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Following the 2019 soundtrack release of ‘Matthias & Maxime’, Mercury KX are thrilled to share Jean-Michel Blais’s upcoming LP aubades. The new album from the Montreal-based icon of modern-classical music shows a new side to the artist. The album features some of his best piano moments but also has grand orchestral elements and arrangements which show a new side to the artist – and has a lot of moments in uplifting major as opposed to melancholic minor.In his own words: “With this album, I was definitely responding to certain trends in classical music. For example, the fact that the solo piano tends to always sounds melancholic. That’s good, but I’ve done that already, I wanted to go beyond that. It was also the first time I’ve ever written so much in major, not minor. So much of piano music, especially in this modern classical music world, is in minor. I wanted to go there but without being kitsch.”

Philadelphia based quintet, Grayscale, continue to break away from their punk roots & establish themselves firmly in pop leaning alternative rock with their third Fearless Records offering. After racking up 50 million streams and receiving praise from Forbes, Alternative Press, Billboard, and more, the quintet have opened up themselves and their sound throughout these 11 tracks. For Grayscale, Umbra is the end of the beginning. All previous records served as stepping stones accumulating and shaping the band's course and leading them down an artistic and aesthetic path to this point. Umbra is more of a feeling than a concept; it is an energy. It is all the things we keep underneath or to ourselves. It is the cold feeling of internal conflict, the bargaining, and the wickedness that exists within a space otherwise covered in light. The sounds don't necessarily match the stories; the energy doesn’t always match the intent. It's not about the light or the dark. It's about the light and the dark

Berlin-based violinist Daniel Hope’s latest album takes a deep dive into the rich repertoire of American music, exploring its roots and distinctive qualities. “We know a piece is from America the moment we hear it,” says Hope. “But what makes music sound American?” Daniel Hope – America provides some answers, presenting works by composers as diverse as Leonard Bernstein, Sam Cooke, Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, Florence Price, Samuel A. Ward and Kurt Weill in outstanding new classical and jazz arrangements by Paul Bateman for solo violin in different combinations, with vocals, piano, jazz trio, string/chamber orchestra and percussion.

of time in the music world, he started to embrace his own limitations, subverting themes like “making it” and preinternet nostalgia with a Jim O’Rourkeinspired wink in his eye. While holed up in his Toronto basement, a lifelong obsession with outdated pop trickery and yesteryear’s preset sounds launched him into an alternate sonic universe—one where The Beach Boys’ late70s albums were big hits, and long-forgotten Italian soft rock is the style du jour. The resulting ten songs were given their final sheen by mastering impresario Dave Cooley (Tame Impala, Blood Orange, J Dilla). Born and raised in West Berlin sometime in the 80s, Carl has already had several musical incarnations. From a Berlin Art Prize nomination for his single-note vinyl record (“The whole concept makes me upset” — VICE), to glimpsing the album charts by cowriting an aging crooner’s magnum opus (“Glamorous” — NY Times), he has always been more interested in exploring different angles than building a career. Since a transcontinental move to Canada, his focus has shifted from the conceptual to the immediate music-making process,

Panthers prowling through a desert. Cowgirls swaggering into a saloon and kicking up dust. Riding shotgun with a Tarantino heroine. Having the fiesta of your lives under a giant piñata with all your friends. Los Bitchos’ hallucinatory surf-exotica is as evocative as it is playful: the London-based pan-continental group could well be your new favourite party band with their instrumental voyages that are the soundtrack to setting alight to a row of flaming sambucas and losing yourself to the night. They’ve got a bun-tight knack for a groove – and they’ve got the best fringes in rock’n’roll too.

Serra Petale (guitar), Agustina Ruiz (keytar), Josefine Jonsson (bass) and Nic Crawshaw (drums) hail from different parts of the world but met via all-night house parties, or through friends, in London. Their unique sound binds them together, though, taking in a

retrofuturistic blend of Peruvian chicha, Argentine cumbia, Turkish psych and surf guitars. They are London’s answer to Khruangbin, if Khruangbin spent all weekend getting slammed on cheap tequila in
a Dalston dive bar.

Hollis Brown's latest album, 'In The Aftermath' (Mascot Label Group/Cool
Green Recordings), is the deliciously depraved outcome of an all-night
rock n' roll riot
The Queens, New York- based quintet escaped to the Poconos to record with a
few handles of whiskey, and, in one 24- hour session, ran down the Stone's
seminal first album of all originals, 1966's Aftermath. Tracked live in the studio
with minimal overdubs, 'In The Aftermath' is potent proof the five-piece group is
one of the last great American rock n' roll bands.'In The Aftermath' is the second
in a casual homage series. Previously, Hollis Brown issued 'Gets Loaded', saluting
Velvet Underground's 'Loaded'. This new album directly follows the band's most
successful release yet, 2019's 'Ozone Park', which earned rave reviews from
Rolling Stone, Billboard, Paste Magazine, Pop Matters, Relix, and Goldmine.

