways that fans of Floating Points, Jan Jelinek, Squarepusher, Tim Hecker, and Oneohtrix Point Never should find compelling. Title track "Solari" opens the album with a cavernous ambient glitch-drone soundscape that envelops ever-shifting timbres of modular arpeggiation, serving as introduction to the clarion call of "En deçà du réel", an homage to video artist Manon Labrecque, where layers of interweaving melodic counterpoint played on Buchla and other synths slowly build to widescreen immersive intensities; "I have this vision of Labreque vibrating eternally between two frames of magnetic VHS tape_ the slow pace of the piece also inspired by Tarkovsky's approach to scenography" says Corbeil-Perron. "Strange Aorta" is ectoplasmic ambient with wistful melody lines transmuting along a central filament, awash in shifting waves of low-end and ricocheting tonal glitch, the title a reference to "the thumping rhythm beating around the main melody_and the heavy remnants of grief related to my father's passing and a brutal confrontation with my own mortality a few years back." Tracks like "La peau des dents" and "Eroding Us" are more firmly rooted in electroacoustic and aleatory systems music, where colliding loops are shaped into unstable flows of deconstructed slippage and reconvergence. Those two pieces bookend the album's pivotal center: the gorgeous piano digitalia of "Horizon n'arrête" and the skittering electronica of 9-minute opus "Unyeldd", its loping broken beat and cascading melodic glitter like a cluster of wind-up music boxes in a dappled forest _ and for Corbeil- Perron also partly inspired by now fellow Constellation labelmates Do Make Say Think: "I spent a lot of time rediscovering their records after seeing them last September 2024 which definitely influenced this piece." Courant Zéro's debut is a vibrant sonic rebus at the junction of electronic, electroacoustic, noise and ambient music that resists easy categorisation. Solari strikes a compelling balance of unsettled disorientation and hospitable warmth, teeming with real feeling throughout. The album's cover art painting Cryptography I by Yen-Chao Lin represents this prevailing sensibility, its mazelike circuitry distinctly carved and crisply rendered, while filigreed with handmade detail and artisanal patina. Thanks for listening.

Leeds six piece, Adult DVD, announced their signing to Fat Possum this year, with standalone single ‘Real Tree Lee’, which landed the band on the BBC 6 Music A-List along with ‘Ones To Watch’ attention from the likes of The Rolling Stone, The Line Of Best Fit and more. On September 25th they release their much anticipated debut, self-titled album. Recorded and produced by the band at hometown The Nave Studios, the new album fuses Adult DVD’s love of hook laden indie, with pulsing groove, 90's acid house influence and an undeniable humour in their songwriting. Known for their electric live show, including their recent sold out London residency plus debut USA and Japan tours, Adult DVD is a festival favourite; hailed ‘Best Of SXSW’ (Rolling Stone), 'Best Of The Great Escape' (The Sunday Times, DIY and Dork). The band are continuously on the road with routing booked through to 2027, across UK/EU/US/JP.

Weezer founding member and original bassist, Matt Sharp, while working on a series of “lost-albums” from the cutting room floor of his creative-life, stumbled upon a curious multi-track reel of analog tape. This mysterious reel found at the bottom of a treasure chest of other master recordings just happened to contain Weezer's very first studio sessions. These were the very same recordings that were responsible for earning the band a record contract for their iconic debut “Blue” album. These newly discovered sessions feature raw, vividly emotional and ecstatic versions of the band's timeless hit songs Say It Ain’t So and Undone (The Sweater Song.) Sharp and legendary music producer Joe Chicarrelli took these recordings to Los Angeles’ famed East/West Studios to take a deeper look into this mythic reel of 1-inch Ampex tape. What the two men quickly discovered was the original lineup (with guitarist Jason Cropper) in an infectious, explosively joyful, feral form. Making the decision to honor the original intention of the music and the traditional technology of the era, the songs were remixed from top to bottom, from tape to vinyl, in a 100% analog process.With Sharp as producer and Chicarrelli on the mix, the result of these sessions makes up the entirety of “1192” (named after the month and year it was originally recorded.) The illuminating spirit of the performances on 1192 are guaranteed to turn the world upside down for blue album fans everywhere. This album stands on its own as an essential entry into the band’s discography and is crucial to understanding the first chapter in Weezer's storied history.

