Buscar:a thin man

Deathchain’s early albums reissued on vinyl for the first time in May via Svart Records Finnish death-thrashing maniacs Deathchain’s debut and sophomore albums will be available on vinyl for the first time ever on May 30th, 2025 via Svart Records. Deathchain, hailing from the city of Kuopio, was formed in 2001 from the remains of Winterwolf when the band’s guitarist Corpse moved from the countryside to the city to kick things off, and they continue their illustrious and wild axe wielding path to this day. DEADMEAT DISCIPLES (2003) and DEATHRASH ASSAULT (2005) were originally released by Dynamic Arts Records only on CD. The debut gained a lot of great reviews in Europe, paving the way for the band’s substantial touring around Central Europe, Netherlands, and Belgium. The sophomore album DEATHRASH ASSAULT, which ended in the 18th place on the Official Finnish Album Chart, unleashed Deathchain on the Hellhoundz of Doom and Thrash -tour with Candlemass and Destruction, playing live shows in thirteen countries across Europe. The Japanese version of the album was later released on CD in 2006, featuring a bonus cover track of Slayer’s Black Magic. Corpse comments the reissues: ”It's been over two decades since we recorded our first two albums, and finally they will be unleashed to haunt in the format that is closest to our hearts. Both of these albums were recorded in Kuopio at Studio Perkele, which was the beating heart of the underground back then. We were young and handsome alcohol fueled bastards aiming to make music that is fast, furious, and riff driven. The legendary Valhalla metal bar scene was our home and starting point, and surely you can hear the echoes of North Sawonian madness within these albums. Those times were full of insanely good times, and we did our best to catch the spirit of the old school within our music. Finally with the help of Svart Records we are proud to present you these buried gems of death thrashing metal.” DEADMEAT DISCIPLES is available on Svart exclusive green & yellow marble vinyl, limited transparent green vinyl, and classic black vinyl.

Deathchain’s early albums reissued on vinyl for the first time in May via Svart Records Finnish death-thrashing maniacs Deathchain’s debut and sophomore albums will be available on vinyl for the first time ever on May 30th, 2025 via Svart Records. Deathchain, hailing from the city of Kuopio, was formed in 2001 from the remains of Winterwolf when the band’s guitarist Corpse moved from the countryside to the city to kick things off, and they continue their illustrious and wild axe wielding path to this day. DEADMEAT DISCIPLES (2003) and DEATHRASH ASSAULT (2005) were originally released by Dynamic Arts Records only on CD. The debut gained a lot of great reviews in Europe, paving the way for the band’s substantial touring around Central Europe, Netherlands, and Belgium. The sophomore album DEATHRASH ASSAULT, which ended in the 18th place on the Official Finnish Album Chart, unleashed Deathchain on the Hellhoundz of Doom and Thrash -tour with Candlemass and Destruction, playing live shows in thirteen countries across Europe. The Japanese version of the album was later released on CD in 2006, featuring a bonus cover track of Slayer’s Black Magic. Corpse comments the reissues: ”It's been over two decades since we recorded our first two albums, and finally they will be unleashed to haunt in the format that is closest to our hearts. Both of these albums were recorded in Kuopio at Studio Perkele, which was the beating heart of the underground back then. We were young and handsome alcohol fueled bastards aiming to make music that is fast, furious, and riff driven. The legendary Valhalla metal bar scene was our home and starting point, and surely you can hear the echoes of North Sawonian madness within these albums. Those times were full of insanely good times, and we did our best to catch the spirit of the old school within our music. Finally with the help of Svart Records we are proud to present you these buried gems of death thrashing metal.” DEADMEAT DISCIPLES is available on Svart exclusive green & yellow marble vinyl, limited transparent green vinyl, and classic black vinyl.

Der 1999 veröffentlichte Soundtrack zu Eyes Wide Shut enthält eine einzigartige Trackliste mit Hits wie „Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing“ von Chris Isaak sowie Originalkompositionen von Jocelyn Pook, die den unheimlichen und spannungsgeladenen Ton des Films perfekt ergänzen. Ein herausragendes Stück, „Masked Ball“, wurde wegen seiner eindringlichen, atmosphärischen Qualitäten zur Ikone. Das Album wurde für einen Grammy Award in der Kategorie „Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media“ nominiert, was die Anerkennung der Kritiker unterstreicht.

Fast Castle kicks off 2025 with another five-track heater: Stable Units by Gent1e $oul!
Across five tracks, Gent1e $oul hones his signature blend of bass-driven genres, adding more dancefloor-focused cuts to his ever-expanding sonic universe.
The opener, 4TC Boom, came together in a single restless session, crafted as a late-night special for the label’s most recent dance at Fitzroy. Its thick, drippy bassline—born from Digitakt overdrive manipulation—makes it the perfect stalactite cave anthem.
Next up, Paladin—named after the strongest horseback unit in Gentle $oul’s beloved AOE II—marks Gent1e $oul’s second collaboration with recent Femme Bass Mafia production graduate Rolex3k. This jersey-tinged, wubby roller was first road-tested by MSJY at Reef, where it proved its undeniable dancefloor potential.
Who doesn’t love that classic M1 grime flute? +390 pairs its signature "ring ring" sound with rolling UK techno drums, making for a no-brainer DJ tool.
On the flip, Steppe Lancer is a brooding, venomous mutation—headsy, progressive, and laced with heavy, evil energy. An FCHQ favorite and one for the heads!
Closing things out, Parthian Tactics dives deep with a late-night dubstep cut. Powerful enough to shake the subs, yet swaying in half-time for those introspective moments.
For the artwork, our graphic wizard Jonas went all out, creating a stunning detailed Bronze Age–inspired 3D equestrian design. Snag the full-cover printed vinyl via Bandcamp or at your favorite record store.

Quick Guide
4TC Boom, 154bpm – Drippy stalactite cave, peak-time weapon
Paladin, 142bpm – Wubby jersey roller, groovy DJ tool
+390, 138bpm – Grime-tinged dubstep x techno hybrid
Steppe Lancer, 154bpm – Headsy, progressive rattlesnake venom bomb
Parthian Tactics, 146bpm – Deep dubstep for late-night sessions

Over the decades, the image of Kompakt as a pirate ship has taken root in our minds, braving the dangers of the seven seas of the music market. Sometimes it glides with a tailwind through calm waters, sometimes it has to survive violent storms. When we set sail in 1993, we never would have dreamt that our journey would still be going on after more than three decades and with 500 releases to date.

In our fast-paced business, the 500 mark is rarely reached, so we want to celebrate it with a lavish 5LP box set. In a democratic process, we have selected 50 pearls from the thousands of tracks released over the last 33 1/3 years and pressed them onto 5 brightly coloured vinyls. Alongside many Kompakt evergreens, there are also some real rarities from the early ‘Kompakt Sound of Cologne’, which have been lovingly remastered here to shine in new splendour.

The box also contains a 144-page book that tells the story of Kompakt from 1993 to today with detailed texts and images. In addition to the manifold musical and graphic achievements of Kompakt, the multidisciplinary links to the visual arts are also highlighted here.

The Bonus Picture Disc opens with the symbolic tolling of 500 bass drums, followed by 50 locked grooves from the 5 Kompakt founders, looping into infinity at 133 1/3 BPM, and the ‘33 1/3 Years Loop Opera’ – in which the loops are combined into one track that, in its reduced essence, is more than the sum of its individual parts. The magic of groovy loop minimalism and the ‘art of omission’ are once again brought to the proverbial point.

On 23 May 2025, the big KOMPAKT 500 art exhibition will open at the venerable Kölnischer Kunstverein to coincide with the release. The entire visual cosmos of Kompakt will be shown here in an unprecedented way on three floors, with the participation of many renowned artists. Of course, there will also be dancing and partying at the vernissage party, with DJ sets and live shows by the Kompakt Allstars.

The last one turns off the bass drum.


Im Laufe der Jahrzehnte hat sich in unseren Köpfen das Bild von Kompakt als Piratenschiff festgesetzt, das den Gefahren der sieben Weltmeere des Musikmarktes trotzt. Mal gleitet es mit Rückenwind durch ruhige Gewässer, mal muss es heftige Stürme überstehen. Als wir 1993 die Segel setzten, hätten wir uns nicht träumen lassen, dass unsere Reise nach über drei Jahrzehnten und mittlerweile 500 Veröffentlichungen immer noch andauert.

Die 500 ist in unserem schnelllebigen Geschäft eine selten erreichte Katalognummer und soll daher mit einer üppigen 5LP-Box gebührend gefeiert werden. In einem demokratischen Prozess haben wir aus den tausenden Tracks der letzten 33 1/3 Jahre 50 Perlen ausgewählt und auf 5 knallbunte Vinyls gepresst. Neben vielen Kompakt-Evergreens finden sich auch einige echte Raritäten des frühen “Kompakt Sound of Cologne”, die hier liebevoll remastered in neuem Glanz erstrahlen.

Die Box enthält außerdem ein 144-seitiges Buch, das mit ausführlichen Texten und Bildern die Kompakt-Geschichte von 1993 bis heute erzählt. Neben den mannigfaltigen musikalischen und grafischen Errungenschaften von Kompakt werden hier auch die multidisziplinären Vernetzungen zur bildenden Kunst beleuchtet.

Die Bonus Picture Disc wird mit einem symbolischen Glockenschlag von 500 Bassdrums eröffnet, gefolgt von 50 Endlosrillen der 5 Kompakt-Gründer, die sich bei 133 1/3 BPM in die Unendlichkeit schleifen sowie der “33 1/3 Years Loop Opera”, in der die Loops zu einem Track zusammengefügt werden, der in seiner reduzierten Essenz mehr ist als die Summe seiner Einzelteile. Die Magie des groovenden Loop-Minimalismus und die “Kunst des Weglassens” werden einmal mehr auf den sprichwörtlichen Punkt gebracht.

Am 23. Mai 2025 eröffnet parallel zum Release die große KOMPAKT 500 Kunstausstellung im ehrwürdigen Kölnischen Kunstverein. Der gesamte visuelle Kosmos von Kompakt wird hier unter Beteiligung vieler namhafter Künstler*Innen in nie gesehener Form auf drei Etagen gezeigt. Selbstverständlich darf zur Vernissagenparty auch getanzt und gefeiert werden zu DJ Sets und Liveshows der Kompakt Allstars.

Der Letzte macht die Bassdrum aus.

My debut EP on Rupture LDN, ‘Shades of Rave Vol 1’ was created with my love of raving at its core. I love arriving early doors when the anticipation of the night ahead is at its peak, feeling like we’re on the edge of something new and thrilling. I love dancing when we’re deep in session, everyone has come undone and the power hours are in full effect - the energy is frenzied and wild. I love the golden hours towards the end of the night when the crowd has thinned and we’re exhausted but energised, physically empty but spiritually full.

This EP touches on 4x4 jungle techno, jungle, deep d&b and there’s also a spoken word/ poem track dedicated to our ‘all night long’ Ferry to the Underworld sessions at Corsica Studios.

Inspired by the many moods and energies of the dance floor, I wanted to express the different shades of rave I continue to love and cherish all these years on since going to my first rave at 14.

Viva la rave!!

Album "My Life - Preisner's Music is a live recording from a concert held in November 2024 in Bielsko-Bia?a, marking the occasion of Zbigniew Preisner receiving Honorary Citizenship of his hometown, Bielsko-Bia?a.
This year, on May 20th, Zbigniew Preisner will celebrate his 70th birthday, and the album is a his gift he made to himself.

The album includes 17 iconic themes composed by Zbigniew Preisner among others from Three Colours, Decalogue, The Secret garden, The double life of Veronique, Damage, When a man loves a woman, Eminent Domain, Aberdeen, Mouvements du desir, Lost and Love, but also Lacrimosa from Requiem for my Friend in the interpretation of Dominik Wania.

Few words from Zbigniew Preisner:
"For years, I've been thinking about reducing my orchestral themes to a single instrument. As a composer, I pay special attention to melody-each of my compositions always has melodic themes.
Ten years ago, I met Dominik Wania, now a jazz star and a brilliant pianist who records albums for ECM. I knew he was the perfect person to bring my idea to life.
The concert you are about to listen to is the result of our collaboration, which has given me great satisfaction. Dominik Wania's interpretation went beyond my wildest expectations. I hope you will enjoy the album."

Reviews of the album:

"When I teach the films of Krzysztof Kieslowski at Columbia University, I always mention that Zbigniew Preisner is one of the world's greatest film composers. He has many fans among my students. And now there is a new album, a haunting distillation of his movie scores into solo piano performances. It demonstrates how he is the master composer of the tritone, trill and tremolo. Listening to his compositions in their own terms - separate from the cinema screen - foregrounds his distinctive and often plaintive melodies.
Because orchestration, lyrics and narrative function are absent, the listener can focus on the richness of the "standalone" music, beautifully performed by Dominik Wania. For example, the memorable score from Kieslowski's "Double Life of Veronique" now feels more ominous than lyrical. From "Mouvements du desir," the tinkling piano sounds grow into cascading notes that envelop the listener. Whether classical (as in "When a Man Loves a Woman" and "The Waltz from The Funeral") or jazz ("The Secret Garden"), the music reigns when there is no movie screen to distract us. This is equally true of the minor-key gems like "Dekalog" and the briskly upbeat "Transient from Twilight" (which invokes for me the joy of Jon Baptiste's compositions).
In addition to Preisner's scores, the mournful "Lacrimosa" is stripped down from a public performance - which included a choir - to a more personal evocation of grief via solo piano. Finally, listening to "Lost and Love" suggests that if Frederic Chopin and Keith Jarrett had an heir together, it would be Zbigniew Preisner".
Annette Insdorf, Film Professor Columbia University

WOW. Daniel O'Sullivan's transcendent new album, Eros, is one of the greatest things we've ever heard. A simply stunning song cycle of hypnotic, experimental contemporary chamber music composed for a 14-piece ensemble. Combining minimalism, complex syncopation, detailed acoustic textures, weird intervals and samurai precision, this record will elegantly blow your mind. When Daniel first sent us this, he pitched it as “Liquid Swords meets Michael Nyman”. Trust us, he wasn't wrong. A "unique hybrid orchestral music", it presents a confluence of Daniel's longstanding fixations; indeed, there's elements of Nyman, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Magma, Aaron Copland and RZA. But this is wholly O'Sullivan's. Originally commissioned for the Sonoton Music Library in Munich, Eros now receives a deluxe vinyl release courtesy of Be With Records, bringing this meticulously crafted work to a wider audience. Limited to just 500 copies for the world, these are gonna fly.

An English composer and multi-instrumentalist, Daniel O'Sullivan’s career has been marked by versatility and innovation. In addition to his work with Sonoton, he has composed extensively for the legendary KPM music library, contributing to its storied legacy of production music. As a deep virtuoso and collaborator, O'Sullivan has also played in a number of influential projects, including Ulver, Sunn O))), This Is Not This Heat, Grumbling Fur and Miracle (with Steve Moore), leaving an indelible mark on the contemporary experimental music landscape.

O’Sullivan’s first foray into classically informed chamber music, Eros is a culmination of his long-standing fixations and expansive musical influences. The album features arrangements that are as detailed as they are emotionally resonant, showcasing his unparalleled ear for intervals and mastery of counterpoint. The music brims with complex rhythmic syncopation and a sensitivity to texture and space, resulting in a soundscape that is both intoxicating and dauntingly precise.

Recorded June 2023 and February 2024, in Brussels, London and Carmarthenshire, Wales, Eros features members of Echo Collective (Neil Leiter and Margaret Hermant), Thighpaulsandra (from seminal post-industrial band Coil), and jazz pioneer Oren Marshall. Daniel's sonic weapons of choice, in his own inimitable words, were "Big Bad Drum, Pee Anne Oh, Low End Brass, Willowy Winds & Samurai Strings." You get the picture. As a cyclical suite, this is a record that really needs to be heard in its entitreity, from start to finish, to truly appreciate the genius at work here.

A jaw-dropping statement of intent, the minimalist "Golden Verses" sets the tone with its complex cue which has your neck snapping right when it feels like it needs to. Listen and you'll understand. A syncopated tangle of sharp strings, crunchy bass, drums percussion and bright piano and mallets vie for position with French horn and woodwind melody in the most compelling and unexpected ways. Quite simply, it's one of the finest album openers I've ever heard. It's followed by the atmospheric rippling minimalism of "Lyre Lyre", a gorgeous gem with shimmering chimes, bright melody, human percussion and syncopated pizzicato strings. It kinda comes on like a less-abstract Boards Of Canada, bursting with typical wonderment. The piano and string-drenched "Dolorous Stroke" effortlessly builds its warm, pastoral orchestration with flowing piano arpeggio, steadfast drums, expressive string quartet, rich low brass, woodwind and lyrical flute. Just sublime.

The insistent frenetic propulsion of "Plain Paper" is utterly beguiling, featuring a determined string motif, urgent drums and percussion, driving low brass and breathless, energetic flute. The haunting, interweaving string arpeggios that propel "Grapes Draped" presents a claustrophobic minimalism for chaos and darkness, with growling low woodwind and brass, spiky harpsichord, skittering flutes and tight drums. Up next, "Xanix Annum" is a stately minimalist waltz with expressive lyrical string quartet and delicate woodwind, anchored by drums and percussion. "Painting Rose" is a bouncy stop-start track with angular syncopated strings and a piano pulse underneath bright harpsichord and flutes. "Rotunda Garden" presents ethereal textural minimalism for landscapes and reflection with flowing string arpeggios, warm, low woodwind drones, floating choir and cymbal swells. Closing out this extraordinary side of music, the glowing, flowing minimalism of "Flowry Orb" features urgent organ, piano and woodwind arpeggios, half-time drums with shimmering cymbals, a soaring, beautiful violin solo and hypnotic vocal chant.