The new album by the Peruvian-born / Berlin-based experimental artist Ale Hop was conceived in a context of immobility and provides six sonic vignettes that wonder about location, circularity, rootedness and experience. In collaboration with Ana Quiroga,
Concepcion Huerta, Daniela Huerta, Elsa M'balla, Felicity Magan, Fil Uno, Ignacio Briceño, KMRU, Manongo Mujica, Moises Horta, Nicole L'huillier, Raul Jardín, Sukitoa Onamau, Tomas Tello.

Following her explorations on music's inherent fixation to geographic space and time, be it through the longing of home ("Apophenia" 2019) or scientific magnification of invisible worlds ("The Life of Insects" 2020), Berlin-based Peruvian-born experimental composer Ale Hop's fourth album, "Why Is It They Say a City Like Any City?", was conceived in a context of immobility. During the lockdown
months, she started a process of remote collaboration, by sending messages, posted from various cities along a South American trip, to thirteen musicians from around the world. She journaled her impressions upon these places to an intimate fictional character while reflecting on matters of time,
sound, space, cosmology and colonial memory. The thirteen musicians dialogued with this voice by taking upon the challenge of responding to the messages with sound collaborations.
Field recordings, mouth drumming, drone cellos, electronic loops, arrhythmic rhythms and voices came back from this experiment. Ale assembled them, by layering, twisting and turning, into sonic vignettes that wonder about location, circularity, rootedness and experience, making it the first time she's set her guitar aside. Expect no answers to the album's title question, but an innermost psychedelic rumination.
"Despite the technological resources that appear to dilute distances, the simulation of closeness mirrored on the digital space is an emptied body, a state of precarity, a flat surface; unable to withhold an experience of exchange," Ale states. "So, I began this project by asking myself, how can we escape from the reduced experience of the virtual? The idea behind this experiment was that my messages and the places they describe could drive the composition, be a catalyzer, a
score. Thus, to use geography as a tool to remember and imagine, to allow new soundscapes to emerge."
"Memory, diffuse and divergent, sometimes reaches out to the future in its search for form, taking shape from the reflections and echoes that come back … like throwing a rock in a pond and having a rock thrown back at you."

The third release from South Italy based label, Soul Departure Recordings, as label head Kikko Esse comes correct with four soulful house heaters.

On the A, ‘I Got Want You’ and ‘Red Wine’, the former a heads down club thumper featuring Del Carmine and the later a piano-laden, Latin influenced bomb.

Flip it to find ‘Midnight’ a Kerri channelling cut from the depths and ‘Believe Me’ a sweet soulful gem with blistering vocals and seductive sax featuring Polose and Baldassarre.

Electronic artist Kristian Shelley - AKA Inwards - announces new EP ‘Feeling So Fun Reality’ for October 8th via Brighton based tastemaker label Small Pond. ‘Raindrops’ is the first single taken from it, and is out on July 29th.

The EP is a sister release to 2019’s ‘Feelings of Unreality’ EP - merely shifting where the spaces between the letters land to flip the meaning entirely on its head. Whereas the 2019 effort was laced with anxiety and cyclical internal conflict at the perspective destroying, fathomless possibilities of ideas and scenarios built in the mind, ‘Feeling So Fun Reality’ reflects an optimism grounded in the real world. In this, it takes on a similar human warmth to the best work of Aphex Twin, Clark or Boards of Canada.

‘Raindrops’ is an apt opening gambit in this sense, combining technology and the earthy tangibility of the natural world. Precise modular synths, inspired by the rain, are twisted into wordless conversations conveying a million and one different meanings to a
million and one different ears. This points to the reason Inwards favours instrumental music over lyrical - the capacity to run off emotion without fully understanding what it is you’re channeling per se, and the multitude of interpretations on the receivers end.

Brooklyn-based musician and producer Varsity Star makes his Small Pond Records debut with ‘More Than Anything’, a mini-album of deeply moving and emotive electronic music.

Varsity Star is an electronic musician and upright bassist who grew up in Boston and spent time playing with various bands as a multi-genre sideman. After deciding to go it alone and produce music on a synth and Ableton, he had a spell living in Berlin. Now back in Brooklyn, he has become a prolific artist who, in just a couple of years, has put out various singles, remixes and LPs. As a programmer by day, he has put together high spec live shows involving 3D printers, soldering together LEDs and writing his own programs that read Ableton and output light patterns, he is a truly creative mind.