A Flower to Water, the staggering new album from Greek Progressive-Post Metal outfit Playgrounded, finds the five-piece pushing their boundaries even further; welcoming the unquantifiable depths of loss, grief and finitude into their meticulous, fractal process as friends in defiance of neglect. Hailing from Athens, Greece but predominantly based in Rotterdam, Netherlands, Playgrounded have never ceased to push the envelope of Post Metal with genre-defying contemporary electronic and cinematic neo-classical elements since the band's inception almost two decades ago. A Flower to Water is Playgrounded's third full-length offering and sees the band thriving in their creative relationship with Pelagic Records. Recorded and produced by the band across multiple studios back home in Athens and Rotterdam, Playgrounded enlisted the help of longtime collaborators C. Cederberg (Leprous, Anathema) who mixed the album at Cederberg Studios in Kristiansand, Norway and George Tandero (Madrugada, Satyricon, Jaga Jazzist) who mastered it in Oslo. A profound sense of patience is keenly felt throughout the album. The deliberate spaces between each hammerblow guitar riff, pulsing bass line or hypnotic drum groove; each heavy, breathless pause and fizzing glitchy whisper all tell of unspoken loss and absence as an indelible part of A Flower to Water and indeed of Playgrounded forever more. In marking this absence however, in embracing loss head on, Playgrounded reify memory in defiance of neglect. By extracting such a colossal, breathtaking piece of work from a seemingly unassuming collection of sounds, clips and sonics; the quintet slow time to a standstill to present grief in bloom; a beautiful, perpetual flower with its roots in loved ones lost. FOR FANS OF Karnivool, Katatonia, Nine Inch Nails, Deftones, Moderat, The Ocean, Vola, Leprous, Skyharbor, Anathema

A Flower to Water, the staggering new album from Greek Progressive-Post Metal outfit Playgrounded, finds the five-piece pushing their boundaries even further; welcoming the unquantifiable depths of loss, grief and finitude into their meticulous, fractal process as friends in defiance of neglect. Hailing from Athens, Greece but predominantly based in Rotterdam, Netherlands, Playgrounded have never ceased to push the envelope of Post Metal with genre-defying contemporary electronic and cinematic neo-classical elements since the band's inception almost two decades ago. A Flower to Water is Playgrounded's third full-length offering and sees the band thriving in their creative relationship with Pelagic Records. Recorded and produced by the band across multiple studios back home in Athens and Rotterdam, Playgrounded enlisted the help of longtime collaborators C. Cederberg (Leprous, Anathema) who mixed the album at Cederberg Studios in Kristiansand, Norway and George Tandero (Madrugada, Satyricon, Jaga Jazzist) who mastered it in Oslo. A profound sense of patience is keenly felt throughout the album. The deliberate spaces between each hammerblow guitar riff, pulsing bass line or hypnotic drum groove; each heavy, breathless pause and fizzing glitchy whisper all tell of unspoken loss and absence as an indelible part of A Flower to Water and indeed of Playgrounded forever more. In marking this absence however, in embracing loss head on, Playgrounded reify memory in defiance of neglect. By extracting such a colossal, breathtaking piece of work from a seemingly unassuming collection of sounds, clips and sonics; the quintet slow time to a standstill to present grief in bloom; a beautiful, perpetual flower with its roots in loved ones lost. FOR FANS OF Karnivool, Katatonia, Nine Inch Nails, Deftones, Moderat, The Ocean, Vola, Leprous, Skyharbor, Anathema