Side 2 opens with "Theia Mania" a determinedly off-kilter, angular track featuring low wind, brass and drum stomp in dialogue with lively string trio, woodwind and solo horn. The light, airy minimalism of "Painting Percy" is built around an interplay of rhythmic motifs for piano, low brass, bassoon, fluttering flutes, urgent strings, drums and percussion whilst "For Archetypes" is a delicate, gently syncopated chamber cue for nostalgia, nature, reflection and moments of calm, with steady piano motif, intimate woodwind and French horn, and warm, graceful strings. The urgent Ars Memoriae is a propulsive march for progress, processes and industry, underpinned by driving tuba, with determined strings, resolute drums, and vivid, expressive flute, clarinet and French horn.

The syncopated energetic minimalism of "Mirrored Seven" presents layers of melodic and cyclical piano, drums, low brass, harp, flute and strings. "Pure Ornament" follows, a slowly evolving chamber cue with flowing clarinet, string and harp arpeggio, plodding tuba and percussion, fluttering flute and graceful, lyrical solos. Stunning! Up next, "Brave Boy" moves from its tender, warm, lullaby-like intro with lyrical flute, clarinet and strings before opening into a playful backend driven by a bouncy tuba riff and syncopated piano, woodwind, string trio, and drums and percussion. Rounding out this astonishing piece, "Waxen Waned" is a warm, pastoral chamber cue with light lyrical woodwind, tender French horn and subtly pulsing string trio.

The album's title is a reference to Plato’s conception of Eros, which is more than romantic or physical desire. It is a dynamic and creative force that drives individuals to seek perfection whether in art, relationships, philosophy or the pursuit of truth. Wholly appropriate, here, we think. When asked what his influences were in making this astounding record, he answered thusly: "Non-musical: Householding, Pythagoras, Goethe, Grail romances, Hermeticism, Doctrine of Signatures (Parcelsus, Bohme, Pliny), Eric Rohmer, John Stezaker, Yasujiro Ozu. Musical: Duke Ellington (late suites), Smile-era Brian, early RZA, Wagner (Parsifal Overture), Magma, Mancini, Axelrod, YMO, Hildegard, Nyman, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Jobim (Stone Flower), Alessandro Alessandroni, Tavener, Moondog, Orthodox Music, Secular Music." That's some pretty deep shit. Makes you want to dive in, no?

Mastering for this vinyl edition was overseen by Be With regular Simon Francis, and it was cut by the esteemed Cicely Balston at Abbey Road Studios to be pressed in the Netherlands by Record Industry. Truly, Eros is a work of extraordinary depth and sophistication. It invites listeners to immerse themselves in its intricate layers, to lose themselves in its hypnotic rhythms, and to marvel at the precision of its execution. With this release, O’Sullivan reaffirms his position as one of the most inventive and uncompromising voices in contemporary music. Do. Not. Sleep.

In the vibrant streets of Tembisa, South Africa, amidst the sprawling urbanity connecting Johannesburg and Pretoria, the story of Moskito began. Formed in 2001 by Mahlubi "Shadow" Radebe and the late Zwelakhe "Malemon" Mtshali, the group first emerged as a powerhouse of pantsula dancers. However, their undeniable passion for music soon led them down a new path_ one that would cement their place in kwaito history. Spending countless hours on the street corners of their township, where they were born and raised, Shadow and Malemon danced and sang with an infectious energy that attracted crowds. It wasn't long before the duo decided to channel their talents into a kwaito group, and after adding friends Patrick Lwane and Menzi Dlodlo, Moskito was born. (Pantsula dancing emerged in the 1950s among Black South Africans in townships and continually evolved until it became intertwined with kwaito music culture. The stylized, rapid foot movements and characteristic low-dancing became associated with kwaito as it took over South African urban culture into the early 2000s.) With limited resources, the group displayed immense creativity, recording demos using two cassette decks and instrumental tracks from other artists. They would rap and sing over an instrumental playing on one deck while the second deck records their performance. Their determination paid off when they submitted their demo to Tammy Music Publishers, who were captivated by Moskito's style. "Kwaito was the thing `in' at the time. If you did music you did kwaito. We wanted to fit in and actually it was easy," says Radebe. "We didn't have engineers in the group, so the first time in a real studio was with Percy and Thami to record Idolar." That same year, the group released their debut album, Idolar, under Tammy Music. The album was an undeniable success reaching gold status selling over 25,000 units and earning them a devoted fan base across South Africa and neighboring countries like Botswana, Swaziland, Namibia and Zimbabwe. Moskito collaborated with industry legends such as Chilly Mthiya Tshabalala, who was known for his work with Thiza and Spoke "H." They drew inspiration from Thami Mdluli a.k.a Professor Rhythm, who had dominated the disco scene back in the 80s and 90s. Mdluli helped with musical arrangements and executive produced the album and signed on producer-engineer Percy Mudau, while Shadow and Malemon took pride in composing most of their songs. Like many of the rising kwaito artists of the time, they didn't have music production or engineering backgrounds so they required support from engineers together their ideas down on tape. They were inspired from South African kwaito icons like Trompies, Mdu, Mandoza, and Arthur Mafokate, alongside international heavyweights like Snoop Doggy Dogg, Dr. Dre, 2Pac, and R. Kelly, Moskito created a sound that was uniquely theirs_a perfect blend of local flavor and global influence.

Three years after the release of her successful debut album 'Alma', Munichbased singer, pianist, and composer Alma Naidu unveils her long-awaited self-produced new album 'Redefine' She presents 13 original songs that showcase remarkable emotional depth, musical diversity, and intensity. The album features a wide range of arrangements, from classic band settings to string orchestras and intimate voice-and-piano solo pieces. It explores themes such as friendship, love, personal growth, and thought- provoking topics like equality and the redefinition of gender roles. The record is further enriched by collaborations with renowned artists, including Mark Lettieri (Snarky Puppy), Raphaela Gromes, Nils Landgren, Jason "JT" Thomas, Lisa Wulff, and Simon Oslender.

Das zweite Album des irischen Bluesrock-Trio jetzt auf Vinyl! 2014 stieg es auf Position 12 in die irischen Albumcharts ein und ist eine brillante Reise voller Blues-Rock Power! Als Nachfolger zu dem 2012 veröffentlichten und von Kritikern vielbeachteten Debüt "Electric Soup"baut das zweite Album der Band, "Rumble Shake" auf diesem Erfolg auf und liefert 10 Bluesrock-Songs aus dem tiefen Süden Irlands. Wahre Geschichten und sündhaft gute Musik mit Gästen wie zum Beispiel der texanischen Legende RAY WYLIE HUBBARD. Aufgenommen wurde das Album in den Westland Studios in Dublin, während das Trio die Historie des Ortes in sich einsog - denn in diesem Studio haben schon Größen wie BOB DYLAN, HORSLIPS und THIN LIZZY ihre Platten machen lassen - und abgemischt in Texas von George Reiff (TEDESCHI TRUCKS BAND, THE BAND OF HEATHENS, RAY WYLIE HUBBARD). Christy O'Hanlon (Gitarre, Vocals), Stephen McGrath (Bass) und Gev Barrett (Drums, Background-Gesang, Perkussion) schrieben bis auf "Jessie Mae" (RAY WYLIE HUBBARD) alle Songs selbst und lassen den Bluesrock weiter Unvergänglichkeit atmen, ohne ihn dabei verstaubt klingen zu lassen.

Carwyn Ellis & Rio 18 release their new album "Fontana Rosa". Possibly the world's only musical group to fuse Latin music of all kinds with the Welsh language, this time Rio 18 draw inspiration from slightly different musical corners, including Chicano Soul, Nuyorican pop, and Salsoul disco plus Latin sounds filtered through the cultural spectrum of the USA.

Most significantly though, the album was among the last ever to be recorded by the acclaimed producer Liam Watson at his legendary studio and shrine to all things analogue, Toerag Studios - a huge inspiration and influence on Rio 18's Carwyn Ellis. The "Fontana Rosa" sessions saw Ellis draw together an all-star band at the fabled studio which is perhaps best known through its place in the White Stripes history.

Talking about the story and gestation of the album, Carwyn said:

"I was in Mexico City with Baldo Verdú when I heard that Toerag Studios in London was going to close. It came as a shock - Toerag and Liam Watson, its owner and resident producer had been a massive influence on me. Liam, along with Edwyn Collins, had taught me much of what I know about recording, had hired me as an instrumentalist on countless sessions and had helped me to get started when I began my own solo career. And over the years, I'd still go in to record with Liam whenever the opportunity arose. When I heard that Liam was shutting up shop, I took it upon myself to try and ensure he went out with a musical bang. I rounded up the best band I could get: the aforementioned Venezuelan percussion wiz and singer, Baldo Verdú: American drummer, multi-instrumentalist and producer Shawn Lee: the Isle of Wight's finest drum and percussion master, producer and composer Rupert Brown (whom I'd originally met at Toerag many moons ago): Elan Rhys, one of Wales's finest voices and long term collaborator with Rio 18, as well as being one third of the wonderful folk group, Plu: and Kassin - my Brazilian brother from Rio de Janeiro, bassist and producer with artists such as Jorge Ben, Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil and a multitude of others, including Carwyn Ellis & Rio 18.

So this was my dream team, assembled to make beautiful music one more time at Toerag (I have to add at this point that Shawn and Rupert hit it off so well at our sessions that they booked their own session shortly afterwards! Look out for the brilliant Shawn Lee's Toerag Orchestra 'Percussion Discussion' album). Toerag, if you're not familiar with the place, made its name as London's foremost analogue studio for some 30 years, recording directly to tape which in essence means musicians playing live, together in a room until they get it right. And the sound? Oh the SOUND!! And this is all Liam Watson's doing, his sonic aesthetic - a real master engineer. The studio is perhaps best known as the place where the White Stripes recorded their monster hit album 'Elephant' but for me it's where I got to record with James Hunter, Lay Low (from Iceland), Quruli (from Japan), Fabienne Delsol (from France) and made many lasting friendships, learnt a great deal about popular music, as well as making a bunch of my own best recordings with Colorama.

Over the course of five days we laid down as much music as we could. We had some visitors too: guitar slinger Little Barrie (Primal Scream, The The and Liam Gallagher among other things, but also my dear bandmate in Edwyn Collins's band): sax and flute maestro Jim Hunt (Amy Winehouse, Primal Scream, Duffy and very many others): and Diego Laverde Rojas, the Colombian Latin harp virtuoso.

This time the music had a slightly different edge - although we still maintained our Brazilian/Welsh connection on 'Deffro'r Dydd' (written with and sung by Elan Rhys), our Cumbia vibe and some Merengue ('Mariposa' and 'Te Adoro', sung by Baldo Verdú) and even a traditional Afro-Venezuelan tune ('La Quichimba', again sung by Baldo) - the main influence for me this time was Latin music as recorded in the USA, both new and old. 'No More Secrets' is a straight up slice of Salsoul disco, while 'Hei Ti' is a punky funky but of Nu Yorican pop somewhere between ESG and the Beastie Boys. But one of my main influences in the last couple of years has been the current wave of Chicano Soul coming from California, particularly via the Penrose and Big Crown labels. I was turned on to this music when I was in Japan in early 2023 - Takashi-san at Pleased To Meet Me Records in Nara played me the Altons' 'Float' and I was hooked!

And that music has a similar aesthetic to Toerag: music recorded live to tape by excellent engineers, performed by fine musicians and singers. So our songs 'Impossible', 'Heartbreaker' and 'Lovesick' are very much in this vein. And that just leaves the title track, 'Fontana Rosa'."

Over and through the hot cement of North East L.A., an almost-dry riverbed winds like a snake through the city. Coyotes lap at its trickling stream by moonlight, as pedestrians rush past it by day without a second glance, their thoughts tangled up in the distractions of life in a sprawling metropolis. Here, amongst the many avenues and gentle hills, we find Coffin Prick (alias: Ryan Weinstein).

Loose Enchantment, this latest Coffin Prick record, is music conceived of in a different frame of mind for humans living in a world nearly-disenchanted with itself. The album consists of eleven new pieces of music recorded by Coffin Prick himself at his home in Los Angeles, a great city of quicksand-like commitments and those who love them enough to uphold the ends of their collective bargains. A record as much about the confusion of modern life as it is endeavored to expose the lusts in the very loins of creation. Sounds enchanting enough for you? Let’s look a little more closely…

On the heels of 2023’s Laughing (Sophomore Lounge), Coffin Prick got busy. And fast. Playing shows into the year with a newly minted live band, while simultaneously working day and night in his home studio laying the ground for what would become Loose Enchantment. Whereas he was essentially a recording know-nothing at the inception of his last LP, he’d learned a thing or two about better capturing his ideas by this point, taking the sidesteps and victories born of the experience Laughing provided and turning the bright lights on them. As many of Los Angeles’s drivers choose to do, it was time to take some surface roads. Odes to self-delusion, the mysteries of creation, cleanliness, and the secrets in other people’s lives.

A little Loose Enchantment for everyone, basically.

In the vibrant streets of Tembisa, South Africa, amidst the sprawling urbanity connecting Johannesburg and Pretoria, the story of Moskito began. Formed in 2001 by Mahlubi "Shadow" Radebe and the late Zwelakhe "Malemon" Mtshali, the group first emerged as a powerhouse of pantsula dancers. However, their undeniable passion for music soon led them down a new path_ one that would cement their place in kwaito history. Spending countless hours on the street corners of their township, where they were born and raised, Shadow and Malemon danced and sang with an infectious energy that attracted crowds. It wasn't long before the duo decided to channel their talents into a kwaito group, and after adding friends Patrick Lwane and Menzi Dlodlo, Moskito was born. (Pantsula dancing emerged in the 1950s among Black South Africans in townships and continually evolved until it became intertwined with kwaito music culture. The stylized, rapid foot movements and characteristic low-dancing became associated with kwaito as it took over South African urban culture into the early 2000s.) With limited resources, the group displayed immense creativity, recording demos using two cassette decks and instrumental tracks from other artists. They would rap and sing over an instrumental playing on one deck while the second deck records their performance. Their determination paid off when they submitted their demo to Tammy Music Publishers, who were captivated by Moskito's style. "Kwaito was the thing `in' at the time. If you did music you did kwaito. We wanted to fit in and actually it was easy," says Radebe. "We didn't have engineers in the group, so the first time in a real studio was with Percy and Thami to record Idolar." That same year, the group released their debut album, Idolar, under Tammy Music. The album was an undeniable success reaching gold status selling over 25,000 units and earning them a devoted fan base across South Africa and neighboring countries like Botswana, Swaziland, Namibia and Zimbabwe. Moskito collaborated with industry legends such as Chilly Mthiya Tshabalala, who was known for his work with Thiza and Spoke "H." They drew inspiration from Thami Mdluli a.k.a Professor Rhythm, who had dominated the disco scene back in the 80s and 90s. Mdluli helped with musical arrangements and executive produced the album and signed on producer-engineer Percy Mudau, while Shadow and Malemon took pride in composing most of their songs. Like many of the rising kwaito artists of the time, they didn't have music production or engineering backgrounds so they required support from engineers together their ideas down on tape. They were inspired from South African kwaito icons like Trompies, Mdu, Mandoza, and Arthur Mafokate, alongside international heavyweights like Snoop Doggy Dogg, Dr. Dre, 2Pac, and R. Kelly, Moskito created a sound that was uniquely theirs_a perfect blend of local flavor and global influence.

Svein Berge and Torbjorn Brundtland have carved out a singular space for themselves in electronic music and here the Norwegian pair offer us a live album, a document of their 2023 tour. It's a sprawling affair, clocking in at over two hours and featuring a diverse cast of vocalists. The tracklist reads like a who's who of leftfield pop, - - Alison Goldfrapp, Robyn, Susanne Sundfor and Fever Ray among them - each voice adding a different shade to Royksopp's already nuanced sound. 'What Else Is There?', a reworking of the Royksopp classic featuring Fever Ray, is an early highlight, a brooding, intense rendition that transforms the original into a pulsating dancefloor beast. Elsewhere we get the Robyn collaboration 'Do It Again' and 'Running To The Sea' featuring Susanne Sundfor, and even die-hard fans will find something to discover here, with subtle tweaks and re-imaginings offering a fresh perspective on familiar material. A fitting tribute to Royksopp's enduring appeal and their ability to continually evolve and innovate.



[a] A1 | The Ladder [True Electric]
[b] A2 | Impossible (ft. Alison Goldfrapp) [True Electric]
[c] A3 | This Time, This Place (ft. Beki Mari) [True Electric]
[d] B1 | The Girl And The Robot (ft. Robyn) [True Electric]
[e] B2 | Here She Comes Again (ft. Jamie Irrepressible) [True Electric]
[f] B3 | Monument (ft. Robyn) [True Electric]
[g] C1 | Oh, Lover (ft. Susanne Sundfør) [True Electric]
[h] C2 | Unity (ft. Karen Harding) [True Electric]
[i] C3 | You Don't Have A Clue (ft. Anneli Drecker) [True Electric]
[j] D1 | The "R" [True Electric]
[k] D2 | Breathe (ft. Astrid S) [True Electric]
[l] D3 | Running To The Sea (ft. Susanne Sundfør) [True Electric]
[m] D4 | What Else Is There? (ft. Fever Ray) [True Electric]
[n] 14 | Never Ever (ft. Susanne Sundfør) [True Electric]
[o] 15 | Sordid Affair (ft. Man Without Country) [True Electric]
[p] 16 | I Had This Thing (ft. Jamie Irrepressible) [True Electric]
[q] 17 | Feel It (ft. Maurissa Rose) [True Electric]
[r] 18 | Do It Again (ft. Robyn) [True Electric]
[s] 19 | Like An Old Dog (ft. Pixx) [True Electric]

After a collage tape collab with Bardo Todol back in 2022 (SUC52, Magnetic Road to Hell) Robert Millis finally gets his Discrepant debut proper, a much overdue entryin our random catalogue of lost musical oddities.