There is a soft and warm late-night melodic glow to the beautiful opening ambiance of 'Christmas Lights' which then makes way for the prickly live drums of 'Mixtape.' Littered with off-grid hits and detuned synth sounds, it's a modern and electronic take on jazz that is deeply absorbing. 'Bedroom' is a gorgeous affair that floats on airy pads and scuffed up, organic drum sounds while the most innocent of melodies play out.

The Norwegian-born/Berlin-based electronic duo Soft as Snow returns with their most powerful statement yet. Their second full length 'Bit Rot' perfectly captures the friction of our contemporary existence in which smooth digital surfaces are locked in conflict with messy physical realities. The crumbling of fantastic European infrastructure is mirrored by luxurious synthwave and ecstatic trance crumbling into nightmarish, corroded cyberscapes.

The songs on 'Bit Rot' create a wide variety of zones in which pleasure and discomfort come together organically and seamlessly. Even as these songs are eaten alive by oppressive atmospheres and destabilizing glitches they never lose sight of their strong melodic underpinnings. Tracks like 'Always On', 'Soft Body Hard Dreaming' and the terrifyingly intense title cut are like visits to a rave inside a paranoid microchipped brain, while 'Rubber Boy' presents electro-industrial funk sung by a caged mutant. On the more restrained tip, fluorescent ballads like 'Hollow' and 'Quiet Anger' evoke the feeling of slipping into a fugue state at an all-night convenience store. This is European nightlife imagined as biomechanical horror.

The album was mixed by Ville Haimala of fellow nordic club destroyers Amnesia Scanner, and the striking cover art features a sculpture by Norwegian artist Camilla Steinum. To further elaborate the album's themes in the visual realm the duo is creating a music video and live A/V show with 3D artist Guynoid, including a special latex suit made in collaboration with AGF Hydra. In this way, 'Bit Rot' grows beyond the album itself into a larger project exploring the fluidity of body and identity when the digital and the physical fuse as one.

Funky organ groove with a spritual soul swing !

One of the most influential and underground Hammond organists of the 1960's was "Big" John Patton as he was then known. If it was the groove that you wanted Patton was your Man and he made several albums for the legendary Blue Note label, many of which went on to sell for eye watering prices. As his style went out of favor, some of the recordings never saw the light of day until almost 20 years later and at the same time Patton slipped into the background. He resurfaced in the 1980s and went into the studio. Among his albums Soul Connection, originally released in 1983 on Nilva Records has now been re-released

Patton had a strong band with him on this record. Avant Garde trombonist Grachan Moncur III fits in just nicely with some funky lines and solo's. Acid jazz Guitar Hero Melvin Sparks rides in the all important funk grooves but the revelation has to be saxophonist Grant Reed, who you may know from the Jazz Room Release of "Shamek Farrah & Folks" and who was a mainstay of the Mongo Santamaria set up. Jazz Exile Alvin Queen has been part of the sound set ups of Junior Mance, Stanley Turrentine and Charles Tolliver, among others.
The whole album sounds as if it was laid down in a Rudy Van Gelder session in the mid 60's and then languished in a vault somewhere, waiting until the fan base had returned.

Berlin’s NIKK drops ‘Paradize EP’ on Radio Slave’s Rekids this January.

Fresh from releases on FJAAK’s Spandau20 and Unknown To The Unknown, Berlin-based DJ/producerNIKK prepares to release ‘Paradize EP’, his latest collection of funky yet hard hitting techno cuts for Radio Slave’s Rekids.

Leading the release, title track ‘Paradize’, played to a raucous response at Printworks by Radio Slave,combines meaty drums, emotive chord stabs, and floating breakdowns for a track sure to cause many more memorable club moments. ‘Mylove’ brings punchy bass and sizzling percussion alongside subtle vocal chopsfor a chunky 4/4 number to round off the A side.

On the flip, ‘Flakes’ brings bubbling low end, pumping drum work, and choppy stabs for a pacey slice of breaks-laden techno, before ‘Give A Funk’ brings together swinging percs and rolling synth lines atop glistening pads and leads to close out the release.