For acclaimed folk artist Martin Simpson, this release reflects not just a remarkable 50-year recording career, but over six decades shaped by song, tradition, and continual artistic growth. Yet this is not a retrospective, it's a forward-looking work, carrying the depth, skill, and passion of a lifetime into the present. Marking 50 years since his debut album Golden Vanity, Simpson describes Some Kind of Jubilee as "my best work to date." To realise this landmark project, he brings together an exceptional group of collaborators drawn from across his long and distinguished career. Among them are renowned pedal steel guitarist Greg Leisz, guitarist Zac Hobbs, cellist Liz Hanks, guitarist Louis Campbell, and double bassist Ben Nicholls. Together, they create a rich and textured soundscape that honours tradition while embracing fresh perspectives. Recorded at Groovemaster Studio in Santa Monica and completed in Yorkshire, the album blends newly written songs with reimagined traditional material and inspired reinterpretations from Simpson's own catalogue. The result is a deeply rooted yet vibrant collection that reflects both heritage and innovation. As Greg Leisz puts it, "This music has some profoundly deep roots - so dig in." With Some Kind of Jubilee, Martin Simpson honours his past while continuing to shape the future of folk music, reaffirming his place as one of the genre's most respected and enduring voices.

Boulderhead arrives on Haŵs with ‘Sunshine’ — four cuts that blur the line between club functionality and sonic experimentation. Twisting delays, playful FX work and endlessly shifting textures give the record a voice that's unmistakably his, pushing familiar forms into stranger territory without ever losing sight of the dancefloor.

The title track ‘Sunshine’ opens proceedings with a heads-down trip anchored by a cheeky, tongue-in-cheek vocal hook, swung grooves, and hypnotic momentum. Jorg Kuning steps up on remix duties, gently reshaping the original at every turn. His hardware-led approach keeps the groove in constant motion, each subtle shift revealing another layer without ever breaking the spell. Flip the record and ‘Moonshine’ strips things back into classic Boulderhead territory, while ‘Practice’ closes the EP on a deeper note, pairing lush synth work with beautifully detailed percussion for one final slow burn.

Never too serious, always full of character. The kind of record that keeps giving something new back with every listen.

Tucked in the heart of Koreatown, Los Angeles, lies The Libra Hotel—the titular architecture of Nick Malkin's new album and site of his musical and psychogeographic exploration. Unlike most musical "site-specific" studies, Malkin remains wholly ambivalent to the documentarian approach, instead sharpening an auteur-like focus on the site as a conceptual and highly expressive backdrop. The Libra is musically explored as a space that houses a noir fragmentation of identity—the exhausted trope of a complicated protagonist walking through rain-soaked street corners and fumy neon lights—where an inner monologue is rendered in both miniature and at a cosmic scale. Casting aside stifling tropes around field recording, ambient, and improvised music, Malkin's work finds its own unique fidelity and emotional core through the assembly and reassembly of memory. Nearly every sound on the album—from frayed saxophones, lambent pianos, and dissected jazz drum kits—are multiplied, shattered, and reconstituted into shapes that adorn The Libra in a motion-blurred fog. The narrative of the Hotel suddenly appears as if out of the mist, with intersecting characters interacting within its walls by happenstance. Adminst the languid set pieces, wraith-like sonic grains gravitate around wide subbass beams that give structural form to The Libra, a narrative tension like when a scene is shot from hundreds of different perspectives: an image both luminous and veiled.

Much like Frank Sinatra's own spatial residency immortalized on "Live at The Sands," "At The Libra Hotel" showcases an exuberant view of entertainment, hospitality, and a form of masculinity, one that can quickly detourn into darkness. Knowing this, Malkin extracts a melancholic core out of The Libra locale. The flickering shadows of American decadence are shown in their ephemeral honesty, lines that trace how even in everyday life virtue is tested, sanity is tested, even reality is tested within the confines of desire, within the night. The album is draped in fleeting textures, carefully arranged with a trance-like microtonality, the faint inflections and articulations of a jazz band cascading into dissipated stillness. Voicemails about changed locations and covert eavesdropping on guests' whispered conversations provide an atmosphere of missed connection and voyeurism—a purloined letter of desire receding into a vanishing point. Like the music itself, The Hotel, a chapel perilous at the intersection of desolation row, the center of it all, yet simultaneously at the edge of town, becomes a structure between libidinous virtuality and actuality—our inevitable half-light.