The not so self explanatory title Interior Music explores Millis obsession with hidden sounds and its anomalies. An hermetic rearrangement of emptiness could be another more big headed title. But I leave the man to talk about his thing:

‘’The phrase interior music occurred to me a few years ago as a way to describe some recent work. It’s about the resonances inside of hollow wooden chambers (and hollow heads) like gramophones and talking machines, music boxes, instruments, metal containers, and resonant rooms. It’s about exploring tiny audio fragments—single notes, vinyl and shellac surface noise, recording mishaps and anomalies—and arranging them into something meaningful. It is about my own interior mishaps and anomalies and attempts to arrange THEM into something meaningful. It also references “interior design” with the placement of sounds in specific locations, layers or in juxtapositions.

Inspirations include Steve Roden’s lowercase work, Toshiya Tsunoda’s field recordings, Eliane Radique’s slowly shifting ambiances, and the musique concrete of Pierre Schaeffer, as well as the dhrupad and kayal traditions of Indian classical music—especially Kesarbai Kerkar and the Dagar family who have a sublime way of stretching out individual notes and exploring their endless permutations, combinations and connotations.’’

Robert Millis is a sound artist known for his work with Climax Golden Twins, the Helen Scarsdale Agency, the soundtrack to cult horror film Session 9, the Victrola Favorites book and cassette series, and many releases on Sublime Frequencies including Indian Talking Machine, Paris to Calcutta: Men and Music on the Desert Road, compilations of the earliest music recorded in Korea, Japan and Myanmar, and the documentaries This World is Unreal Like a Snake in a Rope and Phi Ta Khon: Ghosts of Isan. Somehow he is a Fulbright scholar (to India 2012-13) and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2020). He has or currently does play with AFCGT, Idol Ko Si, and/or Telescoping.

The record is largely sung in Scots language, one of Scotland’s three official languages along with Gaelic and English. “Scots gives me a way of expressing myself which is connected directly with the landscapes I love. It brings the songs alive and it is a fascinating language. The name of the record is in Scots - Forefowk means the people who came before, or ancestors. When we say ‘mind me,’ we can mean a few things- remind, remember, watch over or care for me. The record explores how tradition needs to be constantly reconnected with, built upon, looked after, and shared.”
Quinie sings with a style inspired by Scottish Traveller singers. “I began singing unaccompanied Scots Song in 2015 after hearing Scots Traveller singer Sheila Stewart on the radio. Initially I felt like I shouldn't sing these songs because I'm not a Traveller, and I saw people around me doing that in a way that made me uncomfortable. But on the other hand this music made sense to me and I felt driven to learn. Over the years I have met Traveller friends who taught me that settled people sharing these songs could contribute to raising awareness. Scottish Travellers are marginalised and discriminated against in modern Scotland, despite being custodians of so many of our important traditions. So I started to perform them and tell this story. From there I built on my repertoire and started writing my own songs”.
To develop this record, Quinie travelled across Argyll with her horse. They went on a pilgrimage of sorts through the ancient landscapes of the West of Scotland to explore the interconnected relationships between people, ancestors, animals, and place. The album’s vinyl release is accompanied by a book and film, documenting this unusual research process.
Forefowk, Mind Me was recorded in August 2024 at The Big Shed in Highland Perthshire with support from Creative Scotland. Quinie is accompanied by an ensemble of musicians: Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh (viola), Oliver Pitt (duduk, bouzouki, percussion), Harry Górski-Brown (small pipes, violin), and Stevie Jones (double bass, recording, and mixing). Each of these artists brings their own distinctive voice, bridging contemporary experimental practice with worlds of traditional and early music.

Deerhoof haben sich schon vor langer Zeit als eine der großartigsten Rockgruppen des Planeten etabliert - wer das für übertrieben hält, hat noch nicht genug Zeit damit verbracht, Deerhoof zu hören - das wahnsinnig erfinderische Quartett behandelt jedes seiner neuen Alben als eine Gelegenheit zur kreativen Wiedergeburt. Und doch sind sie irgendwie auch zutiefst zuverlässig, eine seltsame, aber wahre Beschreibung für eine Band, die so kreativ rastlos ist. Man weiß nie, wie ein neues Deerhoof-Album klingen wird, außer dass es immer nach Deerhoof klingen wird. Die Band wird durch solche Paradoxien definiert, wie "Noble and Godlike in Ruin" erneut bestätigt. Ihr neuestes Album ist entweder ein Porträt einer Welt, die in monströsen Hass, Entmenschlichung und Dollarzeichen abgleitet, oder ein eindringliches Selbstporträt der Band als Monster: ein intelligentes, sensibles, hybrides Wesen, das unermüdlich von Liebe singt, sich aber zunehmend von dieser Welt entfremdet. Die Musik ist fröhlich und ahnungsvoll, kybernetisch und zutiefst menschlich, alles zugleich. Streicher, die an avantgardistische Kammermusik und klassische Horrorfilm-Soundtracks erinnern, prallen auf Gitarren- und Basslinien. Das Schlagzeug ist manchmal gefiltert und klingt fast elektronisch, aber kein Computer könnte einen so funkigen und dynamischen Rhythmus erzeugen, bei dem jede winzige Variation von einem Snare-Schlag zum nächsten Welten der Möglichkeiten vermittelt. An der Spitze steht die unnachahmliche Altstimme von Satomi Matsuzaki. Eine Stimme der Einsamkeit, deren schlichte Ruhe seltsam außerhalb des Mahlstroms der Band zu stehen scheint, zu dem sie mit ihren zackig-präzisen Bassläufen selbst beiträgt. Als Einwanderin der ersten Generation in den USA hat sie nie versucht, ihren japanischen Akzent oder ihre Karaoke-esken Vortrag zu verbergen. Auf "Noble und Godlike in Ruin" wirkt dies abwechselnd als Ausdruck von Einsamkeit und als kühle Provokation gegenüber Systemen der Unterdrückung und Kontrolle. ,Kindness is all I needed from you", singt sie auf dem epischen Albumabschluss ,Immigrant Songs`. ,But you think we're in your house." Nicht lange danach explodiert der Song, sein eng gewickelter Art-Pop macht Platz für mehrere Minuten heulenden Lärm. Auch wenn das Thema düster sein mag - wie könnte es anders sein - tragen die Songs trotzigen Optimismus in ihrer Weigerung, sich den Konventionen oder überlieferten Weisheiten zu beugen. Da ist diese berühmte Zeile von Dylan Thomas über das Wüten gegen das Sterben des Lichts: "Noble and Godlike in Ruin" fühlt sich ein wenig so an. Die Welt mag untergehen, aber Deerhoof gehen schwungvoll unter.

Claire Chicha aka Spill Tab is feeling more free than ever before. The LA-based, French-Korean songwriter and producer,has spent the past five years as spill tab honing a sound that is as raw-edged as it is refined, channelling low-slung guitar-strumming confessionals as well as the earworming melodic hooks of anthemic pop to produce a heady and distinctive mix.

Following the 2019 release of her intimate and infectious debut single “Decompose”, Spill Tab has evolved her spill tab project through three EPs: 2020’s synth-pop influenced Oatmilk, 2021’s playful, uptempo Bonnie, featuring Gus Dapperton and Tommy Genesis, and 2023’s co-produced, sonically-intricate Klepto, which gleefully meanders from the Hiatus Kaiyote-influenced jazz freakouts of “CRÈME BRÛLÉE!” to the guitar-chugging thump of “Splinter”. Live, meanwhile, Spill Tab has been tapped for her explosively energetic presence to open the North American leg of popstar Sabrina Carpenter’s tour, as well as touring through Australia with alt-rock trio Wallows.
With “PINK LEMONADE”, opening single from her forthcoming debut album “ANGIE” , spill tab’s freewheeling sound finds its fullest expression, harnessing this onstage experience and recorded experimentation with her bass-weight and pitched-up vocals. Here we find Chicha only ever chasing that “weird thing”, fizzing with an infectious enthusiasm and intricate musicianship. “The best songs come from writing the main idea in a day, as it’s so instinctual,” she says, such as “PINK LEMONADE” recorded “from a clip taken out of a 40-minute jam that we then chopped and spliced”.
Born to her French Algerian composer father and Korean pianist mother, Claire Chicha spent her early childhood in the mixing room of her parents’ LA post-production studio, bringing coffees to artists as they tracked scores for exciting new projects. “I hung out in that studio all the time until I was around 10 years old, absorbing jazz music my dad was into and classical music that my mom loved,” Chicha says. “My mom had a big hand in making me an adventurous kid, always trying new things from piano to harp and violin, forever soaking up new sounds.”

At 12, Chicha’s life was uprooted as she relocated to Thailand to live with her mother’s family following the collapse of her parents’ business after the 2008 recession. What followed was an unstable and formative few years of early teenagedom, navigating new cultures and life changes. In Thailand, Chicha began learning guitar to cover the Paramore and Green Day tracks she had grown to love while also becoming immersed in Thai traditional music. After a year, she moved once more to live with her aunt in Paris and there she was introduced to the classic sound of Serge Gainsbourg and Édith Piaf before ultimately returning to LA following the untimely death of her father.

“I had to become a real people person to fit in everywhere I was moving, and it immersed me into so many different styles of music,” she says. “I went from listening to the nasal singing of Thai traditional music at muay thai fights in Bangkok, to emotive classic French songs. It definitely informed the need to experiment with my sound as I became more interested in making music.”

At high school in LA, Chicha joined one of the country’s foremost show choirs and realised a natural aptitude for stagecraft and performance as she sang medleys in competitions throughout the US. Going on to study Music Business at NYU, Chicha found a love for the alternative soul and singer-songwriting of the likes of Moses Sumney and Bon Iver, as well as developing her own sound while spending summers interning as an A&R at Atlantic Records and being exposed to the gamut of New York’s live music scene.

“I was going to so many shows as an A&R intern and seeing just how much a lot of music sounded alike,” she says. “It made me realise I wanted my music to feel different, to cut through the noise but still make something that felt honest to me.”

Beginning to independently release tracks, Soill Tab gradually built a loyal fanbase with the release of wistful early numbers “Calvaire” and “Cotton Candy” and soon found herself signed to a major label. Yet, as her career progressed through the COVID pandemic the demands of a corporate major began to conflict with her own searching style. “My last two EPs were under contract and it felt like I was always chasing the carrot,” she says, “I felt a certain pressure to put out tracks quickly and find that ‘hit’. It wasn’t the right environment to truly make what I wanted.”

Ultimately parting ways with her label, Chicha began work on a new album, exploring new sounds and ideas with her LA-based community of collaborators like producer David Marinelli, Solomonophonic, Wyatt and Austin and John DeBold, without expectation. “It became this beautiful experience of only following ideas that I really believed in and exploring all the musical avenues I hadn’t before,” she says. “I’ve never been more excited about songs and I’ve never felt like a project is more mine.”

Writing and recording while touring with Sabrina Carpenter and Wallows, Chicha road-tested her new tracks to see what might land best with an audience who had likely never heard her music before. “You have to win people’s hearts as an opener and you can see what resonates and what doesn’t,” she says. “I would watch people fall in love or not and it’s usually always the song you’re having the most fun with that does the best. That’s what I put on the record.”

« Angie », Spill’s Tab debut album is relased on because Music and expected for May 16th release.

Repress!

MIKE’s music carries age beyond his years. Born in New Jersey, he moved to London with his mother before eventually settling in The Bronx for the remainder of his teenage years. Renaissance Man was recorded between the two cities that shaped him, with both regions leaving a distinct mark on his sound. In London, he was immersed in grime and the music of King Krule, while in The Bronx, he gravitated toward the influences of Earl Sweatshirt and MF DOOM.Through his mixtapes Winter New York, Longest Day, Shortest Night, May God Bless Your Hustle, and his EP By The Water, he has made a definitive statement on the state of youth in New York. The releases turned heads outside of MIKE’s immediate community in the city, earning praise from The FADER, The New Yorker, and being selected as Best New Music by Pitchfork.MIKE raps over characteristically lo-fi, and soulfully hazy, self produced beats. Themes about the depression and anxiety that accompany being young and African American abound throughout his music, but a muted sense of hopefulness and certainty that he is moving towards ultimate triumph is the motor quietly propelling things forward.Renaissance Man follows his critically acclaimed Lex Records release, Black Soap

2005's Naturally was a pivotal moment in the history of soul music. It was the first Daptone album tracked at the renowned "House of Soul", a recording studio handbuilt by Sharon and the rest of the Daptone family in a two story rental in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The album has gone on to sell over 200,000 records, with hit singles "How Long Do I Have To Wait?" and "This Land is Your Land" streaming in the hundreds of millions- staggering figures for a wholly independent release.

Up to this point Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings had yet to reach an audience outside of dingy, hole-in-the-wall clubs, dive bars, and underground DJ parties, attended by only the most in-the-know. This was the scene where the band began to flourish, developing the sound that would forever alter the musical landscape and set a lofty new bar for what could be considered real-deal soul music. It made Daptone a household name and opened doors for countless musicians and record labels to come. Naturally sparked a renaissance that is still vibrating today- a testament to Sharon Jones' legacy as the undisputed, reigning Queen of Heavyweight Soul.

Clear Vinyl. Holt Eure Spandex raus, der Glam kommt JETZT in Euer Leben. Eine super warme Dusche aus Australien, mit Leuten von CLOWNS und CABLE TIES. Es gibt 11 zuckersüsse PopPunk Perlen, die mit Twin Leads auch den Hardrockfan an den richtigen Stellen abholt. Stellt Euch eine Melange aus The Exploding Hearts, The Shivvers, Thin Lizzy und Judas Priest vor... Und bums: da stehen Leatherman vor Euch. Qualitativ hochwertig hauen die 5 fünf Australier Hit nach Hit raus, der Gesang von Annabel Brown trifft genau den richtigen Ton zwischen rotzig, unschuldig und aggressiv...

Causa Sui return with the perfect companion to last year's tour de force, "From The Source". Whereas that record was a tightly structured piece of work, that condensed many aspects of the band's sound into a concise 45 minute LP, "In Flux" presents the more loose and impulsive side of Causa Sui. After an introductory suite in classic Causa Sui territory, with deep fuzz riffs and syncopated grooves, things gradually become more outlandish. The following three vinyl sides see the band channeling Hot Rats-style jazz fusion, the oceanic post-rock of late-period Talk Talk, and the impulsive, anarchic experimentalism of Can's "Tago Mago" into their own beatific brew. On "Spree", the band abandons guitar entirely, relying on a dual synthesizer on top of drums and bass instead, yet maintains that uniquely Sui-an vibe.The centerpiece in this set, "Astral Shores", unfolds over 16 minutes - from gently hypnotic, ritualistic folk, through motoric psychedelia and back again. It's been many years since Causa Sui have sounded this unmoored on a studio record. "In Flux" is an essential chapter in the band's ever-changing oeuvre. The double 10" format might seem like an odd choice, but splitting the album into four short, distinctive parts makes perfect sense stylistically. Each side has a character all off its own, taking the listener somewhere different. Still a continious CD version is available as well.

Risk/Reward is the brainchild of New York based, London-born underground music scene veteran and Archivio Records owner Daniel Dutts.

The label fuses leading contemporary artists, with iconic 90s producers to create a playful yet sophisticated sound, firmly focused on creating dance floor magic!

The first EP showcases rising Philadelphia talents Post Play (Sweater & John Raffaele), whose previous excursion on Small Moves became a much sought after cult classic.

Danger is what’s commonly known by DJs as a “sure thing”, guaranteed to get the most stubborn of crowds moving. A cheeky bass groove, quirky stabs, hip hop breaks and scratched vocals, create a vibe best described as “if DJ Premier made a track for Wiggle in the late 90s”

Go blends vintage Nu Groove style NYC house with progressive and techy elements to create a unique dancefloor monster. warping speed garage style sub bass combines with punchy stabs, lush pads, trippy synth leads and skippy, swinging drums, creating an atmospheric but driving track, that keeps you guessing til the very end.

Bushwacka! channels his Plank-era heyday to create a remix of Danger that delivers multiple “what the f#%k was that?” moments, as he takes you on a breakbeat voyage with crisp percussion, devastating low end, hypnotic ragga vocals and a didgeridoo no less! A reminder of the man’s genius and genre-defining sound.

What I Meant To Tell You merges warm, J Dilla style sampled chords, with punchy 808s, a deep and warm bassline, dreamy pads and enchanting male/female call and response vocals. Perfect for a warm up or deep in the afters.

With heavy support from the likes of Dyed Soundorom, Tini, Harry McCanna and more, the Post Play boys are ready to add another buy on sight record to their growing discography.