The debut album from hotly tipped kiwi band Jamie and The Numbers, finally sees a release via Pete Brady’s Superfly Funk and Soul Records. After years of limited release 7”s being fought over worldwide by collectors and fans, this superb LP is the culmination of years of work for highly gifted Tongan-Kiwi Jamie Mavusa. Based in Wellington she can occasionally be seen singing soul tunes for Tapestry Music Promotions at many of their Music Reviews and also in her gospel choir at Church. It was at one of the Tapestry Music shows in Wellington that Jamie met Simon from Deltaphonic Records/The Numbers and after watching Jamie perform an amazing version of "Wade In The Water”. It was suggested they do some recording together with the view of doing some cool Soul classics and a bunch of originals too, the rest is now history.



The Numbers are an incredibly tight Wellington based band. Prolific writers of their own original material they are a 4 piece that consist of three brothers from Wainuiamata and a newly adopted Kiwi originally from Birmingham England. If you get a chance check these guys out they are brimming with cool retro tunes and some barnstorming original songs played with verve and passion and their shows are always fun, 2019 they supported "From The Jam" on their visit to New Zealand and after teaming up with Jamie have played Pasifika Festivals and open-air concerts to thousands of people. The Numbers collectively have played, sessioned, recorded for other artists on such labels as Gut Records, D-Star, EG Records, Imaginary Records and have in excess of 40+ published songs with Universal, Complete Music, KWS Records NYC and Cherry Red Records.

Today New York based singer, songwriter and producer Amber Mark announces details of her long-awaited debut album ‘Three Dimensions Deep’, out January 28th via EMI/PMR Records. The announcement of the album is accompanied by a sultry R&B instant-grat track ‘What It Is’ as well as a huge UK, EU and US spring tour announcement including London’s O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire in March

Amber’s debut album arrives almost 4 years after the release of her second EP ‘Conexão’, an extended process that has proved central to its thematic development. The 17 track album can be divided into three main acts that follow the arc of Amber’s personal and musical development; WITHOUT, WITHHELD and WITHIN. Beginning by acknowledging her insecurities and anxieties before reflecting on her time in denial and spent processing them in all the wrong ways, Amber eventually widens her focus by seeking answers to the world’s negativity and trauma on a cosmic scale. Finding peace and a form of inherent spirituality in the world of astrophysics while writing the album led to a fresh perspective on life and a renewed sense of self. Amber’s debut album is simultaneously a profound concept album and a love letter to herself, richly intertwining messages of self-worth and reflections on the universe beneath a veneer of shimmering pop. In true Amber Mark style, ‘Three Dimensions Deep’ is a kaleidoscopic melting pot of influences and genres, drawing from funk and R&B, soul and hip-hop with international accents influenced by a nomadic childhood spent travelling the world with her late mother.

“Three Dimensions Deep is a musical journey of what questions you begin to ask yourself when you start looking to the universe for answers.” says Amber; “I can only go as deep as the third dimension as that’s how we see the world, but what about when you start looking to the universe within for answers.”

“‘What It Is’ low key is the title track of the album without it actually being the title track” explains Amber; “It comes from going through negative experiences which end up being the gateway to a question I think I’ll be asking for the rest of my life. What is the meaning of life,the universe and everything?”

The three official singles already released from the album ‘Worth It’, ‘Competition’ and ‘Foreign Things’ marked Amber’s first official singles since 2020’s ‘Generous’, though 2020 was still a hugely productive year for Amber. With her hometown of NYC hit hard in the first wave of the pandemic and placed under strict lockdown, Amber turned to her simple home studio to create an acclaimed series of home-produced covers and originals titled ‘Covered-19’, each accompanied by a homemade video and artworks. The series was followed by a collaboration with longtime friend Empress Of on the protest song ‘You’ve Got To Feel’, earning Annie Mac’s Hottest Record, ‘Tune Of The Week’ and a spot on the Radio 1 playlist. Earlier this year Amber was featured on legendary DJ Paul Woolford’s new piano-house track ‘HEAT’, again snagging Annie Mac’s Hottest Record and a long run across the Radio 1 and 2 playlists. Having already amassed over 300 million streams since the release of her breakout debut EP 3:33AM in 2017, Amber has built a global fanbase eager to hear her debut full length -

Tagliabue’s cosmic music is a transcendental journey through introspection and imagination. The latter has no limits, when stimulated by sounds that slowly shade and snake deeply in the listener’s conscious.

With “Ambiente Sonoro” the Milan based DJ and producer now introduces his debut mini-album. The concept is inspired by the Italian library music of the 70s from Daniela Casa, Egisto Macchi and Piero Umiliani, characterized by the extensive use of electronic, experimental and psychedelic sounds. It is arranged and produced in a contemporary way, alternating dark ambient, tribalistic sounds mixed with abstract electronic and IDM influences from artists such as Biosphere, Higher Intelligence Agency, Global Communication or Coil.