Ultimately, the pensive atmosphere of "At The Libra Hotel," powerfully asserts a plea for the kinds of intimacy only possible in transient spaces. Here, memory cascades into a force that feels like something supernatural, perhaps even religious, yet always subject to the infidelity of our imagination. Here, the album opens into its primary psychodrama, the transient nature of subjectivity itself and how this becomes fractured in the tumult between our commitments and desires. Within this nocturnal space, to quote Louise Bourgeois, "you pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture."

Sun Ra is better known to most as a musician than a poet, but he identified equally as both. My Words Are Music provides direct access to the sentiments of a poet who never called Earth home. The spoken word album hosts an inspired array of artists who personally chose their favorite Sun Ra poems to recite. Freed from the page, his poetry acquires an unexpected simplicity and poignance it possessed all along.

This all-star and intergenerational lineup of artists conjure wisdom from his words: spoken word elder Abiodun Oweyole of The Last Poets; rapper, and singer-songwriter Saul Williams; jazz experimentalist Melanie Charles; British-Trinidadian poet, novelist and musician Anthony Joseph; poet Mahogany L. Browne; poet, playwright, and conceptual artist Carl Hancock Rux; musician/digital composer L’Rain; singer, actor, and director Tunde Adibempe of TV on the Radio singer; British DJ and BBC radio host Zakia Sewell; ballistic hip-hop poet Jive Poetic; and longtime members of the Sun Ra Arkestra, Marshall Allen, Knoel Scott, and Tara Middleton.

Punctuated by impish electronic interludes composed and played by Marshall Allen, these voices bless Sun Ra’s poetry with new life My Words Are Music offers the opportunity to follow Sun Ra into a
better future. “Prepare for the journey,” he writes in his poem “The Cosmic Age”, “You have a rendezvous / With the living wisdom.” My Words Are Music is a project developed in conjunction with Living Sky, the all-instrumental Sun Ra Arkestra album released on Omni Sound in 2022

For her new and most radical album »Electroacoustic Works for Halldorophone«, Martina Bertoni used the electronic instrument at EMS Stockholm to create four pieces that are massive in scale and incredibly intimate, sonically restrained and emotionally overwhelming—almost ambient and always demanding your full attention.

Martina Bertoni returns to Karlrecords with »Electroacoustic Works for Halldorophone,« her most radical album yet. The foundation for the four electroacoustic pieces was laid during a residency at Stockholm’s legendary Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) that the Berlin-based cellist and composer used to explore the curious instrument, originally designed by Halldór Úlfarsson in 2008, as an algorithmic system in order to examine tunings and the mathematical relationships between Aiming to analyse and understand their interaction beyond the composer’s control, Bertoni sought to engage more deeply with the concepts of time, tuning, and, most importantly, control. Accordingly, her four »Electroacoustic Works for Halldorophone« seem both massive in scale and incredibly intimate, sonically restrained and emotionally overwhelming— almost ambient and always demanding your full attention.

While the halldorophone—famously used by Hildur Guðnadóttir for her »Joker« score—roughly resembles a cello and can be played like one, it is an electronic instrument. The vibration of its strings is being picked up, amplified, and then routed through a speaker. This creates a feedback loop that becomes increasingly complex depending on how much gain is added to individual strings. Úlfarsson gave Bertoni a carte blanche for how to handle the instrument, but she stresses that she relied on »minimal interventions—some string strumming and plucking« that set the interactions of different sounds and frequencies into motion. »I decided to not approach it like a cellist would,« she explains. »Instead I used it as a kind of generative organ by turning it into a feedback machine, with tuned feedback triggering more feedback depending on the tuning, which was based on tetraphonic scales that I could apply on the four main strings as well as the sympathetic group of strings.«