Silver Vinyl. Metalhorse is Billy Nomates' third studio release, following 2023's critically acclaimed, CACTI, and her self-titled 2020 debut. A concept album revolving around the image of a dilapidated funfair, representing the tumultuousness of life - risk and pleasure, danger and exhilaration. The 11 new songs here explore blues, folk and pianodriven arrangements that take Billy Nomates' stark punk sound in a more pastoral direction. Metalhorse is the first Billy Nomates album to be made in a studio and with a full band, the line-up inc. bass player Mandy Clarke (KT Tunstall, The Go! Team) and drummer Liam Chapman (Rozi Plain, BMX Bandits) plus a special feature from The Stranglers frontman Hugh Cornwell on "Dark Horse Friend". Metalhorse is a balancing of extremes. Reckoning with loss, material insecurity, and trying to stay true to yourself against an increasingly unpredictable backdrop of global chaos, the scales could easily have tipped towards darkness, but the more Maries has had to weather, the more precious those smaller moments of happiness have become. Metalhorse begs the listener to find their own funfair; there will always be things that feel perilous. At the same time, you have to marvel at the lights while they're still on. Dancing with those feelings of uncertainty and joy, Metalhorse is awash with both pain and perseverance.

Silver Vinyl. Metalhorse is Billy Nomates' third studio release, following 2023's critically acclaimed, CACTI, and her self-titled 2020 debut. A concept album revolving around the image of a dilapidated funfair, representing the tumultuousness of life - risk and pleasure, danger and exhilaration. The 11 new songs here explore blues, folk and pianodriven arrangements that take Billy Nomates' stark punk sound in a more pastoral direction. Metalhorse is the first Billy Nomates album to be made in a studio and with a full band, the line-up inc. bass player Mandy Clarke (KT Tunstall, The Go! Team) and drummer Liam Chapman (Rozi Plain, BMX Bandits) plus a special feature from The Stranglers frontman Hugh Cornwell on "Dark Horse Friend". Metalhorse is a balancing of extremes. Reckoning with loss, material insecurity, and trying to stay true to yourself against an increasingly unpredictable backdrop of global chaos, the scales could easily have tipped towards darkness, but the more Maries has had to weather, the more precious those smaller moments of happiness have become. Metalhorse begs the listener to find their own funfair; there will always be things that feel perilous. At the same time, you have to marvel at the lights while they're still on. Dancing with those feelings of uncertainty and joy, Metalhorse is awash with both pain and perseverance.

Three LPs packed in a trifold jacket. Pressed on Deep Ocean Pearl, Gold & Dark Green Vinyl. Take up your sword, channel your magic or board your Mech. Chained Echoes is a 16-bit style RPG set in a fantasy world where dragons are as common as piloted mechanical suits. The game is set on the continent of Valandis during the time of a multi-generational war between three kingdoms, Taryn, Gravos and Escanya. After a great catastrophe caused by Grand Grimoire shakes the continent, the kingdoms agree to sign a peace treaty. One year later, an unknown force strives to begin a new war. A group of unlikely heroes joins forces and eventually becomes the clan of Crimson Wings in order to stop it. The outstanding soundtrack for Chained Echoes was passionately composed, arranged and recorded over four years by Eddie Marianukroh as well as many other musicians who worked under his direction. It includes 50 tracks at two hours in length. Even the game has been out for a while, Marianukroh's admiration and enthusiasm for the game and his addition to it remain undiminished: "It has been over two years now since the release of Chained Echoes, which is rather difficult for me to believe. Time really flies, and it's honestly a bit frightening when I think about it. But, despite that, when I listen to the music I've written for this game, I still very much remain proud of what I composed. I really did give my all for this soundtrack. I will forever be grateful to Matthias for trusting me with the music for his game. I can vividly remember how I felt when I first came across his project, and how I nervously reached out to him about the composer position. I truly, truly cannot thank him enough for giving me this memorable experience that I will always hold dear. Thank you, my friend."

Australia's left-field club renaissance keeps flowering, and Horatio Luna's cult 2020 debut Yes Doctor remains an essential root document. The LP welds dub-soaked bass pressure, broken-beat jack and smoky nu-jazz improv onto a house chassis—picture Moodymann deep cuts drifting through Dadawah's spiritual haze. Championed by Gilles Peterson after Luna appeared on Brownswood's Sunny Side Up compilation—where drummer Phil Stroud and synth maestro Dufresne also featured—the record was pieced together across 2019 during a run of late-night sessions while Hicks was living in the La Sape house. La Sape's brand-new 2025 pressing (cat. SAPE00825) uses freshly cut plates and presents the full ten-track programme on 140 g black vinyl. The package features subtle touch-ups to the jacket artwork and refreshed centre-label stickers while preserving the original aesthetic. "Yes Doctor is my coming-of-age—mixing every style I could think of into house, pushing aesthetic boundaries, making 'un-boxable' music," Luna says. File next to Theo Parrish and Yesterday's New Quintet: DJs will lock onto the title track's seven-minute bruk workout, while deeplistening customers will cherish the front-to-back journey in groove alchemy.

AAA Gripper have seemingly dropped out of nowhere but the story goes back. The idea was conjured in the summer of 2023 at the first Wrong Speed Records festival in the town of Glastonbury. Inspired by a weekend of radical sounds and fine company a decision was made - 'let's try something'.
Recording hours and hours of bass and drums in deep Somerset then editing it down to a sharp and concise 32 minutes. From Can's Lost Tapes boxset to No Means No's 0+2=1 via a thousand song structure decisions. Wild guitar strafe and precise hyper vocal added. Nine tight tunes magically appeared. The band raised a glass of tea. The band was born. The 'something' had worked.
We Invented Work For The Common Good is a deep dive into the world of the working person. How we end up. Why we climb onto the conveyer belt and never get off. The front cover is one of many of the same photo taken every day, on the walk to work, the dark mills looming - KEEP THEM BUSY, THEY WON'T RISE UP.
Music is therapy. They think it's part of the bread and circuses. We know it's armour. We know it's weaponry.
Gigs being planned.

Micke & Lefty feat Chef - Live On Air - Live On Airis a double live album from
Micke & Lefty feat Chef, recorded in collaboration with Deutschlandfunk radio
- Volume One, a studio live session for DLF Radio's On Stageprogram, was
recorded during the 2020 pandemic - Volume Two captures a dynamic 2023
performance at the Blues Baltica Festival in Eutin, Germany
This double live album captures the trio's electrifying and intimate performances,
showcasing their mastery of acoustic blues. Featuring 25 tracks, including originals
and blues classics, from the band's live repertoire over the years. The album also
celebrates the trio's 25th anniversary."Reaching this milestone is incredible, specially
when this all started as a spin off of my main band. We wanted to share these
recordings as a tribute to our long journey and audience. This live album is a real deal,
raw performance as live as it can be with no overdubs" says Bjorklof."Original! Lively!
Entertaining! The trio's performance is as unique as it is high-quality. Bjorklof stomps
on an old suitcase instead of a bass drum, Lefty Leppanen wields his vintage guitar
with effortless mastery, and Mr. Chef's semi-acoustic bass adds depth. This Finnish
acoustic blues is dynamic, original, and captivating." - Deutschlandfunk
RadioReflecting on this dual release, Bjorklof states: "Blues has always been my
foundation, but I've explored it's many shades over the years. WithOuttakesandLive On
Air, I want to celebrate both the electric and acoustic sides of my musical journey. I
couldn't think of a better way to markmy 60th birthday than by sharing these two very
special albums with our fans

There are bands that you feel you have known forever -- recent ones, new
ones even -- because you are already so familiar with what you know they are
going to offer, familiar with the anticipation and the need, with the pleasure
you expect them to, quite rightfully, provide the masses (by which I mean
people who have once considered calling their first-born Kang)
VERDICT is such a band. It has members of MEANWHILE, NO SECURITY,
WARCOLLAPSE, 3- WAY CUM, TOTALITAR, and too many other bands, and even
though I have never actually met any of them, I still have had more interactions with
them through (over)playing and rocking to their records than I have had with some
members of my family, which, to be honest, is definitely for the best. VERDICT is a
rather new (but experienced in the things of the D) kang hardcore band, and they know
exactly what they are doing and how to do it. Had they produced something different,
that would have completely taken me aback -- something horrendous like ska- punk
would have made so little sense that I would have had to quit punk altogether. Alright,
what about The Rat Race, then. This is the follow-up to last year's Time to Resign, and
this one has even more punch, fury, and pummeling power than its predecessor.
Unoriginal, in a good way, and thoroughly checking all the correct boxes: the
drumming is pure and relentless, the riffs' efficiency is religiously executed in a
"Scandicore 101" way, the vocals are angry, direct, and raspy. Think a joyous orgy
between NO SECURITY, UNCURBED, and TOTALITAR.
This is the kind of record that makes the world a better place to rock. Thank you
Phobia Records. Kang up your life.

Swell from San Francisco was formed in 1989 by David Freel & Sean Kirckpatrick First record in 1990. This a RSD exclusive Coloured LP reissue. First time released in 1997. It was the 4th Album of the Band.

For RSD 2025 the influential band will be releasing a new double LP edition of their Nine Sevens box set of 7" records first released in 2018. Combining the run of early singles with more obscure later period tracks underlines the strength in depth that Wire had. This is pop art as art/pop and an exploration of the blank canvas of pop culture and how far that canvas can be stretched going from three minute constructs to ambient washes. The 7" single was always the ultimate artefact and statement with the A side being the band momentarily paused in time and distilled and freeze-framed into the forever with less than three minutes of electric sound. These "sevens" released from 1977 to the end of that decade, signpost the band's remarkable development from their brilliantly monochromatic early phase to the textured complexity of the almost psychedelic unzipping of their sound and vision. In some ways the compilation of Nine Sevens onto a double album makes for quite a weird documentation of the band in this period. The first disc, to some extent, follows the script of a singles / greatest hits collection but the second one goes wildly off-piste and ends up somewhere quite far from where the collection started. A conventional Greatest Hits collection, besides being conceptually a bit naff would, if strictly based on charting singles, consist of only one song! A Best Of is subjective and somewhat pointless in the age of the Spotify playlist that anyone can make. The only thing really that these tracks have in common (besides being by Wire) is that they were released or destined to be released on 7" by Wire in the period 1977-1980. - Nine Sevens is both title & elevator pitch!' Wire always understood the language of pop and also the artfulness of playing with it, deconstructing it and reassembling it into new and thrilling shapes. Decades later, these adventures into sound are like slices of delicious, perfect pop/noise and hits from a parallel universe. Track list:Side A1 Mannequin 2 Feeling Called Love 3 12XU 4 I Am the Fly5 Ex-Lion Tamer 6 Dot Dash *7 Options R * Side B 8 Outdoor Miner (single version) * 9 Practice Makes Perfect 10 A Question Of Degree * 11 Former Airline *12 Map Ref. 41ºN 93ºW Side C 1 Go Ahead * 2 Our Swimmer * 3 Midnight Bahnhof Café * 4 Second Length (Our Swimmer) **5 Catapult 30 ** Side D (154 EP) 6 Song 1 * 7 Get Down 1 + 2 * 8 Let's Panic Later *9 Small Electric Piece * * previously unreleased on vinyl album ** recorded in 1980 but not released until 2014

"JUJU" drops on May 17th (WERF Records) and is programmed at Gent Jazz Festival (July 11th)



Juju continues the work done on the second album half, with the Terre Sol Four quartet: Willems' voice, drums, percussion objects, keyboards and field recordings accompanied by the saxes of Marc De Maeseneer, Vincent Brijs and John Snauwaert.Juju fits perfectly in Willems' output. Also: in the coherent oeuvre it has become, it is perhaps her most consistent release yet. It's infectious as hell, carefully crafted, packs a punch and more accessible than ever before.



Everything is connected. Not just in the grand scheme of things - politically, culturally, socially,... - but also in the colourful universe of Karen Willems. A lifelong quest for profound experiences through organizing sound led to the crucial Terre Sol-series, four tapes released in 2020. Out of that fertile well, Grichte (2022) was born. A double LP that presented Willems as an original explorer as well as a committed bandleader, it was her boldest statement to date.

While the first (solo) album halfalready received a follow-up in K A A P M I J (2023), another tape release that suggested there's still a lot of ground left to uncover, Juju continues the work done on the second album half, with the Terre Sol Four quartet: Willems' voice, drums, percussion objects, keyboards and field recordings accompanied by the saxes of Marc De Maeseneer, Vincent Brijs and John Snauwaert. It was already something to behold on Grichte, swerving from introspective exploration to expressionist riff rock and semi-Dadaist avant-garde.

On Juju, the four-piece digs even deeper and the results are utterly spellbinding. One of the many attractions of Willems' recent work is that it combines relentless artistic experimentation with a commitment to broader socio-political issues. In essence, the artist tries to set up a discussion with her surroundings, sending out musical invitations to connect and participate, reminding ourselves of responsibilities that are too easily forgotten in these hectic, self-centered times. The refugee crisis is one, ecology awareness another, and it's hard not to consider "Voor De Stranden Verdrinken" ("Before The Beaches Drown") a caustic warning. Things need to change.

As said earlier, the music on Juju remains as adventurous as before, but this time around, the playing feels even more confident, diverse and punchy. If the album opener accentuates its urgency with a throbbing pulse and reed sirens, "Tako Deli" continues with rich vocal arrangements, roaring saxes and sweeping melodies. What follows strikes with vigor and consistency: "Nuuki" is as dense as it is infectious, while "Fuzzy Williams" manages to combine Ellingtonian abundance with Swans-like preaching.

And there's more, much more. Eccentricity and playfulness ("The Woo Woo Room, Dance Back In Style", "In Open Veld") go hand in hand with smoldering exercises in tension and release ("Koortsdromen") and a ridiculously infectious call for connection in antisocial times ("Come Vai"). Guest contributions by Nabou Claerhout, Kapinga Gysel, Esther Lybeert and Filip Wauters enrich the band's sound considerably. By the time you reach album closer "When Daytime Lands", Willems takes you on a short trip through that eerie soundscape-land she previously explored.

In short: Juju fits perfectly in Willems' output. Also: in the coherent oeuvre it has become, it is perhaps her most consistent release yet. It's infectious as hell, carefully crafted, packs a punch and more accessible than ever before. It's the sound of an artist at the peak of her powers, not just expanding her range, but digging deeper with obvious glee. It's not just intriguing; it's inspiring to witness..

Indian-born British composer Cephas Azariah presents his highly anticipated debut album, a 12-track neo-classical LP 'Joy Paradox' to Reflections. Cephas was always drawn to classical composition, he studied Music Theology and the Arts at Middlesex university and began composing soundtracks for film right away. He drew on the full spectrum of his influences to write his debut album, including neo-classical, ambient and cinematic, and wrote it in his home studio with a piano he bought off Facebook Marketplace. "I finished it all in Scotland in a cabin by the lochs," he says. "It was a beautiful way to wrap it up." Every track on Cephas Azariah's 'Joy Paradox' has a story, tending to resolve personal conflicts through music, with each piece acting as a gentle unravelling of inner unrest. "This project is a summary of thirty years of life, and a realisation that you can't have good things without sacrifice," Cephas says. "Achieving success takes a certain level of suffering, and that's the paradox of joy."

You’d be forgiven for assuming Main Phase hails from the UK with a style and sound so intertwined with the sound of the British isles. The Copenhagen-born DJ and producer Main Phase is no newcomer to the bass scene however. The last couple of years have seen him quickly rise to being one of the people at the very top of the new wave of UK leaning music.

His contribution to the scene throughout the years, both as a DJ, producer, and co-owner of the independent label, ATW Records, with Interplanetary Criminal, has seen him play and tour some of the greatest parties and venus in the world. From Fabric in London, Boiler Room in Berlin to Lost Sundays in Sydney, he’s been making waves with his unique blend of old and new, UK garage, speed garage, dubstep and jungle – always with a big chunk of unreleased material from himself.

Main Phase has released full EPs and remixes on Hardline Sounds, Instinct, Locked On, ec2a and more – and he’s producing forward-thinking speed garage with Interplanetary Criminal as ATW and futuristic jungle with Lille Høg as First Touch. His work has gained credit from the likes of Ben UFO, Emerald, Pangaea and many more.

About the track / On the EP, Main Phase has said:

“This EP really encapsulates the sound of euro house and UK fused in one. Four big tunes for every hour of the night, there’s bumpy, suave, there’s organ, there’s swing and there’s peak time rave reminiscence across the EP. For club use only!"

Teal’s debut LP, Original Watercolour, is an album that feels like a canvas come to life. A sonic blend of street-soul, digi-dub, and downtempo. Original Watercolour explores the complexities of love, oneness, and intuition — themes that resonate deeply within the context of the history women have shared with what was once known as the “ladies’ medium.”

The bi-coastal family trio—Ashleigh and Melissa Ball, better known as the Ball Sisters, alongside producer N1_SOUND—bring a fresh, genre-defying sound to the table with their latest 6-track album. Running just under 30 minutes, this immersive collection weaves together skipping beats, addictive bass lines, three-dimensional flute textures & emotional vocal melodies. This musical portrait is as ethereal as it is powerful, inviting the listener to get lost in its depths while celebrating the beauty of self-expression.

The opening track, “Original Watercolour,” takes you on a psychedelic trip-hop journey. From the first reverberous snare hit, you’re whisked away to a sonic wetland — lush and euphoric. The soft yet poignant soundscapes set the tone for the album, inviting us into a world where the boundaries between earth and music, reality and imagination, automatically seem to blur.