His experience as a music selector and his previous works anticipate the character of this concept album. A record that cannot be placed in a specific genre.

Ancestral rhythms, post-industrial waves, apocalyptic chants and drones, suggest a mental projection into a new planetary system consisting of six bodies with different landscapes kept in orbit by a cosmic sound perturbation. A dreamy state of emotional, protracted and reflective abandonment.

Early support: Vladimir Ivkovic, Cosmo Vitelli, Alexis Le-Tan, Tolouse Lowtrax, Odopt, Ransom Note, Whypeopledance

Sixteen musical vignettes of electrifying emotion at the crossroads of ambient, modern synthesizer productions and organic orchestral music experimentation, which tint French director Jacques Audiard's new feature film with the illuminated glow of a whole new generation.

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When Jacques Audiard contacted him, Rone was just a few weeks away from receiving the Cesar award for best film score for his very first soundtrack "Night Ride", the highest honor in French film for a composer.

Throughout his career, the French director has been able to surprise his audience by playing on the codes of "genre films", while remaining faithful to the aesthetics of "art film". His cinema is both profound and entertaining, sophisticated and accessible, dark and dreamlike.

"Jacques' cinema is physical, sensual, modern", Rone says about the director, "when he asked me to do the music for Paris, 13th District , I immediately accepted, without seeing any images or reading the script. He is simply one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers."

His new feature film deals with youth in general and their sexuality in particular in a way no one may have done before. The story is based on four young characters and their existential questionings, whose destinies intertwined against the backdrop of the Parisian "Olympiades" high rises in the 13th arrondissement.

But time was already running out, as the film was set to be nominated for *Cannes' Palm D'or* at the rescheduled edition of the festival in July 2021. Between the releases of "Rone & Friends" and his remixes for Agnes Obel, Go Go Penguin and Jehnny Beth (who also plays a role in the film), the producer decided to lock himself away in in his brand-new Isola Studio in Cancale, French Brittany. He also invested in a large screen on which he projected loops of the film and started manipulating his gear. "I had Miles Davis in mind and the way he composed "Ascenseur pour l'échafaud" by improvising with his band while watching excerpts from the film."

After a first conclusive test on three scenes of the film which allowed Rone to showcase the skills he had developed in composition in various musical fields, a relationship of trust developed between the musician and the director, which resulted in over 45 minutes of Rone's music used for the final cut.

"There was a lot of music to be made in a short time, but the talks with Jacques were very stimulating. He had a fairly precise idea of what he wanted, while at the same time, I think, having the desire to be surprised, or even a little shaken up."

If the black and white aesthetic recalls the great hours of the "Nouvelle Vague", Rone´s music gives a new layer to the film which fits resolutely with 2020's zeitgeist.

This second soundtrack by Rone is a sonic urban adventure in itself. As it is used in the film, colouring in the lives of Audiard's protagonists, it will have the same impact on us, the listeners, in our own everyday lives.

Rave for Interest? X-Vandals! The fourth release of Frankfurt- and Berlin-based label Klinika will be out on the eleventh of December. X-Vandals is uniting two of Brazil's most recognized names in electronic music in this upcoming project. The duo consists of Davis, as a central figure of São Paulo's new school electronic music scene, and founding member of the ODD warehouse-party series, and his counterpart Martinelli, as one of ODD's very own resident DJs. As X-Vandals they deliver untrained, raw, and direct sounds filled with restless and stirring energy. Prepare yourselves for "Rave for Interest". Three highly effective tracks: Arena, Ravin for interest & Premier Minister de la Mort providing you Detroit schooled, super fast & non-compromising techno. Enjoy!

With the third vinyl release BRVTAL turns to the east and puts together two favorite noisy-industrial techno artists that originate from Asia, Ryuji Takeuchi & Ospiel.

On hearing the first sound on side A, we already know there will be no joking, because the legendary Osaka-based producer and DJ, Ryuji Takeuchi delivered us two uncompromising, heavy raw and noisy tracks. He has a lot behind him, because his first connection with electronic music was in the early 90s. Since then he lived in the US, bought his turntables, gears, got in touch with Techno and other genres that we can catch in his musical legacy.

Don't worry, there will be no drift on the B side either, because the Brussels-based, but South Korean origin DJ and producer, Ospiel represents another two songs of his own characteristic techno sound. Both tracks influenced by his practice of electroacoustic music, he has developed a musical approach based on the exploration of sound matter. His productions present a narrative in which sound design creates a dark and cathartic soundscape. Industrial rhythms are confronted with manipulated textures and sounds, creating an energy specific to the artist.