Bertoni recorded the material in the EMS studio, later composing and arranging the four complex pieces in her home in Berlin, after which they were mixed and mastered by Ciaran O’Shea. While this can be considered a compositional abstraction process, traces of her concrete work as a performer are firmly ingrained in the music. »The halldorophone doesn’t have a line output, just a double set of speakers, which is why I recorded all sounds with two microphones in the EMS studio,« she explains. »That’s why there’s plenty of breathing sounds here and there—label owner Thomas Herbst and I jokingly refer to the album as my ›chamber music record‹.« And indeed, there is a striking sense of intimacy to these four pieces throughout which individual sounds, harmonic frequencies, and even subtle rhythmic figures seem to move both on their own accord but also according to a underlying vision that steers their interplay.

Indeed, »Electroacoustic Works for Halldorophone« is an album built on and marked by contrasts. The soothing polylogue of single sounds in the higher register on opener »Omen in G« is counterpointed by massive bass drones, while the second piece, »Nominal in D,« plays a cunning game of repetition and difference by combining thick textures with all kinds of rhythmic elements. »Fades in C«—the longest of the four pieces, clocking in at 17 minutes—unlocks the emotional potentials of the sonic qualities of the halldorophone, sounding at once serene and anthemic, and »Organon in D« closes the album by underscoring how Bertoni’s unconventional approach allows her to seamlessly transform simple, quiet tones into complex, towering walls of sound.

»Cosmogonical Ears« is Amosphère's first album for Hallow Ground. Following her contribution to the Swiss label’s »Epiphanies« compilation and her 2021 full-length debut »More Die of Heartbreak« on 33-33, it features three expansive pieces. The Paris-based composer and multidisciplinary artist delves deeper into themes of time, space, cosmology, human perception, and psycho-physical effects, crafting profound sonic meditations. Drawing on a minimalist approach while blending electronic and acoustic elements, Amosphère’s long-form compositions are living, breathing entities whose sonic richness and evocative power unfold gradually over time, putting »Cosmogonical Ears« in direct kinship with previous Hallow Ground releases by artists such as Kali Malone and FUJI|||||||||||TA.

The album opens with its longest piece, »Land of eternal delight,« composed for the Buddha10 exhibition at the Museo d'Arte Orientale in Turin. Written during three years of isolation—a period in which Amosphère explored meditation practices and diverse belief systems—it merges mythology with personal transcendental experiences, reflecting on a challenging time for humanity. »By blending Buddhist philosophy and sculpture with my own meditation practices, I sought to explore a way for people to transcend the boundaries of space and time—not as a believer, but as an observer,« she explains. Featuring handmade ceramic instruments and recorded by Thomas Lefevre, the piece combines Amosphère’s electronic organ with Marc Lochner’s flute contributions, creating a sound that is simultaneously minimalist and expansive.

The concept of teleportation and how it challenges traditional notions of time and space serves as the foundation for the second piece. »Recent advances in quantum physics suggest that teleportation might be possible through quantum entanglement,« Amosphère notes. »What if science fiction is becoming reality—or has already existed in ancient times?« Drawing inspiration from theories proposed by physicists such as Roger Penrose, Amosphère again worked together with flutist Lochner, this time using her VCS 3 synthesizer. »Teleportation« weaves single notes into intricate, non-linear patterns that defy conventional logic, creating a complex auditory tapestry. The last piece »Black hole in, white hole out« was recorded on Corsica and features Miao Zhao’s bass clarinet drones alongside Amosphère’s church organ. It imagines the possible sound of crossing a black hole while also suggesting the study of its theoretical exit and its potential applications for large-scale time and space travel.

The questions posed by »Cosmogonical Ears« do not yield straightforward answers. Instead, Amosphère’s restrained yet intricately layered compositions require full immersion and concentration from the listener. As expressed by the album’s title—which envisions the birth of a new universe through listening—»Cosmogonical Ears« offers an experimental approach to auditory perception as a tool for seeking truth, freedom, and harmony between the outer world and the inner self.