“Locked In 2 Love” offers a boogie-fueled bassline that pushes Teal into dance-floor territory with soaring flutes and rhythmic intricacies that make it impossible not to move — it’s a track that exemplifies the magic of Teal’s ability to craft both intimate and expansive musical landscapes. And then, there’s the hypnotic flow of “One In The Same,” where stacked vocal harmonies and mantra-esque lyrics transport you to a place that could easily be mistaken for a lost Soulquarians demo. It’s gentle yet unrelenting in its depth.

The second side of the album opens with “Sleep on It,” a track that immediately grabs attention with its dancehall-driven rhythm. Ashleigh Ball's vocals set the stage for a song that’s both introspective and emotionally charged, yet unmistakably rooted in groove. The phased-out bassline creates an almost hypnotic atmosphere. Pulling the listener into a mood of contemplation—matching the restless, sleepless night that Ball describes. As the song progresses, this groove builds in intensity, culminating in an explosive ending that mirrors the emotional release of a long-held frustration.

Original Watercolour is more than just an album — it’s a meditation on the interconnectedness of life and art. “Frog Kingdom,” the longest and only instrumental track creates a contemplative space that builds upon the themes introduced earlier. It feels like a sequel to their earlier work, Frog Legacy from their debut Bluish Green 2024 12”, expanding on the familiar sound with even more complex layers.

Yet the real emotional power of the record lies in its closing track, “Can’t Shake the Feeling.” Simple in structure but profound in impact, this song captures a deep yearning and understanding — that everything, from the ecosystems we inhabit to the relationships we nurture and the art we create, is fundamentally interconnected. As the track crescendos in a falsetto peak, it becomes clear that the album is a reflection of both the world around us and the personal journey each member of the band has embarked upon to get to this point.

Just as the medium of watercolor has been traditionally linked to women artists, Teal carries this legacy into the modern musical landscape, blending the richness of history with a unique forward-thinking perspective. The album feels like both a celebration of the past and a bold declaration of a path forward — one that welcomes anyone ready to join in and shape the future of the art form.

The beauty of Teal’s work is that it feels familiar, while simultaneously offering something new and refreshing. Original Watercolour doesn’t just push musical boundaries; it redefines them, offering a lush and textured soundtrack for those willing to listen closely.

In a world that often feels over-saturated, Original Watercolour stands as a reminder of the power of simplicity, intuition, and connection. Teal’s debut album invites you to experience something both deeply personal and universally understood. The landscapes they create are vivid, yet soft, grounding yet expansive. With each track, Teal’s music reflects the interconnectedness of all things — a truly unique piece of work in the world of experimental soul and dub adjacent electronic music.

Rising and falling. We all live in the same pond. Peace to all.

"So the bad news is, in a fit of pique, I asked Chat GPT (nicely) to compose a one-sheet for the new Shit and Shine double album, Mannheim HBF. The even worse news (yes, even worse than resorting to such tactics) is that the resulting biography is halfway passable and on some levels, superior to the sort of thing being published by what’s left of our weekly coupon-shoppers. But for fuck’s sake my friends, Craig Clouse did not get to where he is today today by settling for halfway passable and neither should you. That Shit and Shine’s discography is vast and dizzying is already well established; what’s not nearly as established are these recordings being specifically dizzying. I don’t know if there’s anyone else in modern music as skilled in waltzing around the periphery of so many disparate idioms ('noise', being one of the least prominent this time around) and somehow, against all odds, tying ‘em together in the most intricate of knots. And who doesn’t love knots? We all have our favorite ways to experience music that’s all-engulfing, but whether your preferred method is thru a stadium sized sound system or ear buds affixed as you’ve leapt off the tallest building in Bastrop, TX (the Jerry Fay Wilhelm Center for the Performing Arts, since you asked), not for the first time, Shit and Shine is entirely appropriate in either instance, possibly every instance. There are moments where I think this is a club record. The Friars Club, however. Far be it from me to provide guidelines for how and when you take in Mannheim HBF. 'No interruptions', 'no distractions' are merely suggestions on the label’s part, though we cannot be held responsible for what happens if you ignore ‘em. Thank you."

En pakt med naturen is Tusmorke's first ever live album, recorded live at Oslo's biggest independent record store Big Dipper, as part of their 25th anniversary celebration last October. "We knew we had to do something special with Tusmorke. Benediktator and Krizla have since the early 2000s been building their record collections and releasing their own music simultaneously. We like to think the records we sold them in our store somewhat influenced their musical output, at least we know that the albums they released had a huge impact on us!" (Andreas Leine Jakobsen, Gerenal Manager, Big Dipper Musikk & Hi-Fi "Is this Folk Horror? Silly question, perhaps, but we need you to mutter certain phrases while listening: Bucoloc, acoustic, ancient, uncanny; acid, pagan, peasant, occult; wildness, wilderness, wildestness, Wicker Man. Ever since the start of Tusmorke, we've wanted to make an acoustic album. In Skien, Telemark in the 90s, we wanted to record in an ancient loghouse with an open hearth (årestue) in the local folk museum Brekkeparken. Years passed and line-ups changed. Then, when we supported Ved Buens Ende at Blå in the Autumn of 2021, we were joined by Åsa and Dauinghorn. They played some of the arrangements that we finally managed to record here, after several attempts to find a suitable time and place to make it happen. Again, time had passed and line-ups had changed, but the spirit of Folk Horror remained. We ask you to close your eyes and picture yourself in a windowless low dwelling, open to the sky through a hole in the roof. Acrid smoke curls upward and occasional sparks fly from the smoldering fire. Music wafts through the gloom in this serene scene of timeless primitivism. There is no electricity. There are no synthesizers. I won't even mention digital things, because they don't exist. There is only Folk Horror and you are in League with Nature." (Benediktator)

Chiminyo is a UK-based jazz/electronic artist and the founder of the new label NRG Discs (having previously released on Brownswood, Nightdreamer, Gearbox, and Astigmatic, with artists such as Gary Bartz, Shabaka Hutchings, Maisha, Nubya Garcia, Cykada, Uniri, as well as solo). Chiminyo is a versatile musician who blends the raw energy of live drums and percussion with cutting-edge electronic production.

His early solo releases showcased his knack for unique approaches to making music, using self-coded software to trigger synths and samples from every cymbal crash and drum hit, eliminating loops and click-tracks. This DIY, tech-driven methodology allowed Chiminyo complete, spontaneous control over his music—all from the stool behind his drum kit—creating a sound that is both daring and innovative.

Chiminyo's latest project, NRG, continues this trend of innovative thinking. Born from discussions around the UK jazz scene, Chiminyo concluded that this musical expression is less about "jazz" and more about the energy (NRG) that fuels it. As a result, NRG has evolved into a semi-regular event where Chiminyo brings together some of London's finest musicians for live, improvised performances that encapsulate the spirit of the scene. These live recordings are then given the magic production treatment by Chiminyo and co-producer Aviv Cohen, transforming them into the masterpieces we get to hear on wax.

The first three NRG LPs were a massive success, generating over 600,000 streams, selling over 800 copies (without distribution support), and receiving airplay on BBC Radio, Jazz FM, NTS, Soho Radio, and many more. High-profile DJs like Gilles Peterson and Jamz Supernova championed the albums, which were also covered in print by The Guardian, Jazzwise, Echoes Magazine, and various online channels. This success led to an invitation to record a live album at Ronnie Scott's, one of London's most iconic jazz venues—an incredible opportunity for any artist.

NRG 4 brings together some of the best jazz and electronic musicians in London. The album features Marisia Osu (harp), James Akers (tenor saxophone), Daniel Casimir (double bass), Lyle Barton (synthesizers), and Tilé Gichigi-Liperé (live electronics)—an all-star lineup whose members have released multiple records on Concord, Brownswood, Jazz Re:freshed, Astigmatic and more, and have collaborated with artists such as Laura Misch, Nubya Garcia, Blue Lab Beats and Emma-Jean Thackray. Three tracks are graced with features from Jorja Smith's backing vocalist BAELY and Cuban saxophone maestro Regis Molina.

Limited to 400 12" LPs (350 standard, 50 screen-printed limited edition).

I’m Sad as Hell and I’m Not Going to Fake It Anymore is the best, sharpest, briefest, and fourth record from Paper Castles, the band fronted by Jericho, Vermont’s Paddy Reagan. In one way, it’s a simple and modest collection of nine fuzzy guitar-led pop songs. The title, a play on the iconic scene from Network (written by Paddy Chayefsky), can be clocked as nothing more than that at first glance, playful. But like the music behind it, Reagan thinks you can sit with the title if you want.

I'm Sad as Hell... was tracked by Benny Yurco (Michael Nau, Lily Seabird, Robber Robber) in a little over eight hours across two days, a testament to the quartet’s perfection of these songs on stage, and to Yurco’s comfortable Little Jamaica Recordings in Burlington.

Tompkins and Mangan lock into a wonderful foundation for Kitz’s lolling guitar lines on “Clean + Organized,” while on “Avalon,” the band sings harmony for the most ironic line in the waltz (“We don’t really want company”) before their instruments explode into technicolor. “Lying Here” showcases PC deftly navigating washed out verses and tight knit, twangy choruses, all in a tidy, under-three minute package.

Lyrically, Reagan is at his finest: playful and savage, biting and beautiful. Double entendres and clever wordplay abound—a line like “it's not the ideals but the high heels that’ll make you a man” from “Modern Myth” will make you wish John Prine was still around to hear it. On “Name Changer,” when Reagan sings “I’ll never change my name again / Got a real good handle and I don’t want to give it in,” what kind of “handle” is he referring to? I’d like to think Elvis Costello would smile at most lines in the Attractions rave-up “Content Creator.”

The Bottle Rockets’ 1994 record The Brooklyn Side ranks right up there with Uncle Tupelo’s Anodyne in the pantheon of alt country albums…yet it has NEVER seen a widespread release on vinyl. We hooked up with original producer Eric “Roscoe” Ambel and mastering engineer Scott Hull to score the original tapes and create an all-analog release of this legendary record…but we didn’t stop there. We’ve also added six bonus tracks to flesh out this 2-LP Expanded Edition, winding up with the track that started it all, Brian Henneman’s “Indianapolis.” Reissued with the full consent and cooperation of the band!

"My Last Star" began as a dream that Greg Lee of Hepcat had the week before his death in March of 2024. Greg dreamed of a Slackers song. The Slackers have completed this song, and now the world can hear this truly one of a kind collaboration. In Greg's dream, an old neighbor picked him up in a classic car, turned on the stereo, and played a Slackers song that - at the time - did not exist on our plane of reality. It sounds like the stuff of myth, but the song was so crystal clear in the dream that when he awoke around 2 or 3 in the morning, he immediately wrote down the lyrics he had heard, still humming the tune. "I hadn't seen Greg so excited about a new song in a very long time," says Lee's longtime partner, Mandie Becker. "I found the lyrics when I was organizing his things. I knew he had a voice recording on his phone, too. I decided the best situation was to offer it to The Slackers so we could all hear the song on the stereo from Greg's dream." "I was floored when I received Greg's vocal demo with the lyrics and I vowed to finish the song and make the dream a reality," says Slackers saxophonist Dave Hillyard. "I took the vocal demo to The Slackers, Vic Ruggiero harmonized it, and we wrote music around the words. With this song we came full circle. Greg had given us a gift and we needed to give it back to his family, friends, and musical community. We are the medium for his message." The longer history behind this collaboration is a story of decades of friendship, collaboration, artistry, and mutual respect between LA's Hepcat and NYC's The Slackers, who although from opposite coasts, have both been leading lights and creative forces in the underground ska scene since the early 1990s. Both Hepcat and The Slackers concerned themselves with timeless songwriting that paid homage to the longstanding roots of the music. It is an extraordinary final work envisioned by a beloved and thoughtful musician of the highest caliber and completed by longtime friends and collaborators he knew from the moment of inspiration were the ones that would play it. It is literally a dream come true. "My Last Star" is available as a 12" UV Printed Vinyl Single from Pirates Press Records, with art by The Slackers' in-house artist Catt Gould. The 12" also includes instrumental and dub versions of the song. As a matter of fact, snippets of Greg's original vocal demo from his phone are subtly mixed in toward the end of the instrumental version, underscoring his posthumous presence on the record. Greg's songwriting royalties, as well as a portion of the proceeds from the sales of "My Last Star," will be passed on to his four daughters.

Spanish Electronica, IDM, Electro all-rounder Annie Hall presents her first full EP for Delsin Records. After a sneaky under the radar contribution to an untitled white label series earlier, she hereby delivers four magnificent cuts of machine heavy electro melancholia to form her Practical Optimism EP. Broken beats with Detroit atmospheres strengthened by knife sharp lazer beams, bumpy drum programming and mesmerizing vocal use form the core of an excellent piece of work that represents both Hall and Delsin in optima forma.

Ende 1974 kehrte George Harrison nach Kalifornien zurück, um sein nächstes Album, das soulige Extra Texture (Read All About It, aufzunehmen. Leon Russell spielte Klavier auf „Tired of Midnight Blue“, und bei einigen Sessions wurde Harrison von Gitarrist Jesse Ed Davis sowie Jim Keltner, Paul Stallworth und David Foster von der neuen Band Attitudes begleitet, die später von Georges neu gegründetem Label Dark Horse unter Vertrag genommen wurden.

The Catenary Wires are a group comprising Amelia Fletcher, Rob Pursey and Ian Button. Their critically acclaimed third album ‘Birling Gap’ was released in 2021. Since then, they have been focusing on their other bands, playing around the world with Heavenly (stars of the 90s indiepop scene) and Swansea Sound.
A couple of years ago, word reached Rob and Amelia that Brian had been spotted wearing a Heavenly t-shirt at one of his shows, and was a big fan of their music. Given that they, in turn, were fans of Brian’s poetry, introductions were made, friendships were formed, and ‘Sounds Made By Humans’ took shape.
The album isn’t a set of readings with musical backdrops: it’s a collection of songs, where words and music have become completely intertwined. There are verses, and there are choruses. There is no ‘riffing’, no improvisation. In many ways, Brian’s poems are already like pop songs: brief, direct, and witty; sometimes poignant, sometimes biting and political; but always economical, and always accessible.
Rob took thirteen of Brian’s poems and created melodies and arrangements, which are then played by a full band, with Ian Button on drums and Fay Hallam on keyboard. Sometimes the words of the poems are sung by Amelia or Rob. Sometimes they are spoken by Brian. Sometimes both these things happen at once. This is a pop record where the poetry and the music are equal partners: sounds made by humans in perfect artistic alignment.
Brian Bilston and The Catenary Wires will be performing at selected UK venues in November 2025.

Trambeat are an original soul band from Croydon, South London, formed in 2012 by songwriting duo guitarist Graham Potter and drummer Des James. The two played together in various bands over the years, eventually bringing together like-minded musicians from the Croydon music scene to form Trambeat. The name "Trambeat" derives from the where the band call home, with all band members living along the tram line that runs through the heart of Croydon. Initially the band operated as a loose collective, recording music and self-releasing it online and on CD. But following the 2013 release of their debut vinyl single, "Walk a Mile In My Shoes", and debut album "Tales From the Comprehensives" on Berlin labels Firestation Records and Sundae Soul Records, things began to move fast. With regular airplay by Gary Crowley on Radio London, offers of gigs began to roll in and they quickly morphed into a tight and exciting live band. Trambeat have supported the likes of Ranking Roger's The Beat, Geno Washington, The Four Aces (Desmond Dekker), Shakatak, The Flatmates and The Popguns and have featured at festivals right across the UK and Germany. Trambeat's debut release with LRK Records in 2023, the uptempo funk/soul crossover song "Don't Hold Back", proved popular at both Northern Soul and Funk clubs and was championed by "Northern Soul Girl" Levanna McLean who released a widely viewed clip dancing to the record. Indeed it became a staple at her very own Bristol Northern Soul Club and Funk Addict nights. The new single, "All Killer, No Filler", builds around a sultry, strutting bass riff bolstered by jazzy horns and a funky Nile Rogers influenced guitar. Vocalist Aimee lays down her manifesto for love without compromise, before building to an anthemic chorus you can't help singing along to.

The in demand breakbeat hardcore debut from the reclusive Synthasy. Engineered by Jezz Wright (the man behind the men behind Liquid’s Sweet Harmony and Lemon D’s Toxic Rhythms and Pursuit Of A Vision EPs) at Blockhouse Studios, a private press white label EP was self-distributed across London record shops and received additional exposure courtesy of Entity Records distribution arm. Growing demand warranted a subsequent full artwork label repress, but the record soon evaporated becoming the thing of legend, and now commands big money.

Badmans doing bad man things. With support from Sully, L major and many more various tracks off this ep have been doing damage across the globe. Shout to Swankout every time, a true gift to our scene

The compositions of Miłosz Kędra (b. 2001) explore synthetic sound, electroacoustic music, and self-built acoustic instruments, seeking diverse timbres, tunings, and textures. His main field of work is the pipe organ. Through minimalist motifs, he has transported the instrument’s sound beyond the church space by synthetically processing its tones. He is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in New Media Music at the Academy of Music in Poznań and recently completed a Bachelor’s degree in Electroacoustic Composition, during which he built his own pipe organ from scavenged pipes.

~ Liner notes ~

Miłosz Kędra - "their internal diapasons"

The pipes that Miłosz Kędra used to craft his own organ emulator have lived many lives. They come from churches scattered across Greater Poland—some trimmed for a more presentable façade, others left to gather dust in parish houses until, stripped of purpose, they were cast away. Their first voices have faded, their inner resonance unsettled, yet with patience, one can teach them to sound again—to sing in their altered state, to be gently coaxed out of silence.

Audiomancy—the conjuring of lost sounds—is the word that lingers when I try to grasp the lore crystallizing with Kędra’s second album.

The resolve with which the musician and composer has inhabited his self-built instrument recalls Witold Szalonek and his search for “unexploited properties of wind instruments in classical music.” Szalonek sought to map these hidden voices into a system of multiphonics, revealing over 160 on the oboe alone by 1968. Some sound eerily alike, yet emerge through distinct gestures—“a particular breath, a precise choreography of levers and apertures, the seamless fusion of the two.”

The splitting of a single note into its spectral fragments—allowing a melodic instrument to speak in two, three, even four voices at once—enabled Szalonek to bend the rigid structures of Western music. "their internal diapasons" follows a similar path: an aesthetic bypass through which Kędra taps into the sacred gravity of the church organ, only to reveal it as a domesticated echo of something far older—the primal theater of transformation. To listen closely to an instrument is to learn its flaws, to turn its imperfections into a new way of speaking.

Each of the nine compositions on "their Internal diapasons" is an invitation—to approach the material world with the intent of letting it speak beyond expectation. An instrument that is at once a sculpture, a performance, and a manifesto of voicing the discarded suggests that its creator—following the path of Didier Eribon (Returning to Reims)—might take as his motto, a principle of asceticism, Sartre’s words: “What matters is not what is made of us, but what we ourselves make of what is made of us.”

Filip Szałasek

Mutant, in partnership with Back Lot Music, are proud to present the premiere physical release of Benjamin Wallfisch's incredible score to the 2025 Wolf Man. Leigh Whannell (Invisible Man, Upload) continues exploring the classic Universal monster series, and with Wolf Man hw again teams up with composer Benjamin Wallfisch for the score. Ben's score evokes the lush classic sounds of the original 1940s movie. It's a beautifully light score featuring incredible orchestration, evoking the mystery within the woods. The score is scary and brutal but also delicate and human when necessary. It's evocative and rich and helps add grounding to this very contemporary telling of this tale.

2005's Naturally was a pivotal moment in the history of soul music. It was the first Daptone album tracked at the renowned "House of Soul", a recording studio handbuilt by Sharon and the rest of the Daptone family in a two story rental in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The album has gone on to sell over 200,000 records, with hit singles "How Long Do I Have To Wait?" and "This Land is Your Land" streaming in the hundreds of millions- staggering figures for a wholly independent release.

Up to this point Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings had yet to reach an audience outside of dingy, hole-in-the-wall clubs, dive bars, and underground DJ parties, attended by only the most in-the-know. This was the scene where the band began to flourish, developing the sound that would forever alter the musical landscape and set a lofty new bar for what could be considered real-deal soul music. It made Daptone a household name and opened doors for countless musicians and record labels to come. Naturally sparked a renaissance that is still vibrating today- a testament to Sharon Jones' legacy as the undisputed, reigning Queen of Heavyweight Soul.

Das zehnte Solo-Album von Mathias Schaffhäuser heißt „Singing
About It“ und der Titel ist Programm – hier wird gesungen. Und zwar
auf fast jedem Song, und wenn nicht, dann wird wenigstens
gesprochen. Das gab es auf noch keinem Album des Wahl-Kölners.
Zwar kennt man Mathias in erster Linie als Produzent von Minimal-,
Techno- und House-Tracks, allerdings gab es auf fast allen seiner
Alben auch Stücke mit Gesang, die sich gerade in den letzten Jahren
stilistisch den Tracks auf „Singing About iti" annäherten. Der
wirkliche Unterschied zu dem, was Schaffhäuser in den letzten
dreißig Jahren veröffentlicht hat, ist die Songform, die allen Stücken
auf dem neuen Album gemeinsam ist. „Singing About It“ wurde nicht
für den Dancefloor produziert, auch wenn einige Stücke dort
durchaus eine gute Figur machen dürften.
Letztlich war der Spaß am Singen die Triebfeder hinter „Singing
About It“. Und da die Tanzfläche nicht im Fokus stand, konnten sich
auch Club-ferne Einflüsse aus experimenteller Elektronika,
verschmitztem Pop und sogar Blues und Prog-Rock mehr Raum
freischaufeln.

Psychedelic music can be many things, but not many are quite like Fomies brand of the genre. This Swiss five piece throws some punk rock a la The Dead Milkmen into the mix and describes themselves as:
“Great followers of the D.I.Y., FOMIES is a garage-fuzz band mainly inspired by obscure records badly recorded in weird places.”
For fans of: Oh Sees, Ty Segall, Harvey Rushmoore & The Octopus.

The Crippled Flower was a post-punk band from Düsseldorf - and they arrived late. However, unlike many young, unsuspecting, hairsprayed hopefuls from that time, in 1985 they could sense that the end of their era was approaching. They knew too much to want to take the world by storm. They were four individualists searching their own way. Each of the band members only found their calling after the time that they had spent together – but that's exactly what makes The Crippled Flower still seem really interesting today, this static energy that does not discharge, but is simply there.

Searching dreamers should sound like that and that's what they were. Singer Phil Elston, for example, had brought his love of Kraftwerk from England to Düsseldorf. Even his bandmates found this strange, but they were also entangled in their own longings. This is because the times were still so crazy and these searchers were "on fire". A fire that glows in the band's recordings.

Listening to the songs today, The Crippled Flower sound like they are hugely at the height of their game; think of Wire, Felt, Scritti Politti or Minimal Compact. The variety of musical themes, as well as different soundscapes, which the band created can only be listened to in amazement. Often, it is only Phil Elston's Sprechgesang that confirms that this is really the same band. However, it was back in 1985 when, importantly, the catalyst that brought the musicians together - the short lived eclectic record store "Heartbeat" in Düsseldorf Bilk - occured. It was there where post-industrial and pop, melodic minimal music and sound attacks awaited those who wanted to discover music by artists and bands they did not yet know.

Cassette releases. All recorded on 4-Track. The Crippled Flower succeeded in this medium. Firstly, with a cassette just entited The Crippled Flower, working from project-like studio recorded sketches. Four more tracks from the short-lived band appeared in 1986 on "A Heartbeat Rendezvous“. A demo tape submitted to Les Disques du Crépuscule, however, did not lead to a worldwide career and so, unfortunately, it was soon over.

Stefan Krausen moved on to the follow-up project Deux Baleines Blanches with Stefan Schneider, which, in 1994, gave rise to the band Kreidler. Krausen was already drumming with the I-Burnettes on AtaTak and much later he studied painting in Munich. Nina Ahlers moved from Düsseldorf to Paris to study art, because in the 80s it was still the case that Paris was the destination of choice for those really wanting to become an artist – and that's what she did. Her work is characterized by a non-academic minimalism focusing on everyday objects. Stefan Schneider remained connected to music. Only Phil Elston, who helped sabotage fox hunts in England and wrote these observant lyrics about environmental destruction and time travel, seems to have escaped the social-media world. Whether he found Kraftwerk-fulfilment in Düsseldorf or moved on disillusioned remains a mystery to us. And somehow this also fits in with that peculiar, special band. - Oliver Tepel, Köln 2025 (Translation by Philipp Elston)

Portland's contemporary music makers and the city's historic Black music community come together on this new remix project which draws from the Albina Music Trust's archive. Across the long player, the artist reinvents the sounds of Portland's Black musicians with a modern beat-based sensibility, all of which subtly pay homage to the 1968 "Soul Assembly" program by the Black Student Union which educated audiences about Black Portland's cultural identity. Among many standouts are reimagined works by Jonny Cool, Jumbo of The Lifesavas and Tony Ozier who do a fine job of bridging generations and highlighting Portland's rich heritage.

Coming from a diverse background of equal amounts hip hop and rock, the producer behind the alias of nrl:ndr got into dance music late in his musical career. After playing in kraut-oriented bands like So Many Mammals, parts of that group reformed into the live techno outfit Tren Né, with the goal of fusing techno elements with live drums. Playing for illegal raves with a punk-like energy, nrl:ndr has cemented his relationship with his machines in service of the dance floor.

But his solo debut on blundar is quite far removed from that scene. To understand this music, one should be aware of the conditions under which it was manufactured. Reluctant to consider himself an artist in the traditional sense, nrl:ndr makes his music free of anticipation and without apparent goals. To glean into this outré musical space is like putting one's ear to the boarded up windows of the photograph that adorn the front sleeve.

The album makes extensive use of the Roland JV-2080, a sample-based synth rack from 1996 with a distinctly clean sound. Our producer dives deep into the expansion cards (labeled after genres like “Hip Hop” and “World”) for curious and sometimes cheesy samples. But he also forces the JV-2080 to do things which are not its forte, like the arduous task of programming decent kick drums.

Another technique that is testament to his experimental view on music making, is the idea of using sketches of unfinished tracks with different time signatures, and mash them together into something new - of which the results of one of these experiments can be heard on the closing track and its bilingual conversation between ambient and tribal.

Full of stunted rhythms and eerie melodies, the unclassifiable nature of the music of nrl:ndr lies somewhere in the vicinity of IDM, classical avant garde and private press synth. From the epic opening track - echoing the post-kraut drumming style of Michael Shrieve - to juggling with chopped up vocal samples and treading into almost trap-like territories on A4, he crosses into a multitude of genres without getting his hands too dirty with nostalgia.

Ekman returns to Shipwrec! "Five years is a long time. For many, 2020 seems like a lifetime ago. It was in this fabled year that Ekman last appeared on Shipwrec, Kronkel marking a shift from the blackened acid blooms to more considered, yet unsettling, sounds. It is from this audio fount the dutchman returns with Elixer. Throbs of bass and rasping snares shear a path for smoother tones in Alruin Met Cranberry. Injecting the ever-present sense of unease, a menacing melody stalks the constricting recesses as paranoia takes hold. These inner alcoves are further explored in the disturbing Doornappel Met Peer. Spectral synth-lines don a thin shimmering veil, warbling notes tremble while beats offer little relief in this unstable outing. Aquatic undercurrents introduce the flip, a sharp drum slicing through the burbling bass of Codeine En Rozemarijn. From this murky soup, a string ascends as Ekman toys with contrasting tones to produce a piece of acid dipped elegance. Shattered drums pierce the ambient fog of the finale. Alsem Met Anijs blends intricate percussion with soulful strings to produce a hauntingly beautiful dreamscape to finish Ekman's heady brew."

Luke Titus is a Chicago-born drummer, songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist known for his remarkable versatility and genre-spanning artistry. With deep roots in jazz and a knack for blending it seamlessly with experimental music, drum & bass, and beyond, Titus has earned a reputation as a world-class drummer and a dynamic force across the national musical landscape. Growing up in Chicago's vibrant music scene, Titus flourished alongside fellow young artists in the early 2010s. His work quickly positioned him as a key figure in the city's jazz, hip-hop, and R&B communities, leading to collaborations that propelled him to national recognition. Continue to follow the thread of Luke Titus' many contributions to jazz and alternative scenes across America, and what emerges is a singular weave between his roots in Chicago, LA and New York communities. From What Was Will Grow A Flower is the second LP from the prolific young songwriter and producer, codifying his many musical leanings into an emergent, nearly clairvoyant statement of musical intent. Blooming and innovative songwriting, effervescent vocal hooks, virtuosic instrumental passages, and meticulously studied production techniques abound. About the album, Titus says "This album is about spirituality and connectivity, both with the universe and the self, as told through my personal journey. It questions reality as a way to deepen one's connection to it. I dedicate this album not only to anyone who has been through hard times, but to anyone who relates to the cyclical nature of the human experience. And more than that, I dedicate this album to my mom." As a producer and songwriter, Titus' fingerprints can be found on numerous acclaimed projects, including Noname's Room 25, Luke Titus & Cisco Swank's Some Things Take Time, Orion Sun's Orion, and Ravyn Lenae's Hypnos. His co-production credits span across a roster of innovative talents like Steve Lacy, Monte Booker, Brian Sanborn, Teo Halm, Phoelix, Cisco Swank, Saba, Kiefer, Elijah Fox, and Itai Shapira. Titus has taken his talents to the global stage, performing at high-profile festivals and venues such as Lollapalooza, Coachella, Pitchfork, Blue Note NYC, North Sea Jazz Fest, Smoking Grooves, Fuji Rock Festival, Blue Note Tokyo, and NYC Winter Jazz Fest, amongst many others.

Luke Titus is a Chicago-born drummer, songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist known for his remarkable versatility and genre-spanning artistry. With deep roots in jazz and a knack for blending it seamlessly with experimental music, drum & bass, and beyond, Titus has earned a reputation as a world-class drummer and a dynamic force across the national musical landscape. Growing up in Chicago's vibrant music scene, Titus flourished alongside fellow young artists in the early 2010s. His work quickly positioned him as a key figure in the city's jazz, hip-hop, and R&B communities, leading to collaborations that propelled him to national recognition. Continue to follow the thread of Luke Titus' many contributions to jazz and alternative scenes across America, and what emerges is a singular weave between his roots in Chicago, LA and New York communities. From What Was Will Grow A Flower is the second LP from the prolific young songwriter and producer, codifying his many musical leanings into an emergent, nearly clairvoyant statement of musical intent. Blooming and innovative songwriting, effervescent vocal hooks, virtuosic instrumental passages, and meticulously studied production techniques abound. About the album, Titus says "This album is about spirituality and connectivity, both with the universe and the self, as told through my personal journey. It questions reality as a way to deepen one's connection to it. I dedicate this album not only to anyone who has been through hard times, but to anyone who relates to the cyclical nature of the human experience. And more than that, I dedicate this album to my mom." As a producer and songwriter, Titus' fingerprints can be found on numerous acclaimed projects, including Noname's Room 25, Luke Titus & Cisco Swank's Some Things Take Time, Orion Sun's Orion, and Ravyn Lenae's Hypnos. His co-production credits span across a roster of innovative talents like Steve Lacy, Monte Booker, Brian Sanborn, Teo Halm, Phoelix, Cisco Swank, Saba, Kiefer, Elijah Fox, and Itai Shapira. Titus has taken his talents to the global stage, performing at high-profile festivals and venues such as Lollapalooza, Coachella, Pitchfork, Blue Note NYC, North Sea Jazz Fest, Smoking Grooves, Fuji Rock Festival, Blue Note Tokyo, and NYC Winter Jazz Fest, amongst many others.

Luke Titus is a Chicago-born drummer, songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist known for his remarkable versatility and genre-spanning artistry. With deep roots in jazz and a knack for blending it seamlessly with experimental music, drum & bass, and beyond, Titus has earned a reputation as a world-class drummer and a dynamic force across the national musical landscape. Growing up in Chicago's vibrant music scene, Titus flourished alongside fellow young artists in the early 2010s. His work quickly positioned him as a key figure in the city's jazz, hip-hop, and R&B communities, leading to collaborations that propelled him to national recognition. Continue to follow the thread of Luke Titus' many contributions to jazz and alternative scenes across America, and what emerges is a singular weave between his roots in Chicago, LA and New York communities. From What Was Will Grow A Flower is the second LP from the prolific young songwriter and producer, codifying his many musical leanings into an emergent, nearly clairvoyant statement of musical intent. Blooming and innovative songwriting, effervescent vocal hooks, virtuosic instrumental passages, and meticulously studied production techniques abound. About the album, Titus says "This album is about spirituality and connectivity, both with the universe and the self, as told through my personal journey. It questions reality as a way to deepen one's connection to it. I dedicate this album not only to anyone who has been through hard times, but to anyone who relates to the cyclical nature of the human experience. And more than that, I dedicate this album to my mom." As a producer and songwriter, Titus' fingerprints can be found on numerous acclaimed projects, including Noname's Room 25, Luke Titus & Cisco Swank's Some Things Take Time, Orion Sun's Orion, and Ravyn Lenae's Hypnos. His co-production credits span across a roster of innovative talents like Steve Lacy, Monte Booker, Brian Sanborn, Teo Halm, Phoelix, Cisco Swank, Saba, Kiefer, Elijah Fox, and Itai Shapira. Titus has taken his talents to the global stage, performing at high-profile festivals and venues such as Lollapalooza, Coachella, Pitchfork, Blue Note NYC, North Sea Jazz Fest, Smoking Grooves, Fuji Rock Festival, Blue Note Tokyo, and NYC Winter Jazz Fest, amongst many others.

"The album was created in this back and forth of snapshots - we made most of the decisions impulsively without much questioning. That takes a lot of trust." — Violeta García & Hora Lunga

"I'll Wait For You In The Car Park", the first full length collaboration between Argentinian cellist, improviser and composer Violeta García and Swiss musician and composer Hora Lunga, is a work of extremes. Drawing from the realities of life on two continents, and embodying moods ranging from stoic desire to violent bursts, the album enciphers so-called ordinary moments from everyday life into an alluring collection of musical scenes. Seemingly inconspicuous moments are condensed into a tale of synchronicity: colliding time zones and seasons, metropolitan rhythms raining down onto a glacier's ice field, exploring places through street view, the serendipity of loitering at a kiosk. As such, "I'll Wait For You In The Car Park" brings documentary film essays to mind that carefully observe the private and everyday occurrences.
Violeta García and Hora Lunga crossed paths by chance in 2023 and began discussing and sharing music shortly afterwards. What started as a loose exchange of ideas, sending back and forth sketches and demos between South America and Europe, grew into several studio sessions in 2024. Being sucked into a "quite extraordinary flow", the two musicians recorded, arranged and intervened on a level playing field, using the studio as a playground to record musical layers and interweave them with field recordings and audio notes gathered over the course of a year. Speaking a kindred musical language, they quickly realized how their ideas clung to each other like two familiar souls, complementing, intertwining and merging. From gauzy and eerie textures, musical miniatures floating through time, howling and screaming strings, to tumbling and thundering basses – the sound of the ordinary shapes a body that vibrates, writhes and breathes.

Violeta García is a cellist, improviser and composer from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Based in Spain, she tours a lot with her band Blanco Teta. She is a performer in many art forms, including free improvisation, contemporary and trans-media experimental repertoire in violoncello and electronics and collaborations with dancers, film makers and visual artists. After years of studying classical and popular music on violoncello and, later, contemporary composition and improvisation, Violeta has developed her own musical voice needed to emerge beyond outside specific genres.

Throughout Swiss composer and musician Hora Lunga's work, the focus lies is on exploring boundaries, both musically and in terms of performance and content. Above all, genre designations lose all meaning, as the music always takes place within a dramaturgically conceived overall framework. In recent years, his projects have ranged from pop music productions to experimental works and sound performances, as well astheatre and film productions. His ensemble WIRREN consists of up to fifteen performers.

LP + insert. A cosmically poetic duo playing Afro-Roots-Electro with a clear nod to spiritual jazz. Esinam Dogbatse (flute, synths, vocals, fx, percussion) | Sibusile Xaba (guitar, vocals, percussion).



ESINAM & Sibusile Xaba is a meeting of nomadic, wandering and kindred spirits in music. Both artists draw upon their ancestry: Belgian-Ghanaian(ESINAM) and Kwazulu Natal-South Africa (Sibusile Xaba) through a unique connection, a deep artistic and spiritual level, they use rhythms and grooves to translate stories to the audience. Their vocal chanting enhances trance to rhythmic patterns that grace us by melodies of the future and past.

On April 25th 2025, ESINAM & Sibsile Xaba will release their first joint album entitled 'Healing Voices'.

This album is a reflection of the kaleidoscopic multitude of musical inspirations running through the veins of two very talented solo artists. Both multi-instrumentalists, they provide many different layers to their music. Each track is a reflection of their cross-pollination. Musically inspired by Ghanaian Highlife and traditional songs from Zulu and Ewe culture, but with a distinct contemporary interpretation where their acoustic sound is enhanced by electronic gadgets.

As multi-instrumentalists, the two artists translate messages from their ancestors through rhythms and grooves. Their vocal chanting enhances trance to rhythmic patterns that grace us by melodies of the future and past.

Thanks to their Belgian-Ghanaian and South-African roots, they are unique in their being, strong in their union and connected on deep artistic and spiritual levels. The collaboration between ESINAM and Sibusile Xaba is bringing healing to body and soul.

In 2018 Esinam discovered Sibusile Xaba during his European (solo)tour. She was enchanted by his musical energy and craftsmanship and invited him as a vocal guest feature on the track 'Flowing River', from her debut album 'Shapes in Twilights of infinity'. When she was asked at the first edition of WOMAD Festival in South Africa if she wanted to collaborate with a 'local artist', she didn't have to think twice.

So in October 2022, Esinam and Sibusile seized this opportunity to dive into the rehearsal and recording studio, and discover and combine each other's musical universes to shape up new music together.

In May 2023 this collaboration continued with rehearsals, recordings and a first European tour with performances in Belgium, The Netherlands, France, Germany and Slovenia.

In March 2024 they released the first single 'Africa Wola' out of the fothcoming album. In November 2024, they released a remix of their first single by South-African DJ and producer DaCapo and played at Visa for Music in Morocco.

Taba voices a subtle yet surprising shift for the Japanese musician and producer Satomimagae. Observing and absorbing the fleeting scenes and sounds of life flowing outside of her home studio, Taba unfolds as a series of vignettes that document the personal and the universal. Satomi sings beyond herself in an orbit of souls and systems known and unknown, seen and unseen, in the present and in the strange flux of memory, leaving linear songwriting to rest for circuitous stories expanded and expansive in tone and texture. Following the logic of taba, a Japanese term for a bunch, bundle or grouping together of different things, the album is assembled as a loose collection of short stories. Shapeshifting into something like a poet-narrator, Satomi casts her writer's eye to the often perplexing shapes that form from quotidian events and exchanges defining our increasingly alienated age. Where Satomi's last full-length, 2021's Hanazono, bloomed from the lush soil of a private inner sphere, the bird's eye of Taba searches to place the artist_somewhere, somehow_within a wider, wilder world. Collaborations with other artists and musicians close to Satomi's universe further elevate the album's sweeping sonics. Synthesizer lines from Norio, who also helps define the album's visual identity through photo and video, enliven the tender ballad "Kodama." The bell-like Rhodes piano ringing in and around Satomi's guitar on "Dottsu" is played by Akhira Sano, who created the cover art for her 2021 Colloid EP. Yuya Shito's clarinet was the missing puzzle piece that completed "Spells," and it was also Yuya who mixed Taba with an ear for its organic textures and elegantly frayed edges, giving utterance to a distinctly different energy than Satomi's earlier expressions. The tonal and rhythmic play that lay the foundation of these songs also animates a colorful palette of melodic gestures, noisy resonances and pointed moments captured by Satomi's close-at-hand recorder. While Taba is still carried by the innate intimacy that has defined Satomi's music to date, these songs channel her newly spacious and inquisitive songwriting approach, unlocking unusual layers in the process. Some are subsumed in the speculative poetics of sound design, while others peer through the window of bedroom pop. Gathering imagistic reflections, tracing vast ideations and quietly lingering in humble moments, Taba connects vivid lines between the individual and the collective, the constructed and the cosmic, the articulated and the felt. Satomi's sonic tales gain an eloquent coherence by the simple fact of existing in conversation, humming a harmony of parts that buzzes with the tangled circuitry of a life in motion. Taba is the fifth album from Japanese musician, songwriter and dream traveler Satomimagae, following her 2021 album Hanazono and the 2023 reissue of her debut album Awa, both for RVNG Intl. On Taba, Satomimagae leaves linear songwriting to rest for circuitous stories expanded and expansive in tone and texture, unfolding as a series of vignettes that document both the personal and the universal. Some of the songs on Taba feature intimate moments captured on Satomi's hand recorder, poetic moments of sound design animated by tonal and rhythmic bedroom pop foundations. As with Hanazono, Taba's album artwork features a wooden block print by Satomi's sister, the artist Natsumi Magae.

Norman Westberg (guitar), Giridhar Udupa (ghatam, konnakol, khanjira, percussion) and Jacek Mazurkiewicz (double bass, electronics)An extraordinary meeting of three artists from three different musical worlds and three different continents. Norman Westberg (ex-Swans) and Jacek Mazurkiewicz have already released one album together "First Man In The Moon" in 2021 (published by the Swiss label Hallow Ground).In the new project, they are accompanied by Giridhar Udupa, an Indian master of ghatam (a clay percussion instrument that looks like a jug). The album will feature 3 long trance compositions, referring to ambient, krautrock, free jazz and Indian music.Jacek Mazurkiewicz describes the creation of this album as follows:"I met Norman Westberg while supporting the Swans tour in Poland as 3FoNIA. A few years later, during Norman's tour with Gira, we recorded a duet.The trio session took place similarly to the previous duet session during Norman's solo concert in Warsaw on the Swans tour.Recorded with Adam Toczko, a quick meeting on a day off from work.I invited Giridhar Udupa to the trio, whom I had met earlier during the period when I co-founded the band Limboski. I once invited Wacek Zimpel to play a few concerts with Giridhar. Wacek later created Saagara and I was wondering about some unusual musical context in which I would find myself with Giridhar. I was looking for an interesting sound configuration, but also a cultural one, with a different approach to creating music. I got the impression that for both Norman and Giridhar it was a fairly fresh meeting, not obvious. And on the other hand, ordinary - everyone did their own thing."Detroit guitarist Norman Westberg moved to New York in 1980 and became a part of the experimental music scene that was experiencing its golden age. Westberg himself became a permanent fixture when he joined the iconic avant-rock band Swans in 1983, and was the only member other than frontman Michael Gira to play with them for most of the band's run, both until their 1997 disbandment and his return in 2010. Westberg has also been involved with other legendary New York noise-rock acts, including Jim Thirlwell's Foetus and the post-Swans Heroine Sheiks, in which he played with Cows frontman Shannon Selberg; and in 2014, he joined the noise-rock supergroup Hidden Rifles, whose members included Mike Watt of Minutemen and Mark Shippy of U.S. Maple. Westberg's solo compositions, most often for solo guitar and a set of effects, draw on drone and post-minimalism, bringing to mind dark ambient passages from Swans albums.Giridhar Udupa is an extremely valued teacher and world-renowned artist, an Indian master of ghatam (a clay percussion instrument that looks like a jug). He was born into a family with long musical traditions. He began learning to play at the age of four, guided by his father. At the age of twelve, he already had his first performances behind him. He currently gives concerts alongside the greatest masters. He has received many prestigious awards. He performs in the USA, Spain, Canada, France, Switzerland, Germany, Oman and Kuwait. Giridhar Udupa is a member of the band of the Indian vocalist Bombay Jayashri, nominated for an Oscar for the best song for the film Life of Pi. He is one of the founders of the Layatharanga band. He also plays virtuoso other traditional instruments of South India, such as mridangam and kanjira, and is excellent at using the konnakol technique (a type of rhythmic vocalization).For three decades, the artist has been a global ambassador and icon of Carnatic music. He is the founder of The Udupa Foundation, a charity organization established in 2015 to promote Indian music, performing arts and culture. He has participated in recording dozens of albums. He is also well-known in our country thanks to his cooperation with Polish performers, which resulted in excellent artistic effects, such as the famous Indialucia - Michał Czachowski's group / project or the Saagara formation, led by Wacław Zimpel. Udupa also played on the album Lechoechoplexita, released by Leszek Hefi Wiśniewski, and on the album of the band Layatharanga, released in our country.Jacek Mazurkiewicz is interested in music in the broad sense. He puts his sounds together based on emotional impressions and pulse. Combining acoustics with electronics, he is constantly looking for a new sound. Solo as 3FoNIA, in a duet with Mikołaj Trzaska or Tomek Dąbrowski, the JMB trio with Wojtek Jachna and Jacek Buhl, in the Modular String Trio quartet, the Afrobeat quintet Faso Tamala are just some of his musical incarnations. With Patryk Zakrocki, as part of an audio mission, he massaged hundreds of pairs of ears in the Inner Ear Massage Office. He also deals with sound design, composing and producing music for films and theatre performances. He collaborated with many Polish and foreign artists.

KLÄMP ist ein britisch-niderländisches Kollektiv aus Mitgliedern von IDLES, Sex Swing, Tall Ships, Manatees, Do Me Bad Things, Pulled Apart By Horses, Petbrick und Mugstar. Seit ihrer LP "Hate You" (2020) bei God Unknown Records hat die Band eine tiefgreifende Transformation durchgemacht. Ihr neues Album "TOTAAL TECHNIEK" deckt ein breites Genrespektrum ab und verbindet nahtlos Elemente aus Krautrock, Breakcore, Industrial und Postpunk. Jeder Track ist eine neue Reise, geprägt von innovativem Sound und komplexen musikalischen Texturen. Ihre Entwicklung vom Trio zum innovativen siebenköpfigen Ensemble macht sie zu einem der aufregendsten und unberechenbarsten Acts der heutigen Szene. Human Worth veröffentlicht eine limitierte "TOTAAL GOLD" Auflage der LP, von der 10% aller Einnahmen an Compass Collective gespendet werden – eine Wohltätigkeitsorganisation, die die Integration junger Flüchtlinge und Asylsuchender im UK durch die Künste unterstützt.

Für Fans von: Swans / Sonic Youth / Black Sabbath / Godspeed You Black Emperor / Mark Lanegan / Einstürzende Neubauten / The Fall / Sunn O))) / Wire / Aphex Twin / Portishead / Godflesh / Earth / My Bloody Valentine / Gnod / Anna Von Hausswolf / The Bug

Deerhoof haben sich schon vor langer Zeit als eine der großartigsten Rockgruppen des Planeten etabliert - wer das für übertrieben hält, hat noch nicht genug Zeit damit verbracht, Deerhoof zu hören - das wahnsinnig erfinderische Quartett behandelt jedes seiner neuen Alben als eine Gelegenheit zur kreativen Wiedergeburt. Und doch sind sie irgendwie auch zutiefst zuverlässig, eine seltsame, aber wahre Beschreibung für eine Band, die so kreativ rastlos ist. Man weiß nie, wie ein neues Deerhoof-Album klingen wird, außer dass es immer nach Deerhoof klingen wird. Die Band wird durch solche Paradoxien definiert, wie "Noble and Godlike in Ruin" erneut bestätigt. Ihr neuestes Album ist entweder ein Porträt einer Welt, die in monströsen Hass, Entmenschlichung und Dollarzeichen abgleitet, oder ein eindringliches Selbstporträt der Band als Monster: ein intelligentes, sensibles, hybrides Wesen, das unermüdlich von Liebe singt, sich aber zunehmend von dieser Welt entfremdet. Die Musik ist fröhlich und ahnungsvoll, kybernetisch und zutiefst menschlich, alles zugleich. Streicher, die an avantgardistische Kammermusik und klassische Horrorfilm-Soundtracks erinnern, prallen auf Gitarren- und Basslinien. Das Schlagzeug ist manchmal gefiltert und klingt fast elektronisch, aber kein Computer könnte einen so funkigen und dynamischen Rhythmus erzeugen, bei dem jede winzige Variation von einem Snare-Schlag zum nächsten Welten der Möglichkeiten vermittelt. An der Spitze steht die unnachahmliche Altstimme von Satomi Matsuzaki. Eine Stimme der Einsamkeit, deren schlichte Ruhe seltsam außerhalb des Mahlstroms der Band zu stehen scheint, zu dem sie mit ihren zackig-präzisen Bassläufen selbst beiträgt. Als Einwanderin der ersten Generation in den USA hat sie nie versucht, ihren japanischen Akzent oder ihre Karaoke-esken Vortrag zu verbergen. Auf "Noble und Godlike in Ruin" wirkt dies abwechselnd als Ausdruck von Einsamkeit und als kühle Provokation gegenüber Systemen der Unterdrückung und Kontrolle. ,Kindness is all I needed from you", singt sie auf dem epischen Albumabschluss ,Immigrant Songs`. ,But you think we're in your house." Nicht lange danach explodiert der Song, sein eng gewickelter Art-Pop macht Platz für mehrere Minuten heulenden Lärm. Auch wenn das Thema düster sein mag - wie könnte es anders sein - tragen die Songs trotzigen Optimismus in ihrer Weigerung, sich den Konventionen oder überlieferten Weisheiten zu beugen. Da ist diese berühmte Zeile von Dylan Thomas über das Wüten gegen das Sterben des Lichts: "Noble and Godlike in Ruin" fühlt sich ein wenig so an. Die Welt mag untergehen, aber Deerhoof gehen schwungvoll unter.

Few albums evoke a sense of place as vividly as Desire!, the third offering from Friend of a Friend. The duo—Claire Molek and Jason Savsani—craft music that feels cinematic and immersive, threading themes of yearning, transformation, and resilience through a palette of lush synths, tactile rhythms, and haunting vocals. Recorded in a sprawling Victorian mansion in rural Illinois, with a history steeped in spiritualism and the paranormal, Desire! not only embodies the environment where it was created but also reflects the duo’s evolution as musicians and sonic architects.

Producer Jordan Lawler (M83), who also worked with the duo on FACILITIES, played a pivotal role in shaping the album’s sound. His approach seamlessly integrates analog and electronic elements, from shimmering synth pads to deep, tactile rhythms. The result is a record that feels both vast and grounded, inviting careful listening to its intricate details.

With Desire!, Friend of a Friend captures their evolution as musicians and storytellers, offering a record that lingers in the spaces between tension and beauty. The result is an immersive and deliberate work, one that showcases their musical innovation and their ability to create a vivid, otherworldly sense of place—haunting and cinematic, like stepping into a film where every sound carries a story.

The band has been named an artist to watch by Rolling Stone, an “American visionary” group by Mesmerized, an “indie rock band taking the scene by storm" by Wonderland Magazine, a "cultural phenomenon" by Extravafrench, "sonic visionaries" by Plastic Magazine, "the next huge thing in indie rock" by Each Measure, and "seamlessly intriguing" by Obscure Sound.

Very few bands manage to last decades, and for the ones that do, it's often easy to settle down and get a little too comfortable. But there's nothing comfortable about Devourer, the explosive new album from Cursive. The iconic Omaha group is known for their intensity, ambition, and execution, and has spent 30 years creating a bold discography that's defined as much by its cathartic sound as its weighty, challenging lyrical themes. And Devourer is as daring as ever. Full of intense and incisive songs, the album proves exactly why Cursive have been so influential and enduring-and why they remain so vital today.In the years since their 1995 formation, Cursive developed into one of the most important groups to emerge from the late-'90s/early `00s moment when the lines between indie rock and post-hardcore began blurring into something altogether new. Albums like Domestica (2000) and The Ugly Organ (2003) became essential touchstones whose echoes can still be heard in new bands today. Devourer, as an expansive new double-album, examines humanity's bottomless capacity for consumption through a series of songs that act like vignettes, driven by frontman Tim Kasher's never-ending appetite for both taking in and creating art."I am obsessive about consuming the arts," he explains. "Music, film, literature. I've come to recognize that I devour all of these art forms then, in turn, create my own versions of these things and spew them out onto the world. It's positive; you're part of an ecosystem. But I quickly recognized that the term, `Devourer,' may also embody something gnarly, sinister." Fans have come to expect such heady topics from Cursive, but Devourer sets a new standard.While Cursive's music hasn't gotten any more comfortable, perhaps its being released into a world that's at least a little more shaped in their image. Devourer sounds urgent and fresh, the work of a band still experimenting, still hungering to find new creative heights. On album highlight "Consumers," the protagonist bemoans, "I saw our future and I want to go back." But Cursive are only moving forward.

Northern soul is in the news again, as once more this most resilient of dance floor cults is discovered by a new generation. For four decades now Ace Records has been a natural home for the music and using that experience we are bringing you our first ever all classics collection of some of the scene's greatest hits. All on one LP.

The recordings featured on this release are tried and tested, often in the hot forge of the scene's earliest day, when new discoveries were coming thick and fast, and only the strong survived. These did.

So we have 14 tracks which filled floors in Wigan, Blackpool, Cleethorpes, London's 100 Club and many other legendary venues. From West Coast Mirwood and Kent/ Modern label classics by Jackie Lee, Bobby Garrett, Mary Love and Danny Monday, to the big City Chicago soul of Darrow Fletcher via the super rare recordings by Rita & The Tiaras and Little Ann, which are now accepted standards of the scene.

This is an album for the beginner, those who want to know what all the fuss is about, or those older hands who just want to relive some exceptional memories.

Frizzy P & Mr Cole are a trip-hop duo blending old-school hip-hop, jazz, and analog sounds. Their intimate, melancholic music has earned them growing recognition on the independent scene. Frizzy P, a singer with a captivating voice, and Mr Cole, a beatmaker passionate about vintage sounds, have been collaborating since 2015. Their debut EP, Ladi Dadi (2017), became an underground success, racking up millions of streams and airplay on BBC Music 6 and FIP. In 2023, they followed up with Ladi Dadi II, further refining their musical identity. In 2024, they released The Backroom Tape, a mixtape featuring unreleased tracks, ahead of their final chapter, Ladi Dadi III, set for April 2025. This last installment will feature six new tracks, rich in melancholy and raw emotions. Their live performances have taken them across France and beyond. In 2025, they plan to expand their stage presence with additional musicians. Their unique approach to modern yet timeless trip-hop continues to solidify their place in the music scene.

Danny Ward’s 30-year career has been far from predictable. While best known for the musical eclecticism of his Dubble D project, the dance floor-focused nous of his work as Moodymanc and as a member of the groundbreaking 20:20 Soundsystem, Ward’s bulging CV also includes stints drumming for artists as diverse as Fila Brazillia, Rae & Christian, and The Pharcyde, to Jazz luminaries Mat Halsall and Nat Birchall, alongside countless collaborations (Flora Purim and Nightmares on Wax to name but a couple) and numerous evenings spent adding live percussion to DJ sets at iconic Leeds club night Back To Basics.

Now the long-serving Manchester musician and producer has a new project to share via NuNorthern Soul: Balaphonic. Inspired by a mixture of lockdown-era studio experiments, online collaborations, his long-held love for Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian rhythms and a desire to do things differently, Resolution Revolutions is a gorgeously sonically detailed and immersive album that takes Ward’s musical output to a whole new level.

Like many musicians, Ward used the forced lockdowns of the global COVID-19 pandemic to retreat to his basement studio and make music. Focusing on utilising all of the acoustic and electronic tools at his disposal – not least his beloved percussion instruments – Ward took the opportunity not only to draw on a wide range of musical influences and ideas, but also rhythms, grooves and time signatures. As well as composing new tracks from scratch, he also revisited older compositions with fresh eyes and ears.

The results are simply stunning. Ward sets his stall out via the exotic, slow-burn Balearic warmth of ‘Sunflowers in Dub (Deep Summer Mix)’, where echoing whistles, harmonica motifs, sitar sounds, and cascading piano motifs rise above dub-wise bass and seductive, soft-focus beats. The heady, eyes closed vibe continues on the sunrise-ready awakening of ‘Disorganics (All Strings Mix)’, a samba-soaked summer shuffle rich in sparkling acoustic guitars and infectious Latin percussion, and the fretless bass-sporting Afro-Cuban yearning of ‘Six Fingers’.

As Resolution Revolutions progresses, Ward’s deep love of club-adjacent and dancefloor-focused rhythms subtly comes to the fore. There’s ‘Udders’, a hybrid – and hypnotising – fusion of chopped-up South American percussion, marimba-style melodic motifs, looped bass and spacey electronics, and Ocean Waves Brasil collaboration ‘Oxum’, a mid-tempo Afro-Brazilian deep house number wrapped in deliciously dreamy chords and gentle acid lines.

Similarly impressive and inspired is closing cut ‘Bloco Manco’, where Ward peppers a delay-laden Latin beat and a deep, weighty, dancehall style bassline in waves of echoing hand percussion and restless timbales patterns. Stripped-back, raw and seriously sub-heavy, it provides a jaw-dropping conclusion to one of Ward’s most perfectly formed albums yet.

a A1: Sunflowers In Dub Deep Summer Mix
[b] A2: Disorganics [All Strings Mix]

Percussion mastermind Ploy arrives on Dekmantel with a double-pack of unbridled dancefloor heat that sees him reconnecting with his house roots.

Before he made a striking breakthrough as Ploy with wayward broken techno for Hessle Audio and Timedance, Samuel Smith's first releases as Samuel were leftfield house excursions. On this release for Dekmantel he wanted to reflect on a decade of releasing music and the many high-impact dancefloors he's shared with the label, from Selectors to De School, over the years.

The common denominator across these eight tracks is no-nonsense house, offering up grooves that will serve a DJ exactly what they want in the mix. At the same time, Ploy doesn't dilute the distinctive edge of his sound, from the abundance of perfectly balanced percussion to the nagging hooks of an off-key synth line dropped at just the right moment. Wry samples inject the mischievous humour he's always creeping into his craft. This is where dancefloor magic is nurtured, hitting the sweet spot between rock solid reliability and the wild card energy that brings a heads-down set to life.

From 'Admirer's big room peaks to 'It's Later Than You Think's cosmic incantations, this is the sound of Ploy showing exactly what it takes to make laser-focused club bombs without losing one iota of his inimitable style.

For the first time we are welcoming Molen to the label. The man is a true gem from the exquisite country Uruguay and has produced four unique cuts specially for the hub of Exarde. Each track shows vast and profound level of skill of the artist and are guaranteed to make the sound systems shake from inside to the outside. The emotions are plastic and have been captured bit by bit on this 12” vinyl disc for our sonic pleasure. Molen has been a close friend of the label for quite long time so it is a true honour to welcome him with a full EP which oozes the dark flavour that is so close and warming to the labels sound&vision. Having said all that, I think it is time to indulge into “Plastic Emotions” and give these four audio trips a spin they truly deserve.

The Ibex Band, with Giovanni Rico and Selam Woldemariam at the creative helm, provided the musical backbone for legends like Aster Aweke, Girma Beyene, Tilahun Gessesse, Mulatu Astatke, and Mahmoud Ahmed, including the iconic album Ere Mela Mela, shaping modern Ethiopian music as we know it today. This 1976 album (Ge’ez Year 1968) played a pivotal role in that legacy and has now resurfaced to set the record straight.

There’s a tendency to talk about the seventies as a golden age of Ethiopian music. There are good reasons for that, and just as good reasons against it. However, the notion of a golden past privileges the role of Western explorers and suggests that the pinnacle of Ethiopia’s musical culture is something only a foreigner can appreciate and unearth. It downplays the complexities of Ethiopia’s culture and history, creating an artificial divide between then and now. And it underestimates the constantly evolving sound that has followed.

The legendary musical outfit The Ibex Band, later metamorphosed into The Roha Band, has played a central role in defining the sound of many of the greatest stars on the music scene of Ethiopia from the mid-seventies onwards–but their golden output has never really waned. The story of the origins of the band that provided the musical backbone for greats such as Aster Aweke, Girma Beyene, Tilahun Gessesse, backing the solo career of group member Mahmoud Ahmed as well as backing Mulatu Astatke and many others has yet to be properly told.

Two misconceptions plague the image of Ethiopian music, one is that the music is pure because it is, by some notion, unexploited, the other is that it is all traditional. To begin with, a combination of political changes between the late sixties and the mid-nineties created an environment where only the most dedicated and skilled musicians struggled on and pursued a musical career against fierce odds. The whole Ibex Band, with Giovanni Rico and Selam “Selamino” Seyoum Woldermarian at the creative helm, are arguably the origo of the vibrant scene in the mid-seventies, and the said pair are foremost responsible for not only navigating the band through troubled times, but also modernizing the 6/8 chickchicka rhythm to a contemporary form. Giovanni laid the rhythmic foundation with heavy looped basslines that reinvented traditional melodies as dance music, and with Selamino’s innovative guitar work they influenced scores of musicians from Abegaz Kibrework Shiota to Henock Temesgen. Even Giovanni’s Fender bass and Selamino’s Gibson guitar inspired younger musicians in their choice of instruments. Not only in choice of instruments but also in sound–even as the digital revolution hit Ethiopian music, a lot of popular music still took its cue from the masters from Ibex and Roha.

Ibex emerged out of the ashes of the sixties group the Soul Echos band, adding Giovanni and Selamino to their ranks and taking their cues from a slew of influences, such as Motown and The Beatles, fused with traditional music. A tighter-knit unit than most bands at the time – Ibex has remained six to seven members throughout their whole career, compared to many bands that were as large as fifteen or sixteen men strong when Ibex set out. Their playing has been viciously focused, economical yet heavy. Just a year before the recording sessions of the album in your hands, Giovanni and Selamino made a contribution to the popular musical lexicon of Ethiopia that was simply defining the popular sound: their arrangement and recording of bandmate Mahmoud Ahmed’s solo effort and real commercial breakthrough tune and eponymous album, Ere Mela Mela, from 1975.

Selamino has never limited himself to being an adroit lead guitarist, but has always been a scholar of history, and as such he has probably contributed as much to modern Ethiopian music with his guitar playing and compositions as with a deepened understanding of modern or contemporary – Zemenawi – Ethiopian music. Selamino’s contributions serve as a metaphor for those of the whole band, at one and the same time creating and defining a new, danceable and updated sound anchored in Giovanni’s bass, whilst also elevating the broader scene through their support for others on the scene and on top of that, increasing the understanding of the music.

There is an understandable desire to romanticize the musical heyday Ibex and Roha were at the forefront of, because so much of the output is sorrowfully hard to come by. Ibex creativity was nothing short of ridiculously fierce compared to many of their Western contemporaries. Based on their sheer recorded output alone they could have usurped the title “hardest working in show business” from James Brown, recording more than 250 albums or 2500 songs in the seventies and eighties. Some only surface as cassettes today, others were never given full LP release, and some are simply impossible to find today. In the light of that, it’s nothing short of a miracle that the recording Stereo Instrumental Music from 1976 (Ge’ez Year 1968) has resurfaced. Unearthed in perfect condition on a chrome cassette, this is musical history comes alive–to set the future straight. Stereo Instrumental Music was recorded in collaboration with Karl-Gustav Lundgren, a Swedish national working for the Radio Voice of the Gospel. It took two sessions at the Ras Hotel ballroom in Addis Ababa. The Ibex Band was the first band in Ethiopia to employ a four-track recorder for their recording (the first available in the country, lent by Karl-Gustav). Later the same week, Giovanni and Selamino realized that, lengthwise, the recorded material fell short of what they wished for, so they recorded four more tracks in one more session on a single-track recorder. The Ras Hotel and Ghion Hotel, where the Ibex Band held musical residencies were to Ethiopia in general and Addis Ababa in particular what Motown was to the USA and Detroit a few years earlier – a hotbed of musical creativity and showmanship.

The most astonishing thing about Ethiopian music of the last half century is how tradition and modernity are intertwined. Because of this feature, it’s kind of hard to tell when there ever was or when we are in a “golden age”. So much of music from the past has been criminally neglected, but because of the hardships in the past, it would be an oversimplification to say that said past was a golden age. Probably, the golden age is what we are approaching, because for the first time both the past and future are accessible, and the monumental contributions from before can lay a firm foundation for a thriving music scene today. The Ibex Band stands firmly in the past, present and the future. That, if anything, is golden.

The detailed history of Stereo Instrumental Music is in many ways unique. To begin with, it couldn’t have been recorded earlier (there were no four-track recorders available) and it really couldn’t have been recorded afterwards either, at least not in the years directly following, because of the toll the musical scene took from the unfavorable political climate that followed when the nascent Derg regime and rival groups tried to assert themselves, the musical equipment lent from The Voice of Gospel Radio simply disappeared from Ethiopia when the radio station folded in 1977. Karl-Gustav Lundgren,
the Swedish foreign national who assisted during the recording, worked with the Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus at the time, recalls how they only had about fifteen minutes to get the microphones in place for the recording as to not alert neither the management at Ras Hotel nor the authorities and most importantly, to complete the recording before the curfew came into effect at midnight. In leaping to the opportunity to use previously unavailable equipment to push their sound forward and improvising to meet the logistical challenges, the Ibex Band displayed the very avant-gardism and adaptability that explains their longevity as a band through the years. The recording of Stereo Instrumental Music is from a given time in history, but it sounds as beyond time.
Much of the energy that burst out of the scene that Stereo Instrumental Music came out of dissipated or got sidetracked during the societal changes Ethiopia went through in the 1970s and 80s. Whilst leaders might have professed to be revolutionary, the work ethic of the Ibex Band can truly be described as that. They never called it quits, but adapted, toured extensively abroad in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, and found ways to work even in the face of the curfew that curtailed a lot of musical life. They even played major arenas in the nineteen eighties, despite said curfew and restrictions. The whole extent of their legacy has never been told, but their music speaks louder than words, so therefore… tune in to the Ibex Band’s Stereo Instrumental Music.

For their second album 'The Foel Tower', Quade holed up in an old stone barn in the cradle of a Welsh mountain valley.
The valley was a stark and windswept backdrop with little daylight, as the band would huddle around crackling fires each evening. “There was very much a feeling of being on the complete fringes of society,” the band says. “The last vestiges of settlement before the unrelenting barren moors that loomed over us.”
It was an environment that would shape the band – a Bristol four piece made up of Barney Matthews, Leo Fini, Matt Griffiths and Tom Connolly – and the record they have made. It’s an album that is as dreamy as it is melancholic, and as quiet and tender as it is forceful and potent – gliding across genres like winds blowing over those wide-spanning Welsh hills – to arrive at something the band half-jokingly, yet somewhat accurately, describe as “doomer sad boy, ambient-dub, folk, experimental post-rock.”

Quade is a band but it’s also a very close-knit group that have been friends since childhood who use this musical vehicle for interpersonal explorations and connections. “We’ve individually experienced a lot of difficulty over the last several years and Quade has represented a space to shelter from these,” the band says. “This means we often communicate extensively with each other about the issues affecting us individually and collectively. These conversations and concerns are central to The Foel Tower.”

In many ways, the making of this record – or any Quade record – goes way deeper than the simple writing, construction and recording of music. It is a profoundly deep and meaningful experience. “A key theme of the album relates to why we connect with specific places in the way that we do,” the group says. “We often remove ourselves to isolated valleys, sheltered from some of the painful personal struggles that we have experienced as a band. These become spaces in which we collectively purge ourselves of some of these difficulties hoping to make Quade a physical and emotional place of solace. This album celebrates these places that we’ve been able to retreat to and recuperate.”

It is a deep, dense record that is stuffed with musical, cinematic and literary influences – from Ursula La Guin and Cormac MacCarthy through to RS Thomas and Yeats – but despite the heavy, introspective and anxious nature of some of the material, it is also a record that is remarkably deft, agile and considered.

Made with producer Jack Ogborne and mixer Larry ‘Bruce’ McCarthy, there is a pleasing duality to the final sound of the record. One that feels fragile and intimate but also powerful and forceful, as introspective as it is expansive, and a record that is as detailed and textured as it is wide open and spacious.

The album title also pays homage to the place that shaped it so greatly. Within this remote Welsh valley stands the Foel Tower, a stone structure filled with valves and cylinders that can raise and lower the level of the reservoir to draw off water. Which it can then send as far as 70 miles to Birmingham. However, in the late 1800s this land was occupied by local farmers and families in the hundreds until the British Government acquired the land, cleared the valleys, and promptly displaced them in order to begin serving the vastly expanding industrial English city. The band dug into the history and politics of this and wove it into the themes they were already thinking about, using what the Foel Tower stands for as something of a contemporary metaphor. “This tension was something that we wanted to explore without the haughty judgement of our more metropolitan lifestyles,” they say. “And to explore how this specifically relates to ourselves: how can we envisage a genuinely ecological future for ourselves – one that is accessible, affordable and in harmony with endangered rural practices.”

What makes The Foel Tower such an incredible record is that it feels born of a time, place and situation that only existed in that very moment. It’s a snapshot of those 10 days spent in rural Wales and all the feelings and anxieties the band were experiencing at that specific time, magically caught on tape. “The album very much feels tied to this valley for us and the conversations and experiences we shared there,” they say. “It brings up a great deal of poignancy for us, an emblem of some fleeting respite from the strains we all have to experience. But there’s also deep sadness knowing how transient these moments are – in fact, there’s just a great deal of sadness in this album. But it’s also a record that while personal, resigned, and emotionally burdened, is ultimately hopeful